I was reminded of this paper, and I mentioned it, so I’ve dug it out and here it is. I’ve read but not revised it, and it’s as it was delivered at the Victorian Chapter Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia, on 29 October 1999. It’s not overly footnoted because it was presented verbally; everything said here would be more likely sourced in the thesis from which it is drawn. I thought I remembered dashing to Sydney after presenting, but looking at that date it seems far more likely I actually went to Wangaratta for the Festival. 29 October was a Friday that year. There was some immediacy about it – that rare (for me) sense of having to rush from one thing to another. My PhD was in its final months but wasn’t submitted until the New Year – February I think.

There is another Onions paper, concerning the band’s appearance at the 1963 Australian Jazz Convention, in the MSA’s journal Musicology Australia XXIV (2001). I can’t reproduce that here but if you’re curious, it’s around.

The Red Onion Jazz Band as Practitioners of Australian Jazz

The Red Onion Jazz Band, formed by high school friends around 1960 as the Gin Bottle Jazz Band and concluded at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and Blues in 1996, was a Melbourne traditional jazz band, which is to say that it featured the instrumentation of the early small groups—clarinet, trumpet and trombone in the front line, and a rhythm section which included a banjo or guitar, tuba or string bass, possibly a piano, and drums—and built its repertoire initially on the classic recordings of Louis Armstrong, Clarence Williams, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke and Johnny Dodds. Its career, which was unusually long for a band of its type, saw it move from a kind of cult status in the casual dances of the early 1960s, through periods in which the popularity of traditional jazz (or jazz of any kind) waned considerably, to a position of seniority and enormous respect at the time of its dissolution. The band released eight LP and four EP recordings during the 1960s and early 1970s, and during the 1990s recorded two CDs, one of which was released only after the band had ceased performing. The Onions created their persona as a band early and were a distinctive presence for as long as they existed as a group.

This paper looks at how the Onions can be seen as emblematic of an Australian jazz. This Australian jazz is not necessarily a style, so much as a response to circumstances; it is not a sound so much as an approach to playing which admits a wide range of possibilities. It seems to me that the concentration on isolating aspects of musical sound which tally with national stereotypes—larrikins, gum trees, deserts, sheep, or whatever—is only going to satisfy a short term requirement of the investigation of musical life. So far, the limitation of Australian style or sound to a few bands around 1950 has hampered an understanding of the peculiar conditions under which jazz has been understood and learned by musicians in Australia. An awareness of these conditions is central to an explanation of the many tangential, obscure, or perhaps ‘inappropriate’ additions to the basic jazz vocabulary made by musicians in Australia. Such additions and adaptations are the life of the local musical community, for so many reasons.

To date, Bruce Johnson has been the most energetic exponent of theories of Australian style in jazz. In a body of work stretching over the last 15 or 20 years, Johnson has repeatedly asked the question “is there an Australian jazz?” The answers he provides—affirmative ones—usually concern a number of musicians active at the middle of the century, foremost among whom are pianist Graeme Bell and valve trombone and reed player Ade Monsbourgh. Put very simply, his argument maintains that distinctive local characteristics, which evolved at a time when recorded jazz was still relatively scarce in Australia, were obfuscated as recordings became more plentiful throughout the 1950s. This stresses the necessity of finding personal solutions to musical problems without the aid of reference to teachers or a particularly wide range of recordings. The rise of a group of musicians dedicated to New Orleans jazz at this time is seen as a dramatic decline in local colour, as Johnson writes: “Musicians like Bell, Pickering, and their colleagues assimilated rather than pedantically copied their sources. The mouldy fygges gave jazz more definition as a concept, but in so doing they narrowed its possibilities.”[1]

The primary motivation behind the musical adventure of the mouldy fygges was the recording done by William Russell in New Orleans during the 1940s. Having found ageing African-American musicians such as clarinetist George Lewis, trumpeter Bunk Johnson, and trombonist Jim Robinson, Russell set about preserving their music on his small American Music record label. The appeal of old, neglected, black musicians from New Orleans was irresistible to those seeking an authenticity in jazz, and hence a very strong New Orleans community developed in Australia. In Melbourne, the Melbourne New Orleans Jazz Band was, plausibly enough, an example of this, as was the Yarra Yarra New Orleans Jazz Band. These two groups had enormous popularity at the end of the 1950s and during the early 1960s. It was in fact at a dance in Beaumaris, the Strut, that a performance by the Yarras inspired young friends Bill Howard, Brett Iggulden, and Allan Browne, to form a band of their own, and this was (for the immediate future) the Gin Bottle Jazz Band.

