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Behind the Scenes with co-producer of Shocking Pink and composer, Hollis Taylor
Interview conducted by Johanna Zorn
> Olive Pink isn't exactly well known in America and, in fact, many
listeners here may wonder if she's a real person. Is she a familiar historical
figure in Australia?
Pink is basically unknown in Australia as well, with the exception of Alice
Springs where she's known as an eccentric, not as an anthropologist. The Olive
Pink Botanical Gardens in Alice gives her some notice as a botanist, and a
biography was published several years ago by Julie Marcus. (The Indomitable
Miss Pink: a Life in Anthropology.)
> Then how did you discover her?
I came upon her namesake gardens while we [Taylor and friend, musician Jon
Rose] were traveling in Alice Springs. First, the name got me—it couldn't be
real! Then as I began to find out about her, I thought perhaps a radiophonic
work could come of it, so we made a point of recording hymns on the piano in
Alice Springs (where she lived for years) as a starting point.
> What about Olive Pink made you feel that "a radiophonic work could
come out of it?"
She was an eccentric. There were lots of issues rubbing up against one another,
which can make for good theater and good music. She was passionately involved
in the rights of Aboriginal people but downright rude to those people she
didn't think were on her side; she was her own worst enemy (or was it just the
courage of conviction)—a botanist involved in native flora who would quit
watering a tree she had named after a person if she fell out with that person.
Her life was full of conflicting issues and was extreme in many, if not all,
ways—that's Olive Pink in name and deed.
> Why did you start the project by recording such hymns such as "Onward
Christian Soldiers" and "Abide with Me?"
Circumstance dictated it. I didn't have any piano music with me, so we borrowed
a hymnal from the local Lutheran church. The Lutheran church in particular sent
many German missionaries to convert the Aboriginal people, often to tragic
effect. Olive Pink was very anti-church, and yet quite militant in her personal
beliefs on human rights, and I liked the irony of that.
> I understand that the (untuned) piano that you used to record the
hymns we hear in Shocking Pink has an interesting history of its own?
It was brought to Alice Springs by camel in the 1800s. Alice Springs is a high
desert town at the foot of the rugged MacDonnell Ranges and was the main
stopping point for the historic 1877 telegraph, which ran from Adelaide to
Darwin. From there an underwater cable was extended across the sea to Java and
on to London, thus connecting Australia to the rest of the world. The visionary
in charge was Charles Todd, whose wife was Alice. This poor camel would have
brought this piano up around this time from Adelaide, a very long way.
> How did the letters between Pink and her doctoral professor become
such an important element in the piece?
There is not much that remains of her writing, but since I had access to these
letters here in Sydney, they became the focal point. It's usually easier when
one doesn't have too much information at hand—the weeding out process is done
for you. Her hand was revealing—lots of underlining, exclamations,
capitalizations, and other methods of emphasis. She was a woman with a point of
view.
Editors note: Hollis Taylor graciously provided me with excerpts from her book
Post Impressions, based on her “Great Fences of Australia” project. Taylor and
her partner Jon Rose traveled 30,000 kilometers around Australia "bowing
fences." Music from the Great Fences project is featured prominently in Shocking
Pink.
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Playing a fence proposes new ways of looking at things for the audience and for
us. Although we have a few ideas from all the fences we have played, ones we
have made and others we have come upon, fences differ more significantly from
one to another than, say, violins. Violins have a range of sound quality, but
not nearly that of their longer string cousins.
Cello and bass bows bring out the fence song and dance, both the hair and the
stick, although occasionally we add a found object as a tool in our percussion
artillery. The acoustic sound of a fence is sometimes scarcely audible, more a
suggestion of sound than a production of it. We rely on small contact
microphones stuck into the wooden posts to amplify our efforts.
In bowing fences, accident, improvisation, and intuition take over. (This
assumes ninety years of collective experience wielding the bow.) The making of
music is where we generally start to see our luck surface, and we take great
efforts to encourage it. We play barbed wire fences to whose sound the barbs
add a jingle. We play electric fences, which send a sort of rhythmic clicking
signal along with whatever is being bowed. They send a different signal up your
arm, and I prefer to reserve this for Jon. We excite (the technical term for
making a string vibrate) taut fences and slack ones, new and old.
