The Collection

originally published in the Companion to Australian Music (Currency Press)

Bush-music or folklore clubs based on Australian traditional music and dance were formed in the 1950s but by 1963-64 folk-revival music included English, Irish, American and Australian folk music performed to predominantly young middle-class Australians in coffee lounges, jazz clubs and other intimate venues. This revival was commercialised in the late 1960s to early 1970s, when folksong was watered down for singalong television programs and, to a lesser extent, political movements.

Folk-music enthusiasts responded by organising or joining folk clubs, which pre- sented folk music in a serious listening environment. British and Irish immigrants mainly organised the clubs and the music was primarily traditional music from their own countries, including ballads, folksongs and sea shanties.

The clubs retreated to licensed premises, mostly the upstairs lounges of old-style hotels, which enforced age restrictions and were controllable. Most clubs were non-profit organi- sations. They charged an entrance fee of $2-50 to $6, and most of the income went to the advertised performers.

A singer engaged for a typical folksong evening would perform two 40-minute brackets, and there would be three or four singers “from the floor”.

Most folk clubs were oper ated by singers and usually the compere also sang a couple of songs during the evening.

It was an unusual atmosphere – well managed, exciting and alive with chorus singing. The ambience depended on the room, but the audience was normally seated and quiet, and bar staff learned to work qui- etly. Most folk clubs closed between 10 and 11p.m., depend- ing on the pub’s licence.

After the public program there was usually a “house party”, in which “sessions” were encouraged and everyone could join in vigorous chorus singing.

Discussion gradually led organisers to realise that folk clubs needed to include more Australian material and, later, more contemporary songs in folk style. Depoliticisation was also debated. Many long-term folksong supporters from the political left claimed that the folk clubs were deliberately promoting conservatism.

In time the movement found its own political ground and contemporary singer-songwriters such as Eric Bogle, John Dengate and Phyl Lobl provided a bridge between traditional and contemporary song.

The need for folk clubs diminished in the 1980s as the festival movement strengthened. Interest in performing Australian music grew alongside interest in bush dancing and its accompanying music. Music from other cultures also entered festival programs and then the remaining folk clubs – there are still more than 100.

Whether they are an anachronism or a necessary training ground for performers is continually discussed. There are now a well-organised network of folk federations and an extensive calendar of fes- tivals, so maybe the clubs have served their purpose. Yet there is wide support for attendance at live performances of music and for the belief that, as entertainment becomes increasingly passive, a few old-fashioned chorus sessions would do anyone a lot of good.

Malcolm J. Turnbull is a historian, teacher (and sometime folksinger), with particular research interests in the Australian Jewish community, classic English crime-writing – and the 60s folk revival. Recipient of the Isi Leibler Prize at Deakin University for his 1995 Ph.D. thesis (on Judaism in Melbourne), and a nominee for the Mystery Writers of America ‘Edgar’ award for his first book, Elusion Aforethought (1996), he is also author of Victims or Villains (1998), Safe Haven (1999), A Time to Keep (with Werner Graff & Eliot Baskin, 2005) and Onemda ‘With Loving Care’ (2006). Other publications include contributions to the international journals CADS and Clues, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the Companion to Tasmanian History and the multi-authored monographs A Few from Afar, Carlton: a History and The Australian Jewish Experience.

A veteran of the earlly Tasmanian folk scene Malcolm has also published extensively on the Australian folk revival in the magazines Trad & Now, Australian Tradition, Drumbeat, In-folkus, Town Crier, Folk Rag, Cornstalk Gazette and Australian Music Museum. As a performer, he sings an eclectic mix of traditional and contemporary material with a specific emphasis on neglected songs by Tasmanian writers.

Malcolm writes:

I was lucky enough to encounter folk music during the folk boom of 1963-65 when I first became conscious of the guitar-playing American troubadours of the era. My road to Damascus was seeing a clip of Peter Paul & Mary perform ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ at the Sydney Stadium. So began a 40+ year love affair.

Around the same time, local girl Patsy Biscoe sang folksongs on local (Hobart) TV before making it onto Bandstand; the ABC series Jazz Meets Folk introduced Marian Henderson to a wider Australian public; and shows like The Country & Western Hour, Dave’s Place and Bandstand acquainted many of us with the likes of Tina Lawton, Paul Marks, Brian Mooney, Martyn Wyndham-Read, Sean & Sonja and Lenore Somerset. I bought my first guitar (on lay-by) at Lloyd Campbell’s in Hobart’s Cat & Fiddle Arcade, and made my folksinging debut, rendering ‘Moreton Bay’ at a talent quest in 1967. I was 14 years old. I subsequently played semi-regularly at a Friday night coffee shop run by the Methodist Church in Ulverstone, in Tasmania’s North-west. (An alternative venue was run by the local Catholic church, and featured the youthful Neil Gardner and Mike Raine). Along the way I was inspired by “gods” as diverse as Odetta, Theo Bikel, Joan Baez, Buffy Ste Marie, Donovan, Pete Seeger and Cat Stevens (!).

Over the next few years – as a soloist and member of numerous ensembles (including a shortlived jug band) – I had the good fortune to become part of a highly creative scene that centred around venues like the Gateway, the Eastside, the Tavern, the Folk Inn and the Napoli, and culminated in a series of folk festivals and concerts mounted by the Tasmanian arts organisation Brumida in 1970-72. After moving to Melbourne in the early 70s, I played occasionally at venues like the Outpost Inn, the Green Man and the Bottom Pub (Longford, Tas), and for several years sang as a duo with Gwen Schultz. Making Music subsequently took a back seat to work and “life”.

After a two decade break, I have resumed playing (in a low key way) in the last few years as an adjunct to my research into the history of the folk revival. Highlights of “this time around” have been the chance to meet (and, in some cases, perform with) some of my musical heroes and annual pilgrimages to the Tamar Valley Folk Festival. My CD outings have included Goodness How the Years Have Flown (Cracked Records, 2003), Dabbling in Philosophy (Park Fraser Records, 2006) and, most recently, A Little Folk Noir (Park Fraser Records, 2007). I confess to a particular affection for Break of Day, a collaborative exercise which enabled me to record with revival legends David Lumsden, Martin Evely and the late Lenore Somerset. (Recorded simply and mostly in single takes, in the style of so many classic folk LPs of the “golden age”, Break of Day is a heartfelt collection of our favourite settings of Henry Lawson verse).

Malcolm can be contacted on (03) 9481 3924 or at

malcolmjturnbull@hotmail.com

THE EARLY YEARS OF THE FOLK REVIVAL IN ADELAIDE

Malcolm J. Turnbull
[Parts of this article were previously published in Infolkus, June-Aug 2004; and in Cornstalk Gazette, Feb 2005]
The relative isolation of its population notwithstanding, the Adelaide scene more than held its own musically with its East coast counterparts during what is often referred to as the “folk boom” of the 1960s (circa 1963-6). During that period folkmusic enjoyed mainstream popularity both here and overseas, and the stereotyped image of the “folksinger” imprinted itself on Western consciousness. Pattison & Mulholland have noted that, at its peak, South Australia boasted a thriving, almost self-contained urban milieu which flourished despite comparatively little infusion of talent from the east. [Australian Music Directory, 1982, p.97]. “Adelaide has the highest standard of folk in Australia”, a youthfully earnest Robyn Smith [Archer] informed the Sunday Mail at the tail-end of the “boom” [3 Sept 1966].
I have noted elsewhere the strong connection and interaction between the ‘60s folk revival and the Australian jazz scene. [See Trad & Now #6, Summer 2004, p.54]. Nowhere (with the possible exception of Melbourne) was this nexus more pronounced than in South Australia. Visiting blues legends Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee reportedly found their most responsive audiences there. “Talking blues” typically featured more than rebel ballads or bush songs at folksinging parties or get-togethers in and around Adelaide. Pioneer Melbourne bluesman Paul Marks, initially brought to town by the university jazz club, was an early inspiration to emerging folk-performers in Adelaide. Student lawyer Keith Conlon divided his spare time between high profile trio The Wesley Three and drumming for the Campus Six or the University Jazz Band. (Other trio members, the Wesley-Smith twins, likewise offset folksinging with stints as President and vice-president of the University Jazz Society). For Don Brow, who performed throughout the boom as one half of the folk duo Derek & Don, the folk years were a brief interlude in a four decade jazz career. Brow first came into contact with live music at the 1958 Australian Jazz Convention at Norwood, and subsequently learned to play at venues like the St Vincent’s Jazz Club where enthusiasts ‘bopped’ to the Black Eagles (and where an entry ticket could be swapped for a bottle of beer). He recalls that folkmusic started to attract local interest at the time Bobby Gebhart, Jazzer Hall and Ron Carver were being featured at Blinks and a young Diana Trask could be heard on Thursday nights at the Gawler Institute. Meanwhile vibes-player John Bayliss was a drawcard at the Adelaide Golf Club while jazz could also be heard at the Sigalis coffee-lounge (underneath Scott’s Menswear in Rundle Street) or on Saturday night boat trips per the Amphibian.
Two coffee lounges, both housed downstairs in the Romilly Building at the corner of Hackney Road, North Terrace, appear to have hosted the first formal folksinging in Adelaide. Veteran bass-player Jerry Wesley (who played with the University Jazz Band and the Campus Six, and occasionally stood in for brother Peter in The Wesley Three) remembers first being exposed to live folkmusic at a Sunday afternoon concert at Le Camille, circa 1962. Primarily a jazz concert, the program was interspersed with folksong brackets by Barry Pitman, Roger Cardwell and a couple of others. Run by businessman John Gruen, Le Camille offered a mix of light folk and jazz for a couple of years. (“Because Adelaide was such a small scene, it made sense to combine venues”, maintains Peter Wesley-Smith who – as part of The Wesley Three – welcomed in the new year more than once with a midnight to dawn show at Le Camille).
The Catacombs was a bit more prestigious and quickly became the “in” place – “where the real folksingers hung out”. Initially a jazz cellar, it continued to offer trad jazz Sunday afternoons, organised by John Bradman, Bill Clarke and others, for several years. Its reputation as Adelaide’s premier folk venue was boosted early on when Paul Marks (then regarded as the very antithesis of slickness) appeared over several nights: Charles Higham described it in typical fashion in an expose of “folk people” in the Bulletin [14 Nov 1964]:

You walk in by a narrow door, and along a black and white tiled floor of an office building in one of the inner suburbs. On the other side of the door is an impressionistic sketch of a woman’s face, preparing the uninitiated for what is below. Down a flight of threaded carpet stairs with black painted walls reflecting no light, you pass a desk where the owner’s wife is pulling a coffee-machine. Three pictures on the walls indicate that well-known singers Bob Hardie, Dick Bond and Tina Lawton started there. There are black and red walls, deep red curtains and a red ceiling. Light seeps dimly out of scattered 15-watt globes. There’s a queue here at 8 p.m., people waiting to sit on spidery wicker seats or the floor.
Le Camille and The Catacombs were small inner-city venues, the latter consisting (as its name suggests) of several odd cellar rooms. (The building still exists and has since housed, among other things, a topless restaurant). Folkmusic also supplanted jazz, as early as mid-1963, at the up-market Delphic Restaurant. Other notable venues were the Purple Onion and the Nissen Hut. Resident act at the former – an upstairs lounge over a delicatessen at Unley – was Derek [Housego] & Don who performed Dylan, Guthrie, a bit of PP&M, and Terry & McGhee (rendered distinctive by Don Brow’s enthusiasm for the chromatic harmonica). Brow recalls that the management smiled on improvisation; other performers would frequently sit in with the duo and it was not unusual for half a dozen musicians to be on stage at one time. The Nissen Hut at Henley Beach* was exactly that, a temporary building, left over from the war, constructed of corrugated iron, canvas, tar-paper and cocoanut matting floor covering (a reader. Elsewhere, the Ambrosia, Genevieve’s, a cafe adjoining a squash court in Collie Terrace, and the Sunset coffee lounge in Blackwood offered folksinging entertainment more fleetingly. The Purple Cow, a “downstairs dump furnished with orange crates” existed briefly in Rundle Street. Doug Ashdown vividly recalls one occasion when the manager rid the club of an unwelcome group of bikies by charging up the stairs with a baseball bat. (He was subsequently – and discreetly – congratulated by local police). As well, folk acts were often billed as light relief at 60/40 dances or the floorshow at the John Bull Club and the 20-plus Club; or they were hired to perform at private parties and functions, even in department stores (Tina Lawton and The Wesley Three promoted their first LPs in the record bar at David Jones, for instance, and on one occasion Irene Petrie and Doug Ashdown recruited drummer Keith Conlon and keyboardist Phil Cunneen to perform live covers of material from the new Dylan album Blonde on Blonde!).
The largest and most influential of the coffee lounges was the Folk Hut in Rundle Street, run by singer-promoter John Stevens (aka John Fulton Stevens) in partnership with soft-drinks manufacturer George Hall. During its lifetime it was to Adelaide what Traynors was to Melbourne, the Troubadour to Sydney and the Folk Centre to Brisbane. Stevens was a former country singer/guitarist who had first become interested in folkmusic during a trip to Melbourne in 1962. On that occasion, he heard Glen Tomasetti play ‘Go Tell Aunt Rhodie’ in a coffee lounge (probably the Cafe Ad Lib), and was captivated by both the song and the performer. His enthusiasm was reinforced when he discovered (as had Tomasetti) that many traditional children’s songs and nursery rhymes had their origins in protest. In 1964 he opened Genevieve’s, a club which folded within a few months because of lack of seating space. The Folk Hut, which could (and often did) squeeze in up to 300 patrons a night (compared to the Catacombs which could hold only 45-50), opened in April 1965, with visiting Hobart folksinger Patsy Biscoe (in town for a TV appearance) and Doug Ashdown heading the first line-up. The crowd queueing up on the first night was so large that it took Biscoe nearly a quarter of an hour to fight her way into the building. Her opening number, appropriately, was ‘Twelve Gates to the City’.

The Folk Hut opened six nights a week. Wednesdays were reserved for board games, such as chess and backgammon; Tuesdays were “talk nights”, providing the opportunity for patrons to hear (and respond to) the likes of the Bishop of Adelaide or the Police Commissioner. Thursdays were amateur night. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays featured the cream of local folk talent, and remained well-attended (particularly Sundays) throughout the venue’s lifetime. For a while, Stevens hosted a folkmusic radio program which aired at 7 p.m. on Sundays; he remembers that Folk Hut regulars would sit in their cars, reverently listening to the program and waiting for the club’s door to open at 7.30. The Folk Hut menu was somewhat innovative. Co-owner George Hall supplied bulk home-made ginger beer while a local baker provided a square yard of chocolate cake which Stevens would soak overnight in rum and serve topped with whipped cream and a dash of maple syrup. Cake and coffee (good quality New Guinea Royal) cost 2/6 and admission 5/-.
In addition to the coffee houses, Adelaide was able to provide national television exposure for its folk musicians per the very popular Country and Western Hour. First airing locally in July 1963, The C&W Hour rapidly became a national hit, telecast by some thirteen stations. Host Roger Cardwell (himself a regular at the Folk Hut) ensured from the outset, that the C&W content was augmented by plenty of traditional song, and a spot on the program became a much sought-after gig for folkies throughout the country. The policy of welcoming folk musicians continued under Cardwell’s successor, the Country veteran Reg Lindsay, although the balance shifted more towards Nashville (and Tamworth) as folk fervour/fever evaporated. Adelaide folkies also gained national exposure through the annual Showcase talent quest, among them the Wesleys, Irene Petrie, Ashdown and The John Gordon Trio. Elsewhere, the folk revival in Adelaide resulted in the formation, by Rob McCarthy, Stan Armstrong and others in 1967, of the Folklore & Folkmusic Society of South Australia, an organisation with scholarly and preservation principles similar to its counterparts in the east. Unsurprisingly, given Adelaide’s reputation as the city of churches, Folk masses and youth services featuring folksingers went through a period of substantial popularity.
A reader has explained the Nissen Hut was actually at Grange, behind the Grange SLSC, and was the original clubhouse – adding “It only opened on a Sunday evening during winter and ran for two or three years, I know, as I ran it for the club”

Campus folk clubs evolved at the University of Adelaide and Flinders University, and local artists featured at a string of folk concerts and modest festivals. One gathering, billed as the first Adelaide Folk Festival, was a Jim Carter production, bringing the “stars of the Newport [Sydney] festival” to the Unley Odeon in March 1965.  Martyn Wyndham-Read, Gary Shearston, Tina Date and Marian Henderson shared the stage with Tina Lawton, The Wesley Three and compere Roger Cardwell. (Highlights were reportedly a haunting Danish duet by Lawton & Cardwell and Shearston’s distinctive renderings of ‘Sydney Town’, ‘Ballad of Edgar Cooke’ and ‘The Albury Ram’). A month later, Cardwell again m.c.’d a concert at Lenswood as part of the Adelaide Hills Apple and Pear Festival; participants included Lenore Somerset and The Hayes Brothers from Melbourne, as well as The Tikis, Johnny Mac, Lawton and Robyn Smith. Smith, 16 year-old Kevin Peake, Andy Becker and Perth trio The Twiliters toured country halls as Folk 65. Marian Henderson was the sole interstate star at Folk Scene, an extravaganza at Adelaide Town Hall, in July ’65,  which brought together Lawton, the Wesleys, Irene Petrie, Doug Ashdown, Barry Pitman, The Lincoln Greens, Bob Hardie and The New Folk Four.
Glen Tomasetti organised a number of fringe folk concerts during the 1966 Adelaide Festival of Arts. Robyn Smith, The Wesley Three, Lawton, Petrie and Phil Sawyer subsequently headlined at an open-air concert at the sound-shell in Elder Park (to an audience estimated at 2000). In 1971 (over the Australia Day weekend), performers, scholars and enthusiasts from around the country flocked to Flinders University to take part in the Fifth annual National Folk Festival. Highlights of the festival included workshops on contemporary folkmusic, collecting, country blues, American bluegrass, ‘The Industrial Revolution and its Side effects’ and Aboriginal Music (by John Graham, Wendy Lowenstein, Paul Tarrant, Rob McCarthy, Danny Spooner and H.M. Ellis, respectively) [Music Maker, Dec 1970]. It is worth noting that there was also marginal folk activity, towards the end of the period under review, to the far north of Adelaide. The Elkira Folk Club functioned out of an Alice Springs hotel for 18 months to 2 years from mid 1971. According to Australian Tradition [Oct 1971, June 1972], the Elkira’s most notable achievement was a 32 mile Walk-a-Sing, led by twelve performers, in temperatures over 100 degrees, to raise money for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. 
Tina Lawton was undoubtedly the leading figure on the Adelaide scene during the boom. Born in 1944 into a large and intensely musical family (one of six children), she learned violin and piano from an early age and later combined voice training at the Conservatorium with three years of graphic arts studies at the South Australian School of Art. According to her biographer (her mother Kathleen), Lawton followed her siblings’ lead by taking part in eisteddfods, amateur productions of Gilbert & Sullivan, and a host of other musical activities, including dabbling in jazz (singing with the Uni Jazz Band or the Spiritual Jazz Six) at the Catacombs. It was there (circa 1962) that she heard and met an (unnamed) itinerant East Coast folksinger:
His shabby jacket was crushed-yellow, made, I think of suede or velvet; tight, faded green trousers were patched at the knees; his hair, worn shoulder-length (unusual for that time) was the colour of his tawny moccasins. He sat cross-legged on the floor, plucking at a guitar with woman-hands, and singing … For several hours we sat and listened to that compelling, sexless voice … We never heard what became of him, but he stayed long enough to cast a spell over Tina. All the noisy music … stopped as suddenly as it began, and she became more and more absorbed not only in this new kind of music, but in the stories and origins of folk-singing. [Kathleen Lawton, Singing Bird, 1974, p.8-9]

An invitation to sing at a charity concert at Victor Harbour led to an audition for The Country and Western Hour, and Lawton soon become a regular on the show. She
Quickly built up a large local, and then national, following through appearances on Adelaide Tonight, In Melbourne Tonight, Bandstand, the ABC Lively Arts series, Gary Shearston’s Just Folk and Dave’s Place. Live appearances encompassed coffee shop ‘stints’ in Melbourne and Sydney, guest sets at Port Lincoln’s Tunarama Festival, a concert at the Woomera Rocket Range, and sharing the Adelaide Town Hall stage with Irish tenor Patrick O’Hagan. She took part in both the Four Capitals Folk Song tour of August 1964 and the Newport (Sydney) Folk Festival a few months later, and she was captured on Score Records’ memento of the former, Australian Folk Festival, singing the American civil war tune ‘Buttermilk Hill’ and the perennial ‘I Know Where I’m Going’. Early in 1965, she teamed with harpist Huw Jones and flautist David Cubbin for her own prime-time weekly segment The Tina Lawton Interludes, produced by David Zweck for ABC TV Adelaide. Lawton signed with CBS and her first album, recorded in Sydney and Adelaide in the second half of 1965, was duly released in time for Christmas. (Two other LPs followed in little over a year).
She finished out 1965 on a high note by joining Mick Counihan, Gary Shearston, Peter Dickie, Phyl Vinnicombe, Glen Tomasetti, Brian Mooney, David Lumsden, and others, in the ‘Songs of Peace and Love’ concert at Melbourne’s Myer Music Bowl, organised by the Vietnam Day committee. Her uncustomary participation in such a strongly political program came back to haunt her a few months later when she accepted a request by the Australian Forces Overseas Fund to go and entertain newly arrived troops in Vietnam. Kathleen Lawton recalls that Tina was deeply hurt when colleagues within the folk fraternity accused her of hypocrisy and opportunism in playing at both the Peace concert and travelling to the theatre of war. “I’ll protest too”, she declared, “but in my own way”. That first trip to South-East Asia (early in 1966) opened her eyes to the impact of prolonged fighting on ordinary people. Interviewed by television journalist Joan Disher on her return home, she confided: “I did not think of the ‘rights’ or ‘wrongs’. I was sent there to do a job and wanted to sing my best, just to make those boys happy for a little while. They looked so young”. She concluded the interview by singing the traditional ballad ‘The Cruel War is Raging’ – like ‘Buttermilk Hill’, the nearest she ever came to protest material [Lawton, p.49-50, 61-68].      
Later that year, Lawton joined Peter O’Shaughnessy, Marian Henderson and jazzman Don Burrows in a superior TV film The Restless Years, shot at Sydney’s ABC studios. An anthology of song, verse and narrative of the first 60 years of Australian history, it featured Lawton as a convict girl (singing ‘Convict Maid’) and in duet with Henderson on ‘The Springtime It Brings on the Shearing’. One of 32 filmed entries, The Restless Years  won second prize (after Czechoslovakia) at an international folklore competition in Dublin. Lawton left Australia on a second trip to entertain allied forces in South-East Asia in April 1967. She spent several months travelling and/or working in the Pacific before electing to move on and join family members in Great Britain. In 1968 she resumed art studies in Glasgow, where she specialised in printmaking. Tragically, she died in a light plane crash while on vacation in Kenya, on Christmas Eve, 1968.

Youthful, blonde, pretty and vivacious, with a classically-trained soprano voice, Tina  Lawton was the embodiment of the innocent, maidenly lady folksinger. “Tina was the golden girl” remembers Melbourne singer Chris Larner. For Brian Mooney, any mention of Lawton invariably evokes the memory of a stunningly beautiful, other-worldly young girl effortlessly singing ‘Everytime I Hear a Songbird Singing’ at Sydney’s Temperance Hall during the Four Capitals Tour. “Tina was a lovely kid”, remembers Lenore Somerset. The ethereal image was undoubtedly reinforced by the singer’s untimely death and it is refreshing to note that she could be irreverently down-to-earth on occasion. Tasmanian singer Beth Sowter recalls Lawton elegantly (and imperturbably) advising a carload of wolf-whistling hooligans to “Fuck Off” during a season at the Hotel Cornwall in Launceston.   
Lawton’s legacy rests primarily in the three records she made for CBS. Producer Sven Libaek ensured that she had the advantage of skilled back-up musicians, and that she draw on only the finest traditional material available, and the three LPs remain among the most distinguished locally-produced folk recordings of the period. Tina Lawton (CBS BP 233277) teamed her with guitarist Andy Sundstrom and harpist Huw Jones for 15 famous Anglo-Irish songs and laments, notably ‘Lord Gregory’, ‘Marie’s Wedding’, ‘The Spinning Wheel’, ‘Castle of Dramore’, ‘The Lowlands of Holland’ and an unaccompanied ‘She Moved through the Fair’. An enthusiastic Melbourne Herald reviewer believed that a debut album of this calibre must ensure the singer achieved international recognition; the Melbourne Sun predicted that her quality and style were sure to endure. (“Tina Lawton is no flash in the folk singing pan”).
Tina Lawton sold well enough for CBS to release a follow-up, Singing Bird (CBS BP233315), only six months later. Another collection of ballads and songs from the British Isles (highlights include ‘Lagan Love’, ‘In the Orchard’ sung in Welsh, ‘Charlie is my Darling’ and ‘Garton Mother’s Lullaby), she was accompanied again by Huw Jones along with Russell King on flute. Again, reviews were excellent, one Adelaide critic declaring Tina “this country’s best female singer of folk songs”. Lawton’s third and final album, Fair and Tender (CBS BP 233394), considered by many (including the singer herself) to be her best, offers a similar traditional Anglo-Celtic program, but with more varied (albeit always restrained) instrumental backings: George Golla on guitar, Lal Kuring on cello, Herbie Marks on virginal and accordion, and Don Burrows on flute (all under Burrows’ direction). Released shortly before she left Australia (as it eventuated, permanently), the album’s highlights include ‘Mary Hamilton’, ‘Raggle Taggle Gipsies’, ‘Lady Mary’, and the Anglo-American ‘Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies’.   
 Although there appears to have been a degree of separation between the folksingers and the folk-entertainers in Adelaide, the former “immersed” in Child Ballads and the like at the Catacombs, etc., the latter more likely to be found performing the ‘Duck’s Ditty’ at Red Cross functions or on TV, there is little evidence of significant Melbourne or Sydney-style commercialist-purist cleavages in Adelaide. The Folk Hut was only two doors down from a major discotheque, and it was not unusual for members of the Twilights, the Ferrets, Bobbie & Laurie, etc., to kick on after hours at the former. And vice versa. As a general rule, singers at the Folk Hut would good-naturedly include a handful of traditional Australian songs in their performances, so as to cater for a range of folk biases. 

The Wesley Three, Rob McCarthy, Lynne & Graham McCarthy, The Skillet Lickers, Phil & Pete Sawyer, John Fulton-Stevens, Bob Hardie, The John Gordon Trio, Phil Cunneen, Judy Crossley, Doug Ashdown, Irene Petrie, and Robyn Smith, all fairly eclectic in repertoire and live-and-let-live in their approach to folksinging, were in the front rank of Adelaide’s folk artists.
The Wesley Three, comprised of twin brothers, Peter and Martin Wesley-Smith (b. 1947), and Keith Conlon, was a stylish, musically-knowledgeable, Kingston Trio-like ensemble, which attracted public attention through appearances on the national TV talent quest Showcase 65, recorded two albums in quick succession for CBS (The Wesley Three and City Folk), and enjoyed a brief burst of national success. (“We travelled to Sydney for three weeks each year, doing the coffee lounge round [including the Last Straw and the Copperfield as well as the Newport and Katoomba festivals]. It was heady stuff for young Adelaide kids in the 60s”). Formed in 1962 when the boys were still at St Peter’s College (“performing paid our way through university”), the trio patterned itself after American ensembles like The Chad Mitchell Trio and, more directly, a local pop-group distinguished by its employment of a snare-drum, The Dave Fuller Trio. With Conlon on drum and percussion, Peter on string bass and Martin on guitar, the Wesleys refused to take themselves – or their brand of middle-of-the-road folk-pop – too seriously. Unsurprisingly, the trio was disdained by the folk establishment, notably Wendy Lowenstein of Australian Tradition (who deemed their relevance “at most … marginal”) and musicologist Edgar Waters (who suggested, somewhat unfairly, that the trio of “gimmicky undergraduates” might appeal to people who liked their folksongs sung by a “Village Glee Club”).

“One cannot become involved in folk-circles without becoming also involved in the endless dispute between opposing factions who hold particular views as to what folk is and how it should be performed”, the boys acknowledged, insisting that they preferred the label ‘folk-performers’and confessing, wryly, that they could claim no ethnic authenticity other than “suburbia”.Reflecting recently on the purist vs ethnic debate, and on accusations that the trio had notably failed to sound as if its members “had been digging potatoes”, Peter Wesley-Smith maintained “I can see a case for establishing your categories but to allow the categories to dominate everything is the height of foolishness”.
The Wesley Three’s repertoire encompassed protest standards like ‘The Ballad of Spring Hill’ or Shearston’s ‘The Voyager’; bush ballads such as ‘The Rabbiter’s Song’ and ‘Flash Jack’;  American perennials like ‘Bullgine Run’, ‘Tell Old Bill’ and ‘Drill Ye Tarriers’; and whimsical children’s material such as ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and ‘Little Tommy’. (‘Little Tommy’, written by Martin, was covered American group The Serendipity Singers). Listened to today, the trio remains, arguably, the best of the U.S.-style Australian collegiate trios, far outdistancing such contemporaries as The Southern Folk Three, The Green Hill Singers (or even the substantially more successful Twiliters), at least  in musicality and originality. The Wesley Three moved progressively away from folkmusic in two further recordings, a children’s album titled Banjo and Mr Thwump,and Leaning on a Lamp-post, a collection of vaudeville and music hall songs. The trio lasted until 1968, disbanding when Peter Wesley-Smith went overseas to do post-graduate work. Conlon and Martin subsequently re-teamed, along with brother, Jerry and Amanda Irving, for a recording The Glorious Years (1971), released by the Jacaranda Press in conjunction with the book of the same title by Graeme Inson and Russel Ward. (Martin Wesley-Smith subsequently went on to become a leading exponent and composer of electronic music; Peter Wesley-Smith ultimately became Dean of Law at the University of Hong Kong). 

Doug Ashdown (b.1942) came to folkmusic after several years in the local rock’n’roll scene. Given a ukelele at age 10 by his father (a George Formby fan), he progressed to the guitar and formed his own skiffle band, The Sapphires, in 1958. (Another member of the band, Trev Warner, went on to become a well-known fiddle and banjo-player). When his father transplanted the family back to England for nine months in 1960-1, the youthful Ashdown played electric guitar with an ensemble called Rommel and the Desert Rats (“We idolised The Shadows”). On return to Adelaide, he spent time (1961-4) as one of The Beaumen along with Bobby Bright who went on to make his name (with Laurie Allen) on the Melbourne pop scene. 
Ashdown started listening more and more to Baez, PP&M, etc; in the process, “I discovered Dylan and that was it”. An important local influence was Dick Bond who played one of the few 12 string guitars around. Bond’s was a distinctive instrument, imported from Britain, with a V-shaped sound-hole (like the legendary Seeger’s). Ashdown traded in his Fender electric on one of the first 12-string guitars made by Melbourne company Maton, and he quickly earned a reputation for his instrumental dexterity:
… There weren’t many people playing 12 string guitar then – it looked like an impressive and difficult thing to play, I suppose. Anyway I’d got this style going – a sort of rock strum and not just the usual folk pick. I was singing much the same material as everyone else but it sounded unusual because of the way I handled it.
Ashdown debuted as a folksinger at the Purple Cow, late in 1964, and he had his first big break when Tina Lawton asked him to substitute for her at a Town Hall concert. ‘Ella Speed’ brought the house down. Working during the day for the Post Office, he quickly became a fixture on the coffee lounge circuit. “Those days were the halcyon days of folk”, he recalls. Saturday nights frequently found him performing 5 gigs, usually starting off at the Sunset, then on to the Purple Onion, the Folk Hut and the Catacombs, and finishing up at the Nissen Hut.
It was as the Folk Hut’s chief drawcard that Ashdown came to the attention of CBS’s Sven Libaek, then in Adelaide scouting for new talent. He was offered a recording contract (as were The Wesley Three and Tina Lawton), and his first LP, This is Doug Ashdown, was recorded  – “straight down with a couple of overdubs” – on a 2-track machine in Sydney in mid 1965. Patsy Biscoe, with whom Ashdown was romantically involved at the time, recorded her first LP to his guitar backings, during the same two-day session. Ashdown subsequently recorded two further LPs for CBS, The Real Thing (1966) and Source (1968). Highlights of these early recordings include distinctive versions of Dylan’s ‘Quit Your Lowdown Ways’, Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’, Paul Stookey’s ‘House Song’, ‘Ella Speed’,  Shearston’s ‘Sometime Lovin’’, and Ashdown’s first self-composed song ‘Something Strange’ (a stream-of-consciousness ballad which he now dismisses as “nonsense”). Mark Spoelstra’s  poignant ‘Just a Hand to Hold’ was learned from Judy Collins during her 1965 visit to Adelaide. ‘I’m Going Away’ was written for him by Sydney singer Mike Driscoll. Ashdown, along with Biscoe and Perth trio The Twiliters, also provided national exposure for talented Adelaide singer-songwriter Phil Sawyer, by personalising (and recording) such classics of the period as ‘I Know a Girl’, ‘I Thought I Heard Somebody Call My Name’, ‘What Season’s Coming Nigh’ and ‘Thanks for the Hand to Hold’. (Sawyer subsequently made his living working in the fishing industry).

Almost from the beginning, Ashdown objected to being categorised, insisting that he never thought of himself as a folksinger, and that he found the whole “folk thing” too restrictive. Counting Nina Simone, Richie Havens and Fred Neil among his diverse musical influences, he once declared:
I’ve always tried to emphasise the fact that I don’t believe there’s any real difference between folkmusic and any other kind of music. But because I get up on a stage with an acoustic instrument, it puts me at a disadvantage right away.
Elsewhere, Ashdown was more direct:
I’m not aspiring to be a pop singer, but I’d rather be labelled as one than have to work in hotels … This image of folkies has been taken to such incredible extremes. It’s all imagery. They expect you to wear cords, sneakers and sloppy jumpers. It’s taken me a long time to get out of this bag. People still ring up and ask how much I want for some gig. I say “ring my manager”. They can’t believe it. They say, “What’s a folkie doing with a manager?”.
Unsurprisingly, this lack of commitment to the folk scene earned Ashdown the disdain of the folk establishment – as did the commercial success and orientation of his recordings, or his willingness to record Lennon-McCartney’s ‘Hide Your Love Away’ and the jazz standard ‘Till the Real Thing Comes Along’. (On one occasion, a number of audience members walked out of a folk concert in Sydney when he attempted to perform an electrified version of Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’). Ashdown, in turn,  once confessed to interviewer Greg Quill that his third album, the ground-breaking 1968 LP Source reflected his dissatisfaction with both the folk and mainstream music scenes [Go-Set, 9 Aug & 11 Oct 1969, 1 Aug 1970]

“Above all, music must have entertainment”, he once declared. Intensely critical of the pop scene’s preoccupation with drugs, doom and destruction, he teamed up with Jimmy Stewart in 1968, creating a solid body of self-composed material about “real things”  – small portraits and studies of individual lonelinesses and the patterns of particular loves, recounted (he maintained) without either judgment or world-shattering conclusions. The material was preserved on a ground-breaking double LP, The Age of Mouse, for Sweet Peach Records (a now-legendary label which, in its heyday, embraced Kevin Johnson, Irene Petrie, Lee Conway and Levi Smith’s Clefs).  He tried out the new material extensively on audiences at PACT Folk, the singer-songwriters’ nirvana in Sydney. According to Go-Set, “his Saturday night concerts in Sydney … built the PACT Folk thing into a ‘happening’. A ‘happening’ devoid of any stimulus other than that of experiencing a true artist”. Highlights of The Age of Mouse included ‘Georgetown’ (a tribute to Ashdown’s good friend John Stevens), the powerful ‘Saddest Song of All’ and the elegant ‘Antique Annie’s Magic Lantern Show’ (the last covered by Marian Henderson on Cameo). It was followed by the LP Doug Ashdown Live!
Ashdown married and moved to Sydney in 1970. He and Stewart then spent a couple of years in the USA, contracted to write songs for the giant Nashville-based Tree Corporation, and he found international fame with their ‘Winter in America’ (recorded after returning to Australia in 1973). He has remained a respected elder statesman of Australian acoustic music ever since.
Better remembered today for his organisational role at the Folk Hut, [John Fulton] Stevens was also a likeable and crowd-pleasing performer. Perhaps best remembered for bawdy material such as ‘Never Wed An Old Man’ or his irreverent adaptation of ‘Whistle a Happy Tune’, his repertoire ranged over Ian & Sylvia, Richard Farina, Gordon Lightfoot, his own compositions (including ‘Big Boat’, the beautiful ‘Jennie’ and a heartfelt lament for Martin Luther King, all of which he wrote after the “folk boom”, while living in Tasmania), rarities like ‘Friday Morning’ (which he found in a 19th century hymnal and first aired at a Uniting Church Folk Mass at Burnside), Australian songs like ‘The Tent-Poles are Rotting’ (acquired from Alex Hood and Dave de Hugard). An unabashed romantic, he made a specialty of “heart-rending love songs”, songs which enabled him “to reach out and pat the audience on the head”. Remembering the many occasions on which he might look up from singing to see tears rolling down the cheeks of those seated in the front row at the Folk Hut or elsewhere, he recalls:
Having the ability to make people respond to what the song was written for, was more rewarding than having a whole hall-full of people applauding.
A distinctive feature of Stevens’ performances was his use of a unique 9 string guitar. The guitar was originally a Hagstrom which he aquired from a Swedish sailor for a few pounds, and which he modified himself after hearing Phil Cunneen’s 12 string playing. In Fulton Stevens’ view, the modified guitar gave him the best of both worlds: the upper octaves without the bass tremelo. Fortunately, the Hagstrom’s fret-board was wide enough to accommodate the additional strings. 
Robyn Smith, like so many of her peers, had her start on The Country and Western Hour, at age 15. Possessed of a remarkably mature and powerful alto voice, she made the finals of Bandstand’s  Starflight International Talent Quest (rendering ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ and ‘If I Had My Way’) and subsequently appeared on Bandstand’s Folk specials, The Country and Western Hour, and other popular TV and radio shows, brandishing a 12 string guitar and (like Melbourne’s Lenore Somerset) drawing heavily on Odetta for material. Folkmusic took a back seat when Smith entered the University of Adelaide, to train as a high school teacher, but she found time to participate in the Inter-University Folk Festival in Hobart in 1968, and to form an all-woman skiffle group, the Jug-Scrubbin’ Mommas. Smith subsequently left the folk scene behind as she moved into cabaret and musical theatre. She adopted a new stage name in 1970 and, as Robyn Archer, ultimately became one of Australia’s most successful musical exports overseas.