I believe that the growth of a community of musicians devoted to New Orleans music and the so-called “archaic” style of the Johnson and Lewis bands, was only a consequence of the thinking which had accompanied the beginnings of the postwar Australian jazz scene. The insistence by Bill Miller, when he founded the magazine Jazz Notes in 1941, that there was a strain of righteous jazz which should be pursued to the exclusion of all that was inauthentic, was something which took hold in Australia. Miller cast himself more often than not as the channel for this true music, and the pages of his magazines resound with his uncompromising approach. As interest in New Orleans jazz grew, bitter arguments raged in Miller’s magazines between those who believed Bunk Johnson was truly a link with the very beginnings of jazz, and those who, apart from maintaining a great interest in 1920s jazz, had been captivated by the generation of white musicians in Chicago which took its lead from this music and continued to play it into the 1930s and beyond: Eddie Condon, Pee Wee Russell, and others. The consequences of debates in Australia over authenticity and genuineness in jazz have been far-reaching, and in a sense are not unknown even today. For bands studying from records, the idea that the music could be reproduced faithfully was an important one. But the search for the true music was one which generated enormous acrimony between adherents to one style or another. So authenticity became a significant concern for the traditional jazz community, and in its many manifestations this concern shaped the Australian scene.

Yet it was also a consequence of circumstances in Australia, where there were felt to be few if any direct links to the jazz tradition. Rudi Blesh’s Shining Trumpets, one of the first important histories of jazz, was published in 1946 and arrived in Australia to great acclaim within the jazz community. It begins: “Jazz music is a purely American phenomenon.”[2] Point taken. A great many histories of jazz begin on this note. In Australia, the knowledge of being without engendered a passionate quest for truth in music. Blesh, on this first page of his introductory chapter, took great trouble to make clear that he was writing about “pure” and “authentic jazz,” and it is little wonder that the book did so well with readers here who were desperate for both information and affirmation. The first wave of Australian jazz musicians in the 1940s and the New Orleans aficionados who followed may have had their differences, but the motivations for their tastes were strikingly similar. The New Orleans enthusiasts simply believed they had got closer to the source.

In time, the Onions would show signs of a search for authenticity. Once again, however, the results it produced were unique. Primarily through an examination of developing repertoire, the Onions’ career can be seen to be a modelling of a history of jazz, which at times resembled an argument in favour of specific musicians as important. It is a balance, though, between the planned and the spontaneous, similar to the manner in which their performances balanced the desire to get the music across effectively with a desire to have fun.

None of the boys who began the band had formal musical training on the instruments they chose to play—trombone (Howard), trumpet (Iggulden) and drums (Browne). The colleagues they rounded up to complete the group—Kim Lynch on tuba, Felix Blatt on banjo, John Funsten on clarinet and John Pike on piano—were little better off. In an atmosphere of trial and error, and the absence of any notated music, the boys set about learning to play jazz. Fortunately records were plentiful, as Iggulden’s father had amassed a considerable collection—one which even included the rare French pressings of Russell’s recordings of George Lewis in New Orleans. However the method, such as it was, was by no means methodical or thorough, and the band’s path to the achievement of sound and style was as idiosyncratic and treacherous as had been the Bell band’s over 30 years before. The resources on which the musicians drew were haphazardly selected according to what appealed. Their technical limitations on instruments they were learning as they went meant that although they studied records closely and learned parts by ear, the reproduction of them was always subject to variation.

The beginnings of the band were as much in rituals of teenage friendship as musical exploration. Saturday nights found them walking the Beaumaris streets, drinking and playing. The importance of friendship amongst the musicians was such that it has been suggested that in later stages superior musicians were overlooked in order to employ those who fit in. Stage performances by the band preserved the spontaneous humour and sense of the ridiculous which had their origins in teenage friendships, and it was the dressing up and falsetto singing which for many made the Onions particularly distinctive. The band exploited these qualities, reproducing a measure of them in the studio, and making them an integral part of their image within the local scene, through advertising and the decoration of the venues they operated.

They didn’t sound, then, anything like the models on whom they based their performances. Inspired by recordings made in the 1920s, they sought only to emulate the spirit they found there, and Iggulden has said that in dissecting a song in order to play it, “I was trying to get the same feeling that I got when I played the record.”[3] The Onions’ reputation was made not on their resemblance of American heroes but on their curious selection of repertoire, their sense of humour and energy in live performance, and to a degree their youth.

