TWO SONGS OF HARRY PECKMAN,
THE BLUE MOUNTAINS POET

Another song of Peckman's, also printed in broadside format, that drifted into a communal ownership is 'The Bright Shades of Blue'. Again, there is no printing date, though it is likely that it comes from around the same time as 'Tambaroora Gold'.

We are used to songs depicting the convict's experience of exile but, in this song we share the experience from quite a different point of view, that of an indigenous Australian 'captured' and taken to a 'distant land'. Though no historical event is referred to as a source for the song's subject, it does bring to mind the actual experiences of Bennelong and Yem-mer-ra-wan-nie, two Dharug Aborigines who sailed out of Port Jackson with Governor Arthur Phillip on 11th December 1792. Yem-mer-ra-wan-nie died in England in 1794 and Bennelong returned to Sydney in 1795.

It's a remarkable song in many ways, not least for the attempt it makes to understand the feelings of an Aboriginal person and the love he has for the land of his birth.

In the 1950s John Meredith collected fragments of this song from a number of singers, including Sally Sloane from Lithgow and Cyril Ticehurst who learnt his version while working as a butcher in Grenfell, NSW. The latter version, which had shed the chorus (or rather integrated it into two of the verses), was published with a tune in Folk Songs of Australia and the Men and Women Who Sang Them. Meredith also collected a further version (unpublished) in 1984 from Steve Power who grew up in the Wollar district of NSW and got it from his father.

It is interesting that, while both the Ticehurst and Power versions possess similarities to Peckman's, they also share a major difference. In the narratives of both an experience of ill-treatment is contrasted with one of kindness. In Peckman's text, on the other hand, the 'darkey', while in sorrow, is only ever 'treated with kindness' by his abductors. In the Ticehurst version the convict experience of transportation has somehow also been incorporated into the story. The 'folk' have clearly effected considerable re-creation of the song.6

Towards the end of his life Harry Peckman experienced hard times and, though visitors still often sought him out even in the late 1920s, he watched as the age of the motor car gradually rendered his coach and pair obsolete. At the time of his death he had become something of an icon, a symbol of a past era. On a slow news day the local journalists would seek him out and trawl his still alert mind for reminiscences of the 'old days'. For his 88th birthday, in August 1934, his friends organised a party. He performed his poems for the last time and, some seven weeks later, died. His grave in Katoomba Cemetery looks out over the tributaries of the Grose River that flow into what he once described as “the Hawkesb'ry silver Rhine”.

Since 1982 I've come to know him well. I've learnt from him something about the Blue Mountains where I live and, regarding the two songs discussed here, something of the way folk songs are created. In 1993, nearly 60 years after his death, a small biography and collection of his surviving poems and songs was published.7 A belated and long overdue recognition for the 'Blue Mountains Poet', a man of his place who knew its stories!