Husband and wife team Lyn and Graham McCarthy were among the earliest players on the Adelaide folk scene; they took their neo-Nina & Frederik-style act to England in 1963. So successful did it prove during a two month tour of Scotland that the couple opted to turn professional and they became fixtures on the London folk club circuit (making more than three hundred radio and TV appearances, and four LPs).  Their first album, Way Up from Down Under (1966), teamed Australian songs like ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ and ‘The Overlanders’ with such perennials as ‘Fare Thee Well’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’. The McCarthys’ subsequent releases contained increasingly middle-of-the-road material, much of it written by Lyn, but Graham did record an album of Best-Loved Folk Songs in Adelaide – backed by Rob McCarthy and Phil Cunneen – when the pair returned home in the 1970s. (12 string guitar and keyboard virtuoso Cunneen would carve out a career as a musical arranger within the TV industry).
The John Gordon Trio came to prominence through appearances on the nationally-televised talent quest Showcase 65, and proved popular with ‘middle Australia’, performing at hotels, Leagues and RSL clubs, and the bigger coffee lounges. The trio reportedly combined a folk sound “with a lot of comedy and hokum thrown in”. Also preoccupied with the lighter side of folkmusic were The Skillet Lickers, a gifted bluegrass band comprising Rob McCarthy, Brent Miller and John Munro. The group, which appeared regularly on The C&W Hour, later reconstituted as Country Express. (Munro, McCarthy and Miller would remain respected veterans of the Adelaide folk scene in the 1970s and 80s, as would singer Irene Petrie. Munro recorded a stunning LP, Nightpiece, with Denis & Lynne Tracy in the 1980s. Petrie recorded a couple of singles for Sweet Peach in the ’60s, notably a cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Does Your Mother Know’. In 1984 she toured with U.S. legend Tom Paxton and released an exceptionally fine album, If Wishes Were Fishes, with backing by the Tracys, Eric Bogle and the former Skillet Lickers).
[In addition to printed sources cited in the text, this paper has drawn extensively on interviews and/or correspondence with Doug Ashdown, Don Brow, Peter Wesley-Smith, Jerry Wesley,  Jim Maguire, Cris Larner, Hans Stampfer,  Lenore Somerset, Beth Sowter, Brian Mooney, Patsy Biscoe and John [Fulton] Stevens]

THE EARLY YEARS OF THE FOLK REVIVAL IN BRISBANE

Malcolm J. Turnbull
[A slightly abridged version of this article was previously published in The Folk Rag, July – Sept 2004, and reprinted in Cornstalk Gazette, Sept – Nov 2004]
I was saddened to read, in a recent issue of the magazine Trad and Now, of the passing of one of the true pioneers of the Australian folk revival, collector, singer and lifelong folklore enthusiast Stan Arthur (1925 – 2004).
Although geography prevented our meeting face-to-face, I had the privilege and pleasure of interviewing Stan by phone (over several evenings) a few years before his death. A born raconteur, he delighted me with his frank, albeit affectionate, recollections of the early Brisbane folk scene and (subsequently) with several generous packages of rare recorded tapes and clippings culled from his extensive personal archive. (At that stage he was still attempting to rebuild a legendary folklore collection devastated by the 1974 floods). The following article, a part of my ongoing research into the history of the folk revival in 1960s Australia, draws heavily on my conversations with Stan, as well on notes of interviews with Anne Infante and Dave de Hugard, information from Mark Gregory, and Bill Scott’s interview for the National Library. [Bill Scott, Recorded Interview with Alan Scott & Kevin Baker, NLA Folklore Collection ORAL TRC 2581]
The urban folk revival, as it manifested itself in Brisbane, was able to call on a sturdy tradition of folksong collection and preservation. An enterprising performer Thea Rowe had toured remote schools with a program of folksongs courtesy of an Education Department grant in the mid 1940s. A decade later, the Wynnum North home of the great folklorist John Manifold became a focal point for leftist intellectual and musical activity in the state. Manifold convened regular singabouts, fronted his own ensemble The Bandicoots, and collaborated with Victorian Ron Edwards on the compilation Bandicoot Ballads. (Edwards too became a Queenslander, settling at Cairns in 1960). Manifold’s fieldwork culminated in the Queensland Centenary Songster (1959) and, with assistance from Bill Scott, he compiled and edited the widely-disseminated Penguin Australian Songbook (1964). Meanwhile, just as response to Reedy River (1954-5) had led to the formation of scholarly folklore societies and bush music clubs in Victoria and NSW, so the Brisbane production of Dick Diamond’s play produced the Moreton Bay Bushwhackers Band (MBBB), members of which included Stan Arthur and, later, Bill Scott. (Novocastrian Stan played ‘Irish’ in Reedy River). Together with other enthusiasts, the MBBB formed the Brisbane Bush Music Club (which eventually revamped itself into the Queensland Folklore Society). Bill Scott recalls that the Club inaugurated its own newsletter and songsheet, the Bush Music Telegraph and, in the early 1960s, convened monthly singabouts (Sydney-style) at the Oddfellows Hall in Charlotte Street. A couple of buckets of burgundy punch, circulated over the course of the evening, generally spiced up the proceedings. [Scott Interview NLA]
Other bush clubs emerged in regional Queensland and additional fieldwork was performed by Bob Michell, Bill Scott and Stan Arthur. A credit manager, once described as looking “for all the world like a well-fed leprechaun”, Stan reportedly found his first taste of collecting intoxicating:
I’ll never forget it … We took a train to Bundaberg, hitched a ride to Goodwood and walked to Childers. I walked into Claude and Don Hamilton’s Bellevue Hotel with my guitar over my shoulder and it was on. What was meant to be a five minute stop just went on and on. We finished up staying 14 days. They loved music and we finished up even building a lagerphone and a bush bass. We had a ball. [Gold Coast Bulletin, 23 June 1981]
Scott and Arthur collaborated on the first commercial recording of Queensland folklore, Billygoat Overland, for the fledgling Wattle company in 1958. Wattle celebrated the state’s centenary with Folk Songs from Queensland, teaming the Moreton Bay Bushwhackers and the Bandicoots, the following year.

When The Kingston Trio played Brisbane’s Festival Hall as part of its 1961 tour, Stan Arthur sent a tape of Australian songs backstage to Dave Guard, the trio’s leader. Guard was touched by the gesture and returned the favour with the gift of a 3-year subscription to the American magazine Sing Out and a tape of The Weavers. For Stan, who had formed his own Calypso ensemble, The Banana-Benders, when Harry Belafonte’s popularity was at its height, the tape served as the entree into “a whole new world of songs”, and inspired him immediately to form his own trio. The initial recruits were Bob Stewart and Gary Tooth; subsequently the trio expanded into a quartet with the addition of Alistair Fraser, who brought with him a knowledge of Canadian folklore gained while working for a construction firm in Canada, and the foursome adopted the name The Wayfarers. The Wayfarers was undoubtedly Queensland’s best-known folksinging ensemble of the period. It was also an extraordinarily long-lived one. (Having numbered some three dozen performers in its ranks, the one constant being leader Arthur, the group finally disbanded in 1999).

THE EARLY YEARS OF THE FOLK REVIVAL IN MELBOURNE

Malcolm J. Turnbull
[This article was previously published in 6 parts in Trad & Now, Issues #5, 6, 7, 9,10 & 11 in 2003-2005]
PART 1. BEGINNINGS

In a scathing dissection of the Australian folk revival at its peak, Sydney journalist Charles Higham firmly shifted blame for the phenomenon on to the southern metropolis. “It all began in Melbourne”, he informed readers of the Bulletin [14 Nov 1964], “… in dim clubs, emerging from the always fierce interest there in jazz and blues”. Melbourne’s primacy in fostering the folk boom has since become accepted wisdom, although it should be stressed that the coffee lounge era did not happen overnight. Crucial precedents, many of them NSW-based, included the fieldwork of Meredith, Manifold, Edwards, et al; the formation of scholarly Folklore Societies and Bush Music Clubs in the wake of the success of Reedy River; the establishment of Wattle Records.
While the folksinger per se was a scarce and unusual commodity before the ‘60s, a handful of hardy individuals had been “carrying the torch” for years – people like Thea Bates, who toured remote Queensland schools with a folksong program during World War II; Sydneysiders Jeff Way and Barbara Lysiak (who introduced mainstream audiences to American hootenanny songs); Beth Schurr (who pioneered the performance of folksongs on live-to-air TV); Johnny Earls; Bob Elliott; Frances Shaw; even Shirley Abicair, a typist who started out performing French and Appalachian material to her own zither accompaniment before moving on to fame and fortune in London. Alex Hood and Chris Kempster seceded from The Bushwhackers over the issue of interpretation and wentb on to form The Rambleers. The Lincoln Coffee Lounge played host to the inner-city “arty set” and even produced its own roneo’d songbook for informal gatherings. Elsewhere in late 1950s Sydney, the “folk-oriented”bmight be found at The Tavern near Edgecliff Station or on Saturday afternoons in the back bar of that bohemian Mecca, the Royal George Hotel.
In Melbourne pre-revival folksingers like Joan & Miles Maxwell, the Lumsden Family and Glen Tomasetti also found their main audiences within the urban arts and intellectual sub-community where Spanish Civil War songs, Paul Robeson, The Weavers, Seeger and Guthrie were the music-of-choice: – the Bread and Cheese Club, Ola Cohn’s studio in East Melbourne, Clifton Pugh’s property at Hurstbridge, the Lawson Society, Tattersalls Hotel, etc. Broadcaster Denis Gibbons was performing bush ballads to listeners of Radio 3LO.

Meanwhile the Skiffle craze, Harry Belafonte’s West Indian repertoire and the enormous success of the hit record ‘Tom Dooley’ in 1958, had inevitably inspired a rash of quasi-Calypso ensembles and Kingston Trio imitators throughout the country. (In Brisbane, for instance, Stan Arthur fronted a calypso group The Banana Benders before moving on to form The Wayfarers. In Hobart graphic artist Alan Tweedie entertained diners at the Dutch Inn with ‘Scarlet Ribbons’ and Weavers material).
Still, if a single event can be said to have heralded the advent of a popular folkmusic scene in Australia, it was the decision of restaurateur Tom Lazar to introduce live music at his cafe, the Reata, in High Street, Malvern. A post-war European migrant, Lazar toyed briefly with the notion of presenting a German folk-dance floorshow, complete with lederhosen, feathered caps and beer steins. Fortunately, his wife Veronica was more farsighted; she suggested instead that the restaurant emulate American trends and engage a self-accompanied folksinger to entertain the patrons. “It’s the coming thing”, she predicted. Accordingly, the Reata was decked out in Greenwich Village chic: fishnets on the celing, candles in VAT 69 bottles, red and white gingham tablecloths. A heavy wooden door, separating the entry from the street, reinforced the cafe’s sense of “interiority’. The folksinger in question was a specialist in traditional blues, already well-known on the Melbourne jazz circuit.
Jazz – in particular, traditional jazz – whether at smoky clubs or at dances in suburban R.S.L., scout and town halls, attracted an enormous following in the Melbourne of the late 1950s and early ’60s. Teenagers and young adults – in their thousands – found an alternative to the naivete of mainstream pop music at venues like Basin Street (in Brighton), Katherina’s Cabaret (St Kilda), the Blue Beat (North Balwyn), the Powerhouse (at Albert Park Lake), the Black and Blue (at the Balwyn RSL) or the Downbeat Club (above Bob Clemens’ city music store). “Town halls were literally packed to the rafters every weekend”, singer Judith Durham has recalled. Uniformed in tight corduroys, sloppy joes, desert boots and duffle coats, patrons would stomp and cake-walk to the hot Dixieland, gospel and blues served up by the likes of Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preachers, the Yarra Yarra Jazz Band, the Melbourne New Orleans Jazz Band, the University Jazz Band or the John Hawes Jazz Band. Once the shows were over (Durham informed her biographer), “… everybody went off to a coffee lounge. You maybe had a beatnik boyfriend and went off for coffee and a toasted cheese sandwich after the dance. It was the thing to do” [Graham Simpson, Colours of My Life, p.28-34]. Given the average age of the largely-student jazz-buff population, mostly dependent on train and tram timetables or on obliging parents for transport to and from dances, there was sometimes a more mundane motivation to spend time at coffee-lounges: “When the venues closed around 11.30 p.m. the only safe option, bearing in mind the hostile reaction of ‘rockers’ to duffle coats and desert boots, was to go to one of the new music-oriented coffee lounges that were opening up around town, like the Reata …”[Andrew Pattison & Dave Mulholland, ‘Tradition and Change’ in Australian Music Directory 1981, p.95].
It was inevitable that youthful jazz fans found themselves exposed increasingly to folkmusic as singing took off in more and more coffee lounges. Nor can it be denied that the popularity of folksinging at the height of the boom impacted, to some extent, on urban jazz scenes – particularly in Hobart, Adelaide and Perth, where audiences for alternative music were limited. Yet there was an essential compatibility between Australian jazz and folk in the ‘60s. As jazz historian Bruce Johnson has noted, the two forms of music “appealed particularly to the young products of the ‘baby boom’ for whom the university system suddenly expanded through the 1950s”. Associated with both comfortable middle-class intellectualism and youthful intellectual dissent (stereotypical “angry young men”, beatniks and Paris Left Bank types), jazz – in both its traditional and progressive manifestations (the latter frequently spawned in association with poetry, painting and other non-musical modes of artistic expression) – was deemed an infinitely more valid means of musical recreation than rock’n’roll. A similar aura of non-conformity and intellectual intensity surrounded folkmusic. For more cerebral members of the jazz fraternity, there was an historic edge to the discovery of folksong. Intent on tracing the roots and origins of the musical form they loved, they found themselves led to the riches of American tradition (starting with gospel and blues) and from there, even further back, to the folkmusic of the British Isles. Journalist Craig McGregor [People, Politics and Pop, p.150-151] observed at the time: “recognising in it the qualities which are absent in modern music … jazz has provided the thoroughfare” for many a folk convert.

Born in London in 1932, Paul Marks worked as a Physical Training instructor with the RAF before electing to settle in Australia. In a letter to the author, he recalled: “I had emigrated to Australia in 1956 and soon met Frank Traynor, Bob Barnard and the rest of that talented lot, and started singing with Frank and Bob down at Mentone life-saving club”. Even at that early date, Marks’ musical boundaries were flexible. He formed a shortlived skiffle group and was appearing with the group at the Purple Heaven in St Kilda when he was promptly recruited as vocalist by another act on the bill, the Melbourne New Orleans Jazz Band.
Led by clarinet-player Nick Polites, the MNOJB claimed to be the first Australian band to play in the English New Orleans style. It drew almost entirely on the black American gospel, spiritual and blues tradition associated with legendary Louisiana jazz greats like Bunk Johnson and George Lewis, and attracted a substantial local following. Marks combined vocal duties with the band as a whole and singing/playing with the MNOJB’s rhythm section – banjoist Willie Watt, drummer Graham Bennett and bassist Mookie Herman – as a subsidiary ensemble calling itself ‘The Paul Marks Folksinging Group’. (“This must have been ’57 or ’58”, notes Marks). Nick Polites recalls that the audience threw pennies when Marks first tried out his Folksinging group at the Esquire in Glen Iris; within a couple of weeks, however, the young patrons were “eating out of his hand” and “it became the talk around town”.
In the summer of 1958/9, Marks took advantage of the MNOJB’s holiday engagement at the seaside resort of Lorne, 70 miles west of Melbourne, to first perform brackets of folksongs and blues at a coffee lounge (sometimes solo, sometimes with his backing trio). The Arab Cafe was the brainchild of three young brothers, Graham, Alistair and Robin Smith. Established in 1956 to take advantage of an influx of overseas visitors to the 1956 Olympics, the Arab was a long narrow eatery, an avant-garde structure of bluestone, glass and canvas which modelled itself on European coffee bars. Its espresso machine was only the third of its kind in Victoria. Bikini-clad waitresses served cappucino, milk-shakes, toasted sandwiches, pasta and a range of colourfully-titled desserts (the “Porgy and Bess” and “Harem Girl” sundaes among them) to Toorak surfies or to holidaying students who sprawled on cushions discussing poetry and Plato, debating world issues or listening to music (canned or live). Kristen Lofven (now Williamson), who worked there as a summer vacation waitress, recalls that the cafe “hit a fashion nerve”, staying open around the clock from Christmas to Easter, and serving 2000 people a day:
It was the days before big jets, when anything other than Fletcher Jones trousers, Smokey Dawson and meat pies was considered exotic. Here was a place that offered a smattering of styles, Italian cafe society mixed with the American beat scene as well as a novel bit of Australiana – perving on near naked and unattainable beachgirls [National Times, 15 Feb 1981]
Soon after opening the cafe, the Smith brothers expanded their operations to take in a dance-hall 200 yards away. Fitted out “with Australiana and Beach chic” and reopened as the Wild Colonial, it played host to the cream of Melbourne’s trad jazz bands from 1958 until 1964, when fashion dictated a change to live rock bands. “Anyone who was anyone played there”, remembers Robin Smith, noting that jazz vocalist Judy Durham was recruited for the summer of 1963/4. (Her name features in advertising on the Arab’s distinctive 1964 menu; Durham had to back out at the last moment, however,  when she received an unrefusable offer to travel to England as part of The Seekers). As well as playing at the Wild Colonial’s enormously successful jazz dances most evenings, artists would be called on to entertain patrons at the Arab. Peter Dickie, then still a teenager, remembers first being exposed to his first “real live folkmusic” when he heard Marks play there one night in 1959.
Marks’ folksinging  was “part of the special things being offered on different nights at the Arab”, notes Alistair Smith, and the singer was re-hired a couple of years later (the summer of 1960/1) to alternate folksinging and fronting Frank Traynor’s band. In 1961/2, the Smiths recruited Don Carless, a burly entrepreneur-cum-theatrical director (well versed in the jazz milieu, variety shows, even the circus), to add a professional gloss to the jazz dances and to take care of entertainment at the restaurant. This was Carless’ first exposure to live folkmusic. He became close friends with Brian Mooney,  an itinerant New South Welshman who succeeded Marks as resident folksinger at the Arab Cafe (and provided light musical relief at the Wild Colonial) on the strength of an audition tape he recorded in Sydney. Soon after Carless made a more permanent mark on the Victorian folk scene when he became a partner in Traynors.

For several summer seasons Lorne was a popular out-of-town venue which provided summer work for jazz greats like Dick Barnes, the University Jazz Band and Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preachers, beat poet Adrian Rawlins and folksingers Marks, Mooney, Peter Laycock,  Martyn Wyndham-Read and Glen Tomasetti. (The heavy drinking which accompanied the musicians’ communal living at the local band-house ceased abruptly at the weekends – when “the wives” arrived).
 The cafe itself was run on strict time-and-motion principles (then in vogue). Artists performed short, precisely-timed sets, broken up by lengthy interludes which enabled a 100% turnover in customers. Meanwhile, the practice of interspersing folksong brackets as a change of pace at the Wild Colonial jazz dances soon caught on at metropolitan jazz venues such as the Melbourne Jazz Cellar.
Marks dates the start of his solo career at the Reata to Easter 1960. He also continued to perform regularly with the MNOJB at Jazz Centre 44 in St Kilda and elsewhere, or on record (a series of EPs and LPs for Swaggie Records).  In 1961 the band signed with English agent Lyn Dutton. Marks recalls: “I found out what it is like to be a pro musician! After the seven and a half months [touring the UK], Dutton offered us four months in Germany, which we took. The last booking folded, I left the band, went to England and Long John Baldry took over my vocal spot”. He returned to Melbourne in mid 1962 and devoted himself to folksinging full-time. For new converts he was a charismatic figure. Bluesmen like Marks appeared to “live what they sang about” and were associated with a tough, slightly scary and alluring world (a world rendered even more tantalising by the barely veiled contempt with which the true blues fanatic tended to regard any other form of music). 
Marks was the first jazz musician to make the formal crossover from jazz into folk, but by no means the only one. Throughout the ’60s, the strong nexus between the two would be underlined by ongoing (and national) interplay. A significant number of coffee lounges, like the Primitif in Brisbane, operated out of venues previously associated with the jazz scene, or featured both jazz and folk entertainment (Hernando’s, the Esquire and the Gassworks in Melbourne; the Shiralee and the Hole in the Wall in Perth, for example). Entrepreneurs like Frank French, Frank Traynor, Tommy Davidson and Don Carless entered the folkmusic industry after years on the jazz scene. (Carless was secretary of the Australian Jazz Convention in the late 1950s).  

Like Paul Marks, Sydney’s queen-of-the-folkies Marian Henderson had her professional beginnings in jazz. Jazz veterans like Ade Monsborough, George Golla, Ed Gaston, Herbie Marks, Jim Beal, Frank Traynor, John Sangster, Col Nolan or Alan Pope, also often found themselves in demand as session-men for recordings by folksingers.
Jeannie Lewis, who started singing an eclectic mix of Australian and international folksongs as a first year Arts student at the University of Sydney in 1962, quickly developed a preference for the blues and recorded with both the Ray Price and Alan Lee quartets. Judy Jacques, who became vocalist with the Yarra Yarra Jazz Band at age 15, could boast selling more copies of one of her recordings than had the latest Elvis Presley single, and was one of the few jazz musicians who appeared regularly on commercial televsion. During the folk boom, Jacques carved out a special niche for herself as a specialist in black gospel music and “negro spirituals”, recording with her own ensemble, The Gospel Four. In the early ‘60s her chief competition came from another Judy, Judy (or Judith) Durham, a  young secretary who started singing jazz publicly after a friend loaned her some Bessie Smith records. Durham debuted with the University Jazz Band at the Memphis Club in mid 1961 and subsequently fronted several other bands, most notably Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preachers, with whom she made her first recordings. During the same period (from late 1962) she began performing folksongs, initially one evening a week, in up-market South Yarra, with Bruce Woodley and two of Woodley’s old school friends,  Athol Guy and Keith Potger. Woodley, in turn, combined a day job in advertising with the folk quartet and occasional solo gigs at Traynors and the Little Reata, and still found time to play the banjo and sing at Downbeat with a jazz ensemble called Morris Plonk’s Moonshine Five.
More modestly, Hobart’s Patsy Biscoe began her singing career fronting the Sullivan Cove Jazz Stompers while at university. Perth’s Maggie Hammond alternated singing Baez-style ballads and classic blues as vocalist with the Westport Jazz Band. After sharing the stage with Kenny Ball, as a member of the Dixieland ensemble The Traditionals, Perth bassist Murray Wilkins joined the West Coast Trio. Eighteen year old Melbourne singer Lynne St John alternated sets upstairs at the Campus, fronting Graham Bennett’s band The Hotsands, with folksong brackets in the coffee lounge downstairs. Margaret Smith did likewise, offsetting her folksinging with appearances at the mod Opus jazz club. Even such an unlikely candidate as the classically-trained  songstress Tina Lawton first appeared at the Catacombs in Adelaide with the University Jazz Band. In Melbourne, Margret Roadknight would prove equally at ease in the folk and jazz milieux, mixing appearances on the folk circuit with guest stints with Traynor’s Jazz Preachers.
Meanwhile, Paul Marks led the field at the Reata. Best remembered for his skilled interpretations of American blues, he would also deliver programs of traditional English folksongs, spirituals or sea shanties on occasion. Peter Mann, proprietor of the Discurio record store, recorded him live and issued the LP on Score Records as Paul Marks at the Reata. (Effectively a tribute to black American folksong, the record includes ‘Midnight Special’, ‘We Shall Overcome’, ‘House of the Rising Sun’, ‘Cotton Fields’, as well as spirituals like ‘Sinner Man’, ‘Michael’, ‘This Train’ and ‘I’m Going to Walk and Talk with Jesus’). Something of a minor legend among his successors by virtue of having been the first coffee lounge folksinger in the country, he sadly found it impossible to maintain the momentum of his career. In a review of one of his last Melbourne appearances (at the Little Reata), Adrian Rawlins conceded that Marks was an inconsistent performer and that overwork with the MNOJB had affected his singing for a while. Even so (Rawlins assessed), he was far from being (as some “knockers” claimed) “a depleted talent”:
He is the only white singer I have heard who has developed the natural glissandi which are the essence of blues cadences … [‘Black is the Colour’] assumed a rhythmic inevitability usually created only by a jazz band at the peak of creative swinging – yet Marks was singing melodically! When he stopped, it seemed as though in the middle, life felt empty without the song going on … I had been listening to the song with every bone in my body … This tremendous communicative power is Marks’ genius … [Had] Bessie Smith been in the audience as Paul Marks sang her song [‘Empty Bed Blues’] … she would have applauded: not with her hands, not with cheers; with the tears that have welled and tumbled down her wide and generous, sad, sad cheeks [Music Maker, April 1963].

Marks settled in Sydney in 1963.  He appeared regularly at the Troubadour and the Last Straw, and was a regular on the TV show Dave’s Place,  before moving to New Zealand in 1966.

Glen Tomasetti has recalled that only a handful of singers were active when she left Australia for overseas in 1961; by the time she returned, in July of the following year, she was one of several individuals actually able to make a living at folksinging. Marks’ popularity (and the niche left by his temporary absence while touring overseas with the New Orleans Jazz Band) induced Tom Lazar to expand his stable, recruiting another young Englishman. Sussex-born Martyn Wyndham-Read (b. 1942) first developed an interest in folkmusic and folk-history listening to old-timers in his home-town, the village of Charlwood. He acquired his first guitar (a Hoffner Flamenco model) as a schoolboy and played Leadbelly songs for a time with a skiffle ensemble called The Black Diamonds. Wyndham-Read emigrated to Australia at age 19, intent on learning farm management first-hand as a jackeroo on a cattle station in South Australia. (“A little different to Sussex”). The property, Emu Springs, was a subsidiary of Haddon Rig and the job ended after a few months when the station was sold off for death duties: not before the outback experience had given the young musician his first taste of traditional Australian song, however. He has since compared first hearing ‘Click Go the Shears’ and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ with St Paul’s revelation on the road to Damascus.
Wyndham-Read subsequently spent the best part of a year hitch-hiking around Eastern Australia, gravitating naturally towards the beatnik/bohemian and music-friendly scenes at the Royal George in Sydney and Tattersalls in Melbourne. In late 1961 he teamed up with singer-guitarist Don Lee and the pair were recruited by Tom Lazar to play a four month season, seven nights a week, at a café in the resort town of Portsea. The café (remembered as either The Canteen or the Greasy Spoon) burned down at the end of the season, and the young performers were hired for the Reata. Wyndham-Read became a regular there, initially sharing accommodation above the café with a passing parade of other musicians (including Marks and Brian Brophy, a flamenco virtuoso who subsequently brought folksinging to Hernando’s Coffee Lounge a few blocks away).
Within a couple of years, Wyndham-Read had established himself as one of the most respected folksingers in the country, popular enough to be able to support a wife and two children through his performing.  He supplemented his native English repertoire with ‘Moreton Bay’ (learned from Peter Laycock) and other bush ballads learned from the Lumsden Family and Joy Durst of the Bush Music Club. “[He] sings folk songs in traditional style better than any other professional singer in Australia”, observed folklorist Edgar Waters after witnessing a typical Wyndham-Read set. “It rather grieves me to say it, but this pommy new-chum sings even bushranger ballads better than the local lads” [Australian, 20 Feb 1965; Sun, 21 July 1964].

 Lazar supplemented weeknight shows with highly successful Sunday afternoon concerts, an amalgam of jazz, folk and poetry readings. David Lumsden remembers that the cafe was typically packed to capacity, with patrons spilling out and queuing well down High Street, and that Lazar formed a partnership with theatrical director Wal Cherry to present a series of afternoon concerts at Cherry’s Emerald Hill Theatre in South Melbourne (in 1962). The afternoons (both at the Reata and Emerald Hill) provided an important performing platform for Marks, Lumsden, poet Adrian Rawlins, the Gerry Humphries Trio, Tina Date, Tomasetti, Wyndham-Read and (among others) a long, lean, red-haired teenager, Trevor Lucas.
Lucas, variously described as looking like “a refugee from an El Greco painting”, “Wild Bill Hickok, Rob Roy or a cavalier”, shot to prominence on the Melbourne scene not long after leaving Richmond Technical School and taking up a carpentry apprenticeship. (In that capacity, he helped Lazar fit out The Little Reata in the city). A deft instrumentalist (on 12 string guitar and harmonica), gifted with a deep and penetrating voice, he came to folkmusic after dabbling in C&W and rock’n’roll, and developed an early fascination with American blues musicians like Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. He was also a Bob Dylan enthusiast, and an unabashed advocate of the value of protest music. He informed the Sun, somewhat defensively [17 Aug, 1964]:
The protest songs of this century have a range of comment from industrial conditions to cruelty in the boxing ring … For some reason, many people scoff at them. But they usually have fascinating lyrics and tunes – and what’s wrong with protesting against social evils? People also scoff at my beard and long hair. Those who scoff seem to me to represent the intolerance these songs protest against.
 Lucas recorded an album, See that My Grave is Kept Clean, for East Records in 1964, and also appeared on the Score compilation Australian Folk Festival, with a powerful version of Gary Shearston’s ‘The Voyager’. On New Year 1965 he travelled to Europe with his wife and fellow folksinger Garry Kinnane, and quickly made a name for himself on the British folk club circuit, touring with Ian & Sylvia and Odetta,  even appearing at a Belgian concert headlined by Peter Paul & Mary and Joan Baez. He recorded an album of Australian songs for Reality records, Overlander (1966), and worked with another Australian expatriate, jazz and gospel singer Kerrilee Male, in the electric folk group Eclection before meeting (and ultimately marrying) legendary British singer Sandy Denny. Lucas and Denny teamed in the groups Fotheringay and Fairport Convention. (Following her death in 1978, he returned to Australia and worked – primarily – as a record producer, until his untimely death in February 1989).

Tom Lazar’s engagement of Marks (and subsequently Wyndham-Read, Lucas, et al) at the Reata was the first in a series of significant milestones in Melbourne’s manifestation of the folk boom. Another important event (in September 1961) was a Benefit concert for Pete Seeger which brought a number of budding and veteran performers together on the one stage. The legendary Seeger, along with other members of The Weavers, had been subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Commission into the Communist Party in 1955. Refusing to name names at the height of McCarthy hysteria, he was indicted on ten counts of contempt of Congress and found guilty when the case finally came to trial in 1961. (The charges were dismissed by the U.S. Court of Appeals a year later).
Mounted by the Folklore Society at the Athenaeum Theatre, the “Pete Seeger Goodwill Night” was one of many international responses to the singer’s plight and massive legal bills. Participants included guitarist Sadie Bishop, the Austral Singers, Joan & Miles Maxwell, the Lumsden Family, Don Ayrton and The Southern Folksingers. In a letter thanking the society for its efforts, Seeger’s wife Toshi stressed that “the more publicity the House Un-American committee gets (anti, I guess I mean), and the more protests that are sent to VIPs, the more possible it will be that Peter may not have to spend that year in jail” [Lowenstein Papers]. A series of concerts by Seeger two years later, as part of a world tour, proved inspirational to a large number of would-be singer-instrumentalists.

For David Lumsden, recently graduated in Civil Engineering from Footscray Technical College, a request to render the National Anthem – Seeger-style – on 5 String banjo at the Benefit concert marked the formal launch of his solo performing career. From 1962 to 1967 (when he semi-retired from public performing due to the pressures of work and family) Lumsden was a regular at folk clubs and concerts in Melbourne, either in his own right, with his parents, or with singers Garry Kinnane or Lynne St John. (Lumsden and St John married in 1967).

Peter Dickie cites Seeger’s 1963 visit as the catalyst for his becoming a performer. The son of Alf Dickie, a left-wing Presbyterian clergyman from Essendon who was prominent in the Peace Movement throughout the 1950s, Peter (like David Lumsden) had been exposed to Seeger’s music from an early age. He first picked up a guitar in the early ’60s (left-handed, he was obliged to order a custom-crafted instrument from the Maton company) and sang initially with a childhood friend, Ian White, at peace movement meetings and socials. The duo specialised in Spanish Civil War songs popularised by Seeger and The Weavers (like ‘Venga Jaleo’ or  ‘Si Me Quieres Escribir’). Dickie remembers that the duo met their idol at an informal at-home during the 1963 visit, and that they were thrilled by Seeger’s favourable response to their unaccompanied rendition of  ‘Ballad of 1891’. A professional artist, who trained initially as a High School teacher, Dickie subsequently combined painting (alternating rent-paying commercial commissions like designing posters or decorating theatre sets with his own work) and solo singing, contributing articles and reviews to Australian Tradition and Go-Set (a highlight was a short interview he and Mick Counihan managed to get with Bob Dylan at Essendon Airport in 1966), and leading the Victorian Folk Music Club’s Bush Band. Other members of the Bush Band, formed in 1964, included – at various times – White, Merle Gubbins, Jim Buchanan, David Taylor and Bert Cameron. They were also joined by David Lumsden, on banjo, for a number of recording sessions. Dickie’s solo repertoire evolved over time from American political material through locally-produced protest songs (he recorded a never-released EP of such material with Glen Tomasetti, Phyl Vinnicombe and Mick Counihan in 1966), to British and Australian traditional ballads.   
As audiences multiplied in the wake of the success of the Reata and the Seeger Benefit Concert, other folk coffee lounges emerged. One of the first was in Balwyn (name now unknown). Garry Kinnane, a youthful Joan Baez enthusiast who had studied classical guitar under the gifted Carl Ogden, debuted there and played several nights a week for a couple of months in 1961, by which time the novelty had worn off for both the proprietor and local audiences. Ogden and Kinnane were both associated also with the Cafe Ad Lib, one of three early venues which emerged in South Yarra. The others were the Jolly Roger in St Kilda Road (close to the Melbourne Synagogue), and the Treble Clef, a few blocks east of the South Yarra railway station. In 1962 also, Tom Lazar expanded his business activities by opening the Little Reata in the city. Flamenco guitarist Brian Brophy was a drawcard at Hernando’s, a tiny jazz-meets-folk venue in King’s Arcade near the Armadale Railway station.
Established and run by colourful businesswoman Val Eastwood (best remembered for her restaurant Val’s in the city), the Ad Lib was a small domestic eatery, well-known to the initiated for the quality of its Italian cooking, and a discreet meeting-place for sections of the gay community. It effectively disappeared during the day. Housed in a covered alley-way behind a set of shops at 132 Toorak Road, its furniture, fixtures, etc., were all packed up and stored after closing and set up again late the following afternoon. Ogden played there for a few weeks (gratuitously) before recommending that Eastwood hire balladeer Peter Laycock. Invited to audition, Laycock cannily filled the cafe with “a claque of mates” and went over well enough for Eastwood to engage him (at 3 pounds). In the long run, he played Friday evenings at the Ad Lib for more than two years, eventually graduating to 5 pounds a night. He was soon joined by Glen Tomasetti, recently returned from overseas (initially she performed on Saturdays), and Brian Mooney, lately arrived from Sydney (on Sundays). 

