Together with my colleague Tony Locantro, I’ve been helping
the National Museum of Australia in the run-up to a major exhibition,
Glorious
Days, focused on Australia in 1913. That was the year that the capital city,
Canberra, was conceived. It opened today.
Initially I was commissioned to research and write an essay on music in
Australia in that year. Then they decided to explore the possibility of
complementing the images and objects of that part of the show with a sound-track of relevant recordings.
So Tony and I found and compiled a tracklist, including the
statuesque contralto Dame Clara Butt, the great Irish tenor John McCormack, the
Australian music hall artiste Florrie Forde ‒
and located the recordings.
Job done. Or so we thought. But one of the curators in
Canberra, Anthea Gunn, said: “What about Borneo Gardiner?”
Borneo who? Well, it turns out that he was a whistler, a
“siffleur”. A really brilliant, musical one, who earned his living in
vaudeville – first in his home country, New Zealand, then in Australia in 1913, and finally settling in England before the First World War.
Finding a recording by him was not so easy. We thought we
had tracked one down at Syracuse University in New York, but they didn’t have
it. Eventually he turned up in the library of the University of California
Santa Barbara. And in fine condition.
So visitors to the exhibition will be among the first to
hear this extraordinary talent in nearly a hundred years.
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