‘Myall Creek’ Decade Milestone

10 June 1838

28 Aboriginal children, women and old men were brutally massacred whilst the able bodied men of their families were working for the property owner, Henry Dangar, at Myall Creek Station near Bingara, north west New South Wales.

This callus, calculated and cowardly act is the only massacre of Indigenous People on this continent for which anyone has been tried and convicted. There have been numerous such massacres, larger and smaller, all part of a recipe to rid the continent of everything Indigenous, by a British Empire on which the sun never set on such barbaric brutality.

Spare a thought for their poor soles and think of the implications of their deaths, because it directly effects you.

The arrival of the first fleet wrought devastation, destruction and disease on the Australian continent, on a scale that today has global implications. The landscape was transformed by greed and today we are paying the price. The Indigenous people lived with the land, they were of the earth, not ruling it. The waters flowed, the country was for the most part wooded grassland and the grass put carbon into the ground and a layer of fresh water across the landscape with a salt layer well beneath. Australia had sufficient Indigenous grass land to reverse the effects of ‘global warming’ we are experiencing today and it was cared for and nurtured by Indigenous people who were part of the landscape.

Acknowledge the Indigenous People of this continent who were the victims of systematic genocide on the 10th of June by learning something about Indigenous grasses. Our grasses put carbon into the ground in their first season, more carbon per acre into the ground than trees. We have enough Indigenous grassland in Australia, if properly nurtured and managed, to reverse the effects of global warming for the entire planet. A fact borne out by science.

The displacement of Indigenous People on this continent by European savagery, disease, murder, slaughter of their animal resources, over grazing by introduced sheep, cattle, horses, rabbits, donkeys, goats, deer, the list goes on, let alone the introduction of foxes, foreign bird species, mice and rats. The mass extinction of flora, fauna and human species – FOR WHAT?

STOP & THINK

What if these were your family members? What if this was the land you belonged to? How would you react to your family and friends being purposely infected with smallpox only to die an excruciating death or rounded up and brutally massacred? The subjects of British genocide.

The photograph attached is of Indigenous people not much different to the people massacred at Myall Creek. Children, women and old men, Ngambri People. The people Canberra was named after – after they were displaced off their land – after every emu was shot – after the yam daisies were over grazed – after the goannas were eliminated – after the possums were blasted out of the trees – after their habitat was destroyed – after religion was forced upon them – after they were banished to an Aboriginal camp outside their land – after their children were taken. These are my family.

On the 10th of June, remember the families of the Kamilaroi people of the Myall Creek Station massacre, remember ALL the Indigenous People and Indigenous elements of this country that have been displaced and destroyed, by reinstating the Indigenous grasslands for your own sake and everyone else in the world. Since European settlement, Australia has imported around 28,000 alien plants – more than the total number of native plant species – and one in 10 of these imports has established with adverse impact. 

We cannot bring back the dead or reverse the wrongs of the past, but we can restore the landscape and reverse the effects of global warming in their honor by something as simple as spreading some native wildflower seeds or sewing some Indigenous grasses.

Shane Mortimer – Ngambri Person

The Sydney Hotshots 2008 show will be bigger and better than ever, and is sure to fulfil every girl’s deepest desires! The dazzling costumes and all new choreographed routines are sure to leave the audience captivated, while the games and fun will ensure a great night is had by all. With music spanning all generations, it is a show for women of all ages.

The two hour show is packed with live singing, dance, comedy and even a bit of romance. With all the right ingredients for a great girl’s night out, it’s no wonder that many hens and birthday girls choose to celebrate their special night with the Hotshots – and it pays off, with hens and birthday girls often recipients of some up close and personal attention from the men on stage!

This years 2008 show will see the Hotshots perform to crowds all around Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania. “We love having the opportunity to perform to crowds all around the country – it doesn’t matter to us how big or small the town is, so long as the crowd enjoys themselves and has a great night!” states feature performer Shane.