The first period of the Onions’ career lasted until clarinetist Gerry Humphrys, who had been in the band for three years, tubist Lynch, and pianist Ian Clyne, a more recent addition, broke away to form the pop group the Loved Ones. This followed the dramatic change in musical taste among teenagers which occurred around the time of the Beatles’ Australian tour in 1964. Traditional jazz was no longer as viable a music as it had been, and the three musicians who left the band did so because they were more dependent financially on it than were the others. The band’s second period was one of musical consolidation, in which the repertoire broadened gradually to include music of larger bands, such as those of Luis Russell and 1930s Louis Armstrong. A closer and more thorough attention to model recordings was evident in the EP King Oliver Revisited, recorded towards the end of 1965, on which four Oliver tunes were performed by an enlarged version of the Onions which featured Oliver’s trademark two-cornet front line. The LP Big Band Memories demonstrated a similar dedication to a studious broadening of the band’s repertoire, featuring tunes recorded originally by Russell, Red Allen, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Armstrong, and the larger Oliver groups. It was during this time that the first European tour was organised and undertaken, and the band performed at the Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw, Poland, during October 1967. The third period began shortly after the Onions returned, and replaced the tuba with the string bass. Another tour took place between 1970 and 1971. The continuing quest for new music brought items from the Swing era—a period of music passionately hated by a vast number of traditional jazz fans—into the repertoire, but as the exploration became more and more extreme, it led to an untenable situation wherein the band began to lose its audience and (perhaps more importantly) its direction and conviction. Between 1974 and 1983 the Onions did not perform, and the band was believed to have broken up permanently. After 1983, when a benefit reunion was organised for Bill Howard, whose house had been destroyed in the Ash Wednesday bushfires, the Onions found new life as a band able to maintain a semi-regular performance programme of festival appearances and occasional gigs in Melbourne. They travelled to Europe a third time in 1992, and released the CD Crisis shortly thereafter. Bill Howard’s death in 1996 signalled the end of the band.

At all stages, the Onions were continually open to new repertoire, and eschewed the hackneyed repertoire of the majority of traditional jazz bands. Occasionally chauvinistic about their selections, they were more often at the mercy of what affected them personally, and Iggulden has described the process of finding material: “Someone heard a song, or a thing, or an arrangement, or an idea, or a player, or a band, [and said,] oh fuck, that’s really good, let’s do it.”[4] So the band’s exploration of King Oliver’s music, for example, did not stop with “Dippermouth Blues.” In fact, to my knowledge they never played this most famous of Oliver’s tunes. Those they chose to study—and the fact that they played so many is significant also—were selected with an eye on what would work well for the band, and what they liked. The band’s repertoire ultimately included tunes from New Orleans, a vast number of Armstrong items from across his career, some Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford and Fletcher Henderson items, as well as music of Morton, Dodds, and the other 1920s luminaries. This catholic repertoire was represented in the band’s live performances in a conservatory approach so that tunes which might be energetically demarcated by critics and some musicians were pushed alongside one another. During a performance in Malvern, England, in 1967, Ellington’s “Creole Rhapsody” was followed by Clarence Williams’ “Cushion Foot Stomp,” and preceded by the more theatrical “Big Chief Battle Axe” with its crowd-pleasing drum feature. The Onions adhered ultimately to no single jazz style, and this was a strength of the band, directly resulting from its haphazard beginnings.

But traces of traditional jazz chauvinism subsisted even in the Onions’ outlook. Particularly after 1965, when the split in the group drove home the new favour for pop or mod music, a certain moral superiority inhabited the continuing Onions’ engagement with jazz. The idiosyncratic synthesis they achieved was based on the hard work involved in becoming closely acquainted with a broad range of music. And even as early as the band’s second commercially released recording, which was a performance at the 1963 Australian Jazz Convention, it can be seen that close attention was being paid to specific historical recordings in the development of the band’s repertoire and performance style. The four tunes on this release are traceable to specific sources: “Barnacle Bill” to the Hoagy Carmichael band in 1930, featuring Bix Beiderbecke; “Perdido Street” to Johnny Dodds’ New Orleans Wanderers of 1926; “Since My Best Girl Turned Me Down” to Beiderbecke once again, this time in a group he led in 1927; and “It’s Tight Like That” to a recording by Chris Barber with Lonnie Donegan. Efforts have been made to learn significant parts of the original performances, such as Beiderbecke’s famous solo on “Barnacle Bill,” or Dodds’ on “Perdido Street,” and in some cases formal arrangements have been preserved. This was, however, not so much a conscious attempt to authenticate themselves within a pure jazz tradition as the feeling that such elements were integral to the pieces themselves. A comparison between the Onions’ “Barnacle Bill” and Carmichael’s could not possibly be thought to suggest any slavish copying. But there were elements associated with songs, on the basis of significant recorded performances of them, which musicians learning those songs would accommodate.

