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Charlie McMahon is an Australian
didgeridoo The didgeridoo (;()), also spelt didjeridu, among other variants, is a wind instrument, played with vibrating lips to produce a continuous Drone (music), drone while using a special breathing technique called circular breathing. The didgerido ...
player. The founder of the group
Gondwanaland Gondwana ( ; ) was a large landmass, sometimes referred to as a supercontinent. The remnants of Gondwana make up around two-thirds of today's continental area, including South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Zealandia, Arabia, and the ...
, McMahon was one of the first non- Aboriginal musicians to gain fame as a professional player of the instrument. He is also the inventor of the didjeribone, a sliding didgeridoo made from two lengths of plastic tubing and played somewhat in the manner of a
trombone The trombone (, Italian, French: ''trombone'') is a musical instrument in the Brass instrument, brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's lips vibrate inside a mouthpiece, causing the Standing wave, air c ...
(hence its name).


Early life

In 1955, '' Jedda'', the first Australian feature movie filmed in colour, was released, and the McMahons, living in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney, were just one Australian family among many who went to see it. The film was notable for being the first mainstream Australian movie to have Aboriginal actors in the lead roles and characters that acknowledged the existence of, and identification with, an indigenous culture. Jedda, in the screenplay, is an Aboriginal girl adopted by a white station owner's wife to replace her own child who had died (coincidentally, the station owner's surname, McMann, is a variation of the Irish surname McMahon). Deliberately isolated from all contact with her birth family and relations, Jedda, is unsure of her identity until she meets Marbuck, a tribal Aboriginal man in trouble with the European system of justice. She is seduced by his intense didgeridoo playing but their elopement into the wilderness ends in tragedy when Marbuck's tribe rejects him for having broken its own laws regarding marriage. Marbuck, spurned by both the old and the new cultures, jumps off a cliff and takes Jedda with him. The movie was also significant for its presentation of panoramic
outback The Outback is a remote, vast, sparsely populated area of Australia. The Outback is more remote than Australian bush, the bush. While often envisaged as being arid, the Outback regions extend from the northern to southern Australian coastli ...
scenery and its mixture of documentary and fiction (curiously, the destruction of the last reel of the film in a plane crash meant the movie's dramatic climax had to be refilmed in McMahon's home environment, the Blue Mountains). After the show young Charlie McMahon had been so absorbed by his cinema experience he tried to imitate the gut-stirring didge sound he heard in the movie by blowing into a garden hose and various hollow household objects like vacuum cleaner nozzles. He also developed an ongoing fascination with Aboriginals and their lives an unlikely interest for a four-year-old as "there weren't any black fellas living near us". He also took to running away and wandering in the scrub for comparatively long periods. Later, when he got older, he used to live off the land for a night and generally "went native" whenever he could. During 1958, when he was 7 years old, the McMahon family relocated from the Blue Mountains to the tough outer western suburb of
Blacktown Blacktown is a suburb in New South Wales, Australia, west of the Sydney central business district. It is one of the most multicultural places within Sydney, Greater Sydney. History Before the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, the area of ...
near Sydney, but McMahon still managed to find ways to "go bush" regularly. In 1967, McMahon blew off his right arm experimenting with a homemade rocket in a friend's backyard at Seven Hills, a neighbouring suburb of
Blacktown Blacktown is a suburb in