Laycock (b. 1928) had worked over the years as a newspaper reporter (in India), as a labourer, teacher of the deaf, even as an education officer at Geelong prison. By late 1962 he had become singularly discontented with teaching in suburban secondary schools. To his delight, performing at the Ad Lib and other folk coffee lounges (as they emerged) enabled him to resign his job at Watsonia Tech. and devote himself more and more to working at his pottery studio at Cottle’s Bridge. First exposed to folksongs as a choirboy in Adelaide, and then through left-wing student groups at university, the burly and bearded Laycock learned his first guitar chords from collector Ron Edwards in the mid-‘50s. He specialised in Australian bush lore (he probably knew a wider range of Australian material than any other professional performer prior to Gary Shearston), but was also well-known for his versions of comic songs (like ‘They’re Moving Father’s Grave’), bawdy ballads (‘The Chandler’s Shop’) and Elizabethan songs (Dowland’s ‘Fine Knacks For Ladies’). He remembers that the mix of material went down well with audiences at the Ad Lib and that he and Tomasetti both became adept at gauging audience mood and modifying their play-lists accordingly. They performed together frequently, their specialty being a duet of ‘The Banks of the Condamine’.
Hearing Pete Seeger’s ‘Bells of Rhymney’ induced Laycock to ask a friend who was travelling to New York to bring back a 12 string guitar, one of the first such instruments to reach Australia; he remembers that an earnest 16 year old Trevor Lucas would beg permission to practise on it at any and every opportunity. The Ad Lib closed down around the end of 1964, by which time Laycock was devoting more and more time to pottery and less and less to folksinging, although he has continued to perform intermittently ever since. (He appeared at the 1967 Moomba Folk Concert and at the opening of the Monash University Library, for instance. Much more recently he joined Martyn Wyndham-Read on-stage at the Cumquat Tree at Maldon, in country Victoria, during Wyndham-Read’s 1999 visit to Australia).

Three extremely important innovations occurred in Melbourne in 1963: a pioneering Folk Festival, a second series of concerts at Emerald Hill, and the establishment of Frank Traynor’s Folk and Jazz Club in the city centre. Billed as Australia’s first such event , and organised by the Victorian Folklore Society and the Bush Music (later Victorian Folk Music) Club, the festival lasted a week, from May 11-18. With an emphasis more on scholarship and preservation than on popular performance, the festival’s activities encompassed a one-day seminar on Australian folkmusic (run by the Adult Education Association at the Australian-American Centre in Exhibition Street), a concert of Australian and other national folksongs, lunch-time lectures, folk-dance demonstrations, and a singabout compered by Wal Cherry in the Lower Melbourne Town Hall. Participants and speakers included folklorists Edgar Waters, Alan Marshall, Hugh Anderson and Barry Smith, folkdance expert Shirley Andrews, and folksong collectors Mary-Jean Officer, Stan Arthur (from Queensland), the Lumsdens, and Norm & Pat O’Connor [Australian Tradition, Dec 1971; Wendy Lowenstein, ‘The Folk Song Revival, Adult Education, Dec 1965, p.11]. Prominent among the performers was a recently-discovered group of old time musicians, led by Con and Beat Klippel. Pat O’Connor, the Folklore Society’s treasurer, informed the Melbourne Herald [30 April 1963]:
Recently, about twenty of us from the two clubs decided to go on a collecting trip in the hills near Corryong … We loaded up half a dozen cars with camping and record equipment, five children and musical instruments, and off we went. We camped at Nariel Creek and discovered that an old time country dance was being held in the town that night. The music was played by several men who’d learned it from their fathers and grandfathers …  Shirley Andrews [then President of the Bush Music Club] … whose hobby is old time dances, collected two local dances – the Berlin polka and Princess polka – that she hadn’t come across before. They’ll be demonstrated during the festival … We invited the Nariel Creek people to visit us for a picnic at our riverbank camp the next day. About fifty turned up so we spent the afternoon teaching them songs we’d found on collecting trips.
(From 1963 to the present, the VFMC has continued to sponsor annual gatherings, initially over the Labour Day weekend, more recently at New Year, in the Nariel-Corryong district. These festivals-cum-hootenannies, originally centred around the old-time music of the Klippel family, combine informal concerts, singabouts and traditional dance sessions, and now tend to attract audiences of 2000 and upwards).
During the same period, the Bush Music Club mounted the first of several annual concerts as part of the city’s annual Moomba celebrations and it collaborated with Bob Clemens’ Downbeat in a major jazz, folk and blues concert catering to less scholarly-inclined folk enthusiasts. The latter concert found Marks, Tomasetti, Wyndham-Read, Lumsden and The Seekers sharing the stage with the Red Onions, Judy Durham, Judy Jacques and the Yarra Yarra Jazz Band.

By the beginning of 1963 Glen Tomasetti was singing twice weekly at the Ad Lib, teaching folksinging privately and also making frequent appearances at The Reata and informal get-togethers at the Lazars’ beautifully-appointed Armadale apartment. She was zealous in her attempts to “spread the word”, broadcasting regularly for schools, appearing on television shows such as In Melbourne Tonight and organising singabouts. The success of Lazar & Cherry’s Emerald Hill concerts inspired Tomasetti to organise and stage a second Sunday afternoon series, from March 10 throughout the winter of 1963. In this pre-Women’s Lib era, posters for the concerts featured a distinctive multicultural logo made up of a swagman (emphasising the Australian context) sitting on a guitar-case, playing a lute (the international connection). Regulars at Emerald Hill included several prominent classical guitarists (among them Sadie Bishop and Carl Ogden), operatic tenor Joe Sibella, David Lumsden and the Lumsden Family, Lenore Somerset (well-known through her folksinging appearances on TV), poet Adrian Rawlins, Garry Kinnane, Peter Laycock, and blues-man Graham Squance, while space was allocated to enable other artists, particularly newcomers, to try out their stagecraft. Teenager Don Hirst, who would soon found legendary Rhythm’n’Blues band The Spinning Wheels, played several brackets under the alias Glyndon Rhode.   One newcomer, a flamenco artist just off the ship and with little or no English, wowed the audience with his bravura guitar technique but proved exasperatingly reluctant to give up the stage to the next artist. Virtuoso Carl Ogden debuted his own guitar sonata to a warm response one Sunday and, on another inspirational occasion, a workshop by Pete Seeger drew a packed house.

A local performer who made her professional singing debut at Emerald Hill, and went on to greater things, was Margret Roadknight (b. 1943). Roadknight was a playground leader and ex-clerical assistant who adored Paul Robeson and Odetta. Her first-ever  (unscheduled) singing appearance had been at the Little Reata the previous summer when, in response to Paul Marks’ suggestion that someone from the audience might like to sing, she volunteered ‘Motherless Child’ to Marks’ guitar backing. Impressed, Glen Tomasetti promptly recruited her for Emerald Hill.  David Lumsden recalls the young singer, stricken with stagefright, having to be pushed on stage. With obligato per the bass-player from the Gerry Humphries Trio, Roadknight captivated the Emerald Hill audience, on Mother’s Day 1963, with ‘Motherless Child’, ‘Delia’, ‘Shout for Joy’ and ‘My Lord, What a Morning’. By the time she reappeared a couple of months later, she had mastered the guitar sufficiently to provide her own backing on one song; soon after, she accepted Tom Lazar’s offer of a regular Thursday night at the Reata, replacing singer Bruce Woodley. (Roadknight now credits Tomasetti  – and the Emerald Hill Sundays – with giving her a start in the music business).

Remembered today with considerable affection by former participants and spectators, the Emerald Hill series was organised on a co-operative basis, all featured artists receiving equal percentages of the door takings (sometimes as much seven or eight pounds each); young hopefuls, trying out for the first time, were typically paid three or four pounds. (Margret Roadknight remembers getting four pounds for her four song debut. An idealistic Don Hirst once refused to take his percentage, insisting loftily that, as a “non-commercial artist”, he disdained money. Tomasetti bluntly – but gently – advised him to be realistic).  Any money left over went into a special account. True to the spirit of the enterprise, Tomasetti took home the standard percentage, her multiple responsibilities notwithstanding. Because of legal restrictions on Sunday theatrical performances, all performers were obliged to join the “Folksingers and Minstrels Club”. One Sunday afternoon regular, Bill Spence, recalls:
Emerald Hill was a very pretty theatre. A lovely old school building with timber beams overhead. It was large compared with the coffee lounges – not tight and pokey. Wal Cherry was interested in theatre-in-the-round. The seating was sloped and there was theatrical lighting. There was a sense of real performance and seriousness about it. It was not just a place to hang out like a coffee lounge … There was a new ambitiousness about what they did there. Tomasetti and Wyndham-Read played a proselytising role. They were inclined to scholarship … The afternoon seemed to extend in a logical sort of way. Wyndham-Read talked about songs in historic terms.
    The auditorium was generally packed for the concerts, a fact not lost on the theatre’s management which, at the time, was attempting (rather courageously) to stage avant-garde plays, like Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, to minimal attendances. Rather than negotiate when the board demanded an increased rental, Tomasetti ended the program at the end of the season, and the Sunday afternoons were transferred to the newly-opened jazz and folk venue Traynors. (I will examine Traynors in detail in Part 2 of this article).

Tomasetti was the undisputed queen of the local scene. “At her best, she had everything going for her”, recalls Garry Kinnane. “Glen was a beautiful woman, with a wonderful voice and a real capacity to get into her songs and sing them very movingly. She was an integrated artist”. Dubbed “the high priestess of the Melbourne folksinging cult” by a contemporary journalist [Sun, 1 Aug 1964], she was widely regarded as the embodiment of idealistic dedication to music for its own sake – an approach which emphasised the song over the singer (rather than as a vehicle through which the folk artiste might express his/her individuality). “In our time as in other times, folkmusic is more approachable than awful and that the songs have meaning for both singer and listener is more important than that the listener is impressed by the performance”, Tomasetti advised readers of Australian Tradition [June 1966]. Accordingly, her recordings were distinguished by simplicity and straightforwardness in interpretation and arrangement, and by her commitment to propagating the material. Tomasetti’s first recording was a set of traditional nursery rhymes, with Chris Christensen, Folksongs with Guitar (W&G 1963), Will Ye Go Lassie Go (with Wyndham-Read and Brian Mooney, W&G 1965), and a number of EPs. All the records boasted scrupulous source notes, even page references to standard published songsters. She also collaborated with Tim Burstall and composer George Dreyfus on the soundtracks of a series of short films about colonial Australia.  Later in the decade, Tomasetti would direct fringe concerts for the Adelaide Festival of Arts, stage her own one-woman tribute to Bertolt Brecht, help found what became the National Folk Festival, and become active in the anti-Vietnam and Women’s movements.

Emerald Hill regulars would frequently “kick on”, after the afternoon show, at the Jolly Roger. Frequent performers there included Julie Copeland (later well-known as a presenter for Radio National), David Lumsden, Lynne St John and Martyn Wyndham-Read. Brian Mooney was the Jolly Roger’s (unofficial) resident folksinger for a while. Born at Peak’s Hill, near Dubbo, in 1930, Mooney grew up in Sydney. In the early ‘50s, while taking drawing and painting classes at the Julian Ashton Art School and “hanging out” with the student crowd at the Lincoln coffee lounge, he became friendly with Beth and Reg Schurr. The Schurrs taught him his first guitar chords and helped him build up a base  repertoire. Mooney spent most of the decade in a succession of manual jobs (as farmhand, builder’s labourer, cane-cutter, even sideshow barker) all over NSW and Queensland. In due course he made the acquaintance of other aspiring musicians like Wyndham-Read, Don Henderson and Don Ayrton at the Royal George Hotel (Ayrton dubbed Mooney “massa” because of his boxing ability) and he became one of the inaugural coffee lounge folksingers in Sydney. He appeared with considerable success at the Arab Cafe, Lorne, in the summer of 1961/62 (“Audiences loved him”, recalls Don Carless), and subsequently settled permanently in Melbourne.
Glen Tomasetti was decidedly sceptical when informed by Wyndham-Read that Mooney would shortly be coming to Melbourne from Sydney, and that he was a singer who would appeal to her. (She has admitted that she was probably slightly infected by the traditional cultural rivalry between inhabitants of the two cities). To her delight, Mooney proved to be the antithesis of the “slick Sydney singer” she had expected. His repertoire and singing-style were infused with his passion for all things Irish, a passion which had been nurtured by his Irish-born parents. “As a child, I used to lie on the floor listening to my mother sing Irish songs like ‘She Moved through the Fair’ at the piano”, he notes. Working in the outback, he subsequently acquired songs and lore from expatriate Irishmen at “grand old singalong sessions” at pubs in places like Cooktown.
It was clear to his intimates that Mooney had seen desperate days, and that his determined identification with the old country was a way of coping with the world. “Brian’s Irish persona was a self-construction, but a kind of lifeline to him”, assesses Garry Kinnane; “Brian believed he was Irish”, remembers Don Carless, “He didn’t set out to be Irish”. Critics were not slow to castigate the singer for adopting a strong brogue; other listeners declared that the same brogue imparted “almost incredible beauty to some of [Mooney’s] more tender songs …”. “[He] sings with a depth of feeling which more than compensates for his deficiencies in technique”, declared folklorist Edgar Waters in a contemporary review [Australian, 20 Feb 1965; Sun, 28 July 1964; Herald, 2 March 1963]. Carl Ogden once acknowledged the limitations of Mooney’s instrumental work, but judged him “the only guitarist who can make it sound like an Irish harp”.  Nor could the singer be accused of not having done his homework. Challenged by a sceptical academic to explain ‘Golden Apples of the Sun’ one evening, Mooney launched into a discourse on Yeatsian metaphors which left the critic deflated (and captivated).

By mid 1964, Mooney was averaging five nights a week at the Jolly Roger, the Reata, the Treble Clef, Hernando’s and elsewhere, treating audiences to his versions of I.R.A. laments, Irish ballads and the occasional Australian folksong, and earning an enviable reputation for the quality – and purity – of his approach to folkmusic. “Young girls would fall madly in love with Brian”, recalls Mary Traynor. One girl, in particular would frequently sit on a bench opposite him (when he played at Traynors), tears streaming down her face, totally absorbed in his music and in the passion with which he transmitted his visions of love, life and injustice in Ireland. Mooney’s spare time was spent learning new songs and painting in the romantic – if Spartan –  artist’s loft he occupied in Amess Street, Carlton. The loft featured in a 16mm. short film Moonshine, a black-and-white celebration of the Carlton-based arts and theatrical circle within which he moved. Film-maker Kristen Lofven (later Kristen Williamson) assembled a sequence of evocative glimpses of inner-city back lanes, Peter Laycock’s rural pottery studio, Grinders’ Coffee shop in Lygon Street, and  comings and goings at 205 Drummond Street (a group house which served, throughout the ‘60s, as an informal gathering place for a diverse cross-section of folksingers, actors, educators, writers and painters), all against a soundtrack of Mooney performing ‘The Spanish Lady’, ‘Salley Gardens’, ‘Quiet Land of Erin’, etc. The film premiered at the Carlton Movie House, next door to Genevieve’s Restaurant in Faraday Street, in 1964.
Mooney’s loft, shots of which open and close Moonshine, was bedecked with his landscapes and a few treasured prints, among them a Modigliani nude. Garry Kinnane recalls that the police raided the loft one night, alerted to the sound of “mass folksinging” inside. Names and addresses were being taken when one of the investigators spotted the nude. “Who did that?” was the demand. Informed that the culprit was Modigliani, the senior officer grunted: “Get his address too”.

A survey conducted among Monash University students in 1965 placed the popular Mooney some ten points ahead of second place-getter Wyndham-Read as “favourite Melbourne folksinger”, and even Charles Higham, in his otherwise scathing analysis of the Australian folk scene, singled out Mooney and Wyndham-Read as “the only two singers everyone in the folkie cult seems unanimously to respect” [Bulletin, 14 Nov 1964].  Mooney farewelled the local folk scene in 1966, electing to settle in his beloved Ireland. Don Carless remembers being concerned that, smitten as he was by his romantic conception of  “the auld sod”, he would find the reality heart-breaking. As it turned out, “it all happened” for him and he felt at home from his first day there. Wyndham-Read, similarly, returned to Britain at the beginning of 1967. (After many years in Irelad, Mooney currently lives in Launceston; Wyndham-Read, based in Britain and France, is a regular visitor to Australia).

Memories of Mooney and Wyndham-Read, in their Melbourne heyday, are preserved on the recordings they made, as soloists and together, for the Score and W&G labels: Moreton Bay, Will Ye Go Lassie Go, Brian’s two LPs and one EP of Irish songs; Australian Folk Festival and Australian Folk Night; Martyn’s Bullockies Bushwackers and Booze, Australian Songs and A Wench a Whale and a Pint of Good Ale. (The last featured Danny Spooner, Gordon MacIntyre and Peter Dickie).
 Other early coffee lounge performers who managed to work professionally (or semi-professionally) at the Reata, Ad Lib, Jolly Roger, etc., as early as 1962, included Sydney-born Don Ayrton (b. 1938), a former junior executive with an international building firm, who had learned the customary three guitar chords in a King’s Cross flat after hearing and enjoying a Burl Ives record. Ayrton found regular singing work in Melbourne following a well-received appearance at the Pete Seeger Benefit Concert. He specialised in Scottish material, and gained wider exposure by providing the musical backing for several short films, two of them for the ABC. A tortured soul who died far too young, Ayrton is remembered as “a magical singer”, gifted with a photographic memory which enabled him to look at a song and learn it.

Ken White, who grew up listening to jazz and nurtured a life-long passion for black music, was among the early singer-guitarists recruited to share the bill with more mainstream vocalists and Dixieland and Bebop ensembles at Jazz Centre 44. A less than sedate venue, the Centre (also known as Katherina’s Cabaret) was opposite Luna Park in St Kilda: its patrons included local prostitutes and brawls were frequent. White was a died-in-the-wool blues buff who went on to be a fixture on the folk club circuit and a key influence on younger guitarists through his work as a soloist and in numerous groups – most memorably, a duo with Graham Squance. Mary Traynor remembers White as one of the standout acts of the era, “a talent greatly overlooked”.
 Garry Kinnane found that playing American folksongs at the Ad Lib (and later at the Copper Kettle, the Reata, the Little Reata and other coffee lounges) was a far more pleasant way to eke out a living than working as a clerk in an office, or as an insurance salesman. Having made the move from classical guitar (favoured by most of the early Melbourne folkies) to a steel-strung Gibson, Kinnane (along with Trevor Lucas) has been credited with popularising American instrumental techniques within the Melbourne folk scene. He was also one of the earliest performers to emphasise the richness and diversity of American folk traditions. A devotee of left-wing American culture, Kinnane progressed quickly from performing Joan Baez’s Appalachian ballads and bluegrass to interpreting the contemporary broadsides of Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan.
Dylan changed the whole scene [he observes]. He completely changed the picture. He made us realise you could actually belong to a continually creative tradition. You could write songs, play acoustic guitars – doing what he learned from Woody Guthrie.
  Kinnane remembers that his increasingly contemporary and protest-oriented repertoire was regarded with a degree of scepticism (initially at least) by traditionalists like Mooney and Wyndham-Read. The only American singer they had much respect for was Seeger. He believes that his repertoire was immediately validated by the start of U.S. and Australian involvement in Vietnam. It “was almost as if our worst fears had been proven”; Vietnam was irrefutable evidence that warnings by Dylan and Malvina Reynolds against nuclear holocaust had been “very, very relevant”. Kinnane had started writing his own topical material, including a talking blues on a Pentridge Prison breakout and a song about the Voyager disaster. At the end of 1964 he and his wife Jo joined the newly-married Trevor Lucas on an open-ended trip to England. (The Kinnanes stayed in England nearly 10 years, during which time Garry moved away from folkmusic, resumed his education, and started writing. Prior to retirement, he lectured in American Literature at the University of Melbourne).  

The Treble Clef advertised itself as a “conservative establishment concentrating on quality food and service” and catered primarily to what later became known as “yuppies”. One of several restaurants run by jazz bandleader Tommy Davidson, it reportedly toyed rather reluctantly with the idea of providing folksinging entertainment – ironically, as it is remembered today for having provided the launching pad for a trio-cum-quartet which became the most successful product of the Melbourne folk scene (not just in local terms, but internationally) [Herald 16 March 1963]. Soloist Bruce Woodley teamed up with Keith Potger, Ken Ray and Athol Guy of the doo-wop pop ensemble The Escorts early in 1962, hoping to make the transition from light rock to folksinging. Acquiring a repertoire of folk standards, the four boys quickly attracted a modest following as The Seekers. When lead singer Ken Ray found juggling marriage, work and music too demanding, the remaining Seekers invited jazz vocalist Judy Durham to sit in on one of the group’s regular Monday nights at The Treble Clef, and Australian music history was made.
Durham continued to juggle her developing jazz career with her contribution to The Seekers (appearing with both The Seekers and several jazz bands at a Moomba Folk & Jazz Concert, for instance), but by the end of 1963 the quartet had become sufficiently successful for its members to take the risk of turning professional and devoting themselves full-time to its future. W&G released an album Introducing the Seekers and early in 1964, the group accepted the offer of a round trip to England, as shipboard entertainers on the cruise-liner Fairsky. Within less than a year in England, The Seekers were signed to the Grade Organisation, made two albums for the World Record Club, and hit the top of the charts with ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’
Almost from the outset, the enormous and rapid success enjoyed by The Seekers served to damn the group in the eyes of the folk establishment – somewhat unjustly, in my view. The quartet is remembered today for more over-played hit parade relics like ‘Georgy Girl’ than for the traditional and contemporary folksongs which, in fact, made up the bulk of its repertoire. Along with creditable versions of Australian bush songs such as ‘With My Swag All on My Shoulder’, ‘Wild Rover’ or ‘South Australia’, the group developed an immediate and lasting affinity for American gospel material. Renditions of ‘We’re Moving On’ or ‘Just A Closer Walk With Thee’ drew inspiredly on Durham’s jazz credentials, made full use of her superb voice, and remain highlights of their kind.  
There was more substance, of course, in criticism that The Seekers were primarily entertainers with an act grounded in popular folk material (like The Kingston Trio, Brothers Four, Nina & Frederik, etc) rather than committed folksingers, in touch with social issues and international contexts. They might sing protest anthems like ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ or ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’, but their clean-cut, non-rebellious image effectively rendered the material innocuous. The U.S. trio Peter Paul & Mary was subjected to similar accusations that it had diluted or synthesised folk material with commercial arrangements and sweetly sophisticated harmonies. From the beginning, though, PP&M publicly demonstrated its commitment to Civil Rights, an end to the Vietnam war, and social change. The Seekers never courted controversy in this way. Nothing underlined the quartet’s acceptability to mainstream, suburban Australia (and, hence, its lack of connection with political or social issues) than the award of  Australians of the Year, shortly before the four broke up in 1968.       

[Apart from titles cited in the text, my primary source of information for this paper was correspondence with Paul Marks and interviews with David Lumsden, Peter Dickie, Glen Tomasetti, Don Carless, Kath Lumsden, Elma & Alan  Gardner, Alan Gardner, Garry Kinnane, Lynne St John Lumsden, Cris Larner, Ken & Fiona White, Mary Traynor, Alistair and Robin Smith, Don Hirst, Peter Laycock, Brian Mooney, Nick Polites, Bill Spence, Margret RoadKnight and Martyn Wyndham-Read. Additional information and assistance came from George Dreyfus and Wendy Lowenstein].

[Part 1 of this paper, subtitled ‘Beginnings’, was originally published in Trad and Now, Issues 5 ,6 ,7 & 9. It examined the bohemian and jazz club antecedents of the revival in Melbourne, and looked at organised folksinging activity at clubs like the Reata, Treble Clef, Hernando’s and the Jolly Roger; pioneer festivals; the Emerald Hill concerts; and the influence of singers Paul Marks, Glen Tomasetti, Martyn Wyndham-Read, Brian Mooney, Peter Laycock, the Lumsden Family, Ken White, Trevor Lucas and Garry Kinnane.]

THE EARLY YEARS OF THE FOLK REVIVAL IN MELBOURNE

Malcolm J. Turnbull
[This article was previously published in 6 parts in Trad & Now, Issues #5, 6, 7, 9,10 & 11 in 2003-2005]

Part 2: Traynors
“You’re an old folkie. You might be interested in this”, a work colleague observed, passing me a clipping from the Melbourne Age. “This” was an advertisement for a joint appearance at the East Brunswick Hotel (March 1999) of four of the best-known folksingers of the 1960s: Martyn Wyndham-Read, David Lumsden, Brian Mooney and Danny Spooner. The occasion was the launch on Compact Disc of the landmark album Moreton Bay, originally released on the Score label in 1963.
The evening in question proved to be much more than just the reissue of a historic LP. Investing their renditions of well-worn old songs with all the skill and musicianship they had acquired over four decades of performing, the artists played to an audience largely drawn from old regulars at the legendary jazz and folk venue Traynors. For everyone involved, it was a joyous and memorable get-together. Reference was made to the 60s folk scene throughout the evening; David Lumsden paid affectionate tribute to pioneer singer Glen Tomasetti, and Andrew Pattison raised a toast to the memory of three other artists closely associated with Traynors, Trevor Lucas, Graham Squance and John Graham. Fittingly the evening closed with the perennial ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, sung en masse.
An unabashed exercise in nostalgia, and a tribute to the endurance and survival of music and musician alike, the Moreton Bay concert served as catalyst for my research over the past five years into the history of the urban folkmusic revival as it manifested itself in Australia in the 1960s. The central focus of this extraordinarily rewarding project has been the rise and decline of the stereotyped folk coffee houses – clubs and cafes, romantically Spartan and tantalisingly dingy, where youthful audiences gathered earnestly to absorb and reflect on the “music of the people”. Traynors was “the daddy of them all”. While by no means the first, or even the longest-lasting, it was undoubtedly the most influential and best-loved of the dozens of folk coffee houses that proliferated throughout the country during the so-called folk boom. Invariably mention of Traynors elicits affectionate smiles or a hint of nostalgic tearfulness from old patrons and performers alike. For many a Melbourne baby-boomer, Traynors embodies the ‘60s folk scene.

There has been a surprising amount of disagreement over the venue’s starting-date, ranging from late 1961 [Pattison & Mulholland, Graham Simpson] to February 1964 [Davey & Seal]. The magazine Music Maker is more precise; in his ‘Melbourne Roundup’ column for October 1963, Jack Varney noted that Frank Traynor had recently taken over premises at the corner of Exhibition and Little Lonsdale Streets with the dual object of presenting folksinging and staging jazz parties to pay the rent on the building. (Varney failed to observe that the building had recently seen service as a brothel). Veterans of the Melbourne music scene believe that the formal presentation of jazz and folk at 287 Exhibition Street grew out of the 1963 Emerald Hill concerts (See Part 1).
As founder of the Melbourne Jazz Club and leader of the enormously popular JazzPreachers, Frank Traynor (1927 – 1985) has been credited with initiating the Australian Jazz revival of the late 1950s-60 and with revolutionising its presentation. “Frank promoted jazz with a fervour verging on the religious”, notes Mary Traynor. “It didn’t matter where he played, or what occasion, as long as people heard jazz. He called it ‘spreading the word’”. For several years (1958-63) the Jazz Preachers held a summer residency at the Wild Colonial in Lorne, and it was there that he first connected with the folk revival through friendships with Glen Tomasetti, Brian Mooney and Martyn Wyndham-Read. Years later Traynor recalled: “There was a natural affinity between folk and traditional jazz musicians at the time. They had mutual respect for one another, particularly because they were both taking their music from folk roots, they were both a bit underground, they were both totally sincere in what they were trying to do with their music and had a great personal belief in it; there being a message of truth in the music”.
Frank Traynor’s Jazz and Folk Club, which quickly became known simply as Traynors, grew out of its founder’s dissatisfaction at playing the standard round of RSL dances, wedding receptions or rowdy parties, and his awareness that similar dissatisfaction existed within a folk circuit where “folkies were auxiliary to the coffee machine”. Reconciling business and artistic fulfillment was an ongoing dilemma confronting folk coffee lounge proprietors. Singers who attracted cult followings were anathema to businessmen who wanted a quick and steady turnover of paying customers (not devoted observers, or penniless friends of the artist, who sat all night over one or two cups of coffee). Tom Lazar, at the Reata, had grown increasingly restive as diners complained about having to listen to folksingers when all they wanted was a convivial evening out with friends. Nor, of course, was such an environment likely to bring out the best in the performer. Garry Kinnane was once tossed a pound note with a curt request to “take your banjo up the other end of the restaurant”. Alarmed at declining patronage, Lazar had cut back the entertainment in Malvern and established the Little Reata in the city, hoping to redirect most of the folk trade there. As it was, the new venue encountered similar problems; by now Lazar had lost interest. (The two cafes had ceased to operate as folk venues by the end of 1964).

What Traynor visualised, therefore, was a music club first-and-foremost, where folk and jazz musicians alike could play “the music they wanted to play” to appreciative and attentive audiences, and be decently remunerated. The timing was opportune. His bank account was comfortably “in the black” thanks to a day job (with the National Bank) and a particularly hectic season with the Jazz Preachers. Glen Tomasetti, meanwhile, was looking for somewhere to transfer her Sunday Afternoon Folksingers & Minstrels Club with the end of the Emerald Hill tenancy looming. Traynor earmarked 500 pounds to get the club started. An idealistic musician first and foremost, with little time for the diplomatic niceties required in a “people industry” (and a real skill for delegating responsibility), he promptly recruited two acquaintances from the jazz world to take on the day-to-day management. (Jim Beal and Don Carless were already known to each other from their days with the circus. Carless had previously come into contact with folkmusic via Brian Mooney at the Arab Café. Visiting the Troubadour, the Sydney folk venue established by businessman Jim Carter, had reinforced his interest).

 The late Denis Gibbons has remembered Traynor as an extremely intelligent albeit self-destructive individual, who “drank like a fish” and could, on occasion, “knock off half a bottle of whisky, play the trombone like a madman and then collapse”. Danny Spooner recalls him affectionately as a volatile – if loveable – character, prone to hair-trigger outbursts which were forgotten just as quickly. Traynor’s distinctive laugh reportedly earned him the nickname ‘El Cacklo’ amongst patrons of the nearby Greek Club. On one occasion (legend has it), he was chased down Lonsdale Street by an irate group of Greek Club patrons after he lost his temper and struck one of them with a pool cue. On the other hand, Ken White recalls Traynor as a unique musician and mentor and an unequalled authority on all the glorious eras and players in the jazz world. He frequently spent hours teaching White and Squance (and, later, Margret Roadknight) all about the great bluesmen, often jamming with them into the early hours. “Frank taught me all about the mathematics of music”, notes Roadknight. The name ‘Jazz Preachers’ underlines the man’s fervour for his art. While he might have been unsuited to the mundane realities of running a business day-to-day, Traynor “had his finger on who played there” to a greater extent than has generally been recognised. For a while, he ran a booking agency and, for several years (1967-70), he contributed a regular Folk and Jazz column  to the youth music journal Go-Set.  More practically, he frequently provided struggling performers with temporary floor-space or a decent meal. “If it hadn’t been for Frank, the folk movement would not have evolved the way it did”, observes Mary Traynor.   

Traynor and Carless scouted around for barrels, camp-stools and other furniture and assembled the first roster of performers, and Traynors opened (initially) two nights a week (Friday and Saturday). The first line-up consisted of Tomasetti, Brian Mooney, Martyn Wyndham-Read, David Lumsden and Trevor Lucas ; on Sunday afternoons the premises also played host to Tomasetti’s ‘Folksingers and Minstrels Club’.
From the outset, and throughout its lifetime, the club provided patrons with a mix of both jazz and folkmusic. The jazz formally started after midnight (Fridays and Saturdays) although jazz-buffs would start to wander in around 10.30; accordingly, management was careful to ensure (where possible) that blues singers were scheduled for the last few folk sets of the evening. There was generally a big exodus (three quarters of the audience) just before midnight, then the diehard jazz musicians would start to roll in from their gigs elsewhere around town.
In its first year of operation, music critic Leonard Radic gave the club an extended write-up (and useful publicity) in a survey of Melbourne’s jazz haunts for the Herald:
… there are no neons outside the centre. Not much light inside, either. Two candles on the wall, a few low-watt shaded lamps hanging from the ceiling. Hessian draped across the window of this one-time espresso cafe shuts out the outside world … You go in by the side door. At first you cannot see. The atmosphere is dim, but not smoky. Reminds you of a similar dive in Soho. What was its name? Le Caveau? Anyway, the name fits pretty well. The cashier’s desk is a low table, neatly stacked with shillings and two shilling pieces. In the background the patron stands flicking through a roll of notes. “Two? That’ll be 10 bob. You’ll find a seat inside”. If you’re lucky. Seats, when eventually you spot a pair, are low canvas affairs with inclined wooden seats. Very good for ceiling watching. Kegs take the place of tables.
Radic went on to describe the patrons: young, earnest, a mix of schoolgirls and university students, uniformly dressed in black. “Coffee is served in mugs, one shilling each, serve yourself in the annexe. Yours leaks, but this isn’t the Menzies, so you don’t complain”. A big curly-haired man in a turtle-necked sweater takes the stage.
His voice is good and powerful … Irish ballads are his specialty. He sings a bracket of them … Loud applause each time … At the next coffee break you have a word with the singer. His name is Brian. Singing is his only work. “I make a living – just”, he says. “Of course, I can live on the smell of an oily rag. I’ve got used to it”. [Herald, 19 Aug 1964]
Traynors was, of course, officially a dry venue. Coffee was the strongest beverage formally available to the patrons although more than one regular recalls a terrible concoction of Coca-Cola and red wine, which looked like black coffee and was known as ‘Black Death’, surreptitiously changing hands. (The post-midnight jazz meets were always liberally oiled with wine provided by King & Godfrey in Carlton). Served with pre-packaged cheese and biscuits or pastries provided by a local Jewish baker, the coffee itself came from Grinders in Carlton and was, in fact, the best quality available in Melbourne at that time. Unfortunately Traynor was frequently inspired to prepare it Turkish-style, boiling up coffee grains in big pots of water and allowing the resultant brew to stew ‘for a bit’ (a process which horrified his Italian-born second wife Mary). Once 6 o’clock closing ended in 1966, a number of the singers tended to congregate at the local pub (the International).  The more resilient among them might then ‘kick on’ half the night at the Greek Club before staggering into work the next morning. As well: “there were always parties” (remembers Danny Spooner), “in kitchens – near the fridge … where everyone could join in choruses, trade songs, learn guitar runs”.
The venue was a success from the start. Originally appealing primarily to the folkmusic afficianado, by 1965 Traynors was opening every night except Monday. (“I think it even opened on a Monday at the height of popularity”, notes Martin Wyndham-Read). At a time when other Melbourne venues were facing a marked downturn in business, Carless was able to inform the press that audiences at Exhibition Street – “people who are really interested in folk songs” – were increasing [Australian, 20 Feb 1965].  For a while, it was “the thing to do”. Anyone who was anyone in Melbourne at that time would call in. On one occasion, Adrian Rawlins brought in the legendary beat poet Allen Ginsberg who proved himself a “real person” by insisting on paying the entrance charge. A touring Lou Killen and Liam Clancy once sat up all night debating the folk revival with Julie Wong and Frank and Mary Traynor. Another time Lenore Somerset came in accompanied by Odetta. For a couple of years Saturday night performances were recorded live and then broadcast by Denis Gibbons on Radio 3AW the following afternoon.

Traynors even featured in a short colour film about Melbourne’s night-life, Melbourne: City of Surprises, which opened with shots of singer Margaret Smith performing ‘Every Night’ and ‘I’m Sad, I’m Lonely’. [Sun, 16 March 1966] Early in 1967, after what had been its “most successful holiday period ever”, the club acquired the building next door and knocked out the wall in between. At its peak (1967-69), an estimated 300 people a night (from mid-week) passed through the two buildings. Three to five acts might be scheduled at any one time, rotating between three rooms. On busy Saturday nights, big draws lie Mooney or Wyndham-Read frequently played three half-hour sets at Traynors before being driven across town to “sing in Sunday” at the Reata or elsewhere. The somewhat slower Tuesday and Wednesday evenings would typically feature one advertised performer along with a few hopefuls “off the street”. For a while Traynors published its own monthly newsletter and song-sheet, and housed the specialist Heritage record store on the lower floor. Tomasetti conducted guitar and singing classes upstairs during the first year.
In an article roundly critical of the coffee lounge scene, Edgar Waters dubbed Traynors “the exception to the rule”:
The lighting … is dim, and the seating is not of the most comfortable, and the coffee would hardly delight the connoisseur, even though it is better than in most of the coffee houses. But the atmosphere is very pleasant. The audience is there to listen to the singing, not to chatter, the singers seem to regard the audience much as they would friends at a party, friends who share their own deep concern with the songs, rather than as customers who have paid for superficial entertainment [Australian, 20 Feb 1965]
Waters went on to praise the relationship between artists and management at Traynors. He recognised that Frank Traynor himself was primarily interested in jazz, but noted the man’s ability to communicate with other performers “as one musician to another”. “Even more important”, noted Waters, was the way the place was run. “Management does not pay singers a fixed fee, instead management and singers split the takings in fixed and mutually satisfactory proportions”. This percentage system earned Traynor and Carless the trust of the artists. No doubt, so did Carless’ size and his no-nonsense efforts to ensure that they performed free of annoyance. Contemporaries recall with glee his standard use of the cautionary phrase “None of that” and (on at least one occasion) “None of that. We don’t have any fucking swearing here”. Drunks and other undesirables were either barred at the door or summarily “ejected” (by him or by Jim Beal); Carless remembers that, on the few occasions a fight did break out, he was hard-pressed to stop gleefully willing observers like Declan Affley from joining in. Denis Gibbons remembers being heckled at Traynors one evening; enquiring about the heckler after his set, Gibbons was bluntly informed: “He left”.
Looking back, Carless and Mary Traynor (who took over the day-to-day running of the club after Carless left) remain proud also of what it achieved, particularly its educational impact. “Traynors trained the audience, educating people about Eureka, Ben Hall, and so on, at a time when Australian history was not widely taught”, Carless maintains. Singer Cris Larner remembers Traynor himself as  “very much a concept man” who actively supported innovations like a short season of Irish song-plays (Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea, etc) which she staged at the club with Danny Spooner, Gordon McIntyre and others. School concerts became something of a financial “mainstay” for some performers. Traynors’ management was asked quite frequently to send folksingers out to entertain in school auditoriums and, unsurprisingly, potential new audience-members were recruited in the process. As it was, teachers always made up a significant proportion of the club’s regular patronage.
Prominent among the artists who appeared regularly at Traynors were Trevor Lucas and Garry Kinnane (before they left Australia for Britain at the start of 1965), Brian  Mooney and Martyn Wyndham-Read (who also relocated overseas , in 1966 and ’67 respectively), Peter Dickie and David Lumsden. Later recruits included Bruce Stuchberry, an economics student at Monash University who was initially inspired by seeing Paul Marks play at the Reata and (like Kinnane) he studied guitar under Carl Ogden; Stuchberry specialised in British songs, a repertoire which served him well during several months playing at hotels and servicemen’s bases in Singapore. Carrl Tregonning performed solo and in a Nina & Frederik-style duo and went on to form the psychedelic group ‘Myrriad’.  Blues and Dylan enthusiast Ken White lived on the premises for a while and taught guitar there. Mick Counihan, another Monash student (and committed activist) who specialised in English songs for a couple of years (1965-66), coupled his singing with journalistic contributions to Folksay, Go-Set and Australian Tradition.