At times in the Onions’ career they were referred to as a copyist band, yet the sound they made as a band bore very little resemblance to the sound of any band on which their performances were based. Browne has explained it another way, in terms of the fact that it gave musicians who were not readers and who lacked formal training, material to practise. Learning parts by ear from recordings allowed something to be grasped, and created a point of reference. For whatever reason, there was a faithfulness to recordings then which was important in the adoption of jazz repertoire, and whether it went so far as the desire to be authentic or merely to provide a starting point, remains a matter of opinion.

Distance and detachment give licence, and although writers for Miller’s magazines during the 1940s and 1950s argued for righteous jazz, the situation in Australia was such that it was only a matter of time before opposing, or simply more flexible, positions were outlined. The visits of the Bell band to England around 1950 were the beginnings of a real awareness of the possibility of an Australian jazz style, and yet that band had merely filled in what recordings and teachers had been unable to provide. It’s my position that subsequent bands did the same, and the notion of their having narrowed the possibilities of jazz is slightly mistaken. The communication between band and audience was also important, although it is all too readily ignored in discussion of music preserved on studio recordings. A quick musical example comes from the first period of the Onions, and should properly be compared with their more conventional performances of traditional repertoire. At any rate, this version of “Mandy” demonstrates some of the more unexpected aspects of their performance.

This recording is the product of a band finding its place in a local scene, and putting its stamp on the music it plays. Humour played an enormous part in the Onions’ music, and performances on stage were punctuated by spontaneous absurdist acts. The origins of the elements they introduced are the subject of another paper, but it is obvious that this approach had not been derived from American recordings.

In the creation of their own musical identity, the Onions diverged from tastes and practices of preceding bands; yet their mission as jazz musicians in Australia was similar. They adopted a music from afar, and they sought to play it with a sincerity, an energy and a spirit equal to that which had inspired them. As an Australian jazz band, the Onions consciously or not, conformed with procedures which had become established over the twenty years before they began so that in choice of repertoire, attention to models and the character of the band in performance, they maintained the relationship between scene and tradition which is a foundation of Australian jazz, even as they extended both.

I’ve not written here for about a month, so I’m going to make up for lost time with something of a rave. If you stick with it, you’re an idiot you might find it all ties up nicely, but I can’t make any watertight promises about that. There is a better post to come, I hope, before too long.

The thing I envied Sall more than any other as she was training to become a doctor was the very organized manner of her education. She and her colleagues went to lectures and tutorials, and studied, and things were accommodated and rehearsed and thus reproducible, and exams were sat and assessed and results transmitted, and a pass meant success and advancement, but a fail did not. Or maybe if it was a line ball you could do a supplementary exam, but they weren’t going to let you get away with making it up as you went along. The knowledge was, or is I guess, a corpus, and one needed to have understood it in its specifics and generalities, as the discrete and the associative, as a collected body of tested and agreed-upon propositions within the progressive and cumulative structure of a six-year undergraduate degree. After you’d hung around the uni for three years they let you loose in the wards – subject to the appropriate level of diligence, one thing led to another. After those six years were up there was plenty more to be done, but you continued along a path well-trodden by your predecessors with the markers in place to guide, the ropes to restrain.

It’s arguable that this is a boring educational framework, or that the challenge is only to remember what has been rote-learned and to be able to spit it out on demand, or that the fact-learning is a soul-denying or -destroying path to intellectual and emotional slumber (via pre-occupation) of the most terrifying profundity. And I suppose that if, by chance, you happened to be the kind of person who rose at five to study, then spent ten hours of the daylight at uni, before heading home for a bowl of two-minute noodles and four more hours’ study, you might before too long have choked off any other interests that were threatening to take up your time, including (but not limited to) books, music, even friends. (Speaking personally, watching Scrubs is very consoling on that front.)

