VERANDAH MUSIC – GERMAN STYLE

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.

 

Sally Sloane – A River of Tradition

Sally Sloane

Sally (christened Sarah) Sloane was born at Parkes (NSW) in 1894. Her family were of Irish descent and nurtured a strong musical tradition of singing and instrumental music. Young Sally learned to play concertina, button accordion, jew’s harp and piano from her mother and also learned the fiddle, mouth organ and tin whistle. The sources of Sally’s extensive repertoire of Irish and Australian songs were her mother, her stepfather and other bush workers. Her singing and playing had a characteristic Irish lilt that distinguished it from other British-derived musical traditions.

 

An accomplished musician and singer, Sally performed at many locations around Lithgow, Parkes and Teralba and during World War 2 appeared at the famous Sydney Tivoli in troop benefit concerts. Just as she had learned her songs and tunes from within the family, so Sally passed her skills and repertoire to the next generation. The John Meredith Tape Collection in the National Library of Australia contains, among many other jewels, a superb duet of ‘Miss McLeod’s Reel’ performed by Sally on harmonica and her son Les on jew’s harp. (Tape 10B Item 15)

 

Sally’s outstanding musical ability and her extraordinary repertoire of ballads attracted the interest of many folklorists, including John Meredith, Edgar Waters, Warren Fahey and Graham McDonald. She was – and probably remains - the best-documented traditional singer and musician in Australia and features in many published and recorded works. A very rough and conservative estimate of her repertoire based on the John Meredith recordings held by the National Library (1954-1961) and other recordings of Sally made by Warren Fahey suggest she could perform on request at least 60 tunes and nearly 80 songs. She was also a better than fair spinner of yarns and a repository of local lore and legend about Ben Hall and other bushrangers of the Forbes district.

 

Sally’s broad repertoire was very much a joining of four major streams of Anglo Celtic musical traditions found in Australia. One stream consisted of mainly nineteenth century British broadside ballads such as ‘The Banks of Claudy’ and ‘The Red Barn’, a version of the best-selling English ballad on the murder of the pregnant Maria Marten by her lover, William Corder in 1827.  This stream also included rural English folksongs, such as ‘The Green Bushes’ and a strong helping of Irish street ballads and other traditional songs, such as ‘My Son Ted’ and ‘If I Was A Blackbird’.

 

A second stream was made up of a number of the older ballads like ‘Molly Baun Lavery’, which draws on an ancient international story of a young hunter who mistakes his true love for a swan and kills her. Also included here were some rarely recorded traditional carols such as  ‘Christ Was Born in Bethlehem’.

 

Australian traditional material formed a broad third stream, including poems of Henry Lawson and other poets set to music. One of many outstanding ballads in Sally Sloane’s  extensive repertoire was ‘Ben Hall’, a lament on the 1865 shooting of this folk outlaw hero by police as the bushranger slept. Like many of the Ben Hall ballads it portrays the outlaw in distinctly Australian terms. The song begins:

 

Come, all you young Australians and everyone besides,

I’ll sing to you a ditty that will fill you with surprise,

Concerning of a ‘ranger bold whose name it was Ben Hall,

But cruelly murdered was this day, which proved his downfall.

 

and ends:

 

It’s through Australia’s sunny clime Ben Hall will roam no more.

His name is spread both near and far to every distant shore.

For generations after this parents will to their children call,

And rehearse to them the daring deeds committed by Ben Hall.

 

A fourth stream of Sally’s song and tunes flowed from the popular music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with songs like ‘Boys of the Dardanelles’, ‘The Coolgardie Miner’ and her robust accordion rendition of ‘McNamara’s Band’. These streams ran together into a wide and deep river of Australian traditional music that Sally ferried with great skill.

 

Sally Sloane was a lively and friendly woman who made collectors welcome with cups of tea and more than enough to eat. Well aware of her celebrity status among folklorists, she was extremely generous as a performer, Warren Fahey and I recording over forty items from her in one memorable day at her Lithgow home in 1976. As with many traditional singers, Sally’s music was tied closely to the rhythms of family life and domestic routine and she would sing many of her songs as she did the washing up.

 

Sally Sloane died in 1982 but the extensive and important traditions of which she was an extraordinary bearer live on in the many recordings she made for collectors. You can listen to a large selection at https://sallysloane.wordpress.com/

 

Graham Seal (from Verandah Music: Roots of Australian Tradition)

VERANDAH MUSIC AT THE NATIONAL FOLK FESTIVAL 2026

(l-r) Matt Nightingale, Jac Bradley, Kev Bradley, Chloe Roweth, Jason Roweth, Graham Seal, Ollie Willis, Rob Willis

This year, Rob Willis and Olya Willis received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Folk Festival, recognising their sustained collection and documentation of Australian folklore and oral history. Under the banner of Sharing the Harvest we presented an hour- long selection of traditional song and music collected from many thousands of recordings of Australians from different cultures, countries, locations and occupations all around the country. See previous post on the collection at. 

We had plenty of help from the band in the picture above. Christina Mimmocchi, Gemma Turner and Clarita Derwent (The Third Voice) were also due to join us but were prevented by a virus from attending the festival. Like all the band members, they have taken part in festival performances organised by Rob and Olya over the past thirty or so years, completing the link between collecting, archiving and sharing the folklore harvest.

Graham, Rob and Olya

Sounds Like Australia

 https://www.outbackmag.com.au/sounds-like-australia/

Article about the collecting odyssey of Rob and Ollie Willis in Outback magazine. We featured this work in a previous post at

 https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/2138391645827947224/2607229772787880325

And there is more information at

https://verandahmusic.blogspot.com/p/the-willis-collection-of-life-stories.html

VERANDAH DANCES WITH THE BRUTONS

Here’s a tenth birthday present from Verandah Music, courtesy of Rob Willis:

The late Les Bruton was a versatile musician playing fiddle, accordion and a number of other instruments. His wife, June, learnt slide guitar at an early age and accompanied Les, it was indeed a unique and wonderful sound. Les learnt many of his dance tunes from older players, including his Uncle Charlie and he tells us the story of Uncle Charlie and the Verandah dances. June and Les play us one of Uncle Charlie's tunes, a Schottische. We recorded the Brutons for the National Library of Australia and they are online at Youtube here (double click if it doesn’t work first time and follow the redirect prompt – we don’t know why, either).

https://youtu.be/QBHEgQtejuo  

Verandah Music at Cygnet 2016

Rob, Olya and Graham fronted a concert at the 2016 Cygnet Folk Festival on January 10. Verandah Music Tassie Style also featured Edie Dawson, Stuart Graham and Julie Edwards (with Edie), Chloe and Jason Roweth, Fred Pribac, Christina Mimmocchi, Jacqui Bradley, Ronnie and Dyan Summers, David Wanless and Cathy Huthinson (dancers) and Kerrie Maguire. 

 The day before at the festival, together with Maureen Seal, we presented a workshop on Folklore and Family History.