Having appeared in shows such as Sunrise, and in magazines such as Australian Women’s Weekly and Cleo, the Hotshots have spent the last decade establishing their reputation as the number one show of its kind in the country, complete with professional entertainers. Women of all ages have shown their approval, with the Hotshots having the opportunity to perform in front of sell out crowds in some of Australia’s biggest entertainment venues, including Penrith Panthers, Sydney and Sky City Casino, Darwin. On the road for months at a time, this is a full time job for Australia’s premier male revue show who are definitely enjoying the challenge of entertaining and thrilling women across the country!

All in all, the Sydney Hotshots show is one of the best nights of entertainment for fun-loving ladies anywhere and it can’t get much better than this year’s all new show!

See for yourself when the Sydney Hotshots turn up the heat near you when they perform live at:
* Queanbeyan Kangaroo Rubgy League Club, Queanbeyan on Thursday 26th June 2008. Show starts 8.30pm. For tickets and show enquiries Ph:6297-6222.
* Paparazzi Bar and Nightclub, Manuka on Saturday 28th June. Show starts 8.30pm. For tickets and show enquiries Ph:6232-7888.

Canberra’s Country/Folk couple Craig and Simone Dawson will combine forces with Sydney based Country/Folk duo Pat Drummond and Karen Lynne for one night only this month to bring a spectacular night of music and storytelling that is sure to be a dynamic show to remember.

Pat Drummond and Karen Lynne first teamed up at about the same time as Craig and Simone did in the late 90s. Although their music and song writing styles draw upon different influences, there are some definite similarities. This is particularly evident in the way many of their more meaningful narrative style songs are written and delivered. The presentation of their music is also mostly based on delivering an often powerful and poignant message.

Pat Drummond, the main songwriter in his work with Karen Lynne is
based at Leura in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. His style is a cross between song writing and journalism. His well-documented songs about real people and places are drawn from interviews gathered on his erratic tours across Australia and present a composite picture of that country and her people.

Karen Lynne, also from the Blue Mountains area, is a multi award winning vocalist involved in many different musical collaborations including lead vocalist for the popular bluegrass band “Acoustic Shock.” She is also a popular singer/songwriter in her own right in Folk and Country music.

Craig and Simone are no strangers in folk music circles. Their original songs and instrumentals cover many styles that draw on a diverse range of influences including Delta Blues, Ki Hoalu (Hawaiian slack key), Celtic and Country. They are best known for their hard hitting ballads which explore a variety of political, social and even ludicrous topics.

Following support act “Divided by 3,” Craig and Simone (with special guest Peter Logue) will begin the show with a stack of new songs and some old favourites. Pat and Karen will take the stage after with songs from their long awaited new CD "The Long Journey Home." What happens in between, after or even throughout is anybody’s guess!!!

Appearing at “The Merry Muse,” Polish Australian White Eagle Club, David St, O’Connor on 13 June from 7:30pm. Tickets $12/$15.

Two more weekends and I’ll be going home
My home’s a nowhere
But a nowhere where I’m known
Where the sheep are nervous
And the men are all good blokes
Take me back to where the people get my jokes

From ‘American Guitar’, Texas (2008) by Fred Smith

So saying the above (or rather, singing the above), Fred Smith did literally start heading home, from the USA to Australia. His first chance to play the song live came on his last night after three years in America, coincidentally in a town called Frederick (his first gig three years earlier had been, even more coincidentally, in Fredericksburgh). The next morning he hopped on a plane and returned to Australia via a two week tour of Canada.

In the intervening time, Fred had tripped around the USA: from house-husbanding to house concerts, from suburban conventionality to folk conventions, and to a string of gigs, festivals and song contests along the way.

Fred has now been back in Australia for about six months and he’s appreciating the return to his old neighbourhood. Launching his ‘Texas’ album at Tilley’s Devine Café in Canberra last month, Fred relates a quote on topic: ‘”Home is the place you go where they’ve got to let you in.”’