Particularly influential were two expatriate Britons who both happened to turn up one evening in 1965 and ask if they could perform. Danny Spooner (b. 1936) was a Londoner who had worked on whale-boats and salvage tugs from age 13, thereby learning a wealth of sea songs at first hand, before emigrating to Australia in 1962. After  a couple of years in Sydney where he combined day jobs as a builder’s labourer with performing at the Pigalle, Maxim’s, the Last Straw and the Troubadour, he heeded Martyn Wyndham-Reade’s advice and relocated south. Glasgow-born (1941) Gordon McIntyre had originally emigrated to Australia with his family in 1960; he acquired a guitar after hearing the classic LP The Weavers at Carnegie Hall. Returning to Scotland, he gained performing experience, in company of Bert Jansch (who recorded McIntyre’s ‘Courting Blues’), and as an itinerant musician in Europe before returning to Melbourne where he worked as an electricity linesman for the Box Hill Council. 
Quite unknown to each other before making their debuts at Traynors, Spooner and McIntyre established an instant rapport. During a break on that first evening, they found they knew a number of songs in common and they treated audiences to an impromptu bracket of duets. The pair made an instant impact on the audience (and management) and they quickly acquired a substantial repertoire. Spooner recalls that he would frequently learn two or three new songs a day (while keeping down a job cleaning pubs), rush the lyrics over to McIntyre, rehearse with him in the car en route to the gig, and they would perform the new material that same night. It was the beginning of an intermittent musical partnership which would last until McIntyre’s death in June 1999. Only a year after their first meeting, the pair joined Martyn Wyndham-Read and Peter Dickie for an album of British songs on Score, A Wench, A Whale and A Pint of Good Ale. Another Score album,  Soldiers and Sailors, teamed them with singer Shayna Karlin and Sydney concertina-player Mike Ball. (An immaculate guitarist, well-remembered for his virtuoso rendering of the Davy Graham standard ‘Angie’, McIntyre recorded an album, Behold We Give You the Morning, with the group Desiderata in 1969, and subsequently  relocated to Sydney where he formed a long-standing personal and professional partnership with singer Kate Delaney.
Spooner continued to play in Mebourne solo and in numerous combinations, including the a capella ensemble Canterbury Fair. A firm believer in the importance of knowing and understanding historical frames-of-reference, Spooner was a natural teacher. While still at Traynors, he was recruited by academic Ian Maxwell to lecture on traditional balladry, and from 1968-78 he held a residency at the University of Melbourne, touring and lecturing on various aspects of social history through traditional song. One series of seminars, in which Spooner expounded on ‘The Masters through the eyes of the Convicts’, teamed him with Prof A.G.L. Shaw and Geoffrey Serle. Citing classic performances like ‘Farewell to Tarwathie’, Cris Larner assesses that, as a singer, Spooner was “absolutely present in his music … He gave the duo [Spooner & McIntyre] its passion … No way was he just singing a song, or skiting ‘I can do this better than anyone else’. He was living the song. That’s what drew everyone. The left-wingers responded to it, the idealisation of the working class. It was real”.   Recently retired from teaching, Spooner continues to perform and has remained an esteemed and highly active figure on the local traditional music scene over three decades.

Several talented singer-guitarists, closely identified with Traynors, died well before their time. John Graham, who started out with “three chords and ten Peter Paul & Mary songs” , and ended up performing mostly his own material (a bit before the singer-songwriter vogue really took off), died in a car accident shortly before he was due to be married. Trevor Lucas, who attained international celebrity as a member of Fairport Convention, died, apparently of  heart failure, in Sydney in 1989. Graham Squance, a Country music and Dylan enthusiast who fell in love with American blues when he heard Lucas play, developed a substantial local following as blues-man and bottleneck guitar specialist. As a student geologist, he performed solo and, on occasion, in a trio with country music-buff Glen Foster and Shayna Karlin, or in a duo with fellow blues-enthusiast Ken White. Squance gave up playing professionally after graduation, but he continued to guest at clubs and festivals in NSW and Victoria, and was active in the foundation of a campus folk club at the University of New England. He died in a car accident while en route from Armidale to the Monaro (Canberra) Folk Festival in 1970. A major figure on the early Sydney folk scene, Declan Affley moved to Melbourne for a couple of years in the mid 1960s and became something of a fixture at Traynors. (Affley died in Sydney in 1985). Another ill-fated Sydney singer who divided his time between the two major metropolitan scenes was the gifted Colin Dryden, fondly remembered as a charismatic and complex character with an apparent death-wish: a man “deliberately headed towards oblivion”.  
Denis Gibbons and Lenore Somerset, household names by virtue of their extensive radio and TV work, appeared regularly at Traynors during the club’s infancy (as did big names from interstate like Gary Shearston, Marian Henderson and Tina Lawton). As far as the more puritanical members of the folk fraternity were concerned, radio broadcaster Gibbons was far too well known a figure to qualify as a serious, bona fide folksinger.  Gibbons himself recognised that the likes of Wyndham-Read and Mooney were on “another plane”; similarly, he was determinedly apolitical and (as a lifetime Liberal voter) quite out-of-touch with the protest generation. He was, however a personable being who got on well with people and was much in demand for his skills as a compere. Mick Counihan probably summed up orthodox folkie tolerance of Gibbons in a review of a Folklore Council concert he (Gibbons) hosted at Melbourne Town Hall in 1966. “Although far from our best folksinger, Gibbons is and has been important as a populariser of our traditional material, avoiding the trap into which many of his fellow performers have fallen, that of debasing this material in the popularising process” [Go-Set, 6 July 1966].
The ambivalence with which folk purists viewed Gibbons (and interstate comercial acts like Doug Ashdown, Sean & Sonja, The Twiliters or The Wesley Three) was duplicated in their response to Lenore Somerset. Easily the most widely-exposed woman singer of the era, she boasted a distinctive and booming three octave voice which ranged from soprano down to low alto. Born Lenore Miller in Queensland in 1931, she learned guitar as a child and made her first recordings with her uncle, the legendary Buddy Williams, in 1945. She spent seven years with the Queensland National Opera before moving to Melbourne with her doctor husband and young son (circa 1958). Encouraged by her husband, she resumed voice lessons and took up the guitar again, finding folksinging an enticing contrast.
Folkmusic grew on me because I was a hillbilly singer from Queensland. At 6.30 every morning, I listened to all the [folk and country] records rom America and the Australian ones [on radio]. I had the ability to remember the songs and play them on the guitar … Opera was composed by someone else … you were one of a group who produced the same thing. I was drawn to folkmusic because I wanted to be real … Every folksong told a story and you could dramatise it.
Somerset’s rise to prominence was swift thanks to appearanceas on In Melbourne Tonight, Delo & Daly, Patrick O’Hagan Sings, The Country &Western Hour, Bandstand and three albums for W&G. She took part in the Four Capitals Folk Song Tour, topped the bill at Jim Carter’s 1965 Newport Folk Festival, toured with The New Lost City Ramblers and was featured model in advertisements for Maton guitars.  (The company went so far as to name one of its instruments in her honour: the ‘L.S. Professional’).       Somerset coupled her vocal distinctiveness with skilled 6 and 12 string guitar work. Gibbons, a close friend,  has remembered that she consciously developed her lower vocal register after listening to Odetta records; certainly her huge voice made standards like ‘Jericho’, ‘Children Go’, ‘O Freedom’ and ‘The Ox-Driver’s Song’ natural choices.

Contemporary concert and record reviews confirm that Somerset fell foul of the folk establishment, due to a combination of her classical training, her popularity, her eclecticism (she had no qualms about singing with jazz bands, square-dancing on television, acting on Bellbird and Homicide, or recording with C&W musicians like the Hawking Brothers), and her professional approach to performing folkmusic. (“I remember once being told that I had no right to sing Australian songs because I was a trained singer”, she recalled recently. “Plus women didn’t sing them”). In reviewing the Score LP Australian Folk Festival, Pat O’Connor criticised Somerset’s rendition of ‘The Ox Driver’s Song’ as closer to art presentation than traditional-style folksong, while Mick Counihan once cited Somerset as proof  “… that a singer needs more than lung power to make a sea shanty convincing”. She raised eyebrows by arriving to sing at Traynors fashionably be-wigged, “dressed to the nines” and fully made-up, and on one occasion she incurred the wrath of Australian Tradition’s Coral Robertson when she made a complete costume change in between brackets at a concert. (“Folkmusic should be natural and uninhibited”, admonished Robertson) [Go-Set, 6 July 1966; Australian Tradition, Sept & Nov 1964].   A fun-loving and generous being who “tended to mother everybody”, Somerset  was active on the Melbourne (and national) folk scene from 1963 to mid 1966, after which she moved increasingly into country music and cabaret, becoming a regular face on the RSL, Leagues Clubs and hotel circuit (about as far from the coffee lounges, ideologically, as was possible). Her willingness to entertain troops in Vietnam further distanced her from the folk milieu.  She retired from performing in the 1980s. Interviewed recently, she expressed enduring affection for the folk years – and for Traynors in particular, noting that she had been able “to sing her heart out there”, performing material that might have been deemed too downbeat or esoteric by more mainstream audiences.

In addition to Somerset and Glen Tomasetti,  women folk-performers at Traynors  included Margaret Smith, Margret Roadknight, Phyl Vinnicombe, Sue Lee Archer, Fiona Laurence, Shayna Karlin and Lynne St John. Gabrielle Hartley, a fashion model with an “adequate” voice and good stage technique, spent a short time as a folksinger (at mid-decade) before moving into television acting. As a folksinger, Hartley performed briefly on Bandstand and is best remembered for her recording of Charles Marawood’s poignant ‘Magdalena’. Fiona Laurence, who learned Scottish folksongs from her mother and grandmother, started singing publicly after rendering ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’ at an artists’ party in honour of visiting celebrity Odetta. Intensely shy, Laurence was leaving the party when she was stopped by the great singer and advised gently: “You must sing”. Laurence became a regular at Traynors and other venues from 1966, both on her own and in a number of combinations, most notably with future husband Ken White).

Shayna Karlin (nee Bracegirdle), a Queenslander who had been active in the beginnings of the Brisbane Folk Centre and on the Sydney scene, appeared regularly at Traynors around 1965-7, often in duet with Gordon McIntyre. Karlin specialised in British songs but was also a keen interpreter of American songwriters like Buffy Sainte-Marie. In 1970 she branched out by joining Colin Dryden, Graham Lowndes and others in a shortlived but highly innovative electric folk group Extradition, an ensemble which was favourably compared in its day to the British super-groups Pentangle and Fairport Convention. (Karlin and other members of Extradition also played together as Tully, an experimental ensemble which drew its inspiration from Meher Baba. Tully is best remembered today for performing the score of the musical Hair on stage and record). 
Margaret Smith, a Monash Arts student and former typist, sang alone and as a member of the Caedmon Singers, specialising in Peter Paul & Mary-style material. (The Caedmon Singers recorded a Seekers-style single, ‘It’s Not Love’ for W&G, under the name ‘Maggie’s People’, in 1966). Margret Roadknight, plagued initially by self-consciousness but, even then, an original, got her start at Emerald Hill. She debuted at Traynors, called up out of the audience, stunning those present with an a capella spiritual, and she continued to play there throughout its history. Introduced to black American music by Traynor and members of the cast of the touring show Black Nativity, she sang regularly with the Jazz Preachers and recorded a live album, People Get Ready, at the club in 1973. Roadknight went professional in 1965 and has managed to make her living in music ever since, coupling performing with such related activity as running folkmusic classes for the Council of Adult Education. Rooted in contemporary folk and blues, her repertoire encompasses everything from Malvina Reynolds, Ma Rainey, Joni Mitchell. and Elton John to African and Bulgarian traditions, Barry Humphries and ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Duncan Brown, who first started going to Traynors circa 1968, cites Roadknight as one of the all-time standout acts there: – in particular, her rendition of ‘Love tastes like Strawberries’.
Sue Lee-Archer fell in love with folkmusic as a schoolgirl, listening to Denis Gibbons’ show on 3AW. (Her first ‘gig’, organised by her father, was singing ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ at the Mentone Bowls Club). In response to a letter asking advice on “how to become a folksinger”, Gibbons suggested she come in and try out at Traynors. She appeared at the club for a couple of years (1964-6), playing a mix of Baez, Ian & Sylvia, Cathy & Carol, Judy Collins, Gordon Lightfoot and Irish songs. Lee-Archer married and cut down on performing. She re-emerged in the 1970s as a member of Brendan Hanley’s Moonshiners before moving to Tasmania (in 1976) and becoming part of the Hobart and Longford scene.
Phyl Vinnicombe was a primary teacher, a country girl from Ballarat, first exposed to the local folk scene through house-sitting for Peter and Ruth Mann and then meeting Glen Tomasetti, the mother of two of her young students. She recalls Emerald Hill, Pete Seeger’s workshop there, an early visit to the Reata (where Martyn Wyndham-Read played ‘Widdecombe Fair’) and guitar classes with Tomasetti upstairs at Traynors, as decisive influences on her own musical quest.  Vinnicombe impressed listeners early on with her self-composed protest songs, notably ‘Dark-eyed Daughter’, written in response to Charles Perkins’ Freedom Rides.  She made a guest appearance (singing ‘Andy’s Gone with Cattle’ and ‘O’Meally’s Shanty’) on the Wyndham-Read/ Bush Band album Bullockies, Bushwackers and Booze (1967) and recorded a W&G EP for the Aboriginal Advancement League in 1968. (Vinnicombe married musician Geri Lobl and moved to Sydney where she remained active in the NSW folk scene – singing, lecturing, writing and representing folk arts on the Australia Council – as Phyl Lobl).

Lynne St John was another teacher who welcomed the opportunity to augment her (low) workday salary with appearances at Traynors and other coffee lounges. She started singing professionally while training at Burwood Teachers’ College thanks to an admirer who passed on a tape of her singing to the manager of the Cottage in Doncaster. As a result, she appeared off-and-on at the Cottage for more than two years, as well as at the Pennville and Deep Down jazz clubs, the Campus (both upstairs with Graham Bennett’s jazz musicians and downstairs in the coffee lounge ‘folk’ area), the Jolly Roger (standing in for Brian Mooney for a couple of weeks) and other venues. She was first recruited to sing at Traynors following an appearance at a folk convention at Mt Evelyn in November 1964 and she remained a regular at the club – sometimes singing with David Lumsden, sometimes in a trio with Lumsden and Graham Squance – until 1967 when she semi-retired to devote herself to family and teaching.
In general, those who were speak of Traynors very fondly, citing the almost familial closeness which developed between many of the regulars. Traynor himself, toughened by years in the jazz world,  was struck by the earnestness and basic niceness of the majority of the folkies. Mary Traynor recalls the essential decency of the scene there, a scene characterised by the respect performers displayed for each others’ repertoires, particularly in the early days when recordings were relatively inaccessible and singers went to considerable trouble to build up a songbag. “Traynors was a leveller”, she notes, “ … people came to be entertained and got much more. You could just sit and listen and not speak to anyone. Alternatively, people were open. You could talk. You could talk to the artist and discuss the songs”.

Patrons and performers alike saw the club as a drop-in-centre, where they were bound to run into someone they knew. Even if not scheduled to play, artists would frequently call in to mingle in the performers’ area, swap verses or “help out” with a couple of songs. The Saturday evening show would typically close with Mooney, Wyndham-Read or Spooner performing the final bracket, then inviting friends backstage or in the audience up to close with either ‘Go Lassie Go’ or ‘Singing Bird’. Newcomers were able to sing “from the floor” and (generally) encouraged to return. Margret RoadKnight was a case in point. An equally nervous Paul Wookey debuted one evening and failed dismally, singing too softly to be heard; Mary Traynor allowed him to come back and try again occasionally and, within six months, he had developed into a commanding and outstanding performer.
Over time, some of the more seasoned artists developed a paternalistic attitude to youthful compatriots and patrons. A group of nurses from St Vincent’s Hospital were frequent and popular customers in the mid-60s; following the final bracket of the evening, singers with wheels would be rostered to ensure the girls got back to the hall of residence before their 12.00 curfew. A number of marriages grew out of the club. Even local policemen on their beat would be made welcome and offered coffee, although management tended to breathe a sigh of relief when they left without having reacted to the the unorthodox cigarette smell which occasionally emanated from the performers’ area. A “home base” for musicians and “a reference centre for folk and jazz”, Traynors also developed a word-of-mouth reputation internationally. Young tourists would often call in, saying they had been hitch-hiking through Norway (for example) and had been advised, if ever in Melbourne, to call in at the club. According to Danny Spooner:
It was a music establishment where people went to learn, listen and get their heads together. It was a place of peace for some, and an escape from their dreadful day-to-day existences … Traynors brought together politicians like Jim Cairns, drop-outs, alternatives, actors, all mixing together. The songs were a catalyst.
The club was also unusual among the Melbourne venues for its longevity: 12 years.  It was forced to relocate to 100 Little Lonsdale Street when a motel opened next door to the Exhibition Street building at the end of 1968 (meaning that the jazz musicians could not ‘jam’ after midnight). Although crowds had begun to fall off by the end of the ‘60s, partly because folkmusic (and the venue) had ceased to be fashionable, and partly because the social folk scene was shifting towards pubs like Fogarty’s Union and Dan O’Connell’s, Traynors remained packed on Saturdays (until the end) and it continued to function for several more years. The end came when the building was sold and the new owner demanded vacant possession  in 1975. By contrast, its forerunners, the Jolly Roger, Hernando’s, the Ad Lib and the Treble Clef, had soon been superceded. Even the Reata had gone by 1965 (although The Green Man, established on the same premises, ultimately lasted – and continued to feature acoustic music – into the 1980s).
Traynors was the jewel in the crown of a Melbourne folk scene that encompassed an almost staggering number of live venues in the ’60s. In addition to those already mentioned there were the Cottage, the Gallows, the Copper Inne, the Flower Pot & Candle, the Copper Kettle, the Bastille, the Colonial Inn, the Fall-Out Shelter, the Oupost Inn, Prompt Corner, the Blue Boy, Capers, the Spanish Cellar, the Lonesome Road, the Interlude – and more! Most were shortlived (although the Outpost Inn endured for a decade). The Pricklye Bush and the Dan O’Connell both emerged out of disputes between performers and Traynors management. Supporters of Declan Affley set up the former, at the Union Hotel, following a disagreement between Affley and Don Carless. The ‘Dan’ (which became the focal point of the post-60s folk scene in Melbourne) emerged out of an argument between Frank Traynor and Danny Spooner. Ironically, both rifts healed almost immediately and the pub clubs worked hard subsequently to augment rather than compete with what was on offer at Traynors.
[Apart from the published sources cited in the text, my main source of information for this article has been a series of interviews with Mary Traynor, Danny Spooner, Don Carless, David Lumsden, Denis Gibbons, Glen Tomasetti, Garry Kinnane, Lynne [St John] Lumsden, Cris Larner, Ken & Fiona [Laurence] White, Duncan Brown, Peter Laycock, Martyn Wyndham-Read, Phyl Lobl, Lenore Somerset, Mick Counihan, Margret RoadKnight, Dave de Hugard, Sue Lee-Archer, Jamie Johnston & John O’Leary. Additional detail came from an untitled typescript by Mary Traynor, kindly provided by the author.]  

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE FOLK BOOM IN PERTH

Malcolm J. Turnbull
[Previously published in Town Crier: Newsletter of the Western Australian Folk Federation, 32 (5), 2004 – 33(2) 2005]
Inspired by the work of the Bush Music Clubs in the east, and determined “not to be left out of the national movement”, a handful of enthusiasts gathered together to form the Western Australian Folksong Society – a collection and preservation body – in August 1963. The Society operated out of premises in Malcolm Street. John Joseph Jones, an anthropologist and folkorist who claimed to be a cousin of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, pioneered broader awareness of W.A. folklore and the work of poets Mary Durack and Jack Sorensen in two published collections Condamine Bells:Songs and Stories of the Australian Outback and Australian New Folk and Art Songs. Jones also composed a substantial number of songs “in the bush tradition”, and performed this and other material on a series of EPs for EMI. Like their Adelaide counterparts, most of the better-known Perth folkies included token Australian songs in their repertoires, and two popular performers, Peter Harries and Rod Popham, made a specialty of bringing colonial ballads to a broader public via TV appearances and schools programs on radio. Popham became fascinated with the origins of convict and bushranging songs as a schoolboy:
… the transfer between songs with their roots in the Irish or English traditions. How they were adapted by people coming out to Australia on ships to talk about their own personal problems. I got a buzz out of tracing these songs down. Plus I found an enormous spring of humorous songs.

Otherwise interest in Australian bush songs and traditions appears to have been minimal in Perth during the period under review; so much so (according to Popham) that an attempt by one performer to recite ‘The Man from Snowy River’ at a folk night was summarily howled down by the audience. The W.A. scene of the 1960s was overwhelmingly American (later British)-oriented, student-based, non-political, predominantly non-professional and relatively insignificant. Just as it did the Tasmanian chapter of the revival, geography determined the scene’s cohesiveness and it is hardly surprising, given the “tyranny of distance” that only one W.A.-based folksinging act (The Twiliters) made any real impact on the national consciousness. At the same time, it should be pointed out that the Perth venues drew on a more diverse and distinguished corps of performers than has generally been acknowledged, and that the tiny scene consciously revitalised itself, wherever possible, from outside. Visiting superstars Peter Paul & Mary played Perth (more than once) as did Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Odetta, even Dylan. There also appears to have been a marked degree of interaction between the Perth and Adelaide venues. (Doug Ashdown and Patsy Biscoe, stalwarts of the Folk Hut and e Catacombs, periodically graced the Perth clubs or toured regional W.A. Jim Maguire once made practical use of the lengthy train trip across the Nullarbor to acquire a few basic guitar chords before an important Adelaide gig).
The Perth scene’s beginnings have proved elusive. According to Murray Jennings, western correspondent to the Sydney periodical Music Maker [Sept 1964], W.A. customarily lagged well behind the eastern states in catching up with popular music trends and so Perth was “at least a year” behind Melbourne and Sydney in establishing its own folk venues. “The folk scene emerged in Perth as Perth was just emerging out of the beatnik era … The eastern states had moved on. We used to hang around with bongo drums”, remembers Jim Maguire for whom The Kingston Trio had represented the proverbial “flash of light in the sky”. Frank Povah, who, inspired by the music of the Carter Family had discarded ukelele for guitar and autoharp, inspired by the music of The Carter Family, recalls playing at Chez Nous, a cafe “out on the highway” circa 1962. He also remembers occasional folksinging at a city wine bar (name now unknown).

A striking characteristic of the W.A. scene was the primacy there of folksinging ensembles (duos, trios, etc). The Twiliters and The West Coast Trio, western counterparts to such collegiate ensembles as The Wesley Three, The Coachmen, The Green Hill Singers and The Wayfarers, were the first high profile folk-act to emerge in Perth and they remain the best-remembered performers of the era.
The Twiliters had its origins at Perth’s Christian Brothers College. Kerry White and Hans Stampfer were senior classmates there. Jim Maguire, a former student, was working as a psychiatric nurse after having dropped out of First year Medicine. The boys’ first performances were at school functions late in 1962; then “we chanced upon a little coffee shop, the Quitapena”. Remembered as the first real folk venue in W.A. (“the place where it first got going”), the Quitapena was a cosy cafe in Hay Street, able to accommodate between 30 and 40 patrons. It was run as a hobby by Brian Allen, a clinical psychologist, who jumped at the opportunity to offer customers something other than taped background music. The youthful Twiliters subsequently spent two years as resident attraction there. Further up Hay Street (opposite Parliament House), the Windmill, a “musos’ hangout” run by a mother & daughter team, enabled The Twiliters to mix and share bills with local and visiting pop singers and rock bands, among them Ian Turpie. The trio’s practice sessions were initially timetabled to fit in with Maguire’s shift-work. (“When we were first starting off, we used to rehearse at 4.30 in the morning at Hans’s mum’s or the boiler room of the mental hospital”).
The Twiliters found an early promoter in DJ Keith McGowan and through him they became regulars on the teen TV show Club 17 and appeared to positive acclaim on Variety programs and at rock and country dances, even Hootenanny Stomps, as far away as Bundaberg. The first taste of “something bigger” came with an invitation to appear on The Country & Western Hour in Adelaide. “It was a thrill for us, young working class kids, to stay in motels”, remembers Maguire. In the wake of The Beatles’ Australian tour, Adelaide teenagers decided to give the out-of-town boys the “full treatment” at folk clubs and rock dances. “We couldn’t be heard above the screams”. (The Twiliters enjoyed a similarly frenzied response when they got back to W.A. and were booked to support Johnny Young at a rock concert in Fremantle).
Formed in June 1963 (and drawing “Ivy League” inspiration from The Brothers Four, The Chad Mitchell Trio and The Limeliters), The West Coast Trio consisted of guitarist Nick Melidonis, a trainee Science teacher, law clerk Murray Wilkins on bass (Wilkins also played with jazz ensemble The Traditionals), and guitarist Mike Robinson, also a student teacher. Early in its evolution the trio came to the attention of John Tyrrell, a former Shakespearean actor then doing production work for the ABC, and Tyrrell provided the boys with professional experience on radio light music programs while coaching them in presentation and stage-craft. (“Tyrrell taught us how to perform rather than just play”, remembers Nick Melidonis). The boys gained additional exposure and publicity on Channel 7’s Tonight program and at a two-night poetry presentation at the Dolphin Theatre in February 1964. (Folksongs by the trio punctuated Dorothy Hewett’s reading of her own ‘Country Idyll’, Randolph Stow’s ‘Thailand Railway’, and offerings by Malcolm Levene, Merv Lilley and Griffith Watkins).
Early in 1964 the WCT was recruited to “bring folkmusic” to another coffee lounge, the Shiralee, across town in Howard Street. The group specialised in boisterous renditions of folk favourites like ‘Old Dan Tucker’, ‘Chilly Winds’, ‘Children Go’, ‘There’s A Meeting Here Tonight’ or the Dylan classic ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Allright’, a bit of flamenco, songs from Latin America (like ‘Curimao’ from Brazil), comic numbers such as Shel Silverstein’s ‘Espresso’, and occasional settings of poems by John Joseph Jones, Dorothy Hewett or Merv Lilley. With a built-in university student following, their appearances regularly packed out the cafe.

The Perth scene produced several memorable ensembles.  While it failed to achieve comparable national success, The West Coast Trio rivalled Maguire, White & Stampfer/Ferris on home turf, attracting its own coterie of loyal fans across town at The Shiralee in Howard Street.

The Shiralee attracted a yuppie element [and] the real folk enthusiasts [maintains Hans Stampfer]. The Quitapena was more a real restaurant. The Twiliters appealed to the teen market [whereas]  The West Coast Trio was more up-market … We were pop folk stars… They were more sophisticated musically although they didn’t have the same raw energy … The WCT was influenced by The Limeliters and were generally more in the style of The Wesley Three. The Twiliters combined the more accessible stylings of The Kingston Trio and captured a certain pulse and feeling.

The WCT teamed student teachers Nick Melidonis and Mike Robinson and law clerk Murray Wilkins.

The group lasted from 1961/2 to 1966, through my university years and my first year teaching [remembers Melidonis]. We had worked up a few folk pieces when we were picked up by ABC producer John Tyrrell who put us on air and later featured us on the ABC TV series Folk Cellar. Tyrrell was an ex-Shakespearean actor; he taught us how to perform rather than just play … Murray was an excellent comedian … Our repertoire was a mix of American songs like ‘Old Dan Tucker’, comic songs like Shel Silverstein’s ‘Espresso’, settings of poems by [WA folklorist] John Joseph Jones or Dorothy Hewett, and international stuff, flamenco, Brazilian songs, etc … The fishing song ‘Curimao’ won praise from Eartha Kitt when we supported her at the Capitol Theatre  … We played at the Fremantle Spring Festival and sang at civic functions at Government House and at a big variety concert in the Supreme Court Gardens. We also played   Sunday evenings at the Foxhole, on the corner of George and Hay Streets, and at Floridata in Wellington Street, the only nightclub in Perth.   Perth was still a country town then … We featured in 3 series of Folk Cellar, along with James Smillie, The Yellowstones and Bruce & Romanie Williams, and we started the University of WA Folk Club … A real highlight was a Town Hall concert with the Andre De Moller Trio. 

During the long university summer break of 1964/5 The WCT emulated The Twiliters by heading east (with Wilkins’ double bass strapped, coffin-like, to the top of the car), playing country pubs, Leagues and RSL clubs, and TV shows like In Melbourne Tonight and The Diana Trask Show.  For a while the trio evolved into The West Coast Four with the addition of [ex-Twiliter] Hans Stampfer. Then when work and study pressure forced Robinson and Stampfer to leave, it was back to a trio with visiting student Zaid Aliff. In 1966. The WCT made the finals of the nationally-televised Showcase series with their rendition of ‘Darlin’ Corey’; unfortunately national exposure backfired when it was discovered that Aliff was in the country illegally. He promptly went “underground” and The WCT disbanded. (For a while Melidonis worked in a duo with singer Rod Popham; a professional photographer, he remains active on the Perth music scene up to the present). Unlike The Twiliters, The WCT did not leave a vinyl legacy; their only record was a live custom pressing of ‘Ella Speed’; Melidonis notes, however, that a tape of the trio’s last TV gig, an ABC Special Meet the West Coast Trio still exists.

Also worth recalling is The Wayfarers (not to be confused with the longlasting Brisbane ensemble of the same name).  The youthful ensemble included Kerry White’s brothers Vic and Kim (16 and 14 respectively) and 20 year old Wayne Garton; their impressive takes on PP&M material earned them second place in their heat of Showcase 65 but further success was vetoed when Garton’s number came up in the first Federal conscription lottery. [*For further detail on the early WA folk scene, see my article ‘Recollections of the Folk Boom in Perth’, published in the WA Folk Federation newsletter Town Crier, vol 32(5 &6), 2004; vol 33(1&2), 2005] 

Second in national popularity to The Twiliters was Adelaide trio The Wesley Three, a stylish, musically knowledgeable ensemble which attracted public attention through national appearances on Showcase 65, and recorded 4 albums for CBS: The Wesley Three, City Folk, Banjo and Mr Thwump, Leaning on a Lamp-post.  Formed circa 1963 when Keith Conlon and twins Peter & Martin Wesley-Smith were still at St Peter’s College (“performing paid our way through university”), the trio cited the Chad Mitchell Trio and, more directly, a local pop-group, distinguished by its use of snare-drum, the Dave Fuller Trio. With Conlon on drum, Martin on guitar and Peter on string bass, the trio survived six years until Peter went overseas to do post-graduate work. Their repertoire encompassed the occasional bush ballad (‘Flash Jack’), American perennials (‘Drill Ye Tarriers’, ‘Little David’, ‘Bullgine Run’), vaudeville material (‘Leaning on a Lamppost’), mild social comment (‘Little Play Soldiers’) and children’s songs (a lovely ‘Owl and the Pussycat’ and an original ‘Little Tommy’ which was covered by the American group The Serendipity Singers).

We sang at parties and at school and in 1964 made our first appearance on Channel 7, also on Channel 9’s Adelaide Tonight [recalls Peter Wesley-Smith] .  We played at The Catacombs while we were still at school. Keith also played with the Campus Six … There was a big crossover between jazz and folk. The University Jazz Club brought Paul Marks over … Because Adelaide was such a small scene, it made sense to combine venues … we went on to appear on IMT and Showcase. We travelled to Sydney for three weeks each year, doing the coffee lounge round,  the Last Straw and the Copperfield, and so on. It was heady stuff for young Adelaide kids in the 60s. ..  [Promoter] Jim Carter still owes us for one gig – the Katoomba Festival – which was a complete failure. The whole area was enveloped in fog; Acoustically it was wonderful but you couldn’t see anything but a few lights twinkling … .. Both Martin and I were conscripted in 1965; we managed to have it deferred because of a university and we continued studying. I combined Arts/Law and Honours, then got a special exemption to do a Ph.D. However, the spectre of conscription was over our heads. We had planned to take a year off to devote to music but it wasn’t possible because of the draft. Going overseas to study [in 1968] meant the end of The Wesley Three.

Listened to today, The Wesleys arguably remain the best of the U.S.-style trios by virtue of their musicality and originality. (Martin Wesley-Smith went on to become a leading exponent and composer of electronic music; Peter Wesley-Smith was , for some years, Dean of Law at the University of Hong Kong. Another brother, Jerry [Wesley], is a respected jazz musician in Adelaide; in 1971 he Jerry and Martin teamed with  Keith Conlon and actor Amanda Hodgman for a recording The Glorious Years, released by Jacaranda Press in conjunction with the book of the same title). Another Adelaide band The John Gordon Trio “took off”  briefly after appearing on Showcase 65,  performing at hotels, Leagues and RSL clubs, and the bigger coffee lounges. The trio reportedly combined a folk sound “with a lot of comedy and hokum thrown in”.
(The following additional information was sent by ‘Ronald’, a friend of the Twiliters)   In early 60’s a Perth folk group the Twiliters became a regular feature at a coffee lounge in Unley (Adelaide)  and I got to know the guys  Jim Maguire. Kerry White and Hans Stampfer  at that time I was boarding at the YMCA in a Share Room and had become interested in Folk Music due to my room mate Greg Ferris from Hobart he was into folk music  and also played the guitar and sung folk songs he was very good , I got to know his qualities very well and we used to go to  the Catacombs coffee Lounge in Hackney  and to another one at the East End of Rundle Street  (across the road from another Coffee lounge that I regularly went to  as it had a resident band called BLUES, RAGS & HOLLERS.
I heard of a new Folk Coffee Lounge in Unley so we went there but Greg only went there on the first night but preferred the other coffee lounge as Doug Ashdown was a regular there and like Greg played a lot of 12 String music. I was able to obtain part-time employment at Unley as I had learnt to make espresso coffee at a bowling Alley I had worked at.  So was there most nights except Sunday when I went to CATACOMBS at Hackney (DOUG ASHDOWN played there Sunday Nights)
One night Jim, Kerry & Hans were very serious and deep in a discussion (a group meeting)   later just Kerry & Jim were sitting at the table deciding what they were going to do as Hans was returning to Perth. And  Jim & Kerry were deciding what to do as the TWILITERS were playing for the last time tomorrow. Next Morning  I asked Greg if he would be interested in joining a Folk Group and I explained about the TWILITERS  and he would be the perfect replacement for Hans.  Greg came to Unley that night to hear the TWILITERS and Greg liked them  -I  got Jim & Kerry to come and talk to me about the Future of the TWILITERS  and they said it was too late and I said  I had the perfect replacement for Hans and they said they had not seen any possibilities.  I had arranged for Greg to be booked to do a bracket after the TWILITERS  and Greg were now performing and Kerry & Jim were now sitting back listening to Greg.   When Greg finished he came to the table and I introduced him as the replacement for Hans.    The evening’s entertainment was over and it was just the staff left now and some of the other folk singers.  So Kerry, Jim and Greg decided to do a few numbers as a Trio and they clicked The TWILITERS had reformed on the same night they finished. I returned to Broken Hill for a number of years then moved to London (just before moving to London received the news my friend Greg had passed away) then back to the Hill and in the mid 70’s moved to Perth.  I kept in touch with the guys and on number occasions was able to catch up with them at a gig.  Caught up with Kerry again when I moved to Perth he had the most beautiful voice that you could listen to for hours.  I moved to the Kimberley’s and occasionally caught up with Kerry in Perth and then seen him a few times when I moved back to Perth in  1990  and caught up with Kerry.  But he sadly passed away soon after.  I caught up with Hans a few years back but it was a meeting of acquaintances as we had never had much contact in Adelaide.
There is another TWILITERS connection to Perth a few years ago Greg’s young Cousin moved to Perth and he is the proud owner of Greg’s Guitars and Amplifier.

