Few traditional singers, and even fewer field collectors, have their life stories published, but, as the subtitle of this bulky volume suggests, this book is more than just a biography of the person who is unquestionably the most important song collector in Australia in the Anglophone tradition. John Meredith (1920-2001) was at the very center of the struggle for the recognition of a distinctive Australian song culture in English. This led him first to take part in the larger progressive movements of the left in the 1940s and later to contribute substantial song and oral narrative archives to the National Library in Canberra, first through recordings and later also on film. Keith McKenry, who was himself a friend of Meredith and has been active in developing folklore policy in Australia, is ideally placed to document both the man and the movement.
The early part of the book is based on Meredith’s unpublished autobiography, called “More than a Life,” which McKenry adopted as the first part of his own title. It is an appropriate one, because following the narrative of Meredith’s activities is exhausting: in addition to being a tireless collector of songs and recitations, he was a housebuilder, a smallholder, a rabbit catcher, a poet, and for many years an assistant in a pharmacy. He also played the accordion in Australian’s first folk band to have a large following, The Bushwackers.
Meredith had two active periods of song collecting, as a young man in the 1950s and from the 1970s onwards after he retired. Each resulted in a volume entitled Folk Songs of Australia. McKenry calls the first, published in 1967 and reprinted many times, “easily the most important single volume in the Australian folk song revival” (229). It was co-written with the prolific writer and collector Hugh Anderson, who, more than ten years earlier, had published the first substantial book of Australian folk songs to include music. They set the pattern of concentrating on the singers and their milieu, both personal and social, rather than analyzing the songs at length. The second volume included songs collected from outside the state of New South Wales, to which the first volume was confined. During this second and most intense period of collecting, which began in the 1980s, Meredith started to record on film as well and to include aborigines and performers in other languages than English.
Because of his strong commitment to the idea that the Australian song culture in English was as distinctive as the aboriginal one, Meredith sidelined the songs of Irish and Scottish origin which came with the early migrants. He sought the outback and bushranger narratives of the early settler days, with particular emphasis, of course, on Ned Kelly, and the songs of occupational groups like shearers and cane cutters, but also industrial songs like those of the gold miners. These union songs, often including thick descriptions of working processes and political conflicts, were far from the wacky stereotyped male discourse of the media and the tourist industry at the time. The second book still had a masculinist emphasis, but this was modified when they were printed alongside songs by numerous outstanding women singers whom Meredith encountered, like Sally Sloane, Mary Gilmore, and (singing in German) Toni Seidel.
One of the shearers’ songs, “The Union Boy,” appears on the CD enclosed with McKenry’s book (it includes ten traditional songs and five instrumental pieces as well as performances by members of the Bushwhackers, together with two poems by Meredith, read by McKenry). In his interest in occupational songs Meredith had been anticipated by Burl Ives, who produced an Australian LP after his 1952 tour of Australia and popularized the song “Click Go the Shears” (also included on the CD), and by A. L. Lloyd, with whom Meredith had a running feud over plagiarism and fakery, though McKenry shows that at the same time he was himself borrowing stanzas from Lloyd’s printed versions of songs (177). This book is no hagiography: McKenry documents his enraged responses to various proposals from the National Library and the Victorian Folklore Society (251), and in particular to the way the American folklorist John Greenway had belittled Australian folklorists and used his recordings without acknowledgement as the basis of his own performances in Australian Folksongs and Ballads (Smithsonian Folkways)(192). McKenry rightly calls Meredith “a good hater” (185).
In writing Meredith’s contentious and fragmented life, McKenry faces the difficulty that any biographer has in attempting to construct a rational and coherent subject. Instead he concentrates on laying bare many of the underlying progressive positions that Meredith adopted. The most overt of these was his early allegiance to the Communist Party, which he never abandoned even though he let his membership lapse (176). A chapter is devoted to the fact that he was discreetly gay at a time when it was still a criminal offense in most Australian states. Other defining practices are scattered through the text, often showing his increasing concern for the environment: his early comments on soil erosion as he travelled around Australia; his aspiration to self-sufficiency by running a smallholding, selling his produce at country markets, building his own house, using his pharmaceutical experience to concoct “all manner of useful potions and liqueurs”—and refusing to learn to drive in one of the most car-bound nations on earth (46 ff., 53, 247).
Some reservations remain. The book runs to nearly five hundred pages. It is sometimes weighed down by detail and it is often difficult to get an overview of the central theme of Meredith’s role in the recognition of a distinctive Australian tradition. Discussions of why he was reluctant to print Anglo-Celtic, bawdy, music hall, “composed” and contemporary songs, as well as recitations, and why he was highly unsympathetic to the folk revival are widely separated (133, 207-8, 320 ff.) and are not included in the (usually accurate) index. The index also falls down on its song listings: many of the those discussed and in some cases quoted in the text are not mentioned at all, so it is difficult to trace the often radical discussions of songs such as the “Eliza Wells” group of murder ballads (350) or the performing context of the “splendid” occupational song “Jog Along till Shearing” (115). These, however, are minor grumbles about a biography that is unlikely ever to be superseded.
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[Review length: 1056 words • Review posted on April 8, 2015]