Post 3 January 15 2018
The Original First Nations String Orchestra
A great part of our job as music teachers is the opportunity to meet a diverse range of people and to hear many different stories. Here is a story about meeting Helen Tuckey and learning about a nun treating leprosy in Derby in the 1940s to 1980s who used music to heal. How does this relate to embedding Indigenous cultures and perspectives? Read on.
Helen Tuckey : Australian Strings Association National President
I was lucky enough to be at a workshop she delivered at ASME WA Summer School in January 2018. We chatted afterwards and agreed to meet and talk some more. This we did a couple of months later when she generously shared stories and resources.
Helen has so much experience and knowledge in working with different Aboriginal peoples, particularly in the Kimberley, where she was a visiting musician where she provided educational experiences for school children. She also supported Aboriginal students to acquire high school scholarships to study string instruments in Perth. Combine all of this, together with being a mum and professional musician with Western Australian Symphony Orchestra and she has a pretty full on time.
She has many amazing stories. She is a woman who doesn’t just talk, she thinks and acts. She makes a difference by getting out and trying new and different things and by making considered new connections. I hope you all get the opportunity to meet her one day.
For me the stand out story she related was from Bungarun, the leprosarium at Derby. She told me of the first Australian string orchestra was actually in Derby, made up of Aboriginal lepers.
Background To The Orchestra
The leprosarium, established in 1936, saw the arrival of a new sister In the mid 1940s. She was both a registered nurse and a trained musician. Her name was Sr Alphonsus Daly and she replaced Sr Gertrude as sister in charge.
Sr Alphonsus began teaching the patients music and established a patient orchestra. She realised both adult and young patients could pick up how to play the instruments without the need to read music, and she appealed to the public and the government for donations of musical instruments. Oh how the world turns in similar circles through time, with a similar appeal currently associated with the “Please Don’t Stop The Music” campaign.
The patients played classical music and folk songs, and, in later years, jazz and “The Beatles”.
When official visitors came, they held concerts and dressed up, as you can see in this photo. For Sr Alphonsus, the orchestra performed a number of different therapeutic functions; it was, in her view, a kind of panacea.
For her, playing music also helped to keep the patients distracted from their problems. And patients looking back on this time agreed this was the main reason they were encouraged to play. In their words ”music was an escape from confinement” and another claimed “it was to keep us occupied instead of thinking about our relations”. Another, that “it helped lift spirits up”. In her memoirs, Sister Alphonsus called it the ‘therapy of distraction’.
This amazing woman demonstrated the power of music to heal bodies and hearts and how music brings people together. The trust, cognitive and musical abilities of the Aboriginal people incarcerated at the leprosarium showed people can create beauty in the most unlikely of environments.
So What Can Music Teachers Do With This Story?
Inspire instrumental students
A way the Bungarun Orchestra can be honoured is to remember this story and tell it to our students about the role music can play in our lives.
Create An Australian Context To “Big” Western Art Compositions
When we introduce pieces by Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner or Handel, we can tell this story and show them photographs or the video.
Explain how the orchestra was set up in a place where people were taken if they had a disease to be treated and were kept removed from the rest of society. Over 1500 Aboriginal people were treated at this place in its fifty years of operation until 1986 a cure for leprosy was found. The leprosarium was closed.
High School Teacher Here Is A Relief Lesson
Here is a great opportunity for when your relief teacher is not music trained and but you want to keep the lesson related to music. The documentary presents memories of the leprosarium from former musicians of the orchestra. It illustrates the positive impact classical music and music generally can have on people’s lives. It also shows how music can build bridges between different peoples in society.
Post Script
Sister Alphonsus Daly after her retirement lived on at the leprosarium . She died at St John Of God Hospital, Subiaco, Perth on August 8 1980 and is buried at the Karrakatta Cemetary.
Post Post Script
Just last month, December 2018 the Broome Advertiser announced the proposed creation of a memorial garden at the Derby leprosarium was announced. It is to be at the Sisters of St John Of God Heritage Centre in Broome.
“The Bungarun Reflection Courtyard will include a quite outdoor area, an audio station, interpretive signs and bend seats, telling the story of community spirit that arose.”
“Sister at the heritage centre also hope to incorporate the sound of a 50 piece orchestra started in 1944 by Alphonsus Daly, a nurse and musician who spent 36 years at Bungarun.”
Broome Advertiser 6/12/18
References:
https://heritage.ssjg.org.au/assets/historical-articles/academic/rahs-lecture.pdf
“Healing Hands –Sister M. Alphonsus Daly, MBE of the Kimberley Mission : Memories and Milestones for the Derby Leprosarium. Health Department Booklet produced to mark the 50th anniversary of the leprosarium.
https://www.abccommercial.com/librarysales/program/message-stick-healing-sounds-bungarum-orchestra
Memorial Garden Article Broome Advertiser, December 6 2018.
Many thanks to Helen Tuckey in her sharing of the stories and reference materials. Also her patience. JN
