Bush School by Peter O'Brien

Author:Peter O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2020-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

18

The children loved music and singing, and most could carry a tune. By the second half of that first year we had developed a repertoire.

Each evening, Tom and Debbie would sit with their large family on the veranda at home in the dusk or starlight, all singing along together. They enjoyed creating harmonies and tonal effects.

The Teegan family, with Lindie and Susie, spent most Sundays attending church, where their lay preacher dad, Vic, would conduct the singing. These two girls knew lots of songs and were happy to sing them for their classmates.

But all the children had favourite songs and suggested tunes for our school to learn. Many were of the country-and-western genre and didn’t particularly appeal to me, but I was happy for the kids to be singing with enjoyment—if the songs were about faithful old dogs and unrideable horses, then so be it.

I loved music. Tunes ran along in my head as an accompaniment to my thoughts. But I couldn’t play an instrument, not even the wooden recorder to which I’d been introduced at teachers’ college. I could carry a tune in the right key, though, and I had a trusty tuning fork to give us all a middle C starter. I could read enough music to nut out the starting note of a song and, generally, work out the tune. And the wonderful ABC School Broadcasts ran several music programs, including choral singing, each week. So, I thought, our tiny school could have a music curriculum of reasonable sorts.

Early on I decided the school needed both a radio and a record-player. The former was easy to obtain: I’d brought back a battery radio from that first Easter break in Sydney. But the record-player had to wait until a request to the parents was answered. The Parents and Citizens Group arranged a little raffle, and with the funds raised we purchased a good-quality, battery-operated LP player.

Each morning the two Grade Ones listened to the ‘Kindergarten of the Air’ broadcast, hearing much that I couldn’t bring them otherwise, and they both found it great fun. Once a week the ABC introduced new songs to learn. The radio presenters would break a song into phrases, send a model performance of each phrase from the studio musicians, and then encourage the remote children to repeat these with the help of their teacher. Gradually each song would be built up phrase by phrase, and by the broadcast’s end the kids could generally perform it. Not all these songs became favourites, but they were easily remembered and would be sung with the minimum of encouragement.

A child would sometimes request that a favourite song be taught to the whole group and, if all agreed, we would add such tunes to the repertoire. By July the younger and older children each had a set they preferred. But they all sang, with delight, about fifteen songs in common.

With limited music in most of their homes, school was the children’s main chance to hear something different and to extend their insights into the many forms that music might take.

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