Singing To the View
Why a theme song for a centre of service learning? That’s a good question. Maybe it’s me just wanting to safeguard this notion that the arts should always be a presence in and around service endeavour. They can wonderfully enhance, inform, unpack and capture aspects of the whole service experience which can sometimes be missed in the tangible world of spreadsheets, balances, statistics and the purely analytical. Art’s willingness to dive into the pool of the intangible through creative expression can actually provide a powerful voice to the disempowered, misunderstood and invisible.
It can also bring people together through the sharing of that selfsame expression.
Last week in Tingha, I asked Uncle Alex to contribute didgeridoo to Singing To the View, the song I wrote with the Centre’s opening in mind. I wanted the song to have an Aboriginal sensibility, namely that gentle and timely/timeless passing on of grander stuff, stories and spirit onto those who follow in our tracks. We were outside the Stonewoman sacred site, having paid a respectful and reflective visit, and our hearts and heads were abuzz with creation, concepts and colours. The natural world was being joyously noisy, and Alex indicated that he wanted this outback chorus included in the recording.
I showed him Callum Wills’ evocative film clip and let the musicians uncluttered nuance, Jesse Wright’s unaffected voice and my more huskier, slightly world-weary contribution combine with the aria of insects and birds. Uncle Alex watched it through, pensively. And as Callum’s stunning panorama shot (just before the end credits, taken from his drone high above Booroomba Rocks) highlighted the blanket of fluffy clouds and the pyramid-like points of mountains piercing through them, I turned to Uncle Alex and clumsily asked him what he thought of it all. Words were unnecessary and I was a little ashamed I uttered some. He was in tears and palpably touched by something that had been said, sung and seen.
He reached for his didg, proceeded to negotiate through some invisible haze in the mind, then deftly transcribed the contours of those mountains at dawn into the notes emanating from his instrument. Jesse’s younger brother, Oscar, was there with his laptop, dutifully capturing each take as Alex’s impassioned improvisation encompassed the sudden commentary of birds and the pulsing rhythm of insects, weaving them into a musical painting of the horizon he saw in the clip. I’ve never experienced anything quite so profoundly transformative in the more traditional recording studio.
Except perhaps when Jesse laid down his vocal track.
I nearly wept then too, as there was so much about his innocent, honest rendition that somehow perfectly relayed the meaning of the words on my lyric sheet. (When I play the songs to the Darkinjung Barker and Ngarralingayil Barker primary students I presently work with, many become mesmerised by and comment on the mellifluous quality of his singing. They sense a kindred spirit I suspect.) I recall Jesse, with his eyes customarily shut and that holiday hair periodically ushered away from his face, singing my own lyrics back to me, about how adults sometimes hide in words, words, words, clumsily over-explaining the wonder of life rather than learning to “let things just be”.
Jesse suggested I not film the clip at my default location, that spiritual landscape I love: Whitegum Lookout in the heart of the Warrumbungles, where we often take in and ask questions to sunsets. Jesse often sits on a randomly selected rock and unguardedly ‘sings to the view’, to his ancestors and his Country waiting there before him. No. Instead, he got me at up at 3.45am to experience the polar opposite of dawn, to sit on a Booroomba rock and sing alongside him, as the sun slowly opened the classroom to the new day which proceeded with its incredibly profound instruction.
And today’s was to share these songs (as I did the lead vocals - a first for me in recordings) of experience and wonder, irrespective of age. Older folk must pass on that baton - and often like doing so as it gives them an audience - but they must also listen and learn from the kids commencing their run with it. Besides, ‘older folk’ will often run more confidently into the challenges of later life when affected by that excitement, energy (contagious it is) and naive wisdom of youth.
This is what I want for the Australian Centre of Service Learning. To witness a yearning, spirited, and organic service learning baton of good, grand and great stuff, being passed back and forth between ‘runners’ who will never giving a fig about age, ability, bank accounts, beliefs, persuasions, politics, prejudice and status determined largely by where you were lucky or unlucky enough to be born. I often say the best example of service endeavour occurs when you cannot tell who is serving whom. Or who is passing that baton - or song - ever onward. Or receiving it.
Yeah, yeah. I know. Too many words, H. Perhaps not enough music.
So listen to the song please. Check the lay of the land. Reflect on it. And then maybe play back some beautiful ideas to me. I don’t know if Uncle Alex will ever read this. Wi Fi can be bloody dodgy in the bush. I may never know exactly what produced those tears - both Alex’s and mine. But I am deeply grateful for whatever brought Alex and Jesse and Callum and Oscar and the other fine Junk Sculptors and you dear listener to share in the 7 or so minutes of this special music that is celebrating the start of something new.
H, 17 April, 2022 (Easter Sunday)
