Brassed off

LARRY SCHWARTZ

“Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox …” His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron…” – Job chapter 40, verses 15 and 18. The double B flat bass tuba is the behemoth of brass. “Ah yeah, it takes a good man to handle a double B on the march, I can tell you that,” says Charles McCuish, 63, whose ill-health has forced him to forgo the pleasure of parading with the Natimuk Brass Band. He has played with the band for the better part of 50 years but had to watch from the sidelines when it was recently adjudged best in the march in a district contest in Nhill. The weighty double B – more than 20 kilograms, Mr McCuish says – was all the more burdensome in wetter years when, such was his determination to attend practice, he’d brave a creek in flood. “We look back and laugh over those things,” says the wool farmer, who’d lug it over a rotten bridge at night. “But I don’t know what would have happened if I had of gone into the drink.” The streets of Natimuk, 27 kilometres west of Horsham, are deserted tonight. But there’s a welcoming light in an old weatherboard that once housed the fire brigade. The band is playing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Bandmaster Bob White, 63, who manages a drycleaning business and, on occasion, plays the E flat bass tuba, calls a halt for the umpteenth time, with a caution to the bass drummer to “do a Shane Warne on it, instead of a Brett Lee”. The double B player, bespectacled and flushed from his exertions, regales all with his account of shaky steps over the Natimuk Creek that runs through his property. But he fears the band to which he remains devoted faces an uncertain passage in troubled times for brass bands in the bush. “The whole trouble with banding, particularly in the country areas,” he explains, “is everyone’s getting older. And there’s no younger ones taking the game on.” Bands in bigger towns have a higher proportion of youngsters than his own, which is greying, despite a few players in their 20s and 30s. An exodus in pursuit of study and job opportunity and competing interests, from TV to sport or fondness for “just this loud yah yah yah” of rock ‘n’ roll, are among factors said to have made the future of brass all the more uncertain in the smallest of the country towns that account for a third of 160 bands in the state. Just over 320 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, Natimuk is home to about 500 people. It prides itself on being one of the few small towns in the district with a “stand alone” brass band, able to perform at local events without drawing on members of neighboring bands. Small towns such as Murtoa and Nhill have already merged bands; others seem destined to fall by the wayside. “It’s sad to see but it’s just the way the economics of Australia is,” says Helen Gray, contest coordinator of the Yarraville-based Victorian Bands League. Veteran side-drummer and Natimuk Brass Band secretary, Margaret Knight, 65, played in her mother’s dance band before joining the brass band in the 1940s. “We probably take it for granted,” she says, “because we’ve been there for so long. Some people say you’re part of the furniture. But we love our band and if it wasn’t for the old ones – the older members, I might put it that way – sticking with the band, then we wouldn’t have a band in a town our size.” Brass bands first flourished on the Victorian goldfields in the mid-1800s. For players, there is a masonic-like bond. “People wandering around in the Depression, so I’ve been told, would go into a town and if they were good players, they’d soon find them a job and they’d stay,” says cornet player Barry Whitehead, 60, a retired bank manager who has found many a friend through bands in rural towns in which he has worked. Hardware storeman Brian Lewis, 62, to whom the euphonium is “the best instrument”, remembers the night in ’68 that he first fronted here, “and by the time I walked out that night, I had 15 friends”. Natimuk Brass Band was established in the 1880s. It achieved a brush with glory a century on as runner-up in D grade at the annual Victorian Bands Championship in Ballarat in 1986. Back then, a certain wool farmer would leave home in a Land Rover to cross a bridge to an old Wolsely sedan he’d left on the other side of the creek. “And, of course it’d be dark and in the winter, you know, and the creek would be swishing and swirling and the frogs. “And out would come the torch and the bass and the music and whatever else you had, which was quite a bit of a load to get across a bridge which was, I suppose, the length of this building and about so wide and old rotten boards at that, and a couple of pieces of number-eight fencing wire at each side. “The water would be lapping the bridge on occasions. But we’d make it. No worries. Thank God for that.” A library of sheet music is stored in disused hospital X-ray containers. Showboat. The Wild Wild West. Moon River. Someone To Watch Over Me. A framed photograph of a beloved former bandmaster, the late Bill Schmidt, has pride of place on the wall above an honors board. “He taught me to play when I was eight,” says Robert Emmett, 54, a picture framer who also plays the flugelhorn. “Old Bill loved a beer and a smoke. He’d show you how to play some notes and then give you the instrument back and you could taste beer and cigarettes. I can still taste it to this day. “Bill would get up and he would play different size mouth organs. He had one that he used to pretend to play with his ear, I think … Bill was the centrepiece of the band really. He tried to wipe out a few of the local verandas with his old ute at times. But that was neither here nor there.” Natimuk Brass Band’s youngest, primary teacher Fiona Friberg on cornet, listens privately to Creed, Live and Anastacia – “normal 23-year-old kids’ music”, she says. She sits alongside husband, Jeff, also 23, a bank teller who says he is a “ring-in”. Beside him is Fiona’s father, Bob Mackley, who says he joined the band after “Bill Schmidt turned up on my parents’ doorstep with a cornet in hand and said it’s about time your young fellow learnt how to play …” Some remember a hasty retreat before 10 o’clock closing. “Last note would be played, there’d be a rush for the door,” a player recalls, “and half-a-dozen vehicles would roar into life and go 300 yards down the road to the pub.” Pity poor Charles McCuish. He’d faced the daunting prospect of crossing the creek to get back to his Land Rover again, after the carousing that inevitably followed practice. “There’d be a couple of stubbies on the road home and by the time you got out here, well, you could walk a straight line but you might deviate a bit. “But when you got out to the creek and had to get across this damn bridge, things start to move around a bit. You’d hit the number- eight fencing wire and think, `by hell, steady chaps’. You don’t want the old bass to go sailing down the creek. “But we made it. I never ever lost anything. I often wonder sometimes how I did it.” The Sunday Age, 02-Sep-2001