All together now, Beatles fans. "Holbrook's been knitted a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine ..."
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In April we reported the big ambition of Holbrook Shire's Murray Arts (based in Albury) to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Beatles visit to Australia by transforming Holbrook's famous metallic-black submarine HMAS Otway into a Beatlesesque Yellow Submarine. The knitters (and weavers and crocheters) of the region and of the world were invited to create yellow panels (of any shade of yellow, even our favourite, primrose) with which the sinister-looking brute of a warship would be cloaked in jolly, psychedelic yellowness.
As you can see the just-completed project was a great success.
Murray Arts project manager Jo Bartels has explained that one purpose of the campaign has been "to bring some attention back to the submarine" now that the ring-road around Holbrook means that not everyone beetles past the submarine while driving between Sydney and Melbourne. And after a suitable spell of yellowness the panels (contributors were asked to make them roughly pet-blanket sized) will be donated to dog and cat rescue institutions.
When we spoke to Helen Thompson of Holbrook's legendary Submarine Cafe she rejoiced that "I'm sitting here [in the cafe] looking out at our magnificent Yellow Submarine!"
"Hundreds of people contributed to it. We got everyone who came into the cafe to knit a row or two. It grew and grew like a scarf out of control."
Llewellyn Hall and the demon drink
It would have been civilised if, immediately after Australian Chamber Orchestra's concert at the Llewellyn Hall on Saturday night, there had been a cheerful bar in the building to which we could all have gone to drink some of composer Jean Sibelius' favourite tipples. Disinhibited, we could have chatted together about what we felt of the way the ACO had just tootled the great man's generally merry 6th Symphony. But of course that severe, Presbyterian venue has no such facility.
Some of the objections to the proposed installation of the Wig & Pen Tavern and Brewery within the School of Music and cheek by jowl with the Llewellyn Hall, have a rather Presbyterian ring to them. There's a suggestion that the ready availability of the demon drink must be the enemy of the dignity of a fine music venue and fine music audiences, and of the scholarly behaviour of music students.
But worldly concert-goers know that great music venues are often bar-rich, while the present grog-supplying arrangements for concert-goers at the Llewellyn Hall are primitively unAustralian. Tiny, temporary serving points are created on concert nights, serving a miserably narrow range of beverages during a miserably brief window of opportunity. These little oases are dismantled after the last interlude, so that concert-goers emerge into an inhospitable space and have nothing to do but get into their Audis and purr away to Deakin and Forrest, where most Canberra concert-goers live.
What might we, given the chance to drink something Sibelius might have drunk, have ordered on Saturday night? Sibelius enthusiasts (this columnist is one of them, while not quite belonging to a Sibelius cult) make such detailed investigations of the life (1865-1957) and career of the terrific Finn that there are online comprehensive scholarly lists of what brands of what fermented and spiritous beverages he drank in the 1930s and then (another list) in the 1940s.
It was partly because he was so enamoured of, so enslaved by the demon drink that he lived and worked for so much of his life at his country home, far from the fleshpots of Helsinki where he was prone to binges in the company of fellow creative souls. One is reminded of how Henry Lawson's friends would peel him away from wicked Sydney and keep him in a remote and publess corner of Gippsland.
Is drink necessarily the enemy of musicians and of the School's music students? Some very special composers have been very bibulous and Sibelius zealots do sometimes argue that alcohol may have done as much to assist his creative career as hinder it. He himself expressed different views at different times.
Given what a drinker he was and given that he incessantly smoked cigars (needless to say followers of the Sibelius cult have listed every known brand he ever lit up, including El Palacio and Rosa Aromatica) the fact of his living to be 91 has, like his music, elements of magic. Indeed he lived so long that, according to the biography of him in the authoritative online Uncyclopedia, he was still with us for the dawn of IT and "towards the end of his life, Sibelius began composing ring tones for [Finnish company] Nokia".
"His last published work was the Concerto in A flat major for Mobile Phones and Orchestra. Sibelius wrote the 40-minute concerto because all concerts of his music were constantly being spoiled by idiots who simply could not shut their mobiles off for the duration of a concert program. In his introduction to the concerto, Sibelius encourages the audience to keep their mobiles open during the concert so that as many ring tones as possible may be heard."
We look forward to maestro Nicholas Milton and the Canberra Symphony Orchestra bringing us this seldom-performed audience-participatory work soon and to there being, by then, the Wig & Pen for us to gambol into afterward to gibber excitedly about what we've just heard.