We occasionally put percussion instruments to wooden fences, which can also be
difficult. Due to non-stop traffic noise, we rarely record in a city before
midnight. Then, Jon will play these fences while I keep watch for angry
residents or police. Imagine our parents reading the record cover: Jon Rose,
fence; Hollis Taylor, midnight watch. It's not what our costly lessons or
youthful talent promised.
Sometimes the wind plays the fence in its natural state. The lament of a
long-distance fence is the loneliest howling imaginable. Jon first heard the
wind sounding a fence twenty -five years ago near Broken Hill. It was then he
perceived the fences as huge string instruments lining the landscape.
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Taylor "discovered" Olive Pink at the Botanical Gardens named for her in Alice
Springs. In this excerpt from Post Impressions , she
describes visiting the Gardens.
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We hike around her Gardens, following a path up to a vista of vast plains,
corrugated hills, and sawtooth mountains. A green and yellow-collared bird
fills the air with its "tirrrit." Plains, hills, mountains, birds—that's all I
know about what I'm looking at. The field sciences issue names as a way of
taking possession, lashing new discoveries to the trusty rafts of the known.
I'm out to sea, bereft of local knowledge, and unable to name another thing or
interpret how it all fits together. The Aborigines named as well, but as a path
to
remembering rather than owning. They understood the importance of mnemonic
devices like melody, rhythm, rhyme, and pattern as a tool for remembering.
Miss Pink's fieldwork hung in the balance between the two cultures. I'm drawn
to her in part because she, too, was a list person, conscientiously scribbling
down what others missed or bypassed. (Had I realized at age eighteen that there
was a profession where you could make lists for a living, I would have forsaken
the violin and become an anthropologist.) One entry from Miss Pink's notebooks
inventoried the practical lives of women, material absent in the journals of
male explorers.
Alice must be rich in naming. I incline my ear, squint, and concentrate, trying
to tune into the vista's ecology. Of course, my efforts produce nothing but the
same four words utterly resistant to nuance: plains, hills, mountains,
birds—not enough to even begin a rhyme. I'm no better off than if I'd just
driven by in an air-conditioned motor home with all the trimmings. No need to
get out—we'll just pull off at this scenic overlook for twenty seconds; or if
we decide to stay for lunch, we can always watch a bit of TV while the
microwave heats our meal.
I don't know (until later) that I'm standing on a sacred hill, or that the
small ridge in the middle distance is one of the first sites created by the
caterpillar ancestors. I don't know that the gregarious bird is one of
Australia's most popular, the budgerigar (I've never even heard the word).
Although they can exist without water for some time, these small bright green
parrots are highly nomadic and tend to follow the lush grass brought by rains.
Then, budgies congregating in large numbers can put so much pressure on nesting
sites that some will eventually have to settle for very low stumps or logs.
(Later yet I discover that budgerigars are what we Americans call parakeets,
but I didn't trust myself to make the connection in this kangaroo court of a
place where everything is antithetic.) And how am I to find a wichetty grub
(the larva of this large moth is creamy almond in flavor and high in protein,
an Atkins-approved food source)—who will suggest I look for the telltale piles
of sawdust that the worms leave as they burrow into the lower limbs of a
witchetty bush?
The Olive Pink Botanical Garden museum temporarily tranquilizes me by
explaining how plants in the Central Australian arid zone deal with stress
(such as an irregular supply of water, high heat and radiation loads,
intermittent burning by natural or lit fires, soils low in vital nutrients,
salt accumulation, grazing by indigenous or introduced herbivores). They cope
just like people, by being Avoiders (existing during the most stressful times
as dormant seeds or underground buds) or Tolerators (adapting).
I'm grateful for this expert information but tempted to concoct an antagonist,
one who counters that perhaps this is just so much Eurocentrizing and
anthropomorphizing—this isn't stress, this is how these plants exist. These
florae don't want a lot of water or a soil rich in nutrients. They're
specialists. They would die in a pot in my house—that would be stressful.
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