Grainger’s interest in music made by telegraph wires found reflection in Alan Lamb’s field recordings of such sounds in the Australian outback in the 60s, then in the piano wire music made by New Zealander Alastair Galbraith and American Matt De Gennaro in the 1990s. Grainger wrote that his free music would be ‘more soulrevealing, more melodious, more truly tender and lovely than any music yet’; he was also excited by the idea that, through it, ‘Australian musical life can be freed from the absurdities, falseness, ignorance & good-for-nothingness that plagues European & American musical life.’22
Grainger worked on free music from 1945 onwards, via a number of carefully constructed ‘pretty machines.’ They employed all kinds of cast-off junk, including cotton reels, children’s toy records, carpet rolls, a vacuum cleaner, strong brown paper and string. He gave them deliberately silly names, such as ‘the Crumb-catcher and Drain Protector Disc’ and ‘the Cross-Grainger Double-decker Kangaroo-pouch Flying Disc Paper Graph Model for Synchronizing and Playing 8 Oscillators’.23 Though Grainger was intrigued by sound that was generated purely electronically, his machines were distinct from what we would now understand as synthesizers. The Cross-Grainger Kangaroo-pouch system, for instance:
consisted of two huge vertically mounted carpet rolls around which had been wound two strips of strong coloured paper whose specially cut “hill-and-dale” upper contours corresponded to the pitch and dynamic needs of the music. The two carpet rolls, graphically termed by the inventors the “Feeder” and “Eater” revolving turrets, took the rolls of “hill-and-dale” paper through two metal cages wherein mechanical means were provided to track the undulations and activate the pitch and volume of eight oscillators.24
In the late 1950s, as Professor Loughlin, Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne, was professing the controversial opinion that ‘the higher forms of music, rock ’n’ roll not forgotten . . . occupy their own necessary niche in the musical world,’25 the Grainger Museum was still being developed – a work in progress since 1938 – in its specially constructed quarters.
There is no direct evidence that Grainger’s example inspired Australians to explore their own forms of national pop or experimental or electronic music, or for that matter their own tonal compositions. Nevertheless it should be noted that in 1956 the national news and comment magazine The Bulletin could make jokes about ‘“Waltzing Matilda” being played in rock ’n’ roll time by Billy Bong and his Jumbucks’26 at the same time as – relatively seriously – it evoked bizarre imagery of the ordinary middle-aged man working on his home-made noise generator to create an ‘electronic symphony composition’27, thus implying this was a respectable suburban hobby for Australians, and one recognisable to its readers.
Like Grainger, Ken Taylor found his inspiration at the cinema, albeit as a rock and roll entrepreneur rather than as a composer or performer. This, at least, was Taylor’s claim in his 1970 memoir Rock Generation. After seeing Blackboard Jungle, Taylor relates with sly, tabloidish humour, he felt like ‘a reluctant but overstimulated witness of a rape – which, come to think of it, I was.’28
I almost shed a tear for poor, violated Miss Conventional Music. After such a treatment by Haley and his Comets, could she ever be the same again? I was certain that some remarkable children would be coming from her defloration – and my plans were already made to be doctor and midwife to them. THEY WOULD BE THE FIRSTBORN OF AUSTRALIA’S OWN AGE OF POP.29
Similarly, Taylor (who was, it must be remembered, writing for a permissive late-60s audience) saw rock ’n’ roll as gender-bending:
What we actually experienced in the 1950s was the emergence of the male animal to seize his moment of glory from females in the eternal war of the sexes. Rock music was his weapon, his instrument. He used it ruthlessly to knock mid-twentieth century woman from her traditional role of Seductress. MAN became the coquette!30
Grainger’s ethnic folk music collecting and his obsession with his own racial imprint find reflection not only in the work of later musicians and performers but also in the response they met internationally. Rolf Harris was an entertainer from the Perth suburb of Bassendean (he was known, indeed, as ‘the Boy from Bassendean’) who sought to support his pursuits as an artist by forays into show business in Britain in the early 1950s. ‘I don’t try to push it,’ he said twenty years later and surely tongue-in-cheek, ‘but my roots are all-Australian.’31 Over the next fifty years he was probably the best-known Australian in Britain, Kylie Minogue notwithstanding; he never lost his accent – indeed, it would have been a professional disaster for him if he had. Though he became better known later in life as a painter – and was ultimately defined by his 2014 trial and conviction as a serial sexual predator – he had several hit singles from the 1950s onwards. ‘Two Little Boys’ was a campy World War I–themed folk song, ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport,’ a jovial singalong, and ‘Jake the Peg’ a curiously dirty piece of (apparently) Dutch humour that involved Harris balancing on a life-sized third leg. He created his hit single ‘Sun Arise’ from a traditional Aboriginal song together with Harry Butler, an environmentalist who became famous in Australia as a television documentary presenter in the mid 1970s. There were two versions, one closer to the original; the song’s original producer, George Martin, persuaded Harris to write a middle eight.32 Harris later said:
“Play your didgeridoo, Blue . . . .”
“Tie that kangaroo down, lady, tie that kangaroo down!”
So many people think it is an old aboriginal song, and I could shake them, because anything less like an aboriginal song I can’t imagine. What actually happened was I met a chap called Ted Egan working for the aboriginal welfare department up at Gove in Arnhem Land, and we stayed with him on our last trip around Australia, he sang a lot of songs to me and this was one of them . . . He said it was a song that he had learnt from his Dad . . .33
The list of Australians who made an impact on the international pop scene in the early days of rock and rock-influenced pop is extensive. However, from the perspective of the early 21st century, it would appear that too much effort was expended in the years following the 1950s – perhaps as individuals like Johnny O’Keefe attempted to reinvent themselves on the comeback trail, and books like Taylor’s Rock Generation were published – to make that decade seem like a vibrant and individualistic era in Australian music. If it was, and certainly there were some remarkably good musicians working in the field at this time, particularly those with a jazz background but also others with ‘hillbilly’ or country and western precedents, most recordings that survive from the period do not tend to show it. Perhaps this is merely an indication of the difficulties inherent in recording and the cautious nature of the industry at the time. Slim Dusty’s remark that ‘some of the engineers’ he worked with in the 1950s ‘were real bastards’34 supports this notion.
In addition to O’Keefe, there are a few names that come to mind when people think of pre-60s rock and pop music in Australia. Clinton Walker and Peter Doyle have written about Les Welch, ‘Australia’s great anticipator of rock ’n’ roll’35, whose first record was ‘Elevator Boogie Blues’36 in 1949; six years later Welch recorded an EP, Saturday Night Fish Fry, which ‘blurred the genre boundaries’.37