Well, it’s nice to be back on the tools, as they say. Not much chance of it in recent eons and it’s fair to say the skillset’s suffered to the ennui of it all.
But hey, 4000 people tripping over you on Saturday, without taking terrible offence, and you might be excused for feeling you’re back in the game. The game, by the way, is banging out old tunes on fiddles and banjo s and squeezeboxes at Sovereign Hill.
Hit parade, top 40, stuff from the 1850s with lots of old trad music the diggers were listening to when they emerged from their mole-holes to squander their gold finds in the tent grog-shops and rough houses that provided other entertainments.
But I’m not getting ahead of myself for a second. I’m just a tourist photo op in rustic old clobber. My craggy photogenics have nothing to do with anything. It’s all the braces, vests, neckties, and peculiar headwear.
Still, some folks pick up on the tunes. Lots of 17th, 18th, 19th century Celtic gear. Which is pure catnip to the peculiarities banging out them out. And which I say in all deference to said peculiarities. For it takes all types to pull together a goldfields musical ensemble.
Ragged street musicians are the quair species of artisan. Many turn their hand to other curious, or obtuse, occupations. Our musicians – most barely capable of splitting a log, driving a nail or sinking the meanest of holes – have turned to pursuits more suited to their dull physical co-ordination. Bit like many other musos had to do in Covid.
Like lawyering and God-bothering. Fishing, artistic and crafty peregrinations. Tinkering, rummaging through books. Some even sliding to the depths of that dubious craft, newspapering.
Forgive me if I slip into character for a bit, things weren’t all that PC back then ….
Naturally, we share a somewhat deletrious addiction to the demon drink and readily engage in outrageous flirtations and conniptions. Yes, the very model citizens of moral turpitude.
But gadzooks, I say. Why just last evening one of my fellow street mendicants was extolling the virtues of his time administering British justice to the jigaboos in Africa. How he came to such a magisterial post boggles the mind splendidly, I must say, but he did have a solid grasp of the birch switch and its utility.
“Thank you, sir, please may I have another?” is a thoroughly effective rehabilitation, he assures me. And notably so when your noble savages are distilling liquor from the carcasses of human foetuses.
Absolutely true, I tell you. Cannibalism. Witchdoctors attempting to seize the life forces of poor deceased would-be infants. They paid the price as levied by our Royal Majesty.
Fortunately, the magister’s factotum seized the illicit brew, I can tell you also. And I’m assured by my musical confrere of his innocence when he unwittingly quaffed a glass or two of the stuff after lashing the said shaman.
Errk, indubitably. But such is the life of the hapless Ballarat goldfields musician.
So too, it seems, is rubbing shoulders with aeronauts, quacks, bank robbers, highwaymen, kidnappers, politicians and other ne’er-do-wells – as one of our lot does working as a purported correspondent to that engine of influence, incident and happenstance, the press.
Yet another of our crew, an anthropologist, whatever that is, lays claim to a working fluency in the jabber of the Celestials. But he shows an unhealthy interest in politicks and seems a little too familiar with the opiates those Orientals seem to love.
Yet another again, fluent with brush and oils, is a skilled artist with a penchant for ornithological subjects –raptors, birds of prey. Possesses his own personal menagerie, a Norwegian hardanger violin collection, an Indian wigwam and a Viking small boat. A man of science, you might even say. If he wasn’t a street troubadour.
Apologies for those bitter calumnies. History’s not always pretty but this workplace is in fact a museum. And itinerants parade continues. From ornithologist to oenologist – grape-makers, vintners and bon vivants of the vinous persuasion. In other lives, before falling on hard times, some were teachers, educators of young minds. Their reduction to the street is a sharp reminder of the perils of the vine, hop and malt.
Others of our number elicit gasps of awe for their simple longevity in the game. We’re very catholic in that sense, from our 30s to our 90s. Aged in years, and occasionally in mind and enthusiasm as well, their very presence on the street is testament to God knows what stupefying agent of preservation. Again, men of science, perhaps.
Others again, are powers in their endeavours with acoustic and musical instrumentation. Ahead of their time perhaps but, again, worthies laid low by an addiction to that most base of artistic forms …. Irish music.
So we smile, spit out another tune and go with the ride. If there’s anyone I’ve seen kicked about by the lockdowns of the last two years, it’s my musician mates. Sad thing is, now things are opening up again, they’re still no better off than they ever were.
For all the talk of live music coming back, there’s still nowhere enough for the vast majority of musicians to eke out the most meagre living from their craft. But hey, who knows? They might still strike gold day one day.
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 28 June 2022
