REEDY RIVER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 923, 18 April 1957, Page 4

REEDY RIVER

N contrast with grand epera, there is flourishing in Australia at present a kind of entertainment that seems to be found nowhere else in the world-a cross between a folk opera; a ballad opera and a musical play. Two of the most successful of these entertainments have been Reedy: River and Under the

Coolibah Tree, both written by the Australian playwright Dick Diamond. They were staged in Sydney and performed by non-professional casts. Some of the songs from the first of these, Reedy River, can be heard in Theatre of Music from YAs, 3YZ and 4YZ on Saturday, April 27. Dick Diamond based Reedy River on some of the best of Australian folk songs. They are taken from the days when squatters, swaggers and bushmen thrived, and the campfire, the dance and the bar-room were natural places for singing. There were shearers’ songs, songs about transportation, love songs and Australian versions of folk songs that originally came from overseas. A member of the audience at Reedy River, Ken Hallam, described his reaction to the production in this way: "I suppose that if I had not been pestered by members of the cast who were friends of mine, I would never have seen Reedy River. It’s funny how reticent most Australians (myself included, I must confess) feel about seeing and hearing the characters of our own country in epics about Australia. Australia to us often seems to lack the romance and colour of other countries, whose histories are forced with monotonous regularity down our throats, often in a very subtle and palatable way per medium of novels and films. That’s how I felt about it all anyway. I was very wrong. . . For here in Dick Diamond’s play and in the authentic Australian bush songs that wend their way through it as surely and calmly as Reedy River (if it_really exists!) you will meet living people . . . squatters, swaggies, country schoolmarms, shearers, and, of ‘course, the eternal lovers. You will be carried by them to their campfires; to the country hop at the old schoolhouse, the Reedy River pub, and even into the shearing sheds. . ." The songs that listeners will hear include "Click Go the Shears," perhaps the most famous of all Australian bush songs, which introduces , the famous Bushwhacker’s Band of lagerphone, bush bass, harmonica and guitar. Another favourite is "On the Banks of the Condamine," with its music restored by the composer Margaret Sutherland to words by Vance Palmer, It tells the familiar folk song story of the girl who must follow her lover, to the war or to sea; but here all she wants is to become a shearer. The last song in the selection will be a swagman’s lament, ‘Reedy Lagoon."