Harry Schaefer and Band
Some more additions to the historical field recording on the Verandah Music Youtube channel. Rob Willis has digitised some early films of German song and music in Australia and provides below some background to the project.
A recent chance meeting with two lovely people from Temora reminded me of the many recordings of German traditions that we have made for the NLA.
Pioneer folklorist John Meredith had an interest in the many cultures of Australia, it was not only about the 'old bush songs'. During the 1980s John, along with myself and others, recorded and filmed a number of traditional musicians and singers performing songs and tunes handed down in their German families. We have also included some later videos that followed the tradition of John's films including Forbes local, Harry Schaefer, definitely a musician of note.
Here is a playlist from our Verandah Music channel of some of these, I will be adding to it as time permits.
Please note that John's film "A Lutheran Legacy" was shot on super 8 FILM which did not give great audio and we were restricted by the short amount of film time - at 24 fps we got 2 minutes 30 seconds per segment. John loved the old-style newsreel type doco's and the editing was very basic with no digital facilities utilised. Making do with movies.
Others involved with the project include Bruce Cameron, Jamie Carlin, Olya Willis, Forbes Shire Council.
Please share the link https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeh_9si3jFvI
Readers might also be interested in other collections of German traditions in Australia, including:
Schuster Collection NLA https://www.library.gov.au/research/guides-and-resources/guides-selected-collections/schuster-collection. Includes stories and customs, as well as music and song. Also contains some Scandinavian traditions.
Mark Schuster’s website, Germany Downunder
The National Library of Australia also has significant other collections of German lore, oral history and culture at https://www.library.gov.au/term/germany
German Australia (also good education materials + links to other resources)
Institutions like the State Library of South Australia and the State Library of Queensland maintain extensive regional immigrant papers, church and choir records (such as documentation of the historic Liedertafel singing groups in Adelaide and the Barossa Valley), shipping indexes, and early German-language Australian newspapers
Regional repositories like the Tatura Irrigation & Wartime Camps Museum in Victoria and holdings via Museums Victoria contain localized artifacts, community songbooks, and folk traditions related to waves of European migration.
Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia (OMAA) This is a comprehensive research and educational resource out of Sydney University with connections to many other multicultural projects in other universities and institutions. It is not specifically folkloric in orientation but includes much that is, as well as valuable contextual information (also photographs) about the many ethnic groups covered, including German.
And, of course, you can always take yourself off to the Barossa and elsewhere in South Australia where many of these traditions are alive and well.