‘It’s good to be home!’

How does Fred sum up his time in North America?

‘There’s twenty times more opportunities there but also twenty times more artists looking for a place in the sun. Though there are far more developed structures over there for artists to build a career: folk conferences, folk DJ lists, song contests and promoters ready to help the interesting performers find their feet.’

Fred won the Ploughshares Song-Writing Contest in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania and was chosen from a field of 380 songwriters for an “Official Showcase” at the North American Folk Alliance Conference.

‘The conferences and contests are a strange environment to play your heart out in, but they certainly helped kick start things for me over there and I made a lot of friends doing them.’

‘There are far fewer festivals here but I think the ones we have are better. They are more about getting people involved and less about providing an altar for the worship of a handful of artists.’

Back home and Fred has slipped easily back into gigging and festivals. In late April he was one of the headline acts at St Albans where he played a ‘no repeat’ weekend over several main stage performances, involving a number of confederates and guest artists.

‘It was nice to go St Albans and be billed for five shows on the main stage to an audience that knows me. I really felt free to play the full breadth of my repertoire from the comic to the melancholy.’

‘In most festivals and gigs the sets are short and the temptation is to play my own ‘hits and memories’ but in the long run there’s no risk or growth in that. And it underestimates an audience.’

‘It also gave me a chance to rope in friends like Penelope Swales and Chris Gillespie so that I could present a different aspect of my work each gig and experience the joy and edginess of playing with new collaborators.’

‘Having done a lot of solo gigging over the last three years, that felt great.’

Having survived three years of living in Washington, interspersed with touring and gigging, Fred has collated his experiences, observations and a dash of US history and produced the ‘Texas’ album. It’s a meandering journey that’s the epitome of the performer himself: from the frivolous and light-hearted to the emotive and emotional.

Or the purely wry and observational, as in ‘God Bless America’:

Detox boys watch botox girls
Meet for sushi on 7th Avenue

Fred sets out across the country this winter to play a string of dates (mostly with Liz Frencham) to promote ‘Texas’, following a couple of preliminary shows in home town Canberra over the Mothers Day weekend. The pulling power of Fred in his own neck of the woods is palpable: the Saturday night gig at Tilley’s is sold out a couple of weeks beforehand, and he still manages to pack an overflow gig in a church hall the following afternoon, with a 3pm kick-off and on Mother’s Day, no less.

‘I wanted to do a second gig where people could bring their kids. After three years in USA, I came back and all my friends have got kids.’

Given the demographic, Fred promises to tone down a few racier lyrics for the second show (“I’ll do the American versions!”). But he has at least one little slip up and has to quickly correct a lyric to, “This ship is going down”.

And there was proof positive that the word “jolly” can quite nicely substitute for another more expressive and emphatic adjective.

To underscore the appeal that Fred has among Canberrans, it was noticeable that some faces from the Saturday gig had turned up for more on Sunday afternoon. One punter held her arm out to be tagged by the door dragon and offered: ‘You might as well put the stamp in the same spot as last night!’

One day I’ll calibrate a scale that can record the response an artist gets by measuring the attention they command by their presence and stagecraft. It will be gauged by the ‘Pin-Drop-O-Meter’. In Fred’s case, it just takes one man, one softly played guitar, and the gentle opening lyrics of ‘Into My Room’ to drop the needle down to zero. And we’re talking a room with more than its fair share of very small children with balloons and other distractions.

Several songs later and the twilight zone factor returns as the crowd seems to instinctively and intuitively join in on mass on the first chorus of a song. Then the penny drops, and the reverentially-bowed heads remind me, that they are all singing off the same hymn sheet: lyric sheets with choruses to a selection of Fred Smith songs which went out around the crowd before the gig.

And in the ecclesiastical surrounds of St John’s Church Hall, it’s all the more appropriate when Fred later announces, ‘God Bless America: that’s hymn number four’.

