Finding Borneo

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.

How well he would do nowadays on “Britain’s Got Talent” (or its Australasian equivalents).

Link (with Borneo track):

http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/glorious_days/about/a_musical_year

Denis Dutton RIP

If you are going to be any use to organisations and individuals in a multitude of different fields, you need to know something concerning just about everything.

So for many years I’ve started my day with the Arts & Letters Daily website – http://www.aldaily.com/. Each day I read several of the articles, essays and reviews they have selected from a multitude of newspapers and journals from around the world on every subject under the sun. And once a morning I print off one item for closer scrutiny.

I have never known who was behind it, but the death last week of Professor Denis Dutton, and the swag of obituaries on every continent, has revealed all.

Denis Dutton was born in Los Angeles in 1944. He took a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1966, joined the Peace Corps and went to India, where he learned to play the sitar. After taking his PhD back in California, he lectured in American universities and started a journal, “Philosophy and Literature”.

In 1984 he moved with his family to New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and it was from there that he launched Arts & Letters Daily on the internet in 1998. It now has some 3.7 million page views per month.

“A few years ago,” he told an interviewer, “Bill Gates was boasting that we'll soon have sensors which will turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the paintings we like when we walk into a room. How boring! The hell with our preexisting likes. Let's expand ourselves intellectually.”

Dutton was renowned as a continuous fountain of ideas. Another of them was the “Bad Writing Award” for academic works. Perhaps this might be revived.

Do you visit http://www.aldaily.com/ ?