When autumn comes rolling in, I always welcome a fresh wind that shifts my focus elsewhere, towards music with a more folkloric bent. And for some reason, I’m always surprised to be unsurprised by how much there is to harvest from the Irish or Gaelic diaspora. As leaves start to turn and a certain seasonal mood sets in, I feel the inspiration to talk about the music of Canberra’s own Cathie O’Sullivan and her Summerhaze. It was in 1987 when Cathie O’Sullivan, then deeply ingrained in the Celtic-inspired Australian folk group, The Larrikins, ventured elsewhere, starting a group to create contemporary music with roots in tradition but flowering differently behind her unique musical fruits, culminating in their self-titled sophomore release.
For you Aussies out there, you don’t need me to relate the important Irish-tinged history behind your homeland. For others, though, it was in the 18th century, when British convicts were largely stopped being sent to America to serve their sentence in exile (for obvious reasons that culminated in our War For Independence), the huge continent of Australia became the landing zone for vast swaths of political prisoners and anyone else deemed unsuitable by “The Crown”.
It was in Western Australia where the largest percentage of those that made up the convict class were forced to emigrate. It was this Irish contingent, largely consisting of those part of Irish rebellions and those pushed to thievery (due to famine and awful, persistent, poverty), that were followed by voluntary migration made up of fellow Irish laborers and the poorest of the Irish poor, who through their lot into a new land, hoping to lift themselves up from poverty by taking advantage of “free settlement”.
As generations of Irish in Australia grew and shaped Australia, they remained closely tied to their ancestral tradition and culturally remained as “Irish” as they could be, through religion and culture. It was this attachment to their past that frequently made Irish-Australians the subject of suspicion and discrimination in a largely Anglo-Saxon country. Knowing that history, one could understand just how important Cathie took her early foray into music.
Cathie’s instrument of choice, the wire-strung harp, had brought her under the umbrella of Australian “bush song” writer Warren Fahey, a musician who was instrumental in popularizing and exploring the continent’s folk song or “shearing tradition” in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In the mid ‘70s, out of an Australian Folkways Music store, Warren would create Larrikin Records and The Larrikins band as a means to promote uniquely Australian music that ran the gamut from jazz to traditional. It was in that band that Cathie served as harpist and key singer and sometimes-songwriter.
In the ‘80s, Cathie began to forge her own path as a solo artist, creating albums like Artesian Waters under the Larrikin Records label. At that moment in time, compositions like “Love’s Coming” or “Song Of Artesian Water” remained faithful to the spirit of their Irish lyricists, like John Shaw Neilson and Banjo Paterson. As Cathie came to find her own voice and voicing, albums like 1983’s High Places showed through songs like “The Orange Tree” and “As Stock Go By” a welcome understanding to update tradition, and with violinist, Cleis Pearce, a copacetic compatriot willing to take those first few steps further down a different direction.
At the height of the “new music” or New Age boom, Larrikin Records threw their hat into that ring by creating a sub label they’d go on to dub, Jarra Hill, where they could sign new Australian musicians who wanted to explore more ethereal and experimental music. In 1987 they would release music by artists like Mark Isaacs, John Elder, and later on Sirocco and Chris Campbell, that would introduce the world – or at least, their slice of the world – to the minimal and ambient music of a modern Australia.
It was in that milieu that in 1986 Cathie took a sabbatical from The Larrikin group and teamed up Cleis Pearce and a few choice musical friends like Greg Sheehan (on percussion), Jim Denley (on reed instruments) and Greg Jordan (on guitar) to simply explore the “ever-changing mood of Australian music” and write original music that could “represent Australian music in the twentieth century”.
In what I imagine was meant to address the idea of usually-hot Australians feeling winter-ish mood music, their name “Summerhaze” addressed the foggy music they’d helm at the meeting of warmth and coolness. And tracks like “Sweetheart” and “Cape Portland” found them tackling dub styles and ethereal rock, respectively, in a way that was surprisingly rooted in their folk tradition. That first bite at the originality apple would yield an even more affecting sophomore album.
1987’s Summerhaze would make the leap to the larger label. One can imagine why. It does feel like the folk ideal was there. However, the kind of contemporary folklore that Cathie penned for this record felt closer to the ideas of a New Albion spirited by those early English folk-rock groups that mutated tradition through youthful abandon. Someone on another review site mentioned how songs like “Cameron Quartermain” and the “Maids Of Mitchelltown” reminded him of groups like The Pentangle. Similarly, I hear the connections between these two groups connecting styles like jazz, prog, folk and in this case “ambient” music with Cathie’s timeless poetry, masquerading as lyrics and more directly with their cover of “Cruel Sister”, another fascinating cover of Francis James Child’s murder ballad.
You hear such gorgeous interplay in Jim Denley’s saxophone strains coming up like a sun gently rising over the horizon of Cathie’s heavenly-sounding, “Loving One”. Tracks like “Manhire Poems [Wind I + Night Windows At Careys Bay]” use environmental sound to paint a distinctly “Australian” atmosphere. “Ship Sailing” is a brilliant unfurling of storytelling with Cleis Pearce joining in on strings to create a jig that takes us back and forward to heady days when truly new folk music could be created.
The beauty of Summerhaze lies in just how much of Australia does come through it. “Inland Born” paints this impressive picture of that other side of the Outback few get to experience and does it in such a way that its windswept music careens its sentiments quite universally. As noted in the liner notes, “Summerhaze is a waving blend of music, old and new.” It’s in songs like it you get to hear exactly what this new wave was.
And like all great story albums the way they end tends to shape how they linger in your memory. For me, it’s the joy of hearing that old Irish reel, “The Maids Of Mitchelstown” journeying across many separate oceans and continents landing in Oceania as “Maids Of Mitchelltown”, forming new mercury, performing as a perfect final segue to Cathie’s original “Silly Winds” where her pining vocals and resonating bronze-strung harp sound off like a totemic story that will, thankfully, hopefully, outlive our flash in the pan.
As Cathie sings, “Silly winds of autumn blow and mountain rivers spring, I warm myself on memories of you, and wine and fire, my first and last lover” – my mind travels somewhere. Somewhere, where I find myself without any other words to say.