Playing songs of American history and culture to Australian audiences. How does that play out then? And how does it compare to playing to US audiences?

‘American audiences responded very warmly and I learned not to underestimate them. But in the end I feel Australian audiences really understand my songs- the language, the humour.’

‘By the end of my time there I had over an album’s worth of songs written about America. The more I sang about them the more they responded but that’s not unusual; people respond to music they can relate to.’

‘Australian audiences seem to be really responding to the ‘Texas’ songs notwithstanding their American focus. Maybe they just enjoy a yarn and I certainly came home with a few of them.’

‘But also from our immersion in American TV and music we all have a strong sense of America combined with an appetite to take the piss out of Americans. That’s definitely where I started from but I like to think I got beyond that in the end because it’s a beautiful and complex country full of spirited people.’

There’s a palpable sense of the landscape political in ‘Texas’, reflective possibly of the fact that Fred arrived in the US the day after the 2004 US presidential election, then left in late 2007, as Barak Obama’s star was on the rise, arriving back in Australia in time to vote in the 2007 federal election.

‘[America is] an amazingly diverse country and at the moment, divided and traumatised. The Iraq intervention has polarised the body politic viscerally and everyone you meet there is passionate about it one way or the other.’

As a musical development exercise, America was undeniably beneficial for Fred: ‘I have come back from the US with a stronger sense of myself as an artist. Having played the same stages as the likes of James Keelaghan and Dave Francey, I know my writing is up there.’

And right about now, his music is out there. Fred Smith’s tour kicks off with a screening of ‘Bougainville Sky’ (a film about his peace-keeping work on Bougainville from 1999 to 2003) in Margaret River, WA on 13 June, and then it’s on to gigs in all points west thereafter.

The aforementioned ‘American Guitar’ song is one that wraps up the ‘Texas’ album, and indeed, Fred’s two Canberra shows, with a deft little coda on his time in the US:

Made a name a little fame now wealth
Made some friends and learned a lot about myself
Good enough reasons to come this far
Just to play on an American guitar

For more details and tour dates: www.fredsmith.com.au

Fred Smith plays at the Braidwood Folk Club on Thursday 19 June. Doors 7pm. $15/$10.

Hello and welcome again to your Weekly Wot’s Wot in Folkus & around the traps…

ed…. the past week’s headlines in Folkus
PORNOGRAPHIC ROCK FORMATIONS FOUND ON MARS! … POLICE SEIZE LANDER’S CAMERAS!
NASA DENIES HISTORY OF SERIAL ABUSE OF YOUNG HEAVENLY BODIES!
KEVIN & BRENDAN LABEL MARS "REVOLTING" and "DISGUSTING"!
MALCOLM DISAGREES WITH BRENDAN!
MALCOLM’S TWO PICTURES OF MARS DOUBLE IN VALUE!
those persistent scaremongers & harbingers of DOOM, the wowsers and insurance companies, are taking over our world….
AND politicians prove they know nothing about art or science… nothing new at all really

INDEX
1. This Week in Folkus
2. Next Week in Folkus
3. Parish Notices
4. The Comics
5. Sport

1.

This Week In Folkus – THREE BIG SHOWS and they’re all BEST quality to the core …
The Folkus Room, (operates out of The Serbian Cultural Centre & Club) 5 Heard St. MAWSON ACT .. eastern side of Southlands Centre and just off Athllon Drive.. CHECK OUT OUR NEW MAPS PAGE…. www.thefolkus.org.au and follow the links

Friday 30 May .. King Curly and The Doomsday Piano fresh from a very successful National Folk Festival, this fabulous band was picked up to tour with K D Lang…. ’nuff said …… PLUS Jordan Best

Saturday 31 May .. Sat Arvo Jazz – 2pm to 5pm … with Judi Pearce & The Arrangement

Sunday 1 June .. The Yearlings; PLUS Doctor Stovepipe

2. …….
Next Week In Folkus … MORE GREAT AFFORDABLE ENTERTAINMENT
Friday 6 June .. Queen Juanita & Her Zydeco Cowboys ….. there will be dancing !!
Sunday 8 June .. Harry Manx & Yeshe Reiners …. bookings going fast

3.
Parish Notices…….. who said Canberra hibernates in winter????

3a. The Folkus Room is offering annual subscriptions. Click HERE for details… WE NEED YOU!

