LARRY SCHWARTZ
‘I could tell you any number of stories by Vietnam veterans who can remember very distinctly the first time they heard the song,” John Schumann says. “Who they were with and what they did … They all involve stopping what they were doing – whether driving or mowing the lawn or filling the car with petrol or whatever – sitting down, listening to the song, and crying.”
Fifteen years have passed since Schumann and Redgum recorded the song that begins, “Mum and Dad and Denny saw the passing-out parade at Puckapunyal …” I Was Only Nineteen, based on the Vietnam War experiences of a man who has since become Schumann’s brother-in-law, was in the Top 40 for more than four months and has sold well over 100,000 copies.
“It’s one of those songs that has a life and an integrity of its own,” says Schumann. “Playing it to a bunch of Vietnam veterans is like singing a hymn.”
It is also one of 250 songs included in a new collection, The Great Australian Songbook. This chronological listing of lyric and musical notation is a diverse mix, including Richard Clapton’s Capricorn Dancer, Paul Kelly’s Leaps And Bounds, Don Walker’s Khe Sanh, Tenterfield Saddler by Peter Allen, Slim Dusty’s Duncan and Jake The Peg from Rolf Harris.
There are advertising jingles (I Like Aeroplane Jelly) and television themes (Neighbours) as well as traditional fare: Click Go The Shears, Along The Road To Gundagai. There are songs from the Angels, Rose Tattoo, Billy Field, Midnight Oil, the Easybeats, Crowded House, the Seekers, Men at
Work, Air Supply, the Loved Ones, the Uncanny X-Men, Daddy Cool, Billy Thorpe, the Dingoes, Skyhooks …
The image of Australia emerging from such a collection is heavily anglocentric. Beyond Joe Dolce’s novelty song, Shaddap Your Face, little acknowledges ethnic diversity. And the list seems light on contemporary songs by indigenous Australians: surely Archie Roach’s Charcoal Lane or Took The Children Away, to name just two of his songs, warrant inclusion?
Admittedly Australia’s rich and diverse songwriting tradition derives in part from our Anglo/Irish origins. In The Story Of Australian Folksong, Hugh Anderson writes that the original Botany Bay is generally sung to the tune of an Irish folk ballad, The Black Horse. And the defiant Jim Jones,
covered by everyone from the Bushwackers to Bob Dylan, was originally sung to the tune Irish Polly O.
“Obviously we’ve inherited speech patterns and accents and words that we’ve adopted as our own,” says Warren Fahey, folklorist, musician, music industry executive and author of works including The Songs That Made Australia.
“But the real thing is the emotional value – how it really tugs at the heartstrings or tickles the funny bones or whatever in our unique cultural way … It’s not the imagery of singing about gumboots and gum trees. It’s that emotional thread and it can come from anything as wide apart as
Stephen Cummings and the Bushwackers through to classical music and jazz.”
Michael Thomas has written some of the finest contemporary songs for Weddings Parties Anything, now touring the country for the last time before disbanding: Scorn Of The Women, Under The Clocks, Roaring Days, Monday’s Experts.
“I think there are things that make this a very different country,” Thomas says. “Anyone coming back from Europe will notice the space. It makes people less stressed in every facet of their lives … I tend to think it makes us a bit more casual about things. I think things like that affect your
art.”
The managing director of Music Sales (publishers of The Great Australian Song Book) is Norm Lurie. “Our roots are performance based,” he says, reflecting on songs of the ’80s from bands such as Men at Work, which came through the then-vibrant pub scene. “I suppose we’ve tended to
write songs that are good to sing and sound good in a live environment rather than studio based.” Nor is this just a recent phenomenon. “Whether singing on boats coming over to Australia or in bush ethos bands, our music seems to me to have a strong performance element in it,” Lurie says.
“With Slim Dusty or Paul Kelly songs, you can sit down with your guitar and bash them out, which you can’t do with a lot written for the pop charts overseas.”
Around Christmas, there is always a fierce demand for a song by the country singer Colin Buchanan. From October, the Music Sales fax machine “goes melt down”, Lurie says, with requests for permission to perform Aussie Jingle Bells, one of three Buchanan songs in the new songbook.
