The Story

​Original songs were written in and about the Hawkesbury River region, an area on the northwestern outskirts of today’s Sydney – known as Dyarubbin to the Darug people.   Many of these songs were only known aurally – often written and performed by illiterate troubadours performing in houses and pubs. These songs have largely been lost, such as itinerant tailor Myles Doyle’s ballads about the area, including his ‘capital lines on Yarrow Monday’s Lagoon’ (Karskens, 405. Known now as Yarramundi).

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However, the written record does tell us about the huge amount of music-making that occurred in this area in the 1820s and 1830s. A  fertile agricultural region, with Windsor and Richmond both key river crossing points, meant that colonial settlers rapidly set about seizing land, farming it successfully, and spending their increasing leisure time listening to music in pubs, at parties and weddings, and at the very popular horse race meetings. Copious alcohol consumption and feasting fuelled musical revelry. 

As Alfred Smith described in his memoirs, to publicise the opening of the punt across the Hawkesbury he organises a ‘bullock roast’, with food and drink, including an 18 gallon keg of beer. The party went all night until 9am.  ‘We had plenty of dancing. The fiddle and the tambourine were playing, which sounded something beautiful on the water at night…’ A pub called ‘Butchers’ Arms’ at Clarendon ‘John Bridger, an old friend of mine, who was a good fiddler, came out the last races while I was hotel keeping and played for me. During the nights we had some great step dancing – it was all the fashion in those days – and many a fight as well.’ (p. 32)

Most of the accounts are of instrumental music – Irish and English jigs, reels, and schottisches played on violin, accordion and tambourine, and for dancing. There are several instrumentalists who recur time and time again in the historical record. Many of these players have memorable names, indicating their colourful performance personas and physical attributes. A fair proportion seems to be blind or sight impaired, ie:  Jimmy the Fiddler,  One-eyed Loftus, Mulgoa Joe, Blind Tommie, Davey the Barber, George the Boot Closer, Old Pugh (another blind fiddler with amazing face contortions), Old Slater (a crippled fiddler, who wore putties on his legs) and Harry the Piper, or Hail’s Harry. Some of the names of the musicians suggest that they were not white, and very likely Aboriginal (such as Springwood Jacky), or maybe African-American in origin such as Black Simon (the tambourine player) and Gipsy Oliver (the fiddler).

Many of the accounts of the music-making give vivid descriptions of these individuals’ performance styles. As James T Ryan recounted:

Two fiddlers were brought from Windsor the night before. Blind Tommy and Blind Loftus, the latter being so-called on account of having only one eye, and who had, perhaps the ugliest face ever seen. He was badly pock-marked; his nose was flat, and level with his cheek-bones, being what you would term an apology for a nose. This was the man chosen to amuse the people at the time, and well he could do it. It was very funny to see him and…the tambourine player, in George Freeman's tent at the Windsor race meetings, making grimaces that would frighten a cat. He could play the fiddle well, was a splendid dancer, and could sing a good Irish song. It was surprising that such a splendid voice could belong to the owner of such a mouth and face. (‘Early Hawkesbury Recollections’, p. 9)

Elsewhere, the music and the musicians was remembered fondly as ornamental  delights and charming music for dancing at important events. For instance, at a wedding, some ‘young folk’ ‘revelled in ‘“bating the flure” to the inspiring strains of Gipsy Oliver’s fiddle and the dulcet jingle of Black Simon’s tambourine’ (‘Elsie Moore’, p. 32).

The Hawkesbury region was also an intensely violent place for Aboriginal people, even by the standards of early colonial Australia. Organised military raids and ad hoc settler violence was responsible for the murder of women and children and for the dawn raids on Aboriginal camps.  Following the hunting party led by led by Magistrate Cox, and funded and supported by Governor Macquarie in 1816 (Gapps, p. 251), the bodies of  four murdered Aboriginal men were hung for public display at Rawlinson Corner, at the beginning of the Bell’s Line of Road (Gapps, pp. 109, 112, 249). Most of the perpetrators of this violence ‘some of them young sons of Richmond and Ebenezer constables who accompanied the campaign as ‘white guides’ – received grants of land at the Hawkesbury’. Not only were local white people directly involved in the murder of Aboriginal people, but their deeds were rewarded through generous land grants (p. 251).

While the killings had declined by the 1820s, it is very hard to imagine how such a violent past – only one decade prior – could not affect the settler-colonial cultural life and imagination in this part of the colony. Perpetrators were not only walking freely around the streets of Windsor, but were boasting of ‘how many blacks had been killed’ on their land, and had clearly benefitted from their deeds (Gapps, p. 259). How did music and its cultural milieu reflect this? Did it – along with drinking – provide an outlet for buried dark thoughts and memories? Did it serve to cover up and mask this history? Was it in some ways an extension of it?

While violence and dispossession dominated the relationship between black and white Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury, there were also some examples of relationships, interdependence and even the sharing of music. While it is important not to overstate how much this happened, it seems that some colonialists learnt Aboriginal songs, and certainly Aboriginal people sang songs in English and played European instruments  (Karskens, pp. 318, 44).

There are also stories of cross-cultural jam sessions: combinations of classical Darug music merging with Irish tunes and traditions. One intriguing and colourful story is particularly notable (once again a reminiscence not a contemporary report, so should be viewed sceptically). The narrator James ‘Toby’ Ryan describes the Killarney races of 1833 as a great meeting place of people, and a carnival of culture, including skittles, boxing and puppet shows, as well as the actual racing, and much music such as the fiddle of Blind Loftus and a tambourine player. There were also a large amount of Aboriginal people present and camping there (the site of the Killarney races being a traditional corroboree ground – so often the case that European ceremonies happened on the place of preexisting Aboriginal ceremonies). After several days of apparently carnivalesque revelry, and led by the so-called ‘king of the tribe’ Mulgoa Joe, several people made their way home. This is the description:

Numbering about twenty whites and

the same number of  blacks, the former being

composed of fiddlers, actors, old hangers-on from

Penrith and Yarra Monday's Lagoon. They

wended their way through Windsor, and as the

cattle were facing homewards they travelled well,

thence via the Chain-of-Ponds, and reached Pat

Harper's, of Allan Water, on the Richmond and

Penrith road, about noon. There they unyoked

and watered the cattle, made tea. and the whole

of the broken tucker was taken out and distributed

among blacks and whites. Trunks of turkeys and

geese, portions of sucking pigs, and ham bones,

were all cleared up, and every bottle and keg was

drained. The blacks gave a Corroboree, and the

fiddlers played and sang " Killarney," after which

the bullocks were yoked up again and started on

the straight road. The guides left them, after

being paid, and wended their way home to South

Creek. (‘Early Hawkesbury Recollections’, p. 10)

References:

Laura Case,  ‘Between the Parlour and the Pub: A Social History of Violin Playing in Australia Over the Long Nineteenth Century’, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2023.

‘Early Hawekesbury Recollections collected by ‘Yeldap’, Windsor and Richmond Gazette, 18 July 1896, pp. 9-10.

Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the Early Colony, 1788-1817 (Sydney: NewSouth, 2018).

Grace Karksens, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2020).

‘Dan Mayne: His Reminiscences’, National Advocate, 15 July 1911, p. 6.

‘Elsie Moore: A tale of old colonial days: by “Warrene”’, Australian Town and Country Journal, 3 March 1888, p 32.