the lost navigator Wills. Art, theatre, and culture were secondary to avarice in Melbourne in the nineteenth century, though of course there were those with pretensions.
As Andrea Baker points out, music entrepreneur George Coppin had arrived in Melbourne from Liverpool and gained control of the Theatre Royal. He staged operas, some of which, it is said, rivalled concerts staged at London’s Covent Garden. ‘Gold rush optimism sparked the golden age of Melbourne’s classical music and opera scene. Between 1850 and 1890, thirteen music venues were built along the Hoddle grid in the CBD.’7 Her Majesty’s and the Princess Theatre are just two examples of theatres built during the Victorian era in the Renaissance Revival style.8 But it was the Melbourne Town Hall and the Athenaeum on Collins Street that would mainly host performances by Melbourne’s first musical superstar, Dame Nellie Melba. Melba was Australia’s first diva and she ruled the world stage, appearing everywhere from St Petersburg to Vienna, London to New Zealand and even America. Her career spanned from 1880 until her death in Sydney in 1931.
Melbourne may have been marvellous and its streets lined with gold, but in some ways they were also filled with empty pleasantries. The boom couldn’t last. Land prices were out of control; rapacious land speculators had moved in, bought up vast tracts of dirt and sold them on at wildly inflated prices. London banks lent freely to buyers who were then hocked up to the eyeballs. It was a land boom and inevitably the bubble exploded, which led to debt, a financial crisis and a deep economic depression. Property values in central Melbourne plummeted and did not return to their 1880s levels until the late ’50s.
But Melbourne in the 1890s wasn’t just a time of economic crisis, there was a cultural shift going on, courtesy of a couple of touring outfits from faraway America. The companies brought with them African-American syncopated dancers, spiritual choirs and ragtime piano players. Suddenly amidst the economic gloom some excitement was injected into Melbourne’s nightlife and its vaudevillian theatres filled with people eager to experience the exotica of those African-American entertainers. Ragtime music was a new kind of entertainment for Melbourne and seemed to complement the seedy side of life found in the barbershops, gin joints and opium dens hidden in laneways off Little Lonsdale Street.
The origins of this new music were mysterious. That it was of African-American origin was not in doubt: it came from the blues, from hunting songs and the chain-gangs. Some argue that way back in the first half of the nineteenth century this wild syncopated music was born when black slaves — some from Africa, some from the Caribbean, some from the interior of the American South — gathered on Sundays in New Orleans’ Congo Square to play music and cross-pollinate their traditions. The music evolved overtime from its hard-luck, down-home origins, to become what we now know as jazz.
Christian Blauvett9 argued that New Orleans Creoles were the principal founders of an emerging jazz genre. Creoles were the mixed-race descendants of black and white ancestors and typically identified more with European culture, rather than African culture. After the Jim Crow laws of 1890 classified the city’s mixed-race Creoles as ‘black’, they were only allowed to play with other black musicians. This brought a greater musical fluency and technical skill to black music, as many Creoles were trained in classical music. This new Creole musical mix, soon to be known as jazz, incorporated the African tradition of rhythm and improvisation with a schooled European approach that emphasised harmony and different forms of instrumentation (saxophones, trumpets and pianos).10
Jazz was initially played in the sporting houses of Storyville by pioneers like Jelly Roll Morton who, its rumored, peeked in at those rockin’ and rollin’ couples doin’ what they do and played in time to the rise and fall of those shakin’ money-makers. In fact, the word ‘jazz’ may have come from the slang ‘jass’ which had an association with New Orleans bordellos, jasmine perfume being the favored scent of the city’s prostitutes. Others argue that jass referred to a woman’s rolling derriere,11 which, since time immemorial, has got a lot of mojo workin’.
A few cool Melburnians in the ’20s sure got their mojo working when jazz — labelled dangerous in ’10s New York Times because of its brothel origins — came to town.
‘As the ’20s got underway, the new styles of jazz swept away the elegant dancing of the Edwardian ballroom; jazz was not only a new style, it was a new sound. Instruments that had been excluded from serious music, banjos, saxophones and drum kits reinforced the rhythmic drive of the music.’12
In respectable, suburban, ’20s Melbourne, gardenesque housing estates spread along newly-electrified tram routes. Streets were filled with conservative, male-dominated households that looked to Empire for guidance, excluded liquor, and frowned on the modern, Americanised spectacles of the cinema, the dance hall, and commercial music. These vulgar entertainments had polluted middle class Melbourne via the recent availability of the gramophone, radio, and of course the movie theatre. It was through these mediums that jazz, and its symbol of lasciviousness and moral collapse, the flapper, appeared in the dance halls and supper clubs of Melbourne.
‘The flapper was a girl who ‘jazzed’ her appearance, she bobbed her hair, painted butterflies on her knees, put on her Charleston dress, her ‘art silk’ stockings and her swinging beads and danced the night away.’13 The flapper even swung those long beads in time to arguably Melbourne and possibly Australia’s first all-girl jazz dance band, The Thelma Ready Orchestra.
The line-up for Thelma’s orchestra was: Thelma on banjo, Kath McCall, piano, Lena Sturrock, violin, Alice Organ, saxophone, clarinet and cornet and Lillian Stender, vocals and drums. And they played everywhere. They held down long residencies at the Mayfair Café in St Kilda, the smart and very modern Venetian Room at the Hotel Australia, not to mention the Menzies and Oriental Hotels. They also played two or three nights a week at society weddings and feature events at Melbourne’s premier reception venue; Nine Darling Street, South Yarra. If that wasn’t enough, the orchestra had a regular gig at radio 3DB as well as two mornings a week at the King’s Theatre on behalf of the Herald newspaper.
Jazz, or a form of it, seemed to have infected every female musician in Melbourne. Suddenly all-female dance bands, like those led by Eve Rees, Marion and Dora Lightfoot, Val Summerhayes, Agnes Smyth, Alic Dolphi, Grace Funston and the aforementioned Thelma Ready, were playing regularly at dance halls, balls, receptions and on the vaudeville stage.
Thelma Ready understood that her all-ladies band was something of a novelty: ‘a drawcard with the gentlemen’, as she put it. Their drummer Lillian Stender was a particular attraction, with her ‘natural voice and lovely personality’.
‘She had IT. All the men fell for her. I had a job to control her. A few fights went on. Although Lillian had learned the drums, she was never a good drummer. Lily got by on her personality, her looks and her voice…’14
By the ’30s Melbourne was jumping, and all-female jazz/dance bands were a huge attraction. Eve Rees and her Merrymakers, with its piano, saxophone, trumpet and drums line-up, played every night of the week. Eve told Kay Dreyfus, ‘What a tremendous amount of work we got! … Mayoral balls, CWA dances, cafés lodges, clubs, weddings, parties…receptions of all kinds …’15
Jazz was changing Melbourne. Some opinion leaders at the time said it was destroying the minds and morals of the young, that it was a dangerous and demoralising fad at counterpoint to the morally-correct, white Anglo Saxon, suburban sensibility of middle-class Melbourne. But jazz had resonated with the young ramblers and gamblers of the inner-city; it had infected the city like the Spanish flu. St Kilda and Fitzroy, for example, were wide open to all things American: jazz, flappers, Hollywood movies, cool-cat language and gangsters like Squizzy Taylor. Emulating his hero, Chicago’s Al Capone, Taylor filled the streets of Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Richmond with bullet-holed bodies, debris and sadness.
If you believed the newspapers, inner Melbourne was awash with jazz, crime and sex. The Truth newspaper was full of articles
