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A land
of harmony For charity? Gosh, it was
the people we once played for in dances around So I always knew
yesterday would be embarrassing. What I didn't count on was to be reminded so
vividly how much my love of this country comes from what I saw of it playing
in that band in all those country dances nearly 30 years ago. As you may know if you
read these columns, I'm puzzled why so many artists and academics insist " Our country towns
particularly seem to be loathed and feared. Wake In Fright is one writer's
typical nightmare of waking up in a bush town like one of the several I've
lived in, from Tarcoola in the Nullarbor
to Tailem Bend. Hicks, ferals
and rednecks live out in the bush, don't they? It's
nasty Hanson territory out there. All this astonishes me.
This isn't the I didn't even know the
word racism when I was a boy, growing up alongside Aborigines. Danny was my
best mate and school captain in Tarcoola Primary,
and was, purely incidentally, Aboriginal. His father was a foreman in our
railway town. Nor do I ever recall my
parents, with their Dutch accents and my mother's weird dishes for community
suppers, being treated like aliens. Just pitching in gets you anywhere here. It is true I grew up
knowing a few more eccentrics than many children might today. They were in
your face in the bush, not hidden as they are here in the city. So in Tarcoola
we just had to put up with Charlie Hoskings singing
"I keep my pants up with a piece of twine" during the pictures
every fortnight. We knew two choruses would see him through, anyway. IN Warramboo,
one of the local girls had Down syndrome, but there were always a couple of
men to talk to or dance with her at the town "socials". Difference
was something we had to deal with, and we did it usually without much fuss --
without the academics, the sensitivity training and the awareness campaigns.
Or the furious hectoring. It was the Nelson
brothers' mum, one of those practical Christians you often find in the
country cooking yet another meal for someone else, who told us that if we
were to play dance music we should go to a house on the edge of town and
learn the tempos from the transsexual who lived there. Except, of course, Mrs Nelson didn't use the word "transsexual",
being discreet. So it took me a while to wonder why the woman who taught us
to play every dance from the military two step to
the Pride of Erin had such a low voice and hid her face behind her hand. Still, by the time we got
used to her we got used to what she was, too. No fuss, no politics. She even came with us to
our first dance, at a dairying town on the Oh, we were bad. Peter
Nelson used to smile sorry whenever he played a bum note on the piano
accordion, which probably explains why he always seemed so happy. Allan was
good on the organ, but boom cha was as much as I could manage on the drums. And when my brother,
Richard, later joined us, we at first made him play softly enough for no one
to hear. Yet people hired us and
we gradually got better -- enough to play for church groups and tiny towns,
for sports groups and anyone who thought it was more fun dancing to a bad
live band than a perfect dead record. We'd play in restaurants
or sheds or, more usually, in halls with deep-brown honour
boards, gold-glittering with the names of locals who'd fought for their
country or their club. We'd play while the women
put their plates in the side room and the men chatted by the front entrance.
We'd play while dads danced with their daughters, and aunts taught steps to
their nephews. We'd get half a hamlet of folks in a circle, doing the
progressive military three step, and see the shyest
girl dance at last with the man with the Monaro.
Sometimes we'd play Running Bear for the kids. There would be raffles
for some good cause and announcements of a future do. There'd be votes of
thanks and toasts to the bride. There were no drunks, and we none of us even
imagined people actually took drugs. There were no fights, either, of course.
People there knew each other too well. And no one ever felt the
need to tell us in the band how bad we truly were. This is the country I
remember. This is my I know at times it could
seem dull, and how often our cultural elite seem in horror of that evenness of
our temperament and history, trying to make us more dramatic by inventing
genocides that never happened, satanic legions of racists that never lived,
and rebellions out of a few shots. BUT I guess that's the
dullness of peace and decency, when it's up to you yourself to make your life
rich, without bothering your neighbours too much.
Somehow, quietly, Look what's become of my
old band -- now a child psychiatrist, a government adviser on energy policy,
a truck driver and a columnist. One of us has a Japanese wife, another has
lived in Asia and a third is just back from an official fact-finding tour of From one dorky dance band
from the bolta@heraldsun.com.au
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