Well-regarded on the Melbourne scene were The Coachmen, resident act in 1965-66 at the Colonial Inn in suburban Kew. Typically, Jim Kenny, Ron Cahill (later Chief Magistrate of the ACT) and John Wintle started playing while at school together, circa 1961.

I was turned on to folkmusic by The Kingston Trio  [recalls Kenny].  I made my own guitar out of a door-frame – open  tuning. I also constructed my own banjo. We played at parties, charity dos and dances … even had a youthful manager. Then we appeared on Christies’ Auditions on 3 UZ and earned three gongs. A lot of folkies tried out there. Through [presenter] John McMahon we played at foster homes, boys’ homes, Year 12 concerts, etc. I remember being stunned when we were paid 25 pounds for doing three songs as a Gas & Fuel Company luncheon. In 1964 we played our first coffee lounge gigs … two or three sessions at Prompt Corner, from there to the Copper Kettle. The Seekers, Garry Kinnane and The New World Trio also played there…. The Colonial Inn was two converted shiop fronts near Kew Junction. It served food – Welsh rarebit, cinnamon toast –  but was never really a restaurant. On a standard night The Coachmen went on at 9.00. Maybe four brackets a night. Hans, the owner, wanted quantity not quality … We did lots of requests: Trad stuff, Dylan’s ‘Oxford Town’, Kingston Trio, Australian songs and some of our own … There was a back room where those who were really keen could go to listen silently to the singing. It sorted out the really serious from those wanting a night out … Our other gigs included Showcase 66, New Faces … A highlight was playing a concert at Assembly Hall with Margret Roadknight and David Lumsden. Lumsden’s banjo-playing was a strong influence, so were Mooney, Wyndham-Read and Alex Hood … The group folded when we left university and went to work [1967].

Another Melbourne-bred trio found a broader audience – and the proverbial ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ –  by moving to Sydney.  “I make no apologies for the fact we tried to copy The Kingston Trio, with the ivy-league shirts and the whole thing”, remembers John McMillan, leader of  The Green Hill Singers.  “As far as we were concerned, we wanted to just make music … The beauty of  it was working alongside the Marian Hendersons, the Declan Affleys and the Danny Spooners”. McMillan, his brother Alec and schoolfriend John Jenkinson had earlier enjoyed minor success, as The Vedetts, appearing every Sunday night on Dick Cranbourn’s 3UZ Radio show. Early in 1964 the McMillans teamed up with bass-player Chris Bonett and “it just all clicked. Chris was the talent we had to have to form a trio as we wanted it”. As The Green Hill Singers, the boys played on In Melbourne Tonight (IMT) and had the distinction of succeeding The Seekers as resident group at the Treble Clef in South Yarra. Winning Everybody’s Magazine’s ‘Big New Sound of 1964’ talent quest gained the trio a recording contract with HMV and a season supporting Shirley Bassey at the Palais in Melbourne and Chequers in Sydney. A single ‘Big Land’, a catchy celebration of the outback penned by Bonett, received substantial airplay, and the boys threw up their day jobs and moved to Sydney to appear regularly on the ABC TV series Jazz Meets Folk.      

Throughout 1965 The Green Hill Singers teamed work in the folk clubs (including the Carter venues) with gigs at RSL and Leagues clubs and appearances on Bobby Limb’s Sound of Music and Dave Allen’s Tonight Show. For a while, they were flown down every Friday to play on Noel Ferrier’s IMT, and at mid-year they recorded an LP for Festival, The Folk Sounds of The Green Hill Singers. John McMillan remembers the trio’s excitement when Dave Guard was called in to provide instrumental support on several cuts: “Am I dreaming here? This is the man I went to see in concert [i.e. with The Kingston Trio]. He’s sitting here in the studio playing 12 string guitar and banjo”. An even bigger thrill was meeting Peter Paul & Mary “at Gary Shearston’s flat at St Peter’s, and having Paul Stookey walk in, sit down and play guitar with me”.  

Interestingly, Guard’s interest in the trio heralded a decisive personnel change. In the middle of recording the LP, he ‘head-hunted’ Bonett to appear in his own (Guard’s) group on the TV series Dave’s Place. Brian Godden was brought in to fill Bonett’s place and finish the album (which “sank without trace”). McMillan believes The Green Hill Singers was never quite the same without the versatile Bonett, and the trio disbanded, due to lack of work, in November 1965. (The McMillans played occasional m.o.r. gigs at restaurants for a couple of years. Godden subsequently toured extensively as backing instrumentalist for Alex Hood).

At a time when opportunities to record were significantly fewer than they are today, it is surprising how many of the male trios managed to ‘crack’ the record market. Among the other “Kingston Trio clones” sufficiently successful to actually make it “onto vinyl” (to greater or lesser extents) were The Tolmen, a Sydney-based ensemble comprising Gordon Tolman, Geoff Turner and Lew Jones, who raised eyebrows within the folk fraternity when they were selected by the Arts Council of NSW for a sponsored tour of country towns and schools in 1964.   The Tolmen released 2 EPs, Pieces of Folk and Namatjira, and a single ‘Don’t Book Me Officer’, on RCA.

The Lincoln Trio unselfconsciously sported matching icecream jackets and specialised in upbeat favourites like ‘Midnight Special’, ‘The Queensland Drover’ and ‘O’Reilly’s Daughter’. Led by trainee business executive Brian Tonkin (the other members were Sean Flanagan and Gary Pearson), the trio recorded a single for RCA, ‘Wimoweh’ b/w ‘Go Lassie Go’, before disbanding when Tonkin’s firm sent him overseas. The New World Trio, comprised of Mel Noonan, John Kane and John Lee,  attracted favourable attention with their folky version of ‘Feed the Birds’ (from the film Mary Poppins), and released several folk-pop singles  (‘The World I Used To Know’, ‘Tom Tom Turnaround’, ‘Try to Remember’, etc) before and after reincarnating as the more m.o.r. New World. The Nomads Three (Walters, Grace & McCarter), a trio from Newcastle and stalwarts of venues like the Folk Sanctum, Adytum and the Purple Parrot, preserved their versions of Gary Shearston’s ‘The Voyager’ and  the Mitchell Trio’s ‘Hang on the bell Nellie’ and several bush ballads the albums Folk Songs from Around the World  and Faces in the Street for the local Vista label. The Norfolk Singers mixed classics like ‘The First Time Ever’ and ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ with topical drollery like ‘Nasho Service’ and ‘The Opera House is Falling Down’ in a batch of singles for CBS. Melbourne-based pop threesome The Unichords tapped into the nascent folk boom by remodelling itself as The Southern Folk Three for an album, Gotta Travel On, on W&G, and subsequently, as The Billabong Three for Outback, an EP of bush songs commissioned by the Golden Fleece Petrol Company. More modestly, The Coachmen produced a limited issue LP, privately pressed for St Francis’ Church, which included a self-penned civil rights lament ‘The Long Hot Summer’.      

In terms of long-term influence and/or groundbreaking contribution to the evolution of the Australian folk revival, the commercial male trios are hardly of primary importance. At the time, they were regarded with varying degrees of disdain by the so-called ‘real folksingers’ and the folk establishment amid claims they were diluting or synthesising folkmusic for fame or gain – or as mere “entertainment”.    Eminent folklorist Edgar Waters once dismissed The Wesley Three as “gimmicky undergraduates” likely to appeal to people who liked their folksongs sung by a “Village Glee Club”. (For Wendy Lowenstein of Australian Tradition, the Wesleys’ relevance  was  “at most … marginal”). Peter Wesley-Smith recalls purist criticism at The Wesley Three’s unauthentic approach and their failure to sound as if they “had dug potatoes” with some amusement. (“I can see a case for establishing your categories but to allow the categories to dominate everything is the height of foolishness”). “There was a strong delineation between the ‘true faith’ and those seen as ‘exploiting’ it”, notes Jim Kenny. Likewise, the collegiate trios failed to impress those earnest souls who insisted there must be a fundamental nexus between folksinging and socio-political activism. The Twiliters, for instance, deftly avoided overt political material (the comic ‘With You All the Way LBJ’ was an exception); their conservative image was underlined by their willingness to entertain Australian troops in Vietnam. Peter Wesley-Smith notes:

We were very much non-political as was the Adelaide scene generally. As an indication of how naive we were, we wrote a song about a strike at Holden Motor Works taking the side of management! We played it and only one reviewer objected. The Wesley Three did do some stuff in the protest vein but we weren’t passionate about politics … I recall that Gary Shearston didn’t like our version of ‘The Voyager’. They were very naive times, at least until Vietnam took off.

By extension, it is hardly coincidental that mainstream churches played something of a nurturing role in the careers of a number of the male trios. Just as The Twiliters found their first audiences at Christian Brothers College in Perth, so The Coachmen’s first paid gigs were through their local parish. “Folkmusic was deliberately cultivated as an alternative to rock’n’roll. We were three good Catholic boys who sang wholesome stuff”, recalls Jim Kenny. Similarly, The Greenhill Singers played around the Melbourne Presbyterian church network before ‘hitting the big time’. One Melbourne trio, The Glen Men, actually brought together three trainee priests. (The trio recorded an EP for W&G The Wonderful World of the Glen Men).

In hindsight, however, a sampling of recordings of the era confirms that contemporary critics often failed to acknowledge the skill, fervour – and undeniable affection for the material – displayed by the best of the collegiate trios. While the recordings – and the crowd-pleasing approach taken by the artists – clearly belong to an earlier, arguably less discriminating phase in Australian audiences’ folk consciousness, I suggest that they testify to a musicality and verve that continue to render many of the performances both enjoyable and still valid.   

TIME FOR KINGS AND HEROES: THE FOLK REVIVAL IN TASMANIA 1964-1972

Malcolm J. Turnbull
(previously published as a serial in DRUMBEAT: Magazine of the Tasmanian Folk Federation, Feb 2003 – Feb 2004)
PART 1
Reference to the great urban folkmusic revival immediately evokes images of clean-cut and ebullient collegiate trios or quartets, intense and charismatic young folk poets with their hearts on their sleeves, nomadic troubadours singing for their suppers, dewy-eyed young women keening ancient ballads, long-haired and bearded musical prophets angrily calling for radical social change or predicting global apocalypse, life-scarred and hard-drinking bluesmen, and macho traditionalist balladeers propagating work songs or laments for old Ireland.

For many of us (a significant sector of the so-called baby-boomer generation) the folk revival defines the 1960s. Bob Dylan, Donovan, Peter Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Simon & Garfunkel, Odetta, Buffy Ste Marie, Pete Seeger, The Kingston Trio, even The Seekers: their music, more than any other, provided the soundtrack for our growing up. Against a background of global upheaval – political assassination, Civil Rights crusades, the war in Vietnam, the emergence of Women’s Liberation, men on the moon – listening to acoustic music in intimate coffee lounges, on radio or on treasured vinyl LPs and EPs, helped forge ideals, answered questions and determined our relationships.
Time for Kings and Heroes examines the progress of the folk revival (or, alternatively, the first phase of the revival) as it occurred in Tasmania. Specifically, it records the preliminary glimmerings of public interest in folksongs in Hobart and elsewhere (parallel with folkmusic’s growing popularity as an entertainment medium on the mainland and overseas); the foundation of the state’s first formal folk coffee lounge, the Wild Goose; the evolution of a strongly American-influenced folk scene as other venues appeared in the south and north of the island (among them the Five Believers and Ad Lib, the Copper Pot and the Folk Inn); the peaking of folksinging activity in a spate of early festivals and concerts; and the emergence of a distinctive, home-grown singer-songwriter cult.
It should be noted that Tasmania was a relatively late developer. The Wild Goose did not emerge until the end of 1964 and the stereotyped coffee lounge-style venue remained central to folksinging activity in Hobart and the north long after folk had moved into pubs on the mainland. Enthusiasm for this type of music also seems to have lasted longer. Clearly the state’s remoteness and insularity were decisive factors. Tasmania was the least sophisticated and most change-resistant outpost of a culturally-backward continent which changed dramatically (particularly in social terms) during the period under review. As Hobart historian Alison Alexander has noted, the 1960s witnessed a fundamental shift in values- “from wide acceptance of the Korean War to questioning the Vietnam War”, or from waltzes, barn dances and foxtrots to rock’n’roll and The Beatles.

The old Bohemian dream changed: Sobranies and existentialism gave way to marijuana and left-wing idealism … [By the mid-60s] children born after the war, baby-boomers, were coming to university. Taking a prosperous society for granted, finding the old security boring, many agreed with those who criticised the failings of society: paternal authorities who told them how to think, middle-class hypocrisy and smugness, unfairness, injustice, discrimination. Causes such as opposition to the Vietnam war, Stalinism, imperialism and racism aroused them … The exciting new youth culture included sexual freedom with the introduction of the Pill; freedom of movement with more cars; freedom of lifestyle with more students in flats; plentiful stimulants, with beer and cheap wine in flagons joined by marijuana. It was the era of folkmusic, guitars, long hair, black eye-makeup and white lipstick, miniskirts, flared trousers, platform heels.

Tasmania’s early folk scene, youth-oriented and student-based, emerged and developed within this context.
I should note immediately that the term “folk revival” is problematic. Scholars are divided over (a) the accuracy of the term, and (b) the character and duration of the phenomenon. Melbourne singer and writer Glen Tomasetti has stressed, for instance, that before and after its period of mass popularity in the early ’60s, folkmusic continuously attracted a core audience. Other analysts, like American collector Jerry Epstein, see the activity of the ’60s as a mere prelude to the “real revival” of the last quarter-century. Folklorists Ralph Rinzler, Jacques Vassal, Robert Shelton, et al, strongly prefer the term “folk arrival”, indicating as it does urban awareness of music which had long been a vital factor in the lives of rural “folk”. Some scholars favour use of the term “folk boom” (even “folk fad” or “folk fever”) in differentiating the peak period when interpretations of folksongs headed AM radio play-lists from earlier and subsequent phases within an ongoing revival. Internationally, the scholarship of Francis J. Child in the 1890s and, subsequently, of collectors like Cecil Sharp, the Lomaxes, Pete Seeger, Lloyd & MacColl, preluded the performance and propagation of traditional music. Nurtured within Trade Union and left-wing intellectual circles as “the music of the people”, folksongs began to attract a mainstream audience after World War II, the movement gathering momentum during the 1950s. At the other end of the boom, from the late ’60s to the present, folkmusic in its many forms has maintained a solid minority audience of die-hard “40/50-somethings” while continuing to attract waves of younger performers and devotees.

Some writers bracket the boom era with the chart success of The Weavers’ ‘Goodnight Irene’ (1950) and Bob Dylan’s final appearance at the Newport Folk Festival 15 years later. Some insist that the folk years began with the Harry Belafonte calypso craze or (more usually) with The Kingston Trio’s smash hit ‘Tom Dooley’ (1958), while others maintain that the real boom lasted only a couple of years (c1963-65). The redefinition of rock music at the hands of Dylan, The Beatles, The Byrds, etc., signalled a downturn in the mass popularity of folksongs per se yet audience cultivation of acoustic singer-songwriters like Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen was clearly part-and-parcel of an ongoing folk process. For the purposes of the present study, I use the term revival to encompass the peak period of 1963-65, its precursors and its aftermath. At the same time, I concur with the view that what happened in the ’60s was the high point in what is a continuing process.

The first phase of the revival was over in Tasmania by 1972 (significantly, the year that Gough Whitlam’s ALP routed the country’s entrenched conservative Government). Folk would be back with a vengeance a couple of years later, of course. The injection of energetic performers and organisers, recently arrived from Britain and Ireland, would herald a second (Anglo-Celtic) phase of the revival, a phase distinguished by ten years of the annual Longford Festival and the success of venues like the Bottom Pub, Salamanca Folk and the Bothy. Tasmania’s Anglo-Celtic heyday and the early Longford gatherings (advertised successively as the first, second, third Tasmanian Folk Festivals, and so on) are sometimes regarded, incorrectly, as the first true awakening of folk fervour in the state. While I fully acknowledge the importance, impact and popularity of that second phase, my aim here is to celebrate what preceded it. I approach the topic from inside, as a former participant fortunate enough to have witnessed a golden age at first hand.
My first consciousness of folkmusic was seeing a travelling duo perform ‘A Hole in the Bucket’ during a children’s show at Launceston’s National Theatre circa 1960. (Somewhere along the line I learned that Harry Belafonte had made an immortal recording of the song). The next key event for me was seeing Peter Paul & Mary on the British TV show Hullabaloo. Mary tossed her long hair with artistic abandon and glorious intensity, and the two men pounded furiously at guitars, singing their hearts out on ‘Go Tell it on the Mountain’. I worshipped them from that point on. Around that time, my mother bought a little transistor radio and, in amongst the glories of British pop, I could revel in popular folk hits as diverse as ‘Don’t Let the Rain Come Down’ by The Serendipity Singers, ‘Green Green’ by The New Christy Minstrels, ‘Lonesome Road’ by Joe & Eddie, ‘Dominique’ by The Singing Nun, ‘The Love Come A-Tricklin’ Down’ by The Womenfolk and ‘Little Boxes’ by Pete Seeger. Danish duo Nina & Frederik appeared regularly on ABC TV. Bandstand aired PP&M’s Sydney stadium concert – over two weeks! (First hearing – and seeing – the trio do ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ by one Bob Dylan really “changed my life”). Then there was a wonderful Canadian TV series, Let’s Sing Out, and all the joys of browsing through record covers at Allans or Lloyd Campbell’s in Hobart. This led me to Joan Baez, Ian & Sylvia, Odetta, and the wonders of the Newport Festival.

Pretty soon, I also realised that there were folksingers in Australia. Marian Henderson appeared weekly on Jazz Meets Folk. Lenore Somerset sang ‘The Ox Driver’s Song’ on the Adelaide-produced Country & Western Hour. Bandstand’s folkmusic specials exposed me to Sean & Sonja, Gary Shearston, Doug Ashdown, Brian Mooney, Judy Jacques and Tina Lawton. Closer to home, southern Tasmanians tuned in en masse to barrack for local girl Patsy Biscoe when she competed in the finals of Bandstand’s Starlight International talent quest. Another quest, this one beamed live by TVT 6 from Hobart’s Theatre Royal, was won by a male duo, Brownlow & Pickering, performing ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Allright’. (Second place went to The Jones Sisters, rendering PP&M’s ‘Jesus Met the Woman’). Shortly afterwards, Judith Durham, a former Hobart girl, shot to stardom internationally with The Seekers.

My family’s move to the north-west coast coincided with the end of the folk boom but my passion for folkmusic continued to be fed by chances to play (a relentlessly bleak repertoire, I admit) at a coffee shop run by the Ulverstone Methodist Church, the Gateway in Devonport, and (later) the Napoli, the Folk Inn and the Brumida concerts. Along the way, I was privileged to meet and (in some cases) establish lifelong friendships with talented people like Guy Carey, Frank Povah, Neil Gardner, Suzette Salter, John Fulton-Stevens, Joe & Hetty Binns, Alex Tkaczuk (Myers), John Lavery, Mike & Jacquie Raine, Mal Brooks and David & Ian Paulin. All these years later I look back with pleasure and affection at the era and confess to mild amazement at the quality and diversity of what my peers achieved.

The pre-history of the revival in Tasmania has proved tantalisingly elusive. On the mainland, the crusading endeavours of field-collectors and scholars like John Manifold, Dr Percy Jones, John Meredith, Ron Edwards, John Joseph Jones and Norm O’Connor had fostered the formation of Bush Music Clubs and Folklore Societies (ultimately, in each state), aimed at preserving and propagating the home-grown music of the proletariat. By the mid-1950s, American political and Labor songs, and the recordings of Paul Robeson, The Almanac Singers, The Weavers, Josh White, etc., were current within the left-wing arts and intellectual sub-cultures and milieux of major mainland cities. In the big capitals the activity or interest of a small number of zealots paved the way for the mass enthusiasm of the 60s folk boom.
By contrast, no systematic research campaign prefaced the Tasmanian chapter of the revival. In complaining that the collection of folklore on the mainland had always been largely left to enthusiastic amateurs rather than to academics, folklorist Edgar Waters lamented (in 1965): “Tasmania so far seems to have thrown up no amateurs of folk song”. There were a few exceptions. In 1945, for instance, O. Ingles, a CSIRO scientist based in Hobart, had transcribed a handful of ballads sung by an elderly hospital patient (a Mr Churchill). One of the ballads was ‘The Girls of Tasmania’, a whaling song learned by Churchill from his convict father. (“[F]olklorists may count it a … happy accident that this scientist showed a broader and more sensitive interest in the cultural heritage of his native island than many Australian historians or literary scholars would have done”, Waters has observed).
A decade later Frances Freeman, a Fullbright scolar from Arkansas, spent several weeks in Tasmania as part of her studies in comparative folk literature. According to a report by the Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Freeman:

… sought, and indeed found, several ballads and songs which, from their origin or purpose, fall into this category: pieces whose words have become stabilised by common acceptance during innumerable performances, or whose versions vary according to local circumstance. Those songs, in fact, which originated not as formal composition, but grew up from the alterations and additions of many anonymous hands.

Historian Lloyd Robson made a subsequent attempt at field-collecting, tape-recording Mr Davies, an 88 year-old resident of an Aged Care home at Newtown. A former whaler, Davies provided Robson with versions of a handful of sea-songs (including ‘The Cyprus Brig’ and ‘The Ballad of Bob Mahoney’). In 1965 Sydney singer Declan Affley went so far as to borrow a tape-recorder and tour rural Tasmania hoping to make field-recordings. Itinerant country and blues singer Frank Povah recalls learning alternate versions of country songs from old-timers playing squeeze-boxes in remote rural pubs during his extensive travelling around the state, and cites this as a further example of the folk process at work.
Otherwise though, the general failure of significant material to emerge led ’60s folklorists to assume that virtually no traditional Tasmanian folksong survived. (For example: Patsy Adam-Smith’s failure to locate orally transmitted lore in the Furneaux Islands led her to believe that none existed). It was not until the 1980s that Rob Willis and John Meredith spearheaded the collection of pre-war Apple shed dance tunes and songs in the state’s south-west.
Steve Gadd, who currently collects traditional dance tunes in the Huon and Franklin districts, maintains:

There was a lot of pre-revival folkmusic in Tassie but most revivalists were either not interested in the local version or they looked in the wrong places. It did not seem to occur to people that the old players for local barn dances might still be alive and that their tunes might have a radically different lilt to their British and European source tunes. As for songs: my own grandfather knew and sang a lot of what I thought were boring ballads about railways, bushrangers, mines and local factory life … I recall a song about an accident that he had been involved in at the zinc works.. One of his workmates had composed [it]. In some circles this older type of ballad and song-making were still alive but they were not what the average ’60s folkie would think of as folkmusic.

In Gadd’s view, “the very lack of a solid bridge between Granddad’s music and the music of the revivalist” sheds light on the nature of the revival in Tasmania.
Nor has much evidence emerged to date of a nexus between the folk boom in Hobart and Launceston and an earlier Tasmanian bohemianism. There does appear to have been a low-key awareness of American musical trends within University and Art school circles and among the local jazz fraternity. Elsewhere, singer Christine Lincoln remembers hearing American Union and political songs (even a few Australian folksongs) growing up at Ferntree, a left-leaning artists’ enclave a few miles out of Hobart. Lincoln’s father played accordion, guitar and banjo and occasionally brought his family together in a makeshift skiffle band.
A handful of would-be minstrels heralded the advent of a formal folk scene in Tasmania. Malcolm Brooks, veteran performer and observer of that scene throughout its history, cites singing appearances by Alan Tweedie, a graphic artist, as the first stirring of general interest in folkmusic in Hobart. Tweedie, who accompanied himself on Spanish guitar, found an appreciative audience for his renditions of ‘Scarlet Ribbons’ and Weavers songs at Hobart High School, circa 1959. (“He was a big hit with the lads”, recalls Brooks). Tweedie also played intermittently (and for money!) at the Dutch Inn, a Battery Point eatery which had the distinction of being the first real restaurant in Hobart.
Brooks recalls subsequently seeing folksongs performed live at the old Adult Education building in Argyle Street, circa 1962-3, when the Hobart Jazz Club decided to include interludes by folksingers David Brownlow & Mark Pickering in its Sunday evening programs. Brownlow & Pickering teamed up as students at Hobart High and continued to perform for three years or so (while at university), their high point being winning a talent quest on local TV station TVT 6 in 1964. Brownlow was an enthusiast for popular American folk hits and admirer of the light-hearted approach of groups like The Limeliters and The Kingston Trio. His specialty was ‘The Preacher and the Bear’. Pickering took his folksinging more seriously. The son of legendary Tasmanian jazzman Tom Pickering, he had learned guitar as a child, well before that instrument attained mass popularity. He recalls that weekly lessons with Joe Gear (who played double bass with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra) were an ordeal:

To this day I still have trouble facing Tuesdays. I used to hide the guitar case under the bus seat because of the other kids. It was seen as a “sissy” thing to do. I kept it up because my parents advised me I would be glad of it later on.

Pickering brought to the duo an absorbing interest in black music, particularly blues like ‘Nobody Knows You’ or esoterica like Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’. The mix of material was well-received by jazz club patrons and Brownlow & Pickering were joined in time by several other budding performers, most notably Terry Eastman, Brian Connor, Greg Ferris and Patsy Biscoe. (Eastman was a student teacher. Connor was a trained guitarist with a talent for playing rock’n’roll piano, Jerry Lee Lewis style).
The Colonial Club, a cafe on Sandy Bay’s Long Beach, provided the youthful artists with additional gigs for a few months in 1964. According to the Mercury, co-owners Felix Parker (Hobart manager of an American publishing firm) and Joseph Kisvarda (reportedly a Hungarian count) were keen to provide locals with the mix of “good food … pleasant surroundings [and] genial entertainment” that had proved so popular overseas and on the mainland. Brien Connor remembers playing jazz guitar solos there, and providing backing for Patsy Biscoe on songs like ‘Single Girl’. While artists might be lucky enough to get the odd ten-shilling note (or coin donations from the audience), more often than not payment was in the form of “free cappucinos”.
Parties were another performing outlet. Brownlow & Pickering were hired a number of times to play at gatherings hosted by an eccentric, bass-playing antiques dealer in Liverpool Street, or at bohemian evenings organised by photographer Miles Quatermain, and attended by a predictable mix of Art students and English teachers, uniformly dressed in black and earnestly sipping cheap red wine. One enterprising batch of Art School students broke new ground by actually making a record. “The Group” teamed David Voigt, Janice Minchin, Dave Clark, Chris Fahlberg and Hilary Dixon with Alan Chong (a guitarist, then doing an Architecture degree at the university). The “A” side of the resultant 45 was ‘When Will it Be’, a folky anthem penned by Chong (“a whimsical, lyrical, questioning type of song” recalls Voigt); Dixon’s plaintive vocal bore a passing resemblance to the young Marianne Faithfull. (The “B” side of the single was an unabashed pop song called ‘Blue Blue Baby’).
Meanwhile, audiences elsewhere in the state had a first taste of live folksinging thanks to roving minstrel Buddy Bohn. A college drop-out from Salmon Creek, California, who boasted having previously hitchhiked “through 43 countries in 5 continents … [singing ] for royalty, Prime Ministers, Maharajahs, Dukes, Ambassadors and Sheiks”, Bohn made a similar tour of Tasmania early in 1963, “literally singing for his supper”. His local radio and TV appearances and impromptu performances of such tried-and-true crowd-pleasers as ‘Erie Canal’ and ‘Aunt Rhody’ (or more bawdy offerings like ‘The Temptress of Jerusalem’ which he learned from sailors while crossing the Arabian Sea) were so well-received in Tasmania and (subsequently) on the mainland that Leedon Records recruited him to make an LP, Buddy Bohn – Folksinger, before he returned to America. Around the same time, Lynton Till, a disc jockey with station 7LA in Launceston, attempted to emulate Melbourne’s Denis Gibbons by performing folksongs during his radio broadcasts and on the local television channel TNT 9.
Two pioneering Hobart folksingers managed to attain a degree of national celebrity. Greg Ferris, who learned his craft at the Sunday Night Jazz Club and the Colonial Club, sometimes dueting with a visiting American singer-guitarist Dick McKay, was a twelve-string guitar whiz. He came to folkmusic after a couple of years with Hobart’s first home-grown rock band, The Tasmen. (Mark Pickering recalls spending Saturday afternoons jamming with Ferris at his Battery Point flat, picking up instrumental tips and trying hard to undo the stylised guitar technique he [Pickering] had acquired as a child). After abandoning Chemical Engineering studies in order to hitchhike around the mainland, Ferris teamed up again with McKay and the pair made a strong impression on the emerging W.A. scene as The Travellers. Shortly afterwards, he became a member of The Twiliters, one of the most popular of the many collegiate-style ensembles which emerged during the folk years. (The Twiliters recorded for RCA, toured with Marlene Dietrich, and starred in their own TV series Good Grief it’s The Twiliters in 1968. Sadly, Ferris became ill during a tour of U.S. bases in the Far East and died of a brain tumour, soon after returning home, in 1970).
While Ferris was a successful musician who just happened to begin performing in Hobart, Patsy Biscoe gained rather more mileage as Tasmanian folk’s songbird representative to greater Australia. Born at Simla in India in 1946, the daughter of a British army officer/civil servant, she came to Australia with her family at Partition and grew up in Sydney and (from age 9) the Hobart suburb of Sandy Bay. She was awarded a scholarship to study classical singing after making an unscheduled appearance at the St Mary’s College annual eisteddfod; a few months later she gave what she regards as her first public performance, singing ‘Panis Angelicus’ and ‘Ave Maria’ for a wedding at St Mary’s Cathedral. While a first year medical student, she started appearing at the Sunday Night Jazz Club, either fronting the band or rendering folksongs to Brian Connor’s guitar. (Connor taught Biscoe her first guitar chords). Her studies and fledgling career were interrupted when she was seriously injured in a car accident:

Greg Ferris and Dick McKay and I sang Peter Paul & Mary songs together, the boys playing guitar. Appearances included making a half hour special for Channel 6, Hobart, singing songs such as ‘All My Trials’ and ‘Five Hundred Miles’. It was, of course, black and white TV and was the only TV performance I gave before I was involved in the car accident which changed my face forever. My eyesight was very badly damaged and it was during the convalescence that I learned to play guitar.

Terry Eastman made frequent visits to the hospital while Biscoe’s eyes were still bandaged and spent hours tutoring her in basic instrumental techniques. Her big break came later the same year when she was chosen as a contestant on Bandstand’s Starflight International talent quest (competing for an overseas trip and a recording contract). She made it into the finals, as did Adelaide folksinger Robyn Smith (Archer) and Mervyn de Souza from Perth. Biscoe’s rendition of the perennial ‘I Know Where I’m Going’ was included on the Philips LP memento of the quest finale.
Patsy Biscoe headlined the first folk concert staged in Tasmania, an evening at Hobart’s Theatre Royal, 18 December 1964, which also featured Connor, Ken Wade, Adolf Sawoff, Launceston singer Lloyd Trenham, and Brownlow & Pickering. D.J. Garry Meadows compered. “In Tasmania the fight for recognition of folk music has begun”, she informed the local press at the time:

People from all walks of life and from all parts of Australia are making use of this folkmusic tradition as a medium of expression and of tying up the past to the future … Folk song belongs in a friendly home or amidst a group of carefree friends, young or old. In the alien atmosphere of sophistication it becomes meaningless. Folk singing is inanimate unless singer and audience together participate to bring it to life … Youth, whatever its temperament, can find its expression in this music.

Biscoe elaborated on her youthful attraction to folksinging recently (i.e. some thirty-five years on):

My strongest memory is that the mainstream world of music (and the harsh reality of commerce) passed me by … I remember very little of The Beatles for example, although I enjoy their music all these years later, and I truly grew up naive in the broad sense of the word … From my perspective there was a certain nakedness about performing as a folksinger in the early days. (Scary yet very satisfying). Just a guitar and voice demanded a tremendous purity of performance and didn’t give much chance to hide any flaws. It was also such a pure form of expression – to sing about the emotions and issues that touched your soul and which ultimately became an expression of your spirituality. The music itself also had to touch you.

Biscoe gained further national exposure on the popular Adelaide weekly Country & Western Hour, Dave’s Place, and a couple of Bandstand folkmusic specials. Her appearance on Gary Shearston’s Just Folk brought her to the attention of CBS Records and, in mid 1965, she recorded her first LP in Sydney. Doug Ashdown and Ed Gaston provided guitar and bass backing. Produced by Sven Libaek, The Voice of Patsy Biscoe was – and remains – eminently listenable. Certainly, its quality belies the haste in which it was made. Libaek later described the recording schedule as “one of the toughest we have ever had”: a little over 24 hours studio time to complete both the Biscoe LP and Ashdown’s debut album. The singers took turns recording, with Ashdown laying down additional instrumental tracks when their voices gave out. Immediately after the session, Biscoe made the long drive to Melbourne to connect with a flight back to Hobart.
The contents of the LP underline Biscoe’s affinity with children’s material, most notably her rendition of Don Henderson’s ‘When I Grow Up’, which was subsequently released as a single and charted in Perth and Hobart. Also included are creditable versions of Tom Paxton’s ‘I Can’t Help But Wonder’, George Tomsco’s sprightly ‘It’s My Song’, and the blues ‘Come Back Baby’ (all three songs strongly associated with American singer Carolyn Hester), Pete Seeger’s ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’, Phil Sawyer’s ‘I Thought I Heard Somebody Call My Name’, and Cyril Tawney’s haunting ‘Ogi Man’. All the tracks are elevated by Ashdown’s instrumental virtuosity and by the unadorned, straightforward classicism and simplicity of Biscoe’s approach. The undoubted highlight of the set is a moody and immaculate version of ‘Alberta’.

I remember Doug and I driving to Melbourne, both exhausted but very excited and feeling very close as we shared such an important musical experience. I remember listening to the ‘Ogi Man’ replay and to Doug singing ‘Chilly Winds’ very late in the night, towards the end of the recording sessions and the haunting quality of those moments is still with me.

A formal folk scene did not emerge in Tasmania until late 1964 when Ken Wade, a 24 year-old classical guitarist and teacher-recruit from Canada, appeared on an ABC Current Affairs program. After performing ‘Cry of the Wild Goose’, Wade informed the show’s compere that he was looking for somewhere to start a mainland-style folk club. According to Brien Connor, university student Terry Eastman was also pivotal in actually getting the club underway; in fact, Eastman’s father (who was warden of Bruny Island) provided initial financing for the venture.
Together with Adolf Sawoff (a languages teacher, then based in Burnie) Wade and Eastman rented a former butcher’s shop in historic Battery Point and spent three weeks knocking out walls, stripping back the interior, and installing backless church pews as seating. “When they pulled all the boards off to start renovating it, the sandstone bricks underneath were the old, original convict-type bricks … and there was actually a bullet in the bricks. We don’t know what the story behind that was”, recalls Beth Sowter. Vivid contemporary paintings by Wade, et al were used to decorate the walls. The Wild Goose, at 49 Hampden Road, opened, two nights a week (Friday and Sunday), in November 1964. Patsy Biscoe, naturally, was one of the earliest regulars there.
Michelle Laffer notes that the Wild Goose functioned as much as an artists’ meeting-place as a music venue, “a hangover of the Beat generation”. In a lengthy profile at the time, the Hobart Mercury described it as:

… an artists’ club … modelled not on the rebellious “we want to be different”, but on a desire to stimulate and foster freedom of artistic expression. Unexclusive, the whole spirit of the place is to get people doing things.

“The windows need cleaning, the posters are fading, and the sandstone walls appear to have inherited some of the recent rainfall … yet this is our only public centre of creative art”, declared the student newspaper Togatus. “The Wild Goose [is] a night club that is different”, elaborated journalist David Peace:

Spotlighted on a tiny stage, with one foot resting on a slab of stone, a classical guitarist plays a haunting melody … a folksinger presents a poignant song … a young poet dramatises his latest work … a girl dances. The audience watch from matt-black benches in the shadows … If you have a poem, musical composition, painting, sculpture, play, any artistic creation you wish to “try out” on a useful audience, the Goose extends an invitation … when things are lean, folk singers Sawoff and Wade carry the show.

Tony Ryan recited John Shaw Neilson. Bunny Lambert, Neil Chick and Tim Thorne read their own verse, sometimes to Sawoff’s guitar improvisations. (Wade and Sawoff both supplemented their teaching salary by giving guitar lessons). On one occasion, the club hosted a low-key production of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire. Brian Mooney, who played there on a visit from Melbourne, fondly remembers the earnestness and enthusiasm of the patrons. A solid core of non-performers turned up every night, arriving early and staying “for the duration”. General participation, intimacy and informality were watchwords. Commercialism was sneered at. Performers were unpaid.

