NEW SOUTH WALES JAZZ ARCHIVE

‘A great day in Sydney, 10th October 1999

Elder Man’s Lane, BLUE’S POINT, SYDNEY.

(HENRY LAWSON, 100 YEARS AGO)

I have been wading through two vast volumes of Henry Lawson’s complete works, story after story, spanning the planet and decades of time; every story a gem. Some now considered maudlin, but factual nevertheless. Perhaps our hearts are hardening and our romance with the country dwindling.

There are eight stories of Elder Man’s Lane, Lawson’s setting in the harbourside suburb of Blue’s Point, and of all places in Australia, this beautiful promontory is familiar to me as the site of the staged photograph of a mass of jazz musicians in 1999.

The area is steep, the pretty little suburb piled up the hill that is the subject of Lawson’s  essays; a very wealthy suburb now, but a poverty-nest of last resort 100 years ago, and the higher up the hill, the least accessible and destitute.

I parked somewhere up there and walked down to the photo site. A long row of staging was being set up near the water’s edge, framed by the symmetrical backdrop of the magnificent Bridge. Old blokes and one or two young women were drifting down the slope of rich green turf. The sky was overall blue, the air still and warm, the wavelets flashing in the brilliant sunlight: A Great Day In Sydney, 10th October, 1999.

A quaint idea, to rival a photo ‘A Great Day in Harlem’  in 1958. In terms of numbers and setting, certainly a success, but unfortunately parochial, as virtually none of Australia’s prominent musicians from outside Sydney attended, to my surprise, considering the effort expended by the NSWJA.

What would Lawson have thought of the occasion? His concern was the minutiae of the suburb, the busy harbourside wharves (now gone, in favour of landscaping), the poor struggling population of Elder Man’s Lane. The view still magnificent, he would have agreed, and surely he would have been impressed by the Bridge, and horrified by the insultingly imposing block of flats desecrating that beautiful spot. And the assembling musicians? Well, a very peculiar gathering.

My young son Rupert was living in Sydney at the time, and as he is a musician, and busy with it, I conned him into joining me in the photo. A liberty, but there were many others: surely a quarter of those gathered were blow-ins, and the remainder all either drummers or ‘vocalists’. Except for one or two, the famous faces were all absent.

Maybe I got the wrong message, having traveled down from Queensland. My brief appearance at the beginning of the film of the event was the only un-named participant; strange: everyone else had a nice sub-title. However, there we are, prominent on the back row of the school photo, me weird and beardy, Rupert outrageously blond, young, and shaven, but well-qualified as a jazz musician in any company.

It was a very gentle occasion, most civilised. The gathered participants were well-behaved and orderly, and no-one was drunk. 200 musicians and no-one was drunk, and this was twenty years ago, when the principle ingredient of any gig was alcohol. The day was entirely a success. An orderly assembly of smiling faces, a spectacular harbour-scape, an event and a wind-up and dispersal, without hitch or friction. A credit to the colony.

Now, at my kitchen table, a cup of tea, and Lawson’s essay number VI, the very same setting, 100 years ago. But all the actors gone, the story-teller too, though the landscape is unchanged, and the water sparkles as ever. I would hesitate to excise those in the photo who are now dead, but there will be many gaps, twenty years on, and soon only the photo will remain, and only the stories.