3b. ON STAGE NEXT WEEK – Sunday (dress rehearsals) to Thursday ….Make sure you see the Irish Community Players latest production of Bernard Farrell’s "therapeutic" comedy, "I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell", which will be on at the Canberra Irish Club, 6 Parkinson St, Weston, from 2nd to 5th June at 8 pm. Tickets cost $20 for Adults and $15 for Concessions, and bookings will be available at the club in a few week’s time on 62887451. Don’t miss the play that helped launch Liam Neeson’s career…

3c. Folkus on Blues is about to get happening. If you are a bluesy performer we would like to meet with you or your representative at The Folkus Room (Serbian Club, Heard St, Mawson) at midday on Saturday 31st May. If you can’t attend, or arrange a representative, and would like to be part of the Folkus initiative, please email me to that effect and I’ll see that your act is included. It would help too if band reps could come armed with a list of available dates – your diaries ladies and gentlemen.

3d. The notice with depth & C21…. Arlo Guthrie is on Friday week (13 June) at The Canberra Southern Cross Club. There are still a few seats left…. phone 02 6283 7200 for bookings

3e. There’s a very good reason to go along to The Front Cafe in Lynham on Saturday night (31st of May – 8pm). You’ll get to hear the new and scintillating Moonlight Rooftop Revellers (don’t try to say that too many times out loud!). A love child of Dr. Stovepipe, who as you may know are the very talented Ed Radclyffe, Pablo Shopen and Jim Sharrock. To concoct an elixir for a Moonlight Rooftop Reveller, one only needs to extract a Jim (temporarily, as he attends to other doctorly duties) and add a Krista (Krista Schmeling formerly of the Honeybells). You could imagine the jazzy, westerny, swingy, gospelly, old-timey possibilities – OR you could go along and hear it for yourselves!

4.
Sometime in the future, George Bush has a heart attack and dies. He goes to hell where the Devil is waiting for him. "I don’t know what to do here," says the Devil. "You’re on my list but I have no room for you, but you definitely have to stay here, so I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ve got three people here who weren’t quite as bad as you. I’ll let one of them go, but you have to take their place. I’ll even let YOU decide who leaves." George thought that sounded pretty good, so he agreed. The devil opened the first room. In it was Ted Kennedy and a large pool of water. He kept resurfacing over and over and over, gasping for air. Such was his fate in hell. "No!" George said. "I don’t think so. I’m not a good swimmer and I don’t think I could do that all day long."! The devil led him to the next room. In it was Tony Blair with a sledgehammer and a room full of rocks. All he did was swing that hammer, time after time after time, and more rocks appeared. "No! I’ve got this problem with my shoulder. I would be in constant agony if all I could do was break rocks all day!" commented George. The devil opened a third door. In it, George saw Bill Clinton lying naked on the floor with his arms staked over his head and his legs staked in spread eagle pose. Bent over him was Monica Lewinsky doing her thing. George Bush looked at this in disbelief for a while and finally said, "Yeah, I can handle this." The devil smiled and said… "Monica, you’re free to go!"

Child
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new
Whose name you meditate–
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little
Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical
Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star………… Sylvia Plath

Stay Well & Truly Silly Gentle Folk

Bill Arnett
The Folkus Room
Canberra’s Acoustic Preference
61-2-62627265
0407 434 469
"No Strangers Come Here – Just Friends We Have Not Yet Met"