They had very hard church-pew seats for the people, the audience [recalls Beth Sowter]. And they used to sit there, all night, without a sound, and suffer on those seats for Folk. … Listening to this amazingly bad (sometimes) folkmusic. But it was the height of the folk revival. So it was really popular … If you were quick and got in early, you could get up close to the pot-bellied stove, up on the stage area [the only heating in the building] … They couldn’t afford firewood. We’d get a big tree [or a guidepost], shove it into the pot-bellied stove and we’d all sit on it and every now and then you’d hear “Everybody Up”, so you’d get up, push it in a bit more, and the other bloke on the end would have to find a seat in the [room] …The Turkish coffee was brilliant. The “in crowd” knew to let it settle and avoid the dregs … and we used to to get demijohns, huge great big demijohns of red wine. Killed my palate for years …

“It was the folkiest venue of the lot, even if the people sometimes seemed a bit weird”, maintains Mark Pickering. “Travelling years later in South America, listening to local folkmusic, I became aware just how innovative the Wild Goose had been”. Beth Sowter believes the venue compared favourably with its counterparts on the mainland:

The Goose was one of the best folk clubs I’ve ever been to. I used to go to Traynors and the Troubadour. They were good but they were professional. The Wild Goose was one of those clubs where anybody could get up and play and they were encouraged … It was a really encouraging environment for folksingers … Otherwise I would have finished after my first night ever … The standard was woeful to brilliant … It was a wonderful place … candles, dark lights, all the things you think about – the “old folk club”.

Sowter started singing at the club in the first weeks of her Arts degree. A fellow student, Alan Chong, invited her to work up a handful of Kingston Trio and PP&M standards, to his guitar accompaniment, and the duo performed weekly three song brackets at the Wild Goose until exam pressures forced Chong to bow out. Insisting that Sowter was perfectly capable of continuing as a soloist, he hastily taught her a few simple chords and loaned her his guitar and she made her solo debut with ‘Banks of the Ohio’. She remembers forgetting the chord progression mid-song and being prompted (“C7”) by someone in the audience.
Sowter was a quick study and within a short time she had become Patsy Biscoe’s chief competitor as Hobart’s “Queen of the folkies”. As a national (i.e. commercial) success with a growing public profile beyond the student folk scene, Biscoe was viewed a little sceptically by the more “high-minded” among her peers; Sowter, by contrast, was accepted as “one of the boys” due to her enthusiasm and instrumental competence. She recalls (with some amusement) that blues guitarist Bill Hicks shrewdly overcame her feelings of inadequacy over learning syncopated finger-picking by confiding “Patsy can do it”.
As it was, by mid-1965 career demands ensured that Biscoe was spending an increasing amount of time interstate. “It was quite a thrill to go home to Hobart and appear at the Wild Goose, etc., and see old friends, but those trips were infrequent as most of the time I was travelling around the mainland”, she recalls. (Biscoe moved permanently to Adelaide early in 1966).
The music performed at the Wild Goose was primarily contemporary or traditional American or Anglo-American. There was also some early interest in Irish song. Significantly, there was little interest in playing or hearing Australian traditional songs. Sowter, for one:

… positively hated Australian folksongs … I didn’t like the Australian accent … It was a real anti-jingoism thing … I wanted to be a beatnik in New York. I’m not a hippy. I’ve always associated myself with Greenwich Village.

For Sowter, Dylan, Judy Collins, Richard Farina, Tom Rush, etc., represented the music of the day. She became so immersed in the songs and personae of Buffy Sainte-Marie and Patrick Sky that, after graduation, she would work for a time on an Indian reservation in Canada. It seems safe to conclude that, at that stage in Tasmania’s history, international issues and cultural developments – particularly those transmitted through the American lens – seemed every bit as relevant to the average young Tasmanian, brought up in a fertile and determinedly European island physically separated from mainland Australia, as did recountings of life and hardship in a largely unsighted outback.
Also prominent among the first wave of performers in Hobart was 16 year-old Maeve Chick who played zither but, more often, specialised in unaccompanied Irish songs. A versatile young woman who combined singing with writing, acting, classical ballet and the study of world religions, Chick reportedly delighted in shocking people and “twisting the holy cow’s tail”. “At the Wild Goose … where artists are under no pressure, she sings songs free from the association of clanging cash registers, reads her poetry or someone else’s with the poise and assurance of a veteran actress, and occasionally dances”, noted the Mercury.

Chick’s peers included Beth Wilson, Chris McShane, John Harwood (fresh-faced son of poet Gwen Harwood) banjo-player Alan Shatten, and twelve-string guitarist Howard Eynon. Jo Beaumont was an accomplished blues artist. Suzette Salter was a husky-voiced alto from the east-coast town of St Helens; she learned autoharp, guitar and a substantial number of songs from Beth Sowter while studying French in Hobart. (Salter also wrote some of her own material). Frank Amandola played virtuoso harmonica. Nashville country buff Malcolm Brooks swapped his electric guitar for an acoustic instrument after his first visit to the club, worked up six or seven songs, and sang several sets with trainee art teacher David Voigt before going solo. Frank Povah was a multi-instrumentalist who spent 2-3 years in Tasmania in the course of two decades spent travelling and working all over Australia and New Zealand. Originally from Western Australia, Povah began playing ukelele as a child and progressed to guitar and autoharp, indulging dual passions for classic blues and hillbilly music. His first contact with the Tasmanian scene was a chance meeting with young Hobart blues-player Chris Cruise when both were in Sydney, and the pair became a regular duo at the Wild Goose. (Povah recalls that he and Cruise once provided musical support for the legendary Josh White in Sydney. Accustomed as he was to racial discrimination in the USA, White was greatly amused when the scruffily-dressed Cruise & Povah were told to enter White’s hotel by the back door).
Bill Hicks, a country blues specialist from America, would take over running the club when Sawoff and Wade left Tasmania. He recalls that he happened on the Wild Goose almost by accident.

I wanted to come to Australia from childhood. After I graduated from university I sold my car and got a trip on a boat. I hit Sydney [in March 1965] and, just off the boat, I met up with a friend from California and we hitchhiked up to Cairns … I stayed in Sydney for a while, then went down to Melbourne … I decided Melbourne was not up to much and decided to come to Tassie. I ended up in Deloraine and took a room in a pub for a couple of nights … then I boarded in Ulverstone for a couple of weeks with the mother of a fellow I met who liked the guitar. I hitchhiked to Hobart. Got a ride from a girl in a mini-minor. She knew about the Wild Goose and dropped me off in front of it one Sunday night. I played for Adolf Sawoff [and stayed].

According to Laffer, the Wild Goose functioned informally along “artist in residence” lines, with outsiders like Sawoff, Wade, Hicks or Povah coming to Hobart, running the club and living on the premises, while they made their mark on up-and-coming players. (Living conditions were Spartan – to say the least. “People lived upstairs that ran the Goose”, notes Beth Sowter. “There was no bath, there was half a tub-barrel that they used to put water in, and so my house became: Knock Knock, ‘O Hello. You’ve got your towel? The shower’s up there’”). To culturally-sheltered, wide-eyed young Tasmanians, such colourful, larger-than-life individuals were the embodiment of the roving minstrel. Being “immigrants” and apparently living hand-to-mouth enhanced their mystique. They had seen other places and had sung in other places, living the life they sang about. One such visiting singer (from Canberra) enjoyed a huge hit one Sunday evening with a set of bawdy ballads previously unheard in staid Hobart. On another inspirational occasion, Ken James from the Isle of Man walked in, borrowed a guitar, sang ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Allright’ and “blew everyone away” with his guitar-playing. (James was arrested in the country, not long after, for stealing and barbecuing a pigeon). Tall, dark and dashing Roddy Glendinning from Melbourne looked (romantically) like a pirate and sang Irish rebel songs.

In tried-and-true Woody Guthrie fashion, Frank Povah could – and did – turn his hand to any number of casual jobs when singing work was scarce – or when he needed another box of cigarettes. In Tasmania, this included stints with the H.E.C., the Hobart Mercury and a Devonport sawmill: “Of course, it was a lot easier to get work in those days. Not playing in bands was something of a novelty. You could get a gig just about anywhere”. Povah (who once claimed that his best night’s pay ever was 25 pounds for playing and singing multiple renditions of ‘Frankie & Johnny’ in a Kalgoorlie brothel) recalls :

The folk scene in Tasmania was very naive in a nice way. People actually listened to someone who had something to say … Tasmania was so isolated … All of us exotic, bearded guitar players were put up and stayed at people’s places. I remember I ws going out with the daughter of the Mayor of Devonport. He was wary of me but when he understood what I actually stood for, told me he believed [the state] should be a big national park with a few towns scattered around in it.

Some transient musicians (Wade and Hicks among them) had the additional charm of being able to play and sing American songs authentically (i.e. with a real American accent). Patty Opdike, a newspaper editor from California, drawled an extended variant of ‘The Banks of the Ohio’ which was venerated as the real thing. Hicks played a Classic Southern Jumbo Gibson guitar, used steel finger-picks, and (according to legend) was on the run from U.S. draft authorities. Beth Sowter recalls that another itinerant anti-war activist was similarly inspirational a couple of years on:

There was an American singer/guitarist called Mark Rankin [who] got his draft papers for Vietnam in Boston and jumped on the nearest ship. It happened to be going to the Antarctic. So he scrubbed decks and dykes through the Antarctic, jumped off at Hobart, and became part of our folk scene. It was after the Goose. It was into the Five Believers stage, and he was a major influence on me because I was learning finger-picking and he did wonderful finger-picking and all the songs that I liked – Eric Andersen, Bob Dylan … He gave me a lot of good guitar stuff and he was like a mentor to me … He took off, went to Vietnam and I saw him on TV, burning his draft-card in Saigon. Carted off by the MPs. Instead of going to gaol he entertained the troops. He was brilliant.

Charismatic outsiders of this kind were a minority, of course. The greater percentage of regulars at the Wild Goose and its successors were young Tasmanians who came to folkmusic while studying nearby at University, the Art School or the Hobart Teachers’ College. Some student folksingers even served an apprenticeship of sorts at the Hobart Matriculation College which convened a student folk club, Happy Ho’s, from 1965-69. (Similar ventures flourished briefly, later in the decade, among final year High School students in Launceston, Devonport, Ulverstone and Burnie – under the leadership of young teachers who had been active within Hobart folk circles). Evenings at the Wild Goose were augmented in 1966 when Sowter founded the Tasmania University Folk Club. The TUFC mounted lunch-time concerts and singabouts, produced a newsletter and hosted visits by mainland celebrities. (Its finest hour came in 1968 when the club, with access to student union funds, was able to convene and host the week-long Second Intervarsity Folk Festival. See Part V).

Beth Sowter simultaneously co-ordinated the TUFC while honing her singing and playing skills (autoharp, guitar, mouthbow) through “hanging out” with Hicks, Eastman, Povah, et al, at the Wild Goose and performing solo there or in company of two other young women, Tiiu Raabus and Suzette Salter. Unusual among the Tasmanian singers, Sowter also gained experience and exposure on the mainland, taking advantage of vacations in Sydney and Melbourne to perform at the Pigalle, PACT Folk, The Shack and Traynors. At the last, appearing as support act to Brian Mooney shortly before he left for Ireland, she was billed as “Beth from the Apple Isle”. On one occasion, Sowter found herself recruited to support Adelaide band The Skillet Lickers at the University of New England when members of the scheduled support act had a fight and disbanded minutes before showtime. On another occasion, she was banned by the Pigalle management in Parramatta for daring to sing Eric Andersen’s mildly erotic ‘Come to my Bedside’.
“The Goose” survived little more than two years. Laffer believes its demise reflected audience and performer desire for a more professional, organised and formal venue. The Battery point site is now the carpark of the Prince of Wales Hotel. In February 1967 Ken White (from Melbourne), Mick Fulton, Gerry Balding (another mainlander) and Bill Hicks combined to establish a successor, the Five Believers, at the Adult Education Building, site of the old Hobart Jazz club gatherings. According to Mal Brooks, the “five believers” in question were Beth Sowter, Chris Cruise, Patty Opdike, Jo Beaumont and Tony Ryan.
More an exclusively music venue than the Wild Goose had been, the Five Believers promoted itself as a specialist in folk and (in particular) blues. It met weekly and boasted organised performing schedules, proper advertising, even a P.A. system. Regular artists there included holdovers from the Wild Goose (Brooks, Hicks, Povah & Cruise, Chick, Sowter and Salter) as well as White, Balding and Ian Young, all blues buffs. White was a youthful veteran of Victorian venues like Katharina’s Cabaret, the Reata, the Jolly Roger and Traynors, as soloist or musical partner to singer Graham Squance; he was in Hobart temporarily, working for Websters Woolgrowers. Balding specialised in old-style blues. Young debuted as a schoolboy singing Odetta field-hollers and proved to be a natural. Alex Tkaczuk, a balladeer from Launceston, played at the club during a few months spent at University. The Five Believers was run initially by Tony Ryan, who had performed similar duties for a short time, at the Wild Goose. Finances proved problematic from the outset, however, so much so that the TUFC took over the club’s administration. Dwindling attendances forced it to close in November 1968.
It was succeeded, on the same premises, by the Ad Lib Club (the name derived from the location – the Adult Education & Library building) which met on Sunday evenings from early 1969. Committee-members included Tony Endersby, Jill Roberts, Sowter, Salter and Tiiu Raabus. For the first time top-billed performers were paid. According to Laffer, “The Ad Lib consolidated the professionalism-conscious innovations begun at the Five Believers and drifted yet further from the ethos of general participation, and even took the ‘commercial approach’”. The club’s advertising offered patrons a mix of Blues, Folk, Jazz and Rock. Folksingers continued to play but an increasing number of rock acts featured.
Among the artists who performed at the Ad Lib were visiting Melbourne celebrity Hans Poulsen, Mingus Clarke (then President of the TUFC), Mal Brooks, Keir Martin, Cary Lewincamp, jazzman John Bird, Nino Bucchino, fiddle-player Sally Mainwaring and siblings Anna, Pete and Steve Vertigan. (Steve and Pete Vertigan joined Chris Cruise and Ian Young as a shortlived jug band, the Hobart Fire Brigade Two Step). Helen Henry was “a fantastic girl singer who would invite down-and-out students to eat cheaply at her father’s Chinese restaurant”. Singer-guitarist Tim Palmer once performed ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ – in full! (So did Ian Young, on another occasion). Christine Lincoln, who fell in love with the blues after hearing Barbara Dane and Nina Simone records (during the Wild Goose days), was an accomplished soloist who also sang underground music for a while with Mark Pickering in a band called Medium Cool. An appearance by Medium Cool at the club is remembered as “the night Ad Lib went electric”. Also prominent were three youthful singer-guitarists from the North-west coast: Mike Raine, John Lavery and Neil Gardner.
Although he occasionally reworked Dylan, Donovan or Mick Jagger material, Gardner was unusual in his time for performing mostly his own songs – the first Tasmanian performer to do so. (He recalls that veterans of the Hobart scene were unsure what to make of him). Born and raised in rural Circular Head, he initially found the Ad Lib both exhilarating and a bit overwhelming.

For me it was the big city. I was always a little bit in awe of the place . Always a strong anti-Vietnam thing about it. A bit Woodstock-y as well.

The 1968-70 period was an intensely creative, prolific time for Gardner, his output averaging 2-3 new songs a week – from the social comment of ‘Nelly Spencer’ and ‘O So Tired’ through comic songs (‘Luther Chase that Pig’) and age-of-innocence pastorales (‘Seasons’ and ‘My Celeste’) to the rage and pain of ‘The Kill’ and ‘Spirit in the Stone’. Gardner’s songwriting example was emulated by Raine and Lavery, all well-known to each other from high school days in Burnie. Lavery started out performing Simon & Garfunkel songs, then moved increasingly into singing his own, often mystical, ballads such as the quasi-mediaeval ‘Throstle Song’ or the poignant ‘Memories’. Raine and Mal Brooks, who had both been grounded in musical styles other than folk, readily performed Beatles material together in an electric band called T.S. Eliot’s Shadow. (Suzette Salter sang with the band for a while). As well, Raine and Lavery played as a duo, performing their own ‘Red Wine’ or ‘Hear the Morning Cry’, and Raine solo’d a mix of John Hammond, Beatles, Gardner and his own songs (such as the peace anthem ‘Loving Minds’). During the Ad Lib years, the three singers were simultaneously active in the briefly burgeoning northern music scene.
The TUFC changed its name to Blues’n’Stuff in 1969, reflecting Ad Lib’s move towards a more general musical focus. (Laffer suggests that the term “folk” had become somewhat uncool by that time). The same year, the West End Jazz Club, “a sleazy upstairs joint” which later became Beethoven’s Restaurant, offered some folkmusic but failed to attract an audience after a couple of months. Folksinging gigs at restaurants like Don Camillo’s or the Bistro (in the basement of the Ship Hotel) also largely dried up and the Matriculation College’s folk club folded due to lack of interest. (Blues’n’Stuff would finally – and inevitably – merge with the University’s Musical Society in 1974). Notwithstanding the diversity of its musical offerings, and despite acknowledgment that the standard of performance there was often very high, the Ad Lib too fell prey to dwindling audiences/enthusiasm. The council “pulled the plug” on the financially troubled club and it closed its doors in August 1971. (The building now houses the Carnegie Gallery).
The end of the Ad Lib effectively marked the end of live folksinging in Hobart for the period under review. Another phase of the revival would be well underway within a couple of years (centred around various pubs) but in terms of the intimate, distinctive and inclusive coffee-lounge-oriented music of the ’60s boom, the closure of the Ad Lib marked the end of an era. Interestingly, for several years a parallel scene had been in action in the north of the state. Indeed, for a short but energetic period (late 1970 – mid 1971), northern developments clearly outdistanced what was going on in Hobart. Predictably enough though, the last gasp of folk fever in northern Tasmania would come only a few months after the demise of the Ad Lib.

Apart from occasional talent quests or amateur variety concerts which might afford an aspiring young folksinger the opportunity to try out his/her skills in front of an audience (albeit a generally not very discriminating one), the chances to hear or participate in live folksinging outside Hobart were few and far between until mid-decade. In a pattern certainly not peculiar to rural Tasmania but one which was undoubtedly compounded by particular circumstances of the island state, a number of adolescent singer-guitarists who would become prominent on the local folk scene by the late 60s/early 70s initially acquired the basics of instrumental technique and a working songbag in isolation – only rarely recognising that there might be others out there who shared their passion. Joe Binns, a student radiographer of Launceston, who taught himself to play listening to The Beatles, Peter Paul & Mary and Bob Dylan, remembers first meeting like-minded enthusiasts at a Folk Night held at the (Old) Teachers’ College building in September 1966.
The evening was organised by two young trainee teachers, John Husband and Guy Carey. Husband was a recent arrival from Sydney, where he had seen mythic venues like the Troubadour, the Last Straw and the Folk Attick at first hand. Carey had grown up on the north-west coast listening to country music. Hearing The Seekers’ ‘Morningtown Ride’ on radio inspired him to learn to play.

There were guitars at home. Dad played Hawaiian guitar. I took the high bridge off, put on nylon strings and attacked the chord charts.

For Carey, discovering folkmusic was opportune: “My dad died at the beginning of 1966 and I was an angry young man”. He and Husband found themselves sitting around, trading songs and jamming together in flats or at the Glen Dhu caravan park. Chris Landor, a singer in her final year of teacher training, sometimes joined them to perform PP&M songs and, a couple of times, the trio squeezed into Carey’s FIAT 600 for the round trip to Hobart and the Wild Goose.
According to Joe Binns, who offered up a rendition of Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’, also making its public debut at the Teachers College Folk Night was a trio consisting of Paula Kennedy, Hetty Van Der Aa and Alex Tkaczuk, all senior students at the Sacred Heart Convent. (Legend has it that the girls performed ‘Four Strong Winds’). A flat shared by Carey and Husband, at 273 Charles Street, subsequently functioned as a drop-in centre for aspiring folksingers. Further occasional folk-nights at the Teachers College or Nurses’ Home, or guest spots at the Launceston Jazz Club or Cosgrove Park retirement village, provided them with more formal performing opportunities.
Live folkmusic subsequently took off in Northern Tasmania with the inauguration of several coffee lounge venues in 1967-8. The first was the Crescendo Club in the historic township of Georgetown, 30 miles up-river from Launceston. It was the initiative of Eddie Smith, a jazz-buff well-acquainted with live venues in Sydney, and Peter Lyall, a trade union organiser and long-time Kingston Trio fan. (Lyall’s interest in folkmusic had been nurtured by witnessing Brian Mooney’s inspirational performance of ‘The Patriot Game’ at a concert at Launceston’s Windmill Hill). The Crescendo Club opened an ambitious three nights a week. Smith and Lyall initially hoped to offer a mix of jazz and folk. However (Lyall recalls):

The popularity of Folk soon overcame the Jazz side … The popularity was so great that we had to borrow chairs from the Methodist Church. The club was a converted teahouse. We had a stage, decor, subdued candles, fish-nets, record covers on the wall. Although it was dark, people still wore dark glasses … We sang PP&M, Ian & Sylvia, Limeliters, Clancy Brothers, Julie Felix, Joan Baez, Judy Collins … Later on there were Bob-Dylan-style performers, nearly all bloody dreadful … The boats that used to come into Bell Bay always had seamen on [them] and as soon as they heard there was a folk club … a lot of Brits and Irishmen and Scotsmen would come in. It certainly added to the atmosphere … There were two policemen in town … great blokes. We managed to bribe them with heaps of booze. They would come around to drink at the club and keep the local football club away … Many romances blossomed at the club … (Running a folk club, I’m like a priest in the confessional. I never repeat anything I’ve learned over the years.

Resident artists at the Crescendo Club were David Voigt and Howard Eynon, both veterans of the Wild Goose, who (according to a contemporary press report) “joined to sing anything from traditional folk to bawdy self-composed folksongs. When they sing apart they sound quite different but together they have a unique harmony. Both play guitars – Howard a 12-stringer”.

Howard and David loved the place [recalls Pete Lyall]. When later down the track we lost our regulars, even though they were getting gigs at the Hotel Tasmania and were “on the way” professionally, they played for nothing ’til we called it a day. They were grateful to the Crescendo for giving them their start … Dave was teaching at the local high school. Once when I was leading a picket line at Georgetown, he sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ from the back of a truck.

The Crescendo Club attracted the bulk of its (mostly student) audience from Launceston. Inevitably interest declined within a few months when an alternative (and more accessible) city venue emerged. Around the same time, Lyall, as union organiser, fell foul of management during an industrial dispute. Unemployable locally, he moved to Western Australia for several years.
Initiated by Joe Binns, Carey and Husband, David Humphries (another student radiographer and a future policeman) and Dick Porch (an electrician), the Copper Pot was convened in Charles Street. Porch installed the stage and lighting. “Most of the time it is a sedate coffee lounge” reported the Launceston Examiner, “but each Friday fortnight it is invaded with the ‘folk set’’”. Opening night, June 9, attracted some 70 people. “We were packed out completely. It was fantastic”, noted Alex Tkaczuk who recorded her impressions of the venue in her diary:

The stairs were always crowded with people, and I had to fall over them [coming] down, carrying a weapon. Ian D. (Lynch) and I always sat halfway up the stairs where we could see all and could be within easy reach of my “axe”. It used to be absolute hell trying to tune up in the upper room, 10 people at once. Nick Munting tore around with his flashbulbs, taking photos madly. Tony Naylor and John Edwards gave tremendous renditions of blues, especially ‘Hootchy Kootchy Man’, ‘Summertime’, etc. Great people singing there: Guy Carey, John Husband, Ian Clarke, me, Hetty Van Der Aa, David Voigt and Howard Eynon, and assorted others. And a few times, the guy whose brainchild “The Pot” was, Dave Humphries, came too. Chris Landor from Hobart appeared a couple of times, which occasioned much drinking at 273 Charles Street.

The Copper Pot lasted about six months and was succeeded by two other Launceston venues, the Lemon Tree and Snoopy’s Hollow. The Lemon Tree, which met at Monaghan’s Cafe in Brisbane Street (in the heart of Launceston), lasted for a few months during 1968. Prominent in its running were Humphries, Porch and John “Ted” Myers. By day a trainee metallurgist with the Comalco aluminium company, by night Myers was a dashing figure either clad in black velvet and ruffled linen (and resembling a romanticised Georgian highwayman), or sporting a coonskin cap and carrying a wine-filled leather pouch. Snoopy’s Hollow endured for half a dozen evenings upstairs at the YMCA in Brisbane Street.
A permanent core of popular performers emerged out of the various venues, notably Binns (who worshipped – and specialised in – Dylan), Guy Carey (who revered The Clancy Brothers), a poet who called himself Ian D., and a duo who styled themselves The Islanders. Gospel duo Ian & Edith were Salvation Army officers who played the Copper Pot “in civvies” and were surprisingly well-received there. Peter Turner was an early – and earnest – devotee of Leonard Cohen. Lester Wahlquist, a talented singer-guitarist from South Australia, is still remembered for his distinctive rendition of the Child ballad ‘Matty Groves’.
Joe Binns remembers that Voigt & Eynon were “top class”. Eynon’s immaculate open-tuned guitar work was something of an inspiration to youthful instrumentalists. (The duo folded in 1968 when Eynon moved to Melbourne. Voigt teamed up with another art teacher, Wal Sutherland, as The Walkabouts, and the duo performed ‘Mountain Dew’ on Showcase 68. Voigt also moved to Melbourne in 1970; Eynon subsequently recorded a creditable album, So What if I’m Standing in Apricot Jam, for Spectangle). Ian Clarke was unusual among the northern folkies in having spent a couple of years listening to live folkmusic on the mainland. Deeply influenced by performers like Alex Hood, Declan Affley, Margaret Kitamura and Brian Mooney at the Colonial Inn, the Folk Attick and the Folk Terrace, he invested 10 pounds in a Jason Nevada guitar, and acquired a repertoire of robust Irish rebel songs, protest material (he cites Kitamura’s rendering of ‘The Crow in the Cradle’ as inspirational) and satirical ditties like ‘Plastic Jesus’, before debuting at the Copper Pot. He even sang the occasional traditional Australian ballad. Bluesman Tony Naylor coupled appearances at the folk clubs with fronting local rock groups The Rejected and Ida May Mack.
Alex Tkaczuk was undisputed leading lady of the Launceston scene, excelling at gentle Anglo-American or British ballads like ‘Barb’ry Allen’ and ‘Dainty Davy’ or Carter Family standards like ‘Sweet Fern’, accompanying herself on Spanish guitar and autoharp. She was, effectively, the local Joan Baez, whether singing solo, with Hetty Van Der Aa (herself the possessor of a shimmering and ethereal soprano) or, for a short time, as half of the duo Betty & Dupree with Joe Binns. Launceston singer Phil Rainbird once paid tribute to her voice in song:

Crystal bells, crystal bells,
How I love the magic tales you tell,
Tingling, tangling chimes soften,
Jingling jangling rhymes,
With a voice clear and pure as Crystal bells.

The daughter of post-war Ukrainian and German refugees (she was born at the Uranquinty migrant hostel near Wagga Wagga and came to Tasmania aged three months), Tkaczuk bought her first guitar (for $25) as a schoolgirl and served her musical apprenticeship at the Launceston Jazz Club, the Copper Pot, the Lemon Tree and the Five Believers (the last while studying Psychology – briefly – in Hobart). She also spent a short time as vocalist with a rock band, The House of Simon, and appeared twice on the nationally-televised Showcase 68 (and, later, on Showcase 70). She has remained at the centre of folksinging activity in the north from that time on.
Similarly well-known in the late ’60s were Joe Binns & Hetty Van Der Aa who first started singing together in 1968. Fondly remembered for an eclectic repertoire which drew on Dylan, Donovan, Baez, PP&M, Ian & Sylvia and Arlo Guthrie, Joe & Hetty honed their act with weekly appearances at the Matador, a Launceston restaurant, from 1969-71. Like Tkaczuk, Lloyd Trenham and The Walkabouts, they gained wider exposure with an appearance on Showcase (in their case, performing ‘There But for Fortune’ in 1970). For those who were there, Joe & Hetty’s versions of ‘Ten Thousand Miles’, ‘Girl of the North Country’, ‘Coming into Los Angeles’ and ‘Nancy Whiskey’ remain treasured memories of the era.
Another highly influential singer, somewhat older (and certainly infinitely more experienced) than most of the corps of Tasmanian performers, was John Fulton-Stevens. Born at Papeete, Stevens grew up in Adelaide where he first started performing country & western songs. On a trip interstate he heard Glen Tomasetti sing at a Melbourne coffee lounge and was immediately captivated by folkmusic. In due course, he opened and ran the Folk Hut, Adelaide’s premier folk club, nurturing up-and-coming singers like Doug Ashdown, Robyn [Smith] Archer, Irene Petrie, The Wesley Three and Hobart’s own Patsy Biscoe. Fulton-Stevens spent several years (1968-72) in northern Tasmania, working for Dillingham Thermal Power and the Hydro-Electric Commission. He quickly adopted something of a paternal role on the Launceston scene, compering folk nights and concerts, chauffeuring artists to Hobart (and the Ad Lib) in his Jaguar, and actively encouraging emerging talent. A deft instrumentalist, whether on his unique hand-modified 9-string Hagstrom guitar or his classic 1925 Martin, Fulton-Stevens possessed a winning baritone, a potent repertoire (Lightfoot, Ian & Sylvia, Richard Farina, comedy numbers) and a professional gloss. He knew how to work an audience. “For Stevens a set of songs was a whole experience”, recalls Ian Paulin. “It was about taking people on a journey. He nurtured an audience from one end of a set to another”. On his first Tasmanian appearances at the Lemon Tree, he wowed the crowd with Louisiana swamp songs like ‘Sugar Babe’, material unheard in Launceston up to that time. He is also remembered for a number of self-composed songs, such as ‘Everything’s Coming Up Bare’ (a conservation song to the tune of ‘Joshua’s Gone Barbados’), the cheeky ‘Sugar Plum’, the beautiful love-song ‘Jennie’, and ‘Doctor King’, a stunning tribute to the great American civil rights leader. Fulton-Stevens, himself, was the inspiration for the song ‘Georgetown’ by good friend Doug Ashdown.
An artist who became prominent following the demise of the venues mentioned here was Joe Van Tienen, a self-effacing specialist in Simon & Garfunkel, Beatles and John Denver standards, who accompanied himself on 12-string guitar. Rhiannon Geerlings, a trainee teacher with a glorious, classically-trained alto voice, sometimes dropped by at college folk-meets or parties and sang the odd folksong (like ‘Four Strong Winds’).
“The folk scene was not a huge scene ever in Launceston”, remembers Alex [Tkaczuk] Myers, “but it used to attract more people than possibly it does now … Folk was more mainstream then than it is now … it also attracted the people who would later become the alternate lifestylers”. Parallel with the evolution of the Crescendo Club, the Copper Pot, the Lemon Tree and Snoopy’s Hollow, there was peripheral activity west of Launceston in the coastal Devonport-Ulverstone- Burnie region.
The Gateway Folk Club commenced operation around August 1967, meeting fortnightly at the Adult Education theatrette in Devonport. Exactly who was responsible for its founding is unclear; prominent in its running were Malcolm Dick, a local wine-maker, and Hobart artists Chris Cruise and Frank Povah. Povah was semi-regular m.c. An extraordinarily skilled instrumentalist, he was a dogmatic and somewhat volatile individual who, on one occasion, invited an audience member to settle an argument over the “folkworthiness” of an American country standard by stepping outside. (“I used to get really angry, and still do, about people doing things like the Carter Family and then saying it’s not folk”). At the same time, Povah could be highly sensitive in his encouragement of nervous newcomers. A lunch-time concert by Cruise & Povah at Devonport High School proved inspirational for young Phil Manning who took up guitar as a result.
Povah’s gritty renditions of classic blues like ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out’ or ‘Electricity Blues’, a self-penned satire on the proposal to flood Lake Pedder, simultaneously startled and delighted his audience. Another original composition, modelled on the traditional ballad ‘Moreton Bay’, drew tears from more than one listener (and reportedly did so on another occasion when Povah performed it to a roomful of prisoners at Risdon Gaol). Povah recalls that ‘The Port Arthur Song’ grew out of a visit to the old penal settlement:

Tasmania was quite an experience for me. One of my great-grandmothers could remember, as a young woman, seeing men in chains working on the road-clearing. It reduced her to tears … Convicts were in Western Australia much later than elsewhere … When I went and saw Port Arthur itself and saw the Punishment books, it really brought home to me how terrible it was.

Povah was the stand-out act at the Gateway which appears to have lasted, in all, for only three months or so. Other performers who gained experience there included a couple of local women singers who veered more towards C&W than folk; Sally Temple-Smith, daughter of a local magistrate, who played and sang a mix of Nina & Frederik, Belafonte and PP&M; and 15 year-old Malcolm Turnbull, from Ulverstone, who played mostly American songs.
During the same time-frame, an enterprising clergyman, Ken Ogier, took note of the outreach initiatives made by his peers on the mainland and set up a Friday night coffee shop in the hall of the Ulverstone Methodist church, in a bid to provide some sort of activity for local teenagers. Ogier was a controversial figure locally by virtue of his subscription to Christian Pacifism and his public statements against U.S. and Australian intervention in Southeast Asia. “These days, 30 years or more later, it would seem tame to street kids and the like”, he states, but at the time the establishment of the coffee shop attracted a degree of community criticism, not least because of the prominent display there of Peace signs (“behind which lurked … social agitation mildly stated against the Vietnam war”). Once a month (or so) the coffee shop would feature live folksinging sets. Malcolm Turnbull played regularly for a couple of years (1967-69), while James Graham and Guy Carey (both from Burnie) also appeared on occasion.
Other coastal church groups followed Rev Ogier’s lead and set up similar coffee shop-style drop-in-centres, usually at a modest cover-charge of 20c. One such setting, initiated by Catholic priests in Ulverstone, gave two aspiring singer-guitarists their first public exposure. Neil Gardner and Mike Raine, senior students at Marist College in Burnie, dueted a mix of Beatles, Stones, Dylan and blues (like ‘See that My Grave is Kept Clean’) there before moving to Hobart and the Ad Lib, Blues’n’Stuff milieu. The Bonny & Clyde coffee shop (which changed its name to the Eastside following complaints that the original name glorified crime) was set up by Rev Jim Colville in an under-utilised Methodist church hall in Devonport. During the same period, occasional folk nights, organised by Guy Carey, were held in Burnie, either at the Napoli Restaurant or the Adult Education Centre. Wild Goose veteran Terry Eastman was active for a couple of years, in and around Burnie, combining teaching at Parklands High School with leading guitar classes at the Adult Ed Centre, performing at local functions, and occasionally appearing on variety programs like Line-Up.

KEY PLAYERS ON THE SYDNEY COFFEE LOUNGE SCENE

Malcolm J. Turnbull

[ This paper was originally published, in six parts, in TRAD & NOW Magazine]

I suspect that debate over the relative merits, importance and long-term influence of the early Melbourne and Sydney folk scenes has always been coloured by well-entrenched intercity rivalry. More puritanical elements within the southern folk fraternity have maintained loftily that Melbourne had a monopoly on “real folksingers” whereas Sydney offered (and apparently preferred) the folksinger as entertainer. Sydney had stars, folksingers on TV and events like the big U.S.-style 1965 Newport hootenanny. “In Sydney folk seemed to soar like a rocket then after a couple of years went down … like a bomb”, declared Brian Mooney soon after the event.

Predictably the Sydney scene has had its defenders, including the late Don Henderson

who, albeit Melbourne born and bred, had little respect for the folk venues there. (“… I never liked Melbourne audiences … never liked singing there … never liked Melbourne as a town”). “I never knew there was a Melbourne folk scene then”, confesses second generation Sydney folkie Chris Shaw. While it is indisputable that folksinging attracted substantial audiences to coffee lounge in Melbourne long after it had become passe in Sydney (licensing laws, the relative strength of the local jazz and bohemian enclaves, even differences in the weather, were among factors at play), folklorist Edgar Waters has noted that the northern metropolis eclipsed its sister city in one important regard: early consciousness of the hinterland and interest in home-grown folklore. “There was definitely a pioneering feel about it all … people who were trying to push it that one step further at a time when Australiana was sneered at”, observes Gary Shearston. In hindsight, Sydney also produced some of the most important individual folk artists of the 1960s (Shearston among them) and provided unprecedented media exposure for performers from all over the country per TV outlets like Dave’s Place, Just Folk or Bandstand. This paper looks at contributions made by some key players (performers and others) to the Sydney scene during “the folk years”.

Melbourne-born jazz vocalist Marian Grossman, who moved to Sydney in 1959 following her marriage to fledgling singer-songwriter Don Henderson, has recalled: “If you mentioned folksinging in those days, people looked at you as though you were funny”. In fact there was rather more activity than was immediately apparent. Simultaneous with John Meredith’s pioneering fieldwork, the success of Reedy River, the formation of the Sydney Bush Music Club and Folklore Society, and the launch of Wattle Records, a small but discernible underground folk community was emerging. In the late 1940s, Jeff Way, an electrical engineer, played guitar and banjo in the upstairs room of the New Theatre in Castlereagh Street. The proud possessor of previously unheard records from the Library of Congress or by The Almanac Singers, Way is remembered for his renditions of (then) new and captivating material like ‘The St James Infirmary’, ‘That was News’ and ‘Black, Brown and Blue’. Way taught guitar basics to Chris Kempster and another young enthusiast, Terry Driscoll, who subsequently became a skilled classical instrumentalist largely through listening to Segovia records. The son of teachers who were active in the CPA, Kempster attended Eurekas Youth League camps from an early age, and learned folk dances and international songs, like ‘Peat Bog Soldiers’, from enthusiasts like Brian Loughlin and Peggy Hewett).

