A MUSICIAN HITS OUT.

Evening Star, Issue 23701, 8 October 1940, Page 6

A MUSICIAN HITS OUT.

Sir Thomas Bkkcham has not minced words iu )iis criticism of Australians. It is made with abandon. One surmises that the concert tour which the distinguished musician has conducted in their country did not draw quite the attendances which his fame and the quality of them deserved. That is not surprising in war time, when England itself is proving a bad place for musicians. Australians will resent the criticisms, first, because Australians are sensitive, and again, because the reproaches were too sweeping to be just. One remembers the outcry' that was raised, thirty years ago, when another visitor, of a few weeks’ slay in their country, put his opinions, which were mostly appreciative, into a book. Sir John Foster’s offence seems to have consisted in little more than in questioning whether the easy-going and pleasure-loving characteristics of Australians might not be carried by them too far for their good, ami in putting the query: “What are the Australians intent upon doing to make Australia the great country they all say it will be, some time?”

Sir Thomas Beccham describes the people who have been his hosts as “ sublimely self-satisfied and complacent.” It is an old charge, made also against New Zealanders, not to be scoffed at on either side of the Tasman but thought seriously about. He is right, no doubt, to liud it unwise of Australians to boast so much of the potentialities of their country and leave it as empty as they do. A higher birthrate, in New Zealand also, would he a protection. But the size of Australia is far from a true measure of its habitability. Ttyo-fiftbs of its area lies within the tropics and more than a third has a rainfall of less than ten inches a year. in his references to the intellectual side the famous conductor is most scathing and most unfair. Ju his anger he dismisses the Commonwealth as “ the most backward part,” in that respect, of the British Empire, “ contributing nothing to the world’s fund of creative literature, philosophy, art, drama, and music. I visited live great cities, and iu not one of them is a theatre at which a play was running.” War and the pictures are both bad for the drama, and iu Australia, with its far separated cities, it is loss easy to keep dramatic companies together than in countries that are more closely populated, The poets and writers, even the musicians, who live in Australia may not count much in the world’s art, but good pictures are being produced there, and it is surprising how often, among the Empire’s chief influences in a wide variety of intellectual spheres, one meets a man or a woman who was Australian-born. Singers and musical performers born there make a large family. The art record of America was not resounding in its first one hundred years. The fact that Australia should be torn by a party political conflict in the hour of the Empire’s danger is humiliating, and there is too much party politics still in this country. A musician rather loss distinguished than Sir Thomas Beecham, Dr Thomas Wood, who wrote, without offence, in his ‘ Cobbers,’ perhaps the most revealing of all books about Australia, has this to say after making a sharp criticism: “Here is another generalisation which is far away from the whole truth, though near enough to a part of it.” That phrase might well have qualified most of Sir Thomas’s observations.