“Dashing through the bush,” Buchanan sings, “In a rusty Holden ute, Kicking up the dust, Esky in the boot. Kelpie by my side …”
The Dublin-born songster talks of a “bastardising the old classic” in a larrikin manner he sees as peculiarly Australian. But Buchanan also says songs such as Ross Wilson’s Cool World and Eagle Rock or Midnight Oil’s Beds Are Burning “came to encapsulate” part of his life in his teens. And
in later years, he’s found John Williamson, with songs such as True Blue and Mallee Boy, at least as moving as Jackson Browne or James Taylor.
In his own work, he celebrates the mundane.
“Give me a six or an eight a four wheel mate, The dents and the dust and the grasshopper guts, She’s got holes in the muffler and a gearbox clunk, I’ve cursed her and called her an old piece of junk.”
Buchanan co-wrote She’s My Ute while touring the outback with Lee Kernagan: “It sort of legitimises a whole culture that exists in the bush.”
He wrote Galahs In The Gidgee after a barbecue in Burke. He remembers looking at the vast sky at sunset; there was a threat of rain and he could smell the gidgee. The song is about “heritage and about the landscape that had such an impact on me”.
John Schumann, who now works as a senior media adviser to Democrats leader Senator Meg Lees, believes the particular affection for I Was Only Nineteen “speaks of Australians’ reverence, gratitude, understanding and appreciation of the fighting men and women who went away”.
Nineteen takes you through the experience of the conscript “young and strong and clean”, marching through the streets of Townsville, to the soldier he becomes, riding in Chinooks “from Vung Tau … to the dust at Nui Dat”. His friend Frankie is injured by a mine that leaves bits of shrapnel in his own back.
“And the Anzac legends didn’t mention mud and blood and tears,” Schumann sings; then “And can you tell me doctor, Why I still can’t get to sleep? And night time’s just a jungle dark and a barking M16?”
Schumann was at high school in 1972 when Gough Whitlam ended conscription and withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam, but he says he would have gone without question.
“My grandfather was in the merchant navy on a minesweeper in the First World War and my father was in the air force in the Second World War … it was what you did.”
Impressed as he is by Khe Sanh, Don Walker’s song for Cold Chisel, Schumann believes it reflects the American experience in Vietnam. He wanted to tell the Australian story, but found it next to impossible to get Vietnam veterans to talk “outside the circle”. His then girlfriend’s brother, Mick, finally agreed to talk provided he had right of veto. Schumann made nine tapes during a night of beer and cigarettes in the Adelaide Hills, took them on the road with the band, and listened to Mick’s story in hire cars and aeroplanes “until it just insinuated itself into my subconsciousness”.
Finally, one Sunday morning in Melbourne, he took his guitar “into the pale light with a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes … and the song came tumbling out”.
Mick said he’d “better go and see Frankie”. In Bega, on the NSW south coast, Frankie Hutton “was bowled sideways”. He directed Schumann to the then president of the Vietnam Veterans’ Association of Australia, Phil Thompson (who has since died).
Before his song, “there was no emotional touchstone,” Schumann says. “There was no way for ordinary Australians to understand it. Nineteen kicked the door open.
“What characterises the best Australian songwriting is capturing what it is that is peculiarly Australian about us all regardless of our origins.
“There is something about this land that grips you by the feet and instils you with a set of beliefs and values and principles and it doesn’t matter whether you come from Vietnam or Hong Kong or Germany or America or Scotland. Once you’re here, it just insinuates itself into your being. I
think in the best Australian songwriting, as is the case with the best Australian drama and the best Australian art, there’s a reflection, a capturing if you like, of that essential Australianness.
“I think I Was Only Nineteen does that. And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda does that. Waltzing Matilda itself does that. A lot of Henry Lawson’s prose and poetry does that. As do Banjo Paterson’s and Bruce Dawe’s … (and playwrights) John Romeril, David Williamson. It’s all about
reflecting or capturing that Australianness.”
The Sunday Age, 03rd of January 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 