SYDNEY SIDE WITH JANET PARR Seeking something to sing about

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33942, 8 September 1975, Page 6

SYDNEY SIDE WITH JANET PARR Seeking something to sing about

For some reason Sydney has never been much of a place to make a song about — speaking literally. But a Sydney television station is now making a valiant, if rather self-conscious effort to do something about it.

The station's signing-off sequence includes dissolving shots of the Opera House, the Bridge, city streets, girls in bikinis on beaches and boats, while someone with a Tony Bennett type of voice sings about "My City of Sydney.”

But somehow it is not a song that seems to me to be good “top of the pops” stuff. It took a national disaster for a song about Darwin to top the charts. And then it was a pair of long-expatriate New Zealanders, Bill and Boyd, who did it with a song about Cyclone Tracy and how Santa “never made it into Darwin” because a big wind came and blew the town away. Other Australian cities would doubtless prefer to do without that kind of fame. Goodbye Melbourne Brisbane and Perth bring nothing to mind in song; Adelaide has only a jolly little singing commercial for a South Australian brand of biscuits. Melbourne did have “Goodbye Melbourne Town” but that lays itself wide open to a lot .of funny remarks.

Generally speaking it is the little places of Australia that seem to turn up in the songs of Australia, the dusty little outback towns along the railroad and the wallaby track, the Wombat Creeks and Last Hope Gullies, the pubs, camps and shearing sheds. And Gundagai, of course, as Gundagai is proud these days to tell you although it also started its song cycle as another of those places along the track. They would cross paths on the way to Sydney or Melbourne, do in their

shearing cheques, meet the girl friends still, hopefully, waiting for them. They made .a song about Lazy Hany’s on the road to Gundagai and another about Flash Jack who came from Gundagai. And here we were on the road to Gundagai, blue gums, Murrumbidgee and all, a few old fashioned shacks still there among the new houses springing up along Jack O’Hagan’s winding tracks. We shared the road with the container trucks, the inter-city coaches and the tourists. Flash Harry’s, with its inducements to linger and blow the shearing cheque, is gone. But no doubt if you sign the visitors’ book at one of the clubs along the way they will let you get through as much and more on the poker machines. Tuckerbox The road to Gundagai is the Hume Highway, the main road still linking Sydney and Melbourne and, with its twolane and potholed stretches, not all that much better the cynics say than when Hume and Hovell, Sturt and Mitchell first went through more than 130 years ago. But the dog still sits on the tuckerbox at Five Mile Creek, a rawboned dog but a good worker by the look of him as Frank Rusconi sculpted him as Gundagai’s 1932 monument to the pioneers. An unknown teamster put his dog into verse more than 90 years ago. Jack Moses, wine salesman, traveller and poet, polished the story into his “Nine Miles from Gundagai.” Dad and Dave made that song famous in the pre-war radio serial based on Steele Rudd’s “Selection” stories although his selection was hundreds of miles away in Queensland. Then came Jack O’Hagan’s “Road to Gundagai,” a natural for homesick Australians anywhere whether they came from Gundagai or not. The American wartime invasion produced a rather lessei known ditty about what hap-

pens when a boy from Alabama meets a girl from Gundagai (One hopes she became a war bride). Still, they probably had less to sing about back along the toad to Sydney in Berrima, for instance, where a trust is now making a sympathetic restoration of the little old town, whose early prisoners bitterly christened the prison "Bury Me Gaol.” Nearer Sydney again they get their inspiration from a different kind of music these days. Around Moss Vale a thriving women's basketball league has teams named after pop groups such as Sherbet and Skyhooks and another called the Beatlettes. They start their basketball young with the under eights. And they show a pretty wit with their teams’ names—the Razzles, the O.K.s, St Trinians, Red Peppers, Klute, Misfits, Atticus, Bright Sparks, Birdy Birds, Daredevils, Tiffany, Super Roos, Nymphettes, Gladbags and Gadabouts.