The Lincoln coffee lounge was a meeting-place for the inner-city “arty” set as early as 1950. Although never an actual music venue, the Lincoln produced its own roneo’d songbook containing drinking songs, Gershwin’s ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ and a parody of ‘The Streets of Laredo’ which included the lines:

In the days of my youth I used to go drinkin’
Twas first to the pub and then to the Lincoln
I thought I had friends but it happened this way,
They weren’t my friends cause they led me astray.

Beth and Reg Schurr were regulars at the Lincoln. With a superior light soprano voice and repertoire comparable to those of popular American balladeer Susan Reed, Mrs Schurr (nee Doran) taught herself guitar and started collecting songs after hearing Burl Ives and Mary O’Hara in concert. Specialising in material from Britain and the Appalachians, she gave her first major public performance at the first Australian Folklore Festival in September 1955. She recorded a couple of 78s for Wattle, most notably a lovely version of ‘Green Bushes’ (learned from the singing of Sally Sloane). TV appearances (TV was then in its infancy) led to her writing, compering and performing on a live-to-air children’s show for Channel 9 (and “for the princely sum of 5 pounds a week”). Her co-star was former child-actor Desmond Tester, who subsequently ran camel tours in the outback. Raising a family ultimately “put paid” to Schurr’s folksinging career, although she would continue to perform occasionally into the 1960s. Wendy Lowenstein credits her with being “a folksinger before her time”; had she debuted during the boom, she might well have been one of the stars of the revival. “Beth’s place in the scene came from an inborn talent”, writes Reg Schurr. “She had a good voice – and could sing in pitch – also learned to play the guitar and developed her own arrangements which were well beyond the usual hillbilly strumming. Bringing up a child scotched that!”. The Schurrs were early friends and patrons of Brian Mooney.
Barbara Lisyak, another Sydney housewife (her husband was a doctor at Ryde), appeared on TV with Beth Schurr and chaired the Australian Folklore Society for a couple of years. She has been credited (along with Jeff Way) with introducing the songs of the early American hootenannies – and the guitar as a folk instrument – to the general Australian public. Lisyak also recorded for Wattle, most notably, the children’s song ‘The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly’. According to the late Chris Kempster:

In those days the Seaman’s Union used to have dances down in their rooms near Circular Quay and there were great, large numbers, hundreds and hundreds of people … I remember at one dance, everything stopped and out came Jeff Way and Barbara Lisyak, each with a guitar, and Barbara sang ‘O Freedom’ … The way she just stood up and sang it with this beautiful … penetrating voice. That was a magic moment. The whole place was spellbound with Barbara singing.

[Chris Kempster, NLA Interview]

Although she preferred singing international ballads, believing that “genuinely Australian folksongs” were better sung by men, Lisyak popularised a version of the bushranging song ‘Peter Clarke’ and sang for a while (1959-60) with The Rambleers, even appearing with them on The Snowy, an ABC TV celebration of the Snowy River power scheme. Lisyak and Beth Schurr sometimes shared platforms with a third woman singer, Frances Shaw, wife of poet A.D. Hope’s first publisher Rod Shaw. Shaw began performing French folksongs to her own guitar accompaniment in the early 1940s; her repertoire subsequently expanded to encompass Anglo-American ballads from the Cecil Sharp collection and Australian ballads per the Bush Music Club. Black tenor Harold Blair, a winner of the Sun Aria competition, recorded an early collection of aboriginal songs (to piano accompaniment). Mention should also be made of Shirley Abicair, a typist-turned-cabaret artist who became popular in Sydney in the late 1940s and subsequently achieved stardom as a nightclub and TV personality in London. Although her stage act, image and recordings had all the artificial trappings of the 1950s pop scene, Abicair specialised in interpreting folksongs, sometimes accompanying herself on the zither. Her recorded output included versions of ‘The Turtle Dove’, ‘Botany Bay’, ‘Johnny Has Gone for A Soldier’ and ‘The Fox’.

Other pioneer singers included Delia Murphy (an Irish diplomat’s wife), ‘Frank the Yank’ (the first 5-string banjoist to surface in Sydney), Johnny Earls (who went on to work as an anthropologist in Peru), and Bob Elliott, who reportedly “set an unmatched standard of performance of a range of songs from Australian to country blues”. (Obtaining guitars was a problem for early enthusiasts, necessitating “constant searching in hock shops”. Beth Schurr paid two pounds at a sale for her first, Italian-made instrument. Frances Shaw was the proud posessor of an antique Spanish guitar handcrafted in Paris in 1831). The Tavern, near Edgcliff Station, appears to have succeeded the Lincoln as an informal meeting-place for ‘the folk-oriented’, while early TV footage of Sydney’s Beat poetry, painting and improvisational jazz milieux indicates that singer-guitarists were performing at that bohemian mecca, the Royal George Hotel, circa 1959-60.

  DON HENDERSON (1937 – 1991), who bought a guitar after hearing recordings of blues singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Josh White and spent some time playing  with a Melbourne rock’n’roll ensemble called the Thunderbirds, had recently started composing his own songs. (Woody Guthrie’s  ballad ‘Tom Joad’ was a decisive influence). In an interview for the National Library, Henderson recalled the first time he visited “the watering-hole of the fabled Sydney Push”:

I don’t know what I expected; probably cloaked anarchists priming bombs, smocked artists quaffing absinthe and bereted poets reading their latest works. All I saw, though, was a rowdy Saturday afternoon pub crowd … There was a little bright-eyed bloke with thick horn rimmed glasses, playing some pretty wild Spanish guitar in the corner, but only the people in that particular corner were listening to him. He finished the song and passed the guitar to the big bloke sitting next to him. I recognised that bloke. His face was hard to forget.

[Henderson, A Quiet Century, p.56]p;

The “big bloke” in question, who had once worked on the show circuit with Shana the Snake Lady, and who had “one of the best voices” the Hendersons had ever heard, was Brian Mooney.

    Welsh-born Declan Affley, who first came to Australia as a serviceman with the merchant navy, has also remembered being exposed to the beginnings of local folksinging activity around 1960/61:

On leave in Sydney I was introduced to an old pub where I met Brian Mooney, Bill Berry, Don Ayrton, and later, Martyn Wyndham-Read, and heard them sing. This was where I first heard the general term “folk music”. The “boom” had not yet arrived and the people there knew only the British and American revival.

[Australian Tradition Aug 1969]

Informal Saturday afternoon come-all-ye’s at the Royal George –  were inspirational to Affley, the Hendersons, et al:

The informality of it all, the incredible diversity of the music. Somebody singing 28 verses of ‘Lord Randal’ and a pile of drunks sitting there and listening to it … They saw the likeness of my [Don Henderson’s] music to Jimmie Rodgers because I was like Tex Morton …. Morton had used Jimmie Rodgers as a model. I knew of Jimmie Rodgers but I didn’t know of Woody Guthrie …I found acceptance at the Royal George for these songs … and because I liked the place and because I liked the people, I really started to work hard at them …

    The Royal George was equally divided between anarchists, libertarians and communists … all the people were interested in peace. There was also the beginning of early feminism there, and the beginnings of passive resistance, things like that … and the most horrendous fights I’ve ever seen in my life occurred there. [Don Henderson, NLA Interview]

 “There were always people with guitars” at Push parties, remembers Gary Shearston. Left-wing awareness of folk themes and folkmusic was “rife” there. According to Don Henderson, people like Mooney:
.. were singing songs that I’d never ever heard, you know, and folk became of importance to me and I began to understand what it meant. I found that I could take my songs and sing them there and they sort of accepted them, being interested in this folk music. I then was invited to the Sydney Bush Music Club which I went to. I didn’t know the difference between what they called Australian songs and what Tex Morton was singing. I still thought that ‘The Rain Tumbles Down in July’, from Slim Dusty, was one of the best songs I’d ever heard. They didn’t think so, but they liked some of the others. 

    A solid, imposing man, sporting “a burly red beard”, Don Henderson has been described as “a full-time individualist, a craftsman, an all-Australian ‘casual bloke’, a cynic and a romanticist. And, of course, a militant anti-establishment man”. Raised in the stereotypically middle class Melbourne enclaves of Essendon and Moonee Ponds, he trained as a fitter and turner and worked at a range of jobs, most often as a carpenter. He drew on his experience working on the Snowy Mountains hydro-electricity scheme for one of his earliest (and best-known) songs, the up-beat ‘Put a Light in Every Country Window’. A member of the BLF, Henderson worked in Sydney repairing instruments and eventually branched out into making his own guitars. Gary Shearston remembers that his workshop at Woolahra became the focal and meeting point for one sector of the pre-boom Sydney folk scene (Alex Hood subsequently founded his Folk Arts Centre on the same premises), overlapping with parallel sectors like the Push scene and the activities of the Bush Music Club.

    With his marriage over, Henderson spent a couple of years travelling in outback NSW and Queensland (turning up in either Sydney or Brisbane every once in a while), going back:
… to where people were actually singing hillbilly songs as they heard them on the radio, and about subjects they accepted, like faithful dogs and lost loves and things like that. I decided that I could get up with them and sing songs about building dams and union struggle. [A Quiet Century, p.vi-vii]

Henderson made Brisbane his home base in the mid 60s and was active in the early folk scene there, both as a soloist and member of the Union Singers. His vocal ability was limited but he soon earned a national reputation for the quality of his songwriting. Citing the influence of the “libertarians” he had mixed with at the Royal George, he consciously wrote about the Australian labour force, his compositions blending “the hillbilly idiom” he had learned as a youngster and the “American finger-picking technique”. Interestingly, The Push itself tended to respond more readily to multi-faceted songs like ‘It’s On’ and the highly satirical ‘Hooker Rex’ than to the more straightforward, anthemic ‘Put a Light in Every Country Window’ (celebrating the Snowy Mountains achievement).
[These] people were different. Sydney artists and intellectuals, university people. They weren’t interested in labouring Australians making a mark on the world. They were the people who didn’t rush to the first World War. They didn’t want to put Australia on the map. All the dopey blokes who put their ages up, left good jobs to go and fight for Australia under its own flag. They’re working class, that’s working class patriotism. [Henderson, NLA Interview]

“Despite his commitment to the Left”, Craig McGregor once wrote:
Don Henderson’s songs rarely degenerate into mere propaganda. Most of them are not even protest songs, in the strict sense: they are, rather, sardonic commentaries on contemporary Australian life … He can be as zany as Dylan, as straightforward as Pete Seeger. His songs depend more on cumulative effect than vivid imagery; they are plain song, the plain man’s song. The characteristic note is one of understatement, irony, rather than declamation … [McGregor, People Pop and Politics, p.143]      

Mary Travers, of Peter Paul & Mary, once dubbed Henderson an Australian Woody Guthrie.

  hoped-for musical magic failed to materialise and the trio parted company after nine months. “We just kept practising for months on end and nothing ever happened, we just didn’t click”, Tallis later remarked. Sanday and Miller remained active on the Sydney folk scene, Miller earning a solid reputation as a backing musician, but it was Tallis who went on to make a major impact on the Sydney scene.

   Sonja Tallis was a strikingly pretty 19 year old, rendered mildly exotic by her Norwegian and Greek parentage, her fondness for wearing black, and her avoidance of make-up. According to one press report, she also indulged a liking for fast cars, water-skiing and Bacardi rum. Just starting out in the newspaper business as a copy-girl while studying journalism part-time at Sydney Technical College, she had her sights set on higher things. She had already begun acting with fringe theatre groups and, as folk music became more and more fashionable, she threw in her day job “and took on casual work hoping to find another group or another person to start with again”. A mutual friend (a Kingston Trio devotee) suggested Tallis audition a young advertising cadet, Sean Cullip. Although he had learned piano and ukelele as a child and knew a few guitar chords, Cullip had no previous involvement in the folk scene. He remembers that, at the first meeting at the Prince Edward Theatre (in September 1963), the pair could find only one song they knew in common (the Peter Paul & Mary hit ‘Lemon Tree’). Tallis responded to his voice and enthusiasm however: “We found we both had the same ideas about music; so then we began working on arrangements and numbers”. The duo rehearsed singlemindedly four to five hours a night for nearly four months. Cullip recalls those practice sessions as the most interesting part of the work. “If either one of us found a phrase or a line in the music that we particularly liked, we would work at it again and again”. In the process, he believes they became so “in tune” with the music they were creating that they became “one person”. Their biggest problem – always – was finding songs suited to two voices and palatable to audiences.             

    Sean & Sonja made their debut early in 1964, playing one night a week at a folk lounge in Market Street in Sydney’s central business district. “Sean was still working”, Tallis later recalled, “but I was living on that one night’s earnings”. They also tried out (on unpaid come-all-ye nights) at the Troubadour, hoping to impress the management enough to land a paid spot. A Folk meets Jazz evening staged by Suzie Wong’s Chinese Restaurant helped augment the budget as did a few nights at a pizzeria at beachside Newport, although little of the fee was usually left by the time the duo had paid for bus fares, cigarettes and pizza. The gig proved productive, even so. Margaret Kitamura, who heard Sean & Sonja play at the pizzeria, was sufficiently impressed to recommend them to the management of El Toro in Missenden Road, Camperdown. 

    That one night a week at El Toro turned out to be the duo’s big break. Around the same time, Betty Douglas, the coffee-maker at the Troubadour, tackled Jim Carter, and insisted he sit down and listen to the pair. As a result Sean & Sonja were hired (at two pounds a night) and added to Carter’s regular roster. After less than a year performing together, they effectively stole the show when Carter organised a major Town Hall folk concert in August 1964. With Sonja clad in a stunning purple thai-silk shift, they opened the program and mesmerised the audience singing a capella a stark, perfectly harmonised version of the ancient British ballad ‘The Greenwood Sidie’. A number of TV appearances followed, and (via guitarist Andy Sundstrom, with whom Sean shared a colonial cottage in Barker’s Lane for a short period) the offer of a recording contract with the prestigious CBS.

    For Cullip the CBS offer was one of the undoubted highlights of the duo’s career. Where most of the Australian folksingers would be more than happy to record for small, home-grown companies like W&G, East, Crest or Score, CBS was a mainstream, international mega-player. Its folk catalogue alone boasted American greats like Carolyn Hester, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, The Brothers Four and Pete Seeger; it was even the local distributor for Warner Bros and Peter Paul & Mary. Up to that point, Gary Shearston had been the only Australian folksinger to make it into the recording “big league”. After releasing a self-composed single on Leedon, ‘The Ballad of Thunderbolt’ b/w ‘The Crayfish Song’ (a variant on the American song ‘Crawdad’ which he learned from Brother John Sellers), and in the wake of his success at the Troubadour and other venues (as well as appearances on national radio and TV shows like Bandstand), Shearston had been recruited by CBS for a series of strong-selling LPs. From 1964-66 he recorded  Folk Songs and Ballads of Australia, Songs of Our Time, Australian Broadside (a response to Pete Seeger’s suggestion that Shearston write his own topical material), The Springtime It Brings on the Shearing, Bolters Bushrangers and Duffers, and Gary Shearston Sings His Songs. Gary Shearston Sings His Songs was withdrawn shortly after release when BHP threatened legal action over the song ‘Old Bulli’, and subsequently reissued without the offending track. Furious at the censorship, Shearston demanded – and got – release from his contract. (The following year, he reprised some of the material on a more commercial-sounding album for Festival, Abreaction, released not long before he left Australia for the USA and Britain). Two CBS singles made the hit parade, the satirical ‘Sydney Town’ (from Australian Broadside) and Shearston’s own ‘Sometime Lovin’’, a poetic pastorale which was covered by Doug Ashdown, Sean & Sonja and Peter Paul & Mary.

    Sean & Sonja’s first album (self-titled) elicited critical hurrahs (albeit amidst claims by Edgar Waters, Craig McGregor, etc, that the duo was unacceptably commercial in its approach), and sold extremely well (10,000 copies in Japan alone). Two others followed: A Very Good Year and Sometime Lovin, all within less than twelve months.

    By the time Sometime Lovin’ was in the record stores, Sean & Sonja were seriously reconsidering their future: Sean was conscripted into the army at the beginning of 1966, and for two years Sonja attempted to re-establish herself as a solo act, then in a duo with actor Tony Bonner and a trio called The Newtones. Neither of these recaptured the old magic, however, and in 1968, Sean & Sonja reunited, playing a mix of folksongs and more commercial light rock and folk-pop material. (They remained a popular act on the club circuit, and in concert and cabaret throughout South-east Asia, finally disbanding 11 years after their first meeting, in 1974). Other folk artists who were fortunate enough to gain recording contracts with CBS were Doug Ashdown, Patsy Biscoe, The Idlers Five and Tina Lawton, while the equally prestigious RCA included in its Australian roster The Twiliters, Shirley Jacobs, The Lincoln Trio, Tina Date and The Kinsfolk.       

Just as Shearston was the undisputed male star of the Sydney folk scene – and the crown jewel of the Carter collection – one woman singer stood head and shoulders above her peers. From mid 1963, MARIAN HENDERSON was featured at the Troubadour three or four nights a week, performing a mix of  British, American and Australian traditional material. A “cool, tall, pale, frail girl in a pony tail” (according to Charles Higham, [Bulletin, 14 Nov 1964]), Henderson was recruited by Pix Magazine to record a series of EPs for its readers in 1964. During the same period, she attracted national attention by appearing weekly with Don Burrows, George Golla, John Sangster, The Green Hill Singers, etc., on the ABC television series Jazz Meets Folk, taped live at the Astor Motor Inn in Wolloomooloo.

    Henderson’s folksinging drew discernibly on her beginnings as a jazz vocalist and her voice and style have been compared more than once to Nina Simone. “She has an indefinable quality that puts her right in world class”, declared Jim Carter. “Even after all this time, I thrill every time Marian sings”. The magazine Music Maker once dubbed her “one of the most complete and compelling artists Australia has produced”:

So many girls think that to be a folk-singer requires that you produce a strangely virginal, high reedy voice. Marian flexes the muscles of her voice through all registers, scorning the need to sound superficially feminine.

   Visiting American jazzman Eddie Condon once suggested that the Henderson’s greatness lay in her inherent sense of rhythm and blues. On one occasion, when Condon and blues legend Jimmy Rushing stopped by the Troubadour, they were so impressed by Henderson’s performance that they stayed there jamming with her until 5 a.m. the next morning. It is a great pity, therefore, that she was distinctly under-recorded: only one album, a handful of EPs, and a few guest appearances. Two EPs each of Australian and international folksongs for Pix, and a contribution to the RCA album Folk Concert on Campus, preserve her distinctive versions of  perennials like ‘Old Joe Clark’, ‘Peter Clarke’, ‘Kumbaya’, and an intensely moving ‘Black is the Colour’. Henderson can also be heard on the albums The Restless Years and Old Botany Bay. Her most representative recording was the album Cameo (1970), for which she drew on the services of Doug Ashdown and several backing musicians. The excellent album mixes traditional material (‘Bald Mountain’, ‘Convict Maid’) and contemporary songs by Sandy Denny, Ashdown, even Cole Porter. Leonard Cohen’s ‘Stranger Song’ had particular significance for her:

I very seldom sang love songs. I was pretty cynical, even then, about the male-female relationship. ‘Stranger’ meant a lot to me. I used to spit it out.

    Cameo is one of the best LPs of the era.  Music Maker judged it “impeccable … way above what is usually done in Australia”. Interestingly, the singer herself has little affection for the album. She believes it was fundamentally flawed by the speed with which it was recorded and “should never have been released”. She is much happier with the authoritative rendition of ‘Norfolk Whalers’ which she contributed to Harry Robertson’s album Whale Chasing Man (1971). With superb support from Richard Brooks on harmonica, ‘Norfolk Whalers’ is Marian Henderson’s greatest single recorded performance. (From the vantage of 30-plus years, she recently confessed her satisfaction with “what that lady did” with the song).         

    “I was an excruciatingly shy kid from a very conservative Melbourne background”, notes Henderson. “Folkmusic opened a door for me. It did a lot to bring me out as a person with some musical talent [who] didn’t know what to do with it”. Enamoured, on the one hand, with Odetta or jazz singers Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzgerald (and, much later, Joni Mitchell), she was also smitten, early on, by the treasure-trove of Australian folksong and the light the songs shed on the collective Australian experience. She refused to concede that most bush ballads were unsuited to women singers:

I used reverse psychology. I saw it as telling a story. When you’re telling a story, does it really matter if you’re female? I felt rather proud of the fact that there was this marvellous selection of songs.

    Henderson augmented work at the Troubadour and elsewhere with frequent TV appearances, English-language radio programs for broadcast overseas, and Arts Council tours of the Pacific and Australia’s far north with the Ray Price Quintet or Don Burrows. The ABC film The Restless Years led to an appearance at the Dublin Festival and a tour of Ireland with Declan Affley, Peter O’Shaughnessy and Clare Dunn. In hindsight, she regards her one-woman tours of remote schools as the most rewarding of all her 1960s experiences. Although the tours were “incredibly exhausting”, involving driving vast distances and relying on her own ingenuity (or luck) when she developed car trouble in places like Lightning Ridge:

I learned that if I didn’t overcome tiredness and didn’t enjoy it, there was no point my being there … I played for aboriginal kids who had never seen a live performer … They didn’t know whether to clap, they would giggle and look at their feet. [To reach them] I had to instantly learn to overcome incredibe shyness and treat the audience like an extended family.

Gary Shearston, Sean & Sonja and Marian Henderson were Jim Carter’s most consistent drawcards. Other performers identified as part of the Carter stable, at one time or another, were Tony Morrison, a gifted flamenco guitarist, Tina Date, Jean Lewis, The Green Hill Singers, Leonard Teale, Declan Affley, guitarist Sebastian Jorgensen, The Liberty Singers, Paul Marks and Margaret Kitamura. Chuck Quinton arrived in Sydney, as if out of nowhere, in mid 1962, with a wealth of English songs like Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’, which he taught to Gary Shearston. (He teamed up with Alex Hood, as The Rambling Boys, for a time). Leonard Teale, an eminent Sydney actor who had been drawn to bush songs during the 1950s, appeared periodically at the Troubadour reciting yarns and ballads. He went so far as to take singing lessons from Paul Williams, a leading voice teacher, and teamed up with guitar and balalaika maestro ANDY SUNSTROM.

    Born and raised in Denmark, Sundstrom drew on a colourful musical apprenticeship, having busked with a friend, two guitars and a balalaika, through Germany, Italy, France and Spain. He travelled out to Australia on board a 38-foot ketch Sarong, and made a number of instrumental recordings for CBS before teaming up with Teale. The pair  recorded two albums of home-grown material, Songs of the Sundowners and Travelling Down the Castlereagh, and even enjoyed a minor chart success (in Tasmania) with the single ‘Bound for Hobart Town’, promoted to tie in with the annual Sydney-Hobart Yacht race. (Sundstrom was a crew-member when the schooner Astor made the Sydney-Hobart run). The Liberty Singers, consisting of guitarists Brian Godden and Bix Bryant and a singing ballet-dancer Irene Whitehead, attempted to tap into the Sean & Sonja market. Resolutely opposed to scruffy folksingers who “hide behind a ‘front’ of beards and general unconformity”, the trio released a single, the sea shanty ‘Lay me Down Dead’, and performed on the soundtrack of a documentary film Road to the West before disbanding in mid 1965. Godden subsequently filled a vacancy in The Green Hill Singers. 

    THE GREEN HILL SINGERS were three Melbourne boys who enjoyed their “15 minutes of fame” in Sydney during the boom: unashamedly commercial, consciously non-political and unaffected by division among their peers over ethnic vs popular folk. “I make no apologies for the fact we tried to copy The Kingston Trio, with the ivy-league shirts and the whole thing”, remembers group leader John McMillan. “As far as we were concerned, we wanted to just make music … The beauty of  it was working alongside the Marian Hendersons, the Declan Affleys and the Danny Spooners”. McMillan, his brother Alec and schoolfriend John Jenkinson had earlier enjoyed minor success, as The Vedetts, appearing every Sunday night on Dick Cranbourn’s 3UZ Radio show. Early in 1964 the McMillans teamed up with bass-player Chris Bonett and “it just all clicked. Chris was the talent we had to have to form a trio as we wanted it”. As The Green Hill Singers, the boys played on In Melbourne Tonight (IMT) and had the distinction of succeeding The Seekers as resident group at the Treble Clef in South Yarra. Winning Everybody’s Magazine’s ‘Big New Sound of 1964’ talent quest gained the trio a recording contract with HMV and a season supporting Shirley Bassey at the Palais in Melbourne and Chequers in Sydney. A single ‘Big Land’, a catchy celebration of the outback penned by Bonett, received substantial airplay, and the boys threw up their day jobs and moved to Sydney to appear regularly on the ABC TV series Jazz Meets Folk.

    Throughout 1965 The Green Hill Singers teamed work in the folk clubs (including the Carter venues) with gigs at RSL and Leagues clubs and appearances on Bobby Limb’s Sound of Music and Dave Allen’s Tonight Show. For a while, they were flown down every Friday to play on Noel Ferrier’s IMT, and at mid-year they recorded an LP for Festival, The Folk Sounds of The Green Hill Singers. John McMillan remembers the trio’s excitement when Dave Guard was called in to provide instrumental support on several cuts: “Am I dreaming here? This is the man I went to see in concert [i.e. with The Kingston Trio]. He’s sitting here in the studio playing 12 string guitar and banjo”. An even bigger thrill was meeting Peter Paul & Mary “at Gary Shearston’s house, and having Paul Stookey walk in, sit down and play guitar with me”.

Interestingly, Guard’s interest in the trio heralded a decisive personnel change. In the middle of recording the LP, he ‘head-hunted’ Bonett to appear in his own (Guard’s) group on the TV series Dave’s Place. Brian Godden was brought in to fill Bonett’s place and finish the album (which “sank without trace”). McMillan believes The Green Hill Singers was never quite the same without the versatile Bonett, and the trio disbanded, due to lack of work, in November 1965. (The McMillans played occasional m.o.r. gigs at restaurants for a couple of years. Godden subsequently toured extensively as backing instrumentalist for Alex Hood).   

    Also born and raised in Melbourne (her mother was noted sculptor Anita Aarons), TINA DATE studied piano at the Melbourne conservatorium, and was an early player on the Victorian folk scene (at Emerald Hill, most notably). She was offered  a paid spot at the Troubadour while on a visit to Sydney in 1963, and she subsequently settled there, combining folksinging with acting and modelling engagements. (Sean Cullip remembers being amazed that her guitar playing was not impeded by her 2 inch fingernails). Date appeared in the stage show ‘By Royal Command’, a verse and song anthology about the British monarchy, in 1965, and in the same year she joined Sean & Sonja and Danny Spooner in an avant-garde presentation ‘Bill meets Bob’, which paid tribute to both William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan. Date reprised her renditions of Elizabethan laments like ‘How Should I My True Love Know’, ‘Tomorrow is St Valentine’s Day’, and ‘It Fell on a Summer Day’, along with more recent compositions like Dylan’s ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ and Andy Sundstrom’s setting of Dylan Thomas’ ‘Polly Garter’s Song’, on her debut LP for RCA, A Single Girl. No sooner had it been released than she headed off overseas to visit her mother in Canada and to take on a job with the United Nations in New York. Judy Collins, with whom Date had become friendly during Collins’ time in Australia with the Pan-Pacific Tour, introduced her to the fabled Greenwich Village folk scene. Brother John Sellers invited her up out of the audience one night at Gerde’s Folk City and this led to a two-week stint at the legendary club as well as two weeks standing-in for ailing blues singer Judy Roderick at the Gaslight Cafe. In the process, she became romantically involved with Phil Ochs. Ochs’ biographer Marc Elliot identifies Date as the great love of the gifted but deeply troubled singer-songwriter’s life. On her return to Australia, Date married and retired to the country to raise her children.   

  Jean (Jeannie) Lewis was initiated into the Sydney folk scene as a teenager, jamming in the back room of the Royal George with Johnny Earls and harmonica virtuoso Shane Duckham. “I was always interested in music”, she recalls, citing the early impact of the New Theatre and Reedy River. (Lewis’ mother constructed a lagerphone for her to play when her primary school staged a modest revival of the show). Paul Robeson’s voice and Pete Seeger’s renditions of Spanish Civil War Songs were other key influences. (“I was always political”). From the start, she strongly disliked hearing her powerful soprano voice compared to Joan Baez; as far as she was concerned, the vocal styles of the great black bluesmen were infinitely more interesting. She began folksinging in public as a first year Arts student at the University of Sydney in 1962 and ultimately became so involved in music and campus activism that it took her five years to complete her B.A.

    Lewis recalls that most of her early performances were at demonstrations. On one such occasion, her guitar (hand-made by Don Henderson) was smashed by police outside the American Embassy. According to a contemporary report, “she leaped to notoriety on Commemoration Day [1964], when she was last seen battering a policeman with a guitar through the bars of a Black Maria”. She sang for a year or so as a member of The Radiation Quartet, an intensely political ensemble which included Mike Leyden, Chris Kempster and Mark Gregory. The quartet appeared along with singers Chris Shaw, Dick Hackett and Graeme Turner on two untitled EPs on the Mutual label, commissioned by the NSW Teachers’ Federation and offering listeners early versions of Leyden songs like ‘A Time to be Singing’, ‘Chessboard of Vietnam’, ‘Sweet Song for Katie’ and ‘Weevils in the Flour’. (The last two songs, settings of poems by Dorothy Hewett, eventually reached a wider public per Gary Shearston). Lewis combined work as the baby of the Carter stable with membership of the York Gospel Singers, a heterogenous instrumental and vocal line-up which united Chris Daw, Alison McCallum, Viv Cargher, Adrian Forward, Bob Montgomery and John Bates. The group’s finest hour was supporting Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee at the Sydney Town Hall.

Jeannie Lewis’ repertoire was always wide-ranging, teaming protest material with traditional Australian and Irish ballads and blues (her first love). As the decade progressed, she immersed herself more and more in jazz, cabaret, musical theatre and South American political song. She recalls a five week trip to Chile and singing at the three day ‘Cancion Protesta’ with 52 other international artists (among them Barbara Dane, MacColl & Seeger and Sandra Kerr) as the undoubted highlight of her early career. (Lewis formed the band Gypsy Train in 1970 and recorded three innovative and well-received albums in the 1970s: Free Fall through Featherless Flight, Looking Backwards to Tomorrow and Tears of Steel and the Clowning Calaveras. She continues to perform, more than  four decades after her debut, in 2005)

    Born at Cardiff in 1939, of Irish ancestry, Declan Affley received his initial musical training at the Royal Welsh College of Music before joining the British Merchant Navy. He settled in Australia in 1960 and came into contact with the emergent folk scene in Sydney courtesy of the Royal George and other “pubs and low dives”. Acquiring a repertoire of Irish rebel and Australian songs along the way, he eventually “gave up the sea” and became a regular at the Troubadour and other Sydney venues. During a couple of years spent in Melbourne, he appeared frequently at Traynors and the recently-established folk-meets at the Union hotel. He recorded and released two solo albums during the period under review, Rake and Rambling Man on Score in 1968 (which preserves Affley’s immaculate renditions of ‘Carrickfergus’ and ‘Jim Jones’ and his unmatched version of Don Henderson’s title song), and The Day the Pub Burnt Down for Festival in 1971.

Affley also appeared on the compilation Folk Concert on Campus (1965) and on the recordings he made as a member of The Wild Colonial Boys. Credited with having one of the best singing voices ever to grace the Australian folk scene, he has been described as “representative of the great contribution which expatriate Irish, Welsh, English and Scottish singers and musicians have made to folk music in Australia”. (Affley died suddenly – and far too early – in 1985)[Companion to Australian Folklore, p.11-12].

Paul Marks had established himself as a major and influential blues and folk artist in Melbourne before relocating to Sydney in 1963, where he appeared at coffee lounges, all the major concerts and on TV. He was a died-in-the wool traditionalist. Interviewed for the Bulletin during his time in Sydney, he confessed to feeling at odds with the proliferation of protest songs. In his view, folkmusic was “essentially poetic and romantic … I see the song when I am singing it. I’m tremendously influenced by Dylan Thomas … the songs I sing give me a feeling of fantasy … sometimes when I sing I can close my eyes and see the crotchets and quavers in coloured shapes floating about in front of my eyes …”[Bulletin, 14 Nov 1964.] A bracket, taped at the University of Sydney in 1964 and released on the RCA compilation Folk Concert on Campus, underlined his affinity with traditional English material, particularly light and whimsical songs like ‘Widdecombe Fair’ and ‘Sipping Cider through a Straw’. According to Edgar Waters, Marks rendered English traditional songs with “some of the rhythmic freedom, and some of the delicate and musically meaningful melodic decoration and variation that are so often heard from good English country singers. But, alas, all too seldom from singers of the folksong revival”. [Australian, 5 June, 1965]

     Margaret Kitamura grew up on a cattle station so remote that her early musical experiences were confined to listening to the family’s antique gramophone and selection of Melba and Gilbert & Sullivan 78s, or picking up occasional songs from the station-hands. She was well into her teens before she first heard the radio or popular music. Kitamura started singing to student audiences at El Toro in Sydney before moving north, where she was a regular at the Brisbane Folk Centre. Her repertoire evolved from Child Ballads (a la Baez) to political and topical songs (by Don Henderson, et al), delivered in a piercing soprano which tended to waver dangerously off-key when she was nervous (viz, her rendering of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ on Australian Folk Festival) but made her songs compelling listening when she was in top form. Tasmanian singer Ian Clarke cites hearing Kitamura’s distinctive version of Sydney Carter’s anti-war lullaby ‘The Crow on the Cradle’ as an influence on his own decision to become a performer. Sean Cullip remembers Kitamura with affection as a vibrant, striking and extremely witty woman, given to wearing white make-up and (Dietrich-like) a man’s tuxedo, with a rose at the lapel. According to the late Stan Arthur, she lost her voice in later years, left Australia, and found work with a drive-in church in the United States.   

     Jim Carter once insisted (rather ingenuously) that making a success of the Troubadour represented the height of his ambition and that only the existence of a power vacuum at the top of the industry impelled him to branch out. (He described his own musical tastes as “eclectic” – so long as it was “done well and the material [was] good”). Early in 1964 he co-leased the Copperfield at Newtown. Described colourfully by the Bulletin as “a kinky, Dickensian roost tucked behind Central Railway”, the Copperfield was somewhat grander in conception than the Troubadour, offering wining and dining “in mature comfort for around 30/- a head while enjoying the music”. A small gallery catered for the “young-in-pocket” who preferred to outlay 6/- “for entertainment only”. In September 1964, Carter bought into a third venue, the Last Straw. “A chi chi barn complete with straw-decorated loft”, on Military Road in conservative Neutral Bay, the Last Straw was (reportedly) a little forbidding in appearance:

Thick straw blinds cover the windows, and only a glimmer of light shows through. Inside, blackened beams, a smithy’s apron hanging at the entrance to the kitchen, old bits and pieces of brass and, pride and delight of the showman side of Jim’s nature, synthetic cobwebs, create a ‘folky’ atmosphere … [W]aitresses [serve] cups of coffee (1/6) … and the listeners, moving up along the rough benches which [flank] long trestle tables, [settle] down to 40 minutes complete absorption.

[Woman’s Day, 1 Feb 1965]

    According to Carter, business at the the three venues (and later the Folk Terrace, as well) – while steady – enabled him to make only a “fairly modest” living, hardly the fortune he was rumoured to be raking in. The clubs attracted big crowds but (he noted) seating capacity at each was small. The artists were paid cash in hand at the end of each week – “enough to pay the rent and exist on”, remembers Gary Shearston. “On occasion, different people used to swan about in the kitchen down at the Troubadour and you could actually get a plate of food if you were dead lucky”.Carter sometimes found himself short of funds to cover the rent and pay the performers, and he was bailed out more than once by a generous business acquaintance who admired what the clubs were doing. Adelaide trio The Wesley Three were among the performers who never received payment for appearing at the Katoomba Jazz Festival, a Carter production which failed completely when the whole area was enveloped by fog. (“Acoustically it was wonderful but you couldn’t see anything but a few lights twinkling through the fog”).  Sean Cullip remembers being annoyed when (on several occasions) Carter underpaid him and then neglected his promise to make up the balance later. Plus – the performers frequently found their nightly fee hard-earned. Carter tended to maximise their services by paying aspiring singer Mike Eves petrol money to shuttle them from one venue to another over the course of an evening – a procedure lnown as “the milk run”. John McMillan (of The Green Hill Singers) claims that “the milk run” was actually fairly standard practice within the Sydney entertainment industry:          
Sydney had a reputation. If you wanted to do a strip club night and you went to, say, a dozen strip clubs, you’d see the same acts at each club … In the folk clubs, you’d go from Rushcutters’ Bay to Newtown to Neutral Bay  … and probably end up out at Hornsby! … We were so green it wasn’t funny … We went with the flow.

