Learning the didge takes dedication, patience and both cheeks, writes Larry Schwartz.
THE plumbing supplies salesman seems puzzled when I ask for 1.2 metres of 40-millimetre PVC pipe. He smiles, though, when I tell him I plan to use it as a makeshift didgeridoo.
It turns out to be a poor substitute for the chin-high bloodwood didge, hollowed by small ant-like termites somewhere in northern Queensland, which I bought at an introductory session at the Koorie Heritage Trust in King Street.
Some didge players will tell you they first made the low, resonant drone sound using a PVC pipe (or vacuum cleaner nozzle). I wrongly assume Tim Bettingill, a plumber in his early 40s, had started out with PVC. Not so, he reassures me at a meeting of a group of Melbourne enthusiasts, the
Didge Circle.
He’d seen a sign in Alice Springs offering a one-hour class while on a family holiday and encouraged his children to have a go. “As I drove home, I thought, ‘I’ve got be able to do this’,” he remembers at a small gathering at an eastern suburbs primary school music room.
Bettingill makes it sound easy enough. But many of us struggle to master the ancient woodwind instrument once found only in parts of Australia above the Tropic of Capricorn and now in vogue as far afield as America, Germany and Japan.
I don’t have a clue how to play when I turn up for a four-hour session at the Koorie trust early this year, with four others, to learn from one of Victoria’s most respected players, Ron Murray.
They at least know to vibrate their lips to make a sound. My face reddens, trying. One of the blokes feels so sorry for me he comes over to advise. “Too much stiff upper lip,” he says.
I drive home flapping lips into an invisible, pretend didge.
A mild interest soon gives way to near obsession. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t play. I’d started with an interest in the instrument as artefact and notion of using it to engage with indigenous Australia but have become entranced by the music.
I’ve sought out, or stumbled on, CDs with didge featured solo or with singing and clapsticks (bilma), acoustic and/or electric instruments.
Among the artists are Djalu Gurruwiwi, a celebrated traditional player and maker from near Yirrkala on the Gove Peninsula at the north-east tip of Arnhem Land, and contemporary players including Mark Atkins, Matthew Doyle and Charlie McMahon, of Gondwana.
Then there is the prolific David Hudson, founder of the Tjapukai Dance Theatre, who has recorded solo and in a range of musical settings.
It is Hudson who, during a brief stopover in Melbourne en route from LA to his home near Cairns, after playing at a private party hosted by Richard Branson, describes what you should feel when you first master a technique called circular breathing that involves sustaining the drone with
air from your cheeks while breathing in through your nose. It’s like an orgasm, he says.
Didge Circle co-ordinator Peter Matic, a telecommunications technician in his early 50s who founded the group late last year, says circular breathing is “a bit like magic”.
“Honestly, I couldn’t believe it when it happened,” Matic remembers. “I just thought I was never going to get there and all of a sudden, boom.”
We’d struck up a conversation weeks earlier at a concert in Warrandyte featuring a duo from Germany, Stefan Goggel and Doris Neff. Neff’s playing had intrigued me. I’d heard that the instrument is supposed to be played by men.
(The issue was in the news recently when a Victorian Aboriginal education advocate, Dr Mark Rose, reportedly said the Australian edition of a US book, The Daring Book for Girls, should be pulped because a chapter that teaches girls to play the didgeridoo showed cultural insensitivity.)
Bruce Rogers, also on the bill that night at Warrandyte, has some thoughts on the gender issue. “There is no single hard and fast rule to the didgeridoo,” says Rogers, who plays solo and with his band, Tongue n Groove, and makes some of the most sought-after didges at his home near
Kangaroo Ground. “It varies from tribal group to tribal group.”
Rogers favours stringybark and bloodwood, which he gathers on trips to northern Queensland. Each didge is tuned to a specific key. He has travelled to Europe to hold workshops and perform and has a stall at St Andrews market most Saturdays.
“What you’re doing is not using your cheeks enough,” he advises when I visit him at his home, set among towering box wood and stringybark that might have been ideal for didges but for the lack of the kind of termites that eat the heart-wood. “You can be expelling a lot more air out of your
cheeks.”
Whitefellas coined the word “didgeridoo”, also spelt “didjeridu”, mimicking the sound of the instrument. Traditionally used for entertainment, corroborees and secret ceremonies, the didge is also called a yidaki, mole, eboro, yiraga or ganbag, depending on the region.
Some didge makers cut them lengthwise, hollow each half separately and “sandwich” them together. (“A didgeridon’t,” David Hudson calls it). Others use tools to hollow them and make them from materials including glass, resin, leather, plastic, metal, paper, stone and even hemp.
My first instructor, Ron Murray is a member of the Wamba Wamba people from around Swan Hill. He makes his didges from Victorian red gum hollowed by ants. He learned how at Yirrkala during a Northern Territory visit to demonstrate the boomerang-making techniques that he’d learned
from his grandfather.
“He spent hours around the fire. I put that into every didgeridoo I make,” says Murray, from near Castlemaine, who plays in a duo called Kinja with his violinist wife, Sarah James, and teaches indigenous inmates of juvenile correctional facilities and at the Koorie Heritage Trust.
David Hudson has been playing for at least 40 years. “Since I was a young bloke,” says Hudson, vice-chairman of the Ewamian people of northern Queensland. “But it probably wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I realised that this instrument here is a magic wand. It’s a learning tool to
educate people.”
Didgeridoo player and maker Stax, in his mid-50s, is from the Dandenong Ranges. He has made a modest career of the ancient instrument since an injury forced him to quit the computer industry a few years ago.
He patiently takes me through his method of circular breathing. I play it over and over, determined to get it right.
Then he gives me some very good advice. “Relax,” he says.
The Age, 02nd of October 2008
Larry Schwartz Writer 