In any case, I have to admit that part of what was making me consider retraining in law was the seductive thought of accommodating such a body of knowledge, becoming fluent in a new language, another variety of thought, getting a grip on something solid, even sort of belonging, if I may put it with such a tragic edge. Lectures! Tutorials! Books! Ideas! Precedent! And so on.

It’s kind of lame and anyway, two days before my offer was to expire I went to the Uni website and declined it. I had been conflicted about this, and even after the grand discussion and forensic examination and archeological dig and so forth had been conducted with Sall – patient, wise, wonderful Sall – I realised that I could still, curiously enough, see myself going in there and clicking on ‘accept’. So why did I not?

Well, the main reason I gave (from the available list of options) was ‘financial difficulty’. A further $110K debt is not something we really need right now, and although yes, by and by it gets paid off and the training provides a means via which this is made practical, it’s a shitload of money and I cost enough as it is.

But that’s not all, is it? Let’s say this is a mid-life process, or the realization of a mid-life program; I don’t feel in crisis as such and most certainly I shan’t be getting a tattoo, buying a flash car, or rooting a teenager. Seeking clarity is not served by such panaceae and anyway, tattoos hurt. Clarity and authenticity are what are at issue, and conviction, and responsibility, and resolution and so forth.

I’ve mentioned before that I went through the VCA, and in the early 1990s the Improv department there was a fabulously loose and embracing love-in where even despite the existence and the passionate demarcation of borders between stylistic or procedural strains the primacy of Who You Are and What You Need To Play was rigorously unquestioned. Beboppers, post-boppers, free players, composers, instrumentalists who wanted to sing, someone who even brought a chainsaw to a recital. No joke – we just about had it all. It was exciting and it was stimulating and some parts of it felt really, really good. And there were exams, but they were pretty hard to fail. Someone once got very aggro and tried to monster Brian Brown, and I think that did the trick. And there was another instance where a trumpet player had become upset about something and asked that the room be held in silence for forty-five minutes – this would be his recital – whereupon as I recall he packed away his instrument and left the building. These were exceptional cases however, and I suspect that the failing of the exams did not interfere with the general developing trend of these students’ academic records.

How would it be though if education in musical improvisation resembled that given to medical students? Okay, it would be shithouse. And why? Because music is nothing like medicine, and we musicians are not all trying to do the same thing, and if we did it would be so very tiresome, and you can’t tell me that’s wrong because I like how it sounds and it’s mine. The goals of music education and medical are obviously so different as to defy comparison. Obviously, hey. It’s obvious. But in these days of measurable outcomes and quantification and accountancy it seems there are those who would like to see it all the same. And why did I envy Sall? Because the measures were there, and perhaps (to be absolutely blunt) it might be easier not to have to take responsibility for the thought itself, just one’s own mastery of it. I’m not really sure.

Since I left the Veece (the first time) I have become partial to the idea that the majority of things you learn that really matter, you have had to teach yourself. I found books about counterpoint, for example, because I had read enough about its importance to musicians whom I admired to make me think it might be worth investigating. And pieces that I was never, ever going to play, like Béla Bartók’s string quartets, or David Del Tredici’s Tattoo – pieces that struck me as fascinating, dynamic and engaging – I tried to find out some more about not as a means to imitating their sounds or techniques but because they represented something unfamiliar but immediately affecting. One needs to be open. Trial and error are companions for life, and the constant engagement with both has to be a matter of almost daily procedure. Probably no-one can tell you what to play, or how to play it; they can tell you what they’re hearing and either what they’re liking or what they think is missing, but you have to process this yourself to make it mean something, to make it workable. If the education is, as they say, teaching you how to think rather than what to think, you ought to be able to manage this. But is it?

The codification of jazz language is its enemy, pedagogically speaking, and even the identification of a jazz language sounds dicey to me. In the effort to give students a sense of security, perhaps, or points of focus, things like ‘synthetic modes’ are dreamed up and passed along like a chalice, transcription is uncritically accepted as worthy even when it constitutes a colossal waste of time, and jazz trivia is valued out of any proportion to its relevance or utility. I am often saying how desperately tedious I find the question ‘what do I play over this?’ when a student is perplexed by a particular chord. That such a manner of thinking has been engendered in the student is the most distressing thing of all, because s/he has lost all sense of the chord taking its place in a progression, within a harmonic context that can be perceived as greater than any individual sound. That ‘what do I play over this?’ even seems like a question with meaning makes me grind my teeth in an agonizing sense of hopelessness, for as long as it takes me to draw breath and say ‘what went before it? What comes after?’ Chord/scale relationships exist, certainly, but the nature of their relationship, always in terms of function and forward motion, must never cease being investigated. Chord/chord relationships are just as important. Harmony is the consequence of line: successions of tones within the line and the relation of each to the others, and one line in concert with another one. (Or two, or three.) Voice-leading. Counterpoint.