“We certainly earned our money”, maintains Jeannie Lewis, conceding that the system was all most of the younger artists were used to.  Lewis’ recollections of playing the Carter network are a little hazy 35 years on, although she remembers “hating” the Copperfield because playing there meant having to compete with people having dinner. For young interstate artists, used to the relatively democratic philosophy of Traynors, etc., working for Carter was an eye-opener. Peter Dickie, who once shared the bill in Sydney with Sean & Sonja, remembers being awed by the schedule; clearly this was the “big time”. Lynne St John is less charitable, insisting that, from the point of view of the performer, “Sydney was not up to Melbourne”. Being taxi’d back and forth between the Last Straw and the Troubadour was exhausting and poorly paid. Danny Spooner, who made his debut when Declan Affley invited him up from the floor one night at the Troubadour (circa 1963), and who subsequently played both the Copperfield and the Last Straw, remembers that the rates offered by Carter and other Sydney promoters – rates which the the artists were prepared to accept – infuriated country singer Tex Morton, who wrote ‘Burn another Folksinger’ by way of protest.

Two artists came into open conflict with Carter over money; Don Henderson in the lead-up to the Troubadour, and Alex Hood when  the club was at its height. Aware that “the folk thing was coming” and that there was a need to protect potential coffee lounge singers from exploitation, they both helped found the Association of Sydney Folksingers. Realistically, the Association recognised that paying full Union rates to performers could well send folk clubs to the wall; nonetheless it was keen to ensure a degree of fair play. Henderson has recalled:

I was voted the delegate to go and talk to [Carter] … and he told me to get fucked. And I said “You can get fucked because no-one will ever work in your fucking club. It won’t even open”. He said “we’ll see”, and the first [sic] person he signed up was my wife. We were estranged by then, of course.

Hood remembers:

I had a falling out with Jim Carter … over money … he was paying what he thought he could get away with to various performers. And the thing was really going very well. I subsequently found out, or I was told, that the whole thing had been set up with “funny money” … That’s what I heard … The other artists wouldn’t support me in what I was trying to do because they were afraid they were going to lose work. It’s the old thing. Here’s me trying to be altruistic and stand up for people like Declan Affley who were getting ripped off. 

    We finally had a meeting with Actors’ Equity and we had to have a compromise … I didn’t get the complete amount of the back money that was legally owing to me, but we arranged a compromise deal … Jim paid this amount.

[Alex Hood, NLA Interview]

    Carter was Sydney’s first and most successful folk entrepreneur, the “nearest thing to a mastermind” in the industry. He was by no means alone. In his analysis of ‘The Folk People’ for the Bulletin, Charles Higham cited as Carter’s main competitors “a man called Murphy” and 18 year old Michael Darby. Murphy, who ran Binky’s Burgers at the Central Station end of Elizabeth Street, opened the Gas Lash in the building next door in August 1964. Decorated with Martin Sharp’s “snaggle-toothed fauna” and featuring a “natural earth floor” and thatched ceiling, the Gas Lash offered a mix of folk (ethnic and otherwise), jazz and Victoriana. It failed to survive beyond a couple of months; by the end of the year it was advertising in Oz Magazine and elsewhere as the Gas Lash discotheque.  

    Darby, son of a famous radio personality-turned-politician, established the Folk Attick in a Kings Cross tenement early in 1964. (Calypso and blues specialist Jan de Zwaan got his start there. Other artists included Shane Duckham, Peter Parkhill and Bob Hudson). Charles Higham described the venue as

… tall, ancient, and dark, lit only by the ultra-violet glow bathing the singers and thin, guttering candles in wine-bottles, most of the customers crouched furtively on stairs out of earshot of the performers but silent just the same, and a singer in each room, surrounded by bodies, crammed solid.

Within months of opening the Kings Cross club,  Darby had established Folk Atticks at Surfers Paradise and in Melbourne. “Most of my customers are in the low income or no income brackets”, he recognised.

They’re school-kids, or young students, who want a night’s entertaiment for five bob. I can get 700 in at a squeeze. I pay some of my singers 45 pound a week. As well as singers in each room, I’ve got one out on the terrace for soft songs – no microphone, no neighbors’ complaints, get it? I serve percolated coffee, lots of people come and help in the kitchen. [Bulletin, 14 Nov 1964] 

    Darby’s dalliance with the folk scene did not last long. Jim Carter took over the Folk Attick early in 1965, and renamed it the Folk Terrace. Other venues which emerged between 1963 and 1966 included The Folksinger, which succeeded The Flying Dutchman in Elizabeth Street (and which headlined Gary Shearston). Chuck Quinton, playing English songs and blues, accompanying himself on 6 and 12 string guitars, was resident performer at the Fountain in Pitt Street, while Margaret Kitamura (and subsequently Sean & Sonja, The Sowers, Bob Reynolds and Greg Butler) were prominent at El Toro. (El Toro was listed as offering folksinging on Saturdays as late as August 1966). English-born blues singer, harmonica player and guitarist Shane Duckham was the first folksinger to perform at Maxim’s, a “very bohemian” coffee lounge at Palm Beach which attracted “kids with no shoes, torn jeans and sunglasses”. (Duckham first started playing at the Barrelhouse and Blues Club in London, in a group with Alex Korner and Cyril Davis. After emigrating to Australia, to join his parents, he became involved in the Perth folk scene before “taking the plunge” in Sydney, where he worked for a time with Dutch Tilders, played in the group The Offbeats, and performed solo at the Folk Attick and the Troubadour). Danny Spooner, who also played there for a time, remembers that Maxim’s inspired Larry King, a left-handed guitarist from Tasmania, to write a song (to the tune of ‘Little Boxes’), which included the sentiment: “See the beatniks down at Maxim’s – all individuals, all look the same”.

    A couple of  local hopefuls, calling themselves Frances & John, persuaded the owner of the Black Poodle in Chatswood to hire them on Friday and Saturday nights in the second half of 1965. (Frances and John also played intermittently at El Toro). The Greenwich Village, in Anzac Parade, Kensington, offered live poetry-readings, quietly emphasised the performance of Australian material, actively encouraged audience-members to take the stage, and boasted the talents of Bob Reynolds, a Canadian singer-guitarist who spent a year or so in Sydney before resuming his travels to South Africa, and Declan Affley. The Castaways at Crow’s Nest teamed such big names as Hood, Henderson and Shearston with Larry King, the New World Trio, and interstate acts like The Twiliters, The Wesley Three and Irene Petrie.It also gave impetus to the careers of The Lincoln Trio and The Kinsfolk, two of the best of the transient Seekers/ Kingston Trio/ PP&M-derived ensembles which were an inevitable by-product of the folk boom.

    Led by trainee business executive Brian Tonkin (the other members were Sean Flanagan and Gary Pearson), The Lincoln Trio unselfconsciously created a U.S. collegiate-style singing act, complete with matching icecream jackets, and specialising in upbeat arrangements of old favourites like ‘O’Reilly’s Daughter’, ‘Queensland Drover’ and ‘Midnight Special’. The trio recorded a single for RCA (‘Wimoweh’ b/w ‘Go Lassie Go’) before disbanding when Tonkin’s firm sent him overseas. The Kinsfolk was a family act (formed after its members saw Peter Paul & Mary at the Sydney Stadium in 1964), grounded in church and gospel music. Work in Sydney coffee lounges (they also appeared regularly at the Copperfield) led to appearances on national TV shows like Bobby Limb’s Sound of Music, tapping into the lucrative middle-of-the-road Twiliters/ Wesley Three market. Marion Begbie, an infant teacher, featured on vocals, celeste and recorders; brothers Richard (a theology student) and Ross (a teacher) played guitars and banjo and another brother Tim (a university student) sang and played bass. Although their influences were readily apparent in performance, arrangement and choice of material, The Kinsfolk were skilled and well-trained professional musicians, as evidenced by two creditable LPs they recorded for RCA, Ain’t That News (1968) and For Tomorrow (1970).

Among the artists who appeared at the Pigalle, a tiny venue which functioned for a couple of years (1965-66) in Church Street, Paramatta, were Danny Spooner, Doug Ashdown, Margret Roadknight, and newcomer Mike McClellan. Spooner was then combining solo singing with membership of a bluegrass band called the Warrenbungle Mountain Ramblers! (Another member of the group was dobro-player Gary Greenwood). Ashdown, a leading performer on the Adelaide scene, debuted at the Carter clubs and the Pigalle just as folk-rock was making its presence felt.  He cites Sydney and the new Dylan as the impetus for his “going professional”:  “I was sitting in a sleazy hotel in King’s Cross with Phil Sawyer when I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ on the radio and I said ‘That’s it’”.   

    Roadknight, who had become friendly with Prof Alex Bradford and other cast-members of the American folk-pageant Black Nativity during its Melbourne season, had acted on their suggestion that she join them in Sydney and try her lack within that city’s folk-club network. Bradford’s well-meant attempt to negotiate a ‘good deal’ for her with Jim Carter (10 pounds an appearance) backfired and resulted in her being barred from (paid) performing at any of the Carter venues. Accordingly, Roadknight spent a rather lean ten months in Sydney before returning to Melbourne (and Traynors, etc) at the end of 1965. She remembers that her stay coincided with the first series of a now-legendary satirical TV show; at 6’4” and fond of wearing flowing capes and big black hats, Roadknight found herself, not infrequently, pointed out by Sydneysiders as Mavis Bramston. 

    McClellan (b. 1945) was a young teacher, recently graduated from Armidale Teachers’ College where he had learned guitar while singing pop tunes with the college band. Occasional trips to Sydney, and Peter Paul & Mary’s renditions of Dylan songs, had alerted him to the folk boom:

Shearston was building a reputation. Jim Carter was building audiences … I looked in on the periphery … Paul Marks was pivotal for me. His singing of traditional blues songs by Big Bill Broonzy, etc., blew me away. The guitar really got me and the interplay between voice and guitar. Marks was not only a very convincing singer, with a lovely voice and great phrasing. A lot of singers were trying to do that stuff. Others were often pretty inept. [He] had the sense of feel about the blues that gave them life and vitality.

    On crutches after a football injury, McClellan made his folksinging debut on an Open night at the Troubadour. (“I remember the difficulty of negotiating the stairs to go down. It took a fair bit of courage, struggling with the guitar as well”). Performing at the Last Straw and the Pigalle soon convinced the young enthusiast that his first musical love  – much as he loved the form – was not his true metier.

I came into this environment … with a fairly naive assumption that I could actually do the blues … Looking back, it’s somewhat embarrassing … Vocally I was clearly unsuited … a middle-class white boy trying to sing the blues. I’d absorbed the technicalities … But I realised I had not absorbed the history of the music  … Graham Lowndes walked in one night and I realised I didn’t have the voice for it at all.

    McClellan played for a while with Lowndes and Derek Robinson as the respected Currency Blues Band (“Gary Shearston gave us our name. He said we were pioneers”) but, as a soloist, he was moving increasingly into writing and performing his own songs. Records by American guitarist Doc Watson and, in particular, balladeer Tom Rush, were his chief influences:

The Circle Game LP was pivotal. It had the first recorded versions of songs by Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell … I suddenly started to find that the things I was interested in weren’t getting much [airplay] … Not much was happening in singer-songwriting here. Even Shearston was still mainly a traditionalist … I was never accepted by the traditionalist folkmusic movement, and the folkmusic movement in general. A lot of people said I was too slick. There was always that element of cautious approach to what I was doing.   

    McClellan would give up teaching for full-time music after winning a heat of the TV quest New Faces and taking up the offer of regular work on the variety program Sound of Music (to the dismay of some in the folk establishment). His first LP, Mike McClellan, released on Col Joye’s ATA label in 1972, heralded his arrival as one of the country’s leading (and enduring) singer-composers.

    Also featured at the Pigalle in 1965-6 were the John Gordon Trio, Brisbane-ite Shayna Karlin (nee Bracegirdle), visiting Irish group The Leprechauns, Vicki Reiner, The Green Hill Singers, Bob Reynolds and Alex Hood. The Leprechauns (Sean, Liam and Mick) were former skiffle and modern jazz musicians who had reverted to folksinging and acquired a solid reputation in their native Belfast before spending several months in Sydney. Hood is credited with having persuaded the Pigalle’s co-owner Frank French to stage folksinging – and with organising the performing rosters there. French, a former jazz enthusiast (“a big band man at heart”), would continue to host informal folk-meets at his home on Sydney’s outskirts after the Pigalle closed. Arguably the most influential Sydney promoter/organiser after Jim Carter, French would re-emerge later in the decade and reactivate PACT Folk as a platform for the new breed of singer-songwriter.

    As for Jim Carter himself: – his involvement in folkmusic failed to survive much beyond the boom. Yet while he is remembered sardonically by some of the performers of the era, others recall him with considerable warmth. Writing at the time, Edgar Waters observed that singers and audiences alike were in the debt of Carter, et al, for having taken a gamble on folkmusic.

Jim Carter and his fellows have been paid, of course, in hard work by the singers and in hard cash by the audiences. But … it is realised that they helped to stimulate interest in folk-song and helped to improve the quality of the singing, at the same time as they helped themselves to an honest quid … I, for one, am prepared to give them a word of thanks as well as an occasional five bob.

[Australian, 20 Feb 1965]

Don Henderson – notwithstanding their early stand-off over pay-rates – later paid tribute to Carter as “a terrific bloke, a fair man and a unionist … He knew the situation. Probably when it came that he could pay, he paid”. On principle, Carter never formally employed Henderson, but he did give him carte blanche to use the Troubadour at any time as a “permanent platform” for his new songs.[NLA Interview] “Jim Carter was very fluid provided people presented themselves well [and there was] a certain amount of decorum”, maintains Marian Henderson. “He was always fair with me. Jim was our Father Christmas”. Gary Shearston, in particular, has always disputed claims that Carter was, first and foremost, an opportunistic businessman. Maintaining that a lot of patrons took advantage of the size and informality of the Troubadour “by not paying”, Shearston once insisted: “I’ve been in with Jim Carter … from the start and I know he was interested in folk music years before the boom started”. More recently, Shearston has elaborated:

I have heard on occasions – and it makes me very annoyed when I do hear it … some “slagging” of Jim Carter and his role in the whole thing. Jim Carter, before he opened that club, had probably the best private collection of folkmusic records, and blues, in Sydney. He had been a lover of the music for years before he even thought about opening the club. Before he opened the club he went to … London to see Les Cousins and all the folk clubs in England, to get the feel of them, the ambience, to see the way it went, you know … and came back to Sydney and all he could afford was that tiny little shoe-box called the Troubadour in New South Head Road … set it up and then came up and knocked on the door to see if John Sellers would open the club for him ….

    Jim, actually, in that tiny little place, virtually supported about ten performers over a period of about two-and-a-half years … at some considerable struggle for himself  … Marian, Alex, myself, Tony Morrrison … Chuck [Quinton], Martin Wyndham-Read, Brian Mooney, Tina Date, Lenore Somerset whenever she came up from Melbourne, Paul Marks … and then all the Johnny-and-Jill-come-latelies … It was as a result of that that we ended up doing the Just Folk program on Channel 7, which was supposed to have run for 13 episodes and ending up running for 26 … He spawned a lot of good things – he was the instigator of the Newport Folk Festival … copying the name and all that, but nevertheless that was a great event in Sydney … [in that] bloody great circus marquee down there ….

[Gary Shearston, NLA Interview]

The Troubadour is still remembered with affection by public and performers – particularly the upstairs room where the singers congregated between sets. “The Troubadour was always packed with audiences who wanted to hear the music”, remembers Sean Cullip, “Smoke-filled, silent rooms, full of the smell of indifferent coffee  … [bringing together] very talented people singing the most wonderful music and enjoying it enormously”. Like Traynors in Melbourne it attracted overseas celebrities, among them Eartha Kitt, Dame Margot Fonteyn & Rudolph Nureyev, Rita Streich, Theo Bikel, Israeli singer Batya, and Nina & Frederik. Peter Yarrow (of Peter Paul & Mary) once gave an impromptu three-hour recital there. “It was a wonderful time”, reminisces Alex Hood:
Seven nights a week and packed all the time. Upstairs. Downstairs. Going all the bloody time. The singing never stopped. You got the idea that suddenly people liked you. They liked what you were doing … I’m sure it started a lot of people off that continued with it [Alex Hood, NLA Interview]

    Apart from the venues, which provided a performing platform for the cream of Sydney’s folksingers (and visiting interstate headliners), Carter mounted several major

concerts, two of them at the Town Hall in 1964 with the second so well-attended that an estimated 1000 customers were turned away. His best-remembered – and most ambitious – undertaking was the Folk Festival at Sydney’s Newport Beach, produced in partnership with Brian Nebenzahl, managing director of Playbill Inc., in January 1965.

       The festival was the high point in Carter’s dominance of the Sydney scene and – in retrospect – the highpoint of the boom in NSW. The beach site was chosen because of its popularity with summer vacationers and because its name evoked immediate associations with the annual Rhode Island extravaganzas at which the American folk pantheon gathered. Black and green posters featuring Adelaide songstress Tina Lawton were pasted up all over Sydney, and Carter and Nebenzahl shrewdly leased the Elizabethan Trust’s giant tent theatre and erected it on the oval at Newport. Capable of seating 2000 people, the tent was reportedly packed to capacity at each of five concerts. Loudspeakers relayed proceedings to hundreds more would-be patrons outside. The Workers Educational Association buildings nearby provided space for seminars, discussions and film-screenings, and accommodation for interstate performers. “Not just from Sydney, but from … all points west and north, singers and audiences came with bedding rolls, sleeping bags, and prized guitars ..”, reported one Sydney journalist.

     Citing the enormous success of Newport, Carter successfully tendered to stage the annual Moomba folk music concert in Melbourne, somewhat to the dismay of that city’s folk establishment. He also expanded his coffee lounge empire to encompass Darby’s Folk Attick, revamped it as the Folk Terrace, and thereby provided his roster of regulars (Shearston, Date, Marks, Henderson, Lewis, etc) with another performing outlet.

The ‘Carter family’ gained enviable exposure during 1965 on the TV programs Bandstand; Just Folk, hosted by Shearston; Leonard Teale’s Folk-Moot; and Dave’s Place, hosted by ex-Kingston Trio member, Dave Guard, who had settled in Australia in 1962. Dave’s Place was an ambitious meld of folk and jazz, set in an imaginary teahouse somewhere remote in the Pacific. Veteran vaudeville star Queenie Paul appeared weekly as chief tea-lady Priscilla, and a trio comprised of Guard, Chris Bonett and Norma Stoneman / Kerrilee Male opened each show. Interestingly, the trio discarded the customary acoustic accompaniment for electric instruments (in Guard’s case a Melnik ZJM guitar), and a repertoire of country/folk, R&B and gospel. (Guard appears to have been strongly influenced by The Staple Singers at this point). Drummer Len Young and jazzmen Don Burrows and the Col Nolan Trio provided instrumental support. Highlights of Dave’s Place included Nina & Frederik performing the Israeli hora ‘Eretz Zavat Chalav’, Judy Henske singing ‘Charlotte Town’, Kitamura rendering ‘Mary Anne’, Kevin Butcher’s ‘Brisbane Ladies’, Scottish singer Lesley Hale’s ‘Still I Love Him’, ‘Singing Bird’ by Wyndham-Read & Mooney, Marian Henderson’s ‘Euabalong Ball’, Irene Petrie’s ‘Coal Tattoo’, ‘Sometime Lovin’’ by Shearston, ‘Ella Speed’ by The Twiliters, McGhee & Terry’s ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’,  and Guard dueting ‘The Frozen Logger’ with Margret Roadknight. (Roadknight appeared as a singing waitress, garbed in an English parlourmaid outfit). [See Ken Bradshaw’s excellent on-line articles on ‘Dave’s Place’].

     However this peak of activity was of very brief duration. By the last quarter of 1965, Music Maker’s Stuart Gordon was alerting readers of his ‘Like Folk’ column that “commercially speaking, the Sydney folk scene appears to be in the midst of a depression”.The plug was pulled on Just Folk; the Last Straw closed (re-opening as a discotheque), and Brian Nebenzahl announced that the proposed 1966 Folk Festival at Newport would not be going ahead. A tour by U.S. bluegrass stars, The New Lost City Ramblers, proved such a bust financially that promoter Harry M. Miller wryly hosted a ‘Let’s Forget about Folkmusic’ party.  Coffee lounge operators, in general, declared that business was “declining to nothing”. Undoubtedly overseas musical trends (i.e. the emergence of folk-rock) were echoing resoundingly in Australia, and the mass audience was restless for newer diversions. Insiders conceded, as well, that the market may well have been saturated, a case of “too much folkmusic, too soon”. Gary Shearston did not mince words, insisting that the decline had been hastened by the “usual gluttonous appetites” of “commercial interests”. (Shearston would spend two decades in Europe, enjoying an international hit with his rendition of Cole Porter’s ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’. For the past 15 years he has worked as clergyman in rural NSW parishes. He remains active musically and, in 2005, is preparing a new CD).

    Concerns about exploitation of the artist by some coffee lounge entrepreneurs had underpinned the foundation of PACT Folk at mid-year. (Jenny McCallum, former manager of the Troubadour, was a key player in its establishment). Despite grumbling that they had become overly commercial (i.e. too well-known), Leonard Teale insisted that Sean & Sonja be invited to participate in the new venue. PACT Folk operated out of the old corn exchange building at the corner of Sussex and Market Streets, Pyrmont, and opened on 15 May 1965 with the line-up of Tina Lawton, Jan de Zwaan, Sean & Sonja, Brisbane singer Ros Corven, Canberra artist Malcolm Wilde, and Teale & Sundstrom. The organisation adopted the name the Limejuice Tub for its regular activities. Directory listings in Australian Tradition and elsewhere indicate that the Limejuice Tub developed a life of its own, outlasting its parent organisation by several years. It finally closed early in 1970. (Sean Cullip remembers celebrating his 21st birthday there with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot).          

   By the beginning of 1967, the folk boom was a thing of the past in Sydney; so much so that the Limejuice Tub and a more recent arrival on the scene, the Sydney Folk Song Club (which met in an upstairs room at the Hotel Elizabeth), were being cited as the only two major venues left. The Bush Music Club continued to meet regularly, seemingly untouched by the ups-and-downs of popular taste, but the major folk coffee lounges were gone – including the Troubadour, El Toro, the Folk Terrace and the Pigalle.

Once Jim Carter had withdrawn from the Copperfield, the management hired Alex Hood to “hold court” and co-ordinate rosters which featured Kevin Butcher (a former commercial artist with a superior tenor voice), Emma Hanna, Marian Henderson, The Kinsfolk and a very popular Perth trio The Twiliters. Significantly the club was keen to play up its resemblance to “a Victorian era English inn”. Hood was ending a turbulent marriage at the time. Opening his guitar-case on stage one evening, he found the instrument smashed to pieces – a parting gift. (The patrons assumed it was all part of the act and laughed uproariously). 

The Copperfield, too, would fold by mid-year. The dearth of performing outlets was not lost on Music Maker columnist Stuart Gordon who compared the local state-of-play with the rather more healthy situation in Melbourne. Citing the Port Phillip Festival, a scheduled festival at rural Wangaratta, and the persistence of the magazine Australian Tradition, Gordon wrote: “Rivalry between [the two cities] is always keen, no matter at what level or subject … but we Sydneysiders might as well concede to the southern city on the river that its folk scene has by far the healthier outlook”.

    The move from coffee lounge to pub, which started in Sydney, would be characteristic of the Australian folk scene in general, reflecting a fundamental shift away from

U.S.-influenced singing and playing to hard-and-fast concentration on British and Irish music. What became the Sydney Folk Song Club originated in informal gatherings of a number of expatriate Englishmen, on Friday evenings, at the Mercantile Hotel under the Harbour Bridge. “I really liked it there”, recalls Dave de Hugard. “It wasn’t a club but an assembly of people with a common love, all enjoying songs and tunes”. Within weeks the gathering shifted to the larger Vanity Fair Hotel in King’s Cross (still “a loosely-organised evening”) and from there to the Hotel Elizabeth (where it would continue well into the 70s). Reportedly formed “to fill the gap between the coffee bars and the Bush Music Club”, the SFSC appears to have been the initiative of multi-instrumentalist Mike Ball. Regular performers included Ball, de Hugard, Carol & Mike Wilkinson and Chris Kempster. Declan Affley, Marian Henderson, Mark Gregory, Jeannie Lewis, Mike McClellan and Alex Hood made frequent guest appearances. (Hood recently notched up fifty years as part of the backbone of the Australian revbival. In 2005 he and wife Annette continue to tour Australia with their highly successful folklore for schools program).

     The “shift towards the Anglo-Celtic” also became more and more apparent at the Limejuice Tub which, by late 1967 (according to Australian Tradition), was being “run solely by [expatriate Englishman] Mike Eves … in the most uncongenial surroundings imaginable”. In due course, the club moved from the Corn Exchange to the nearby Maitland and Morpeth Hotel, where regulars included Peter Parkhill and Colin Dryden. Visiting Melbourne journalist/singer  Mick Counihan waxed enthusiastic about the strong emphasis at both clubs on unaccompanied singing, and the general absence of “the sort of superficial hotch-potch PP&M – Judy Collins – Pete Seeger – Joan Baez repertoire which was the staple of so many singers of the folk-boom period”. In Counihan’s opinion, Sydney performers were belatedly acquiring an awareness of the difficulties involved in singing folksongs. With admirable foresight, however, he cautioned that:

… while the emphasis on British songs in Melbourne and Sydney is a gigantic step forward in terms of the growing maturity of the revival here, there is the possibility of a new orthodoxy replacing the old pop-folk one.

[Go-Set, 25 Jan 1967]    

    Hotel folk-meets were at the centre of the Sydney scene from 1967 throughout the period under review (and beyond). John Huie’s Wine bar in George Street hosted Thursday folk nights for a few months while Limejuice Tub regulars met for a time at the Bognor Hotel, three doors from the corner of Castlereagh and Elizabeth Streets. Other clubs functioned out of the Edinburgh Castle (led by Warren Fahey) and the Boars’ Head, and an Irish Musicians Group met for a while at the Hotel Elizabeth. Occasional folk evenings were also convened at the Mercantile, Hero of Waterloo and Hollywood hotels. Dick’s Hotel at Balmain was a popular gathering-place for folkies on Saturday afternoons circa 1970, while during the same period, folkmusic (performed by Colin Dryden, John Francis, Declan Affley and Martin Van-Herk) emanated from the recently renovated cellars of the old Royal George in Sussex Street. The Town Crier Folk Club, founded by Derrick Chetwyn and Trevor Sutton with the backing of the NSW Folk Federation, met on Thursday nights (from April 1971) at the Town Hall hotel in Balmain. According to a contemporary report:
The Town Crier goes like a party. In a big back bar with the spirits high and the music REAL … The audiences are REAL too. Cross-section audiences. Like Balmain itself. Several strata. Old men on benches. Young chicks with babies and nowhere to go except Balmain. It’s all there. Even container-truck drivers, the hated few of the noise and exhaust, occasionally blow in, breathe in, drink in, and sing … There’s a hard-core following of sixty regulars. They range in age from around 18 to around 60. No generation gaps in traditional music … 

    Meanwhile, occasional efforts (usually shortlived) were made to rekindle the coffee lounge ambience. Beekers at Manly, the brainchild of a multicultural trio (an American, a Scotsman and an Englishman), briefly offered a mix of jazz and folk at weekends. Folksinging was also advertised for a time at Ferdinand’s at Collaroy, at the Workshop in William Street (on Thursday nights), and at The Web in Smith Street, Parramatta. A group calling itself the Folk Arts Co-operative ran The Shack in Waterloo Road, Narrabeen, at weekends from 1970-73, reportedly catering “for all tastes” with “a balanced format of traditional and contemporary music”. Peter Phelps and Reg Burns were resident artists at Friday and Sunday folk evenings at the Quintette Coffee Shop, a cellar in South Terrace, Bankstown, while Greg Quill was resident artist at ‘Googaloo’ in King Street in the CBD. ‘Rentace’, a “suitably dark little clubroom-cum-coffee lounge place”, was founded by young Fourth Internationalists, and offered a program of films, talks, recorded music and live folksongs. (A successor, the ‘Third World’ in Goulburn Street, advertised itself as “the only revolutionary folk club in Sydney”). A trio consisting of Robert Miller (guitar), Adrienne Bartlett (vocals) and Ian Foster (tea-chest bass) held court performing folk hits and light pop songs on Friday evenings, throughout 1970, at the Jersey Coffee Lounge in fashionable West Pymble.

 Only one venue appears to have challenged the dominance of the pubs, however. This was the revitalised PACT Folk.

In marked contrast to the intensely traditionalist orientation of the emergent pub clubs (and, of course, the BMC), it actively promoted itself as a showcase for contemporary music. Weekly (Saturday night) concerts were organised and presented, from early 1969, by Frank French, former owner of the Pigalle – first at the co-operative’s old Sussex Street premises (rather hazardous on rainy nights because of a leaking roof), then in the cellar of the YWCA in Liverpool Street. (“You had to go down many flights of stairs or in a lift”). French also initiated weekly (Thursday) evening workshops “at which the amateur finds himself in constructive discussion with the audience and other artists”. According to French (in Music Maker, Feb 1970), the venue “did not take off too well at first”:
Folk had been in the doldrums … and, basically, singers were still singing their old repertoire. We had a few discussions and then decided that we would switch from traditional folk by evolving a policy that would still allow the presentation of some traditional, but our major direction would be to attempt to organise classes in contemporary folk. Singers suddenly found that if they sang their own songs they were received better. All of a sudden people started to sit up and take notice, this was what put us back on the market again … [The] teenager of today … must have something to think about and is looking for something with a bit more body than the old style of folk singing … PACT Folk has become a sounding board for both singers and material, as the audience on an ordinary Saturday night is a very representative cross-section of involved Australians. If a singer goes on with one of her own songs and gets an 80% affirmative reaction, you can say she is on the right direction.

Artists closely associated with the venue in its early years included singers Kathie Fisher, Marian Henderson, Doug Ashdown and Mike McClellan, comedian Graham Bond, satirist Bernard Bolan, and an innovative folk-rock band Moonstone (fronted by former rock’n’roll singer Ray Brown) In addition to its regular nights, PACT Folk mounted a number of successful concerts, including a Sunday series at the Avalon Peninsula Playhouse.

More than any other venue of the period – and under French’s direction – PACT Folk (according to Pattison & Mulhallen, Australian Music Directory, 1982, p.105):
… encouraged the blossoming of Australian singer-songwriters, contemporary folk artists and acoustic musicians in general … it is to Frank French that many … [subsequently] prominent musicians owe a large part of their careers. The list is long and includes Mike McClellan, Doug Ashdown, Marian Henderson, Don Henderson, Graham Lowndes, Margret Roadknight, Jeannie Lewis, Bob Hudson, Al Head, Bernard Bolan, the East Neasden Spasm Band … Al Ward … John J. Francis, Terry Hannagan … and Richard Clapton.  

    “The music was just brilliant”, remembers Tasmanian singer Beth Sowter who spent a few months in Sydney in 1969, playing at PACT Folk (and elsewhere) in the group The Famous Cottonwood Patch. (Gary Greenwood was also a member). Sowter recalls French with particular warmth. At a time when the group was usually taking home a pittance from other gigs, “Frank would give us $10 because he knew we were starving … I have a soft spot for him. He looked after us” Marian Henderson concurs:
People went to stay overnight at Frank’s house when they had nowhere else to go … His day job was as a foreman in a plastics factory, which probably contributed to his death. He should have had a long life … Frank took over from Jimmy Carter though there were years in between. He was a bit of a fairy godfather. He organised a lot of work for a lot of people. Big folk festivals, concerts that were very very diverse. Without being pushy and taking any money for it, he would promote the people who worked for him as much as he could .

    French had an advantage over businessmen like Jim Carter: “He didn’t have to live off it”, notes Mike McClellan. “He wasn’t an entrepreneur. He had a second career … He got involved in the music because he loved it and he loved the people. He was like a magnet … prepared to welcome new talent when it came in”. “A wonderful, wonderful man. I have the fondest memories of him”, states Doug Ashdown.

   The outreach of the folk coffee lounges (and pub folk clubs) was augmented by periodic large-scale concerts and festivals. I have already noted the crowd-drawing Town Hall concerts staged by Jim Carter, and Carter’s hugely successful Newport extravaganza. Among other notable events were a hootenanny at Anzac House in May 1963, presented by the Folk Song Society of Sydney. Gary Shearston cites as significant a series of concerts mounted at Sydney University’s Union Theatre in conjunction with Charles Perkins’ Freedom Rides; highlights of other Union Theatre concerts (organised by the University’s Folk Song Society) were preserved by RCA as the LP Folk Concert on Campus. (Performers at these concerts included British singer traditional Roy Waterson and aboriginal rhythm’n’blues player Alan Moarywaalla. Moarywaalla, aka Alan Barker, hailed from Western Australia and had been a regular at the Royal George). The university Society was founded by Sylvia Haneman in 1963. Its membership rose to 300 within its first year as students flocked to sample regular singabouts, lunchtime meetings and a camp at which participants acquainted themselves with Australian aboriginal music. Society alumni included Lewis, Graeme Turner, Chris Kempster (pioneer of the Bush Music Club and The Bushwhackers who completed a Science degree as a mature-age student during the folk years, and was an early enthusiast for emerging U.S. song-poet Bob Dylan) and Chris Shaw.

    Involved in the Bush Music Club and Folklore Society milieu from childhood (through her parents Frances and Rod), Chris Shaw learned her first guitar chords from another young schoolgirl, Shayna Bracegirdle, while on holiday with the Bracegirdle family in Brisbane. She later acquired a hand-made instrument from Don Henderson. Like her mother, her repertoire was primarily Anglo-American ballads and international folksongs. (She remembers forgetting the lyrics of the Yiddish love song ‘Margaritkes’ during her one appearance at the Troubadour and being prompted by Frances from the sidelines). Shaw was a popular singer of the “sweet young thing” ilk, appearing at concerts and on TV shows like Dave Allen’s Tonight throughout the boom. She also appeared, along with The Radiation Quartet, Dick Hackett and Graeme Turner on a couple of topical recordings for the NSW Teachers’ Federation. Shaw largely eschewed folksinging after completing her degree, in favour of work in theatre   

    In 1967 enthusiasts at both the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales co-operated in hosting the first national Intervarsity Folk Festival, billeting participants from all around the country, and convening a series of workshops and concerts over a ten day period. Other significant initiatives included a folk night at Granville in 1965 (advertised as the first such presentation in Sydney’s industrial west. It attracted regulars from the Pigalle and featured Sean & Sonja, Danny Spooner, Jan de Zwaan, The Norfolk Singers, Vicki Reiner and The Lincoln Trio. The recently-formed PACT Co-operative initiated a similar concert at the Chatswood Town Hall in August 1965, as part of the North Side Arts Festival. In October 1967 (notwithstanding reported rifts between the two organisations) The Limejuice Tub and the Sydney Folksong Society combined with the Bush Music Club to stage a three day festival.  Its aim was “to create greater awareness of folkmusic proper in Sydney”.

     Most successful was the Port Jackson Folk Festival, i.e. the Fourth National Folk Festival, held over the Australia Day Long weekend in 1970, and a “tremendous box office success”. According to Go-Set [4 Feb 1970]:
From the ages of ten to 50 they came in … beads and singlets, suits and ties, on motorbikes, in old jalopies, by train, by airplane and by foot – 5000 avid folk followers from the far corners of the country.

Advertised as commemorating the bicentenary of Captain James Cook’s discovery of Eastern Australia, the PJFF set an important precedent by channelling some of its profits into promoting further collection of folklore in NSW. Nearly 20 workshops included demonstrations and talks on Instrument making, Whaling songs, the Blues, Bluegrass, Oral Humour, Magic & Superstition, Folk dancing, even puppeteering. Two evening concerts were devoted to Australian and contemporary song and British and American music respectively.

    A major (and revitalising) innovation which paralleled the staging of the PJFF was the formation of the NSW Folk Federation, set up with the aim of affiliating all folk-oriented clubs and organisations throughout the state. By December 1970, 12 organisations had joined the Federation and membership stood at 300. Mike Eves served as inaugural chairman with Bernard Bolan treasurer and Warren Fahey in charge of public relations. The Federation promptly made its presence felt in a tangible way by mounting a public symposium, ‘Where Are We Going’, and sponsoring concerts at the Conservatorium of Music and the Science theatre at the University of NSW; presenting American artists Mike & Alice Seeger at the University of Sydney’s Wallace Theatre; and staging two Christmas come-all-ye’s at the Scots Church Assembly Hall (utilising the talents of Declan Affley, Warren Fahey, John Francis, Jamie Carlin, Roger Montgmery and Marian Henderson).

SOURCES:

Apart from publications, etc. cited in the text, my main sources have been:

1.   National Library of Australia (NLA) Oral History Interviews with Chris Kempster (TRC 2690/30-31 1992), Don Henderson (TRC 2581/14-16, 1989), Gary Shearston (TRC 2590/40, 1992) and Alex Hood (TRC 2608/35, 1994; TRC 3515, 1996/9);
2. the magazines Australian Tradition & Music Maker 1964-70;  and
3.   personal interviews and correspondence with Beth & Reg Schurr, Brian Mooney, Mark Gregory, Chris Shaw, Marian Henderson, Brian Nebenzahl, Gary Shearston, Sean Cullip, Danny Spooner, Ken White, Cris Larner, Jeannie Lewis, Stan Arthur, Peter Wesley-Smith, John McMillan, Peter Dickie, Lynne St John, Ian Clarke, Mike McClellan, Margret RoadKnight, Ken Bradshaw, Dave de Hugard, Bernard Bolan, Beth Sowter & Doug Ashdown.