It is an almost impossibly challenging thing to strike the right balance between commending students on their efforts, and whipping them into knowing more than they do. Artists are so fragile, right? and they’ve spent so much for what they can already do; it’s their blood you’re hearing. But you owe it to them to help them be as good as they can be, to assist them in working their plot in the most productive fashion, to encourage them towards developing self-cultivation as a matter of habit, of instinct.

I am afraid that a search for quick-fix or fit-all solutions to questions like ‘what do I play over this?’ is the consequence of an attempt having been made to render jazz education amenable to more regularly measureable outcomes, or to make improvisatory practice more dependable, less risky. In a manner of speaking, it’s all about fitting in. But conformity is not what motivated Thelonious Monk or Billie Holiday or John Coltrane so, kid, why should you be chasing it? If you think you can get through this improvisatory labyrinth untroubled by wrong notes or something, then you haven’t been listening.

Listening being, you know, rather important. The recently published Australian Jazz Real Book is apparently being promoted as ‘a resource [to] facilitate a greater knowledge and understanding of the Australian Jazz sound’,[1] which sounds great until you examine the assumption that a sound can be transmitted via a printed page. News flash: it can’t. (Disclaimer: my compositions are not included in the AJRB, and no, I don’t care. You can find them right here on this site, if you want them.) If there were an Australian compositional style, detected among works developed for improvisers, would that be analogous with a ‘sound’? Let’s not be so lazy with our language, even if so.[2] And really, the idea that there were a single national tendency in this regard is quite preposterous. There are reasons for this, and they’re what’s worth investigating, rather than some fanciful concept of parochial unity, of sunny Australian easy-going have-a-beer-ity.

Once I presented a paper, with roots in my doctoral research, entitled ‘The Red Onion Jazz Band as practitioners of Australian jazz,’[3] and one of the questions that followed came from someone in the front row, who asked, ‘did they use any Aboriginal instruments?’ I wanted to shake this gentleman until his dentures fell out, and scream, ‘haven’t you listened to a word I’ve said?!’ but I didn’t – I smiled and said no, as a matter of fact, they didn’t. My definition of ‘Australian jazz’ was, I hope, a little more sophisticated than this.[4] Now some people do incorporate instruments from indigenous communities into their music-making, and as far as I’m aware that’s okay. But are they more Australian as a result? I think not. The idea strikes me as rather ridiculous. Unless to be Australian is to be appropriative and short-sighted and even slightly patronising.[5]

We have to face assumptions wherever they present themselves. That there’s a jazz language. That there’s an Australian sound or Australian jazz. That improvisation is a matter of finding modes that fit, and rotating through their constituent elements until a change is made. That music is written music, or music that can be written. Back to clarity and authenticity and all that: what are you going to play?

I have ditched law (and I was never going to go anywhere near medicine) and I am resolved to being a musician. One needs to make up one’s mind about things, and devote oneself to the path one has elected to follow. My education has been chancy, in many respects, and while I’ve been very lucky I have to say I’d have been grateful to have someone insist a little more strongly on my knowing my way around an orchestral score, or the collective spontaneity of Miles Davis’s 1960s quintet, or the curly thematic manipulations in the last movement of the Piano Quintet, op. 34, of Brahms.[6] Now is the time to turn whatever it is I did learn to the best possible use. This was a trough, of a kind, preceding the moment at which our last child starts school. It’s a bigger moment than that makes it sound – I’m actually apprehensive and may in fact, for the first time, attend the ‘tea and tissues’ session that is held on the first day of the school year for parents of children commencing prep. But I’ll still be learning, still wondering, still willing creation.

Yesterday’s AFL Grand Final, in the company of my brother and my parents, was a spectacular occasion. I’m a Melbourne supporter, in as much as anyone who can attend 4-5 games per year and name no players currently on the field can be counted as such, but I live in Hawthorn so I was backing the Hawks. I congratulate them on winning. They can treasure this as they swan off to Vanuatu (or wherever it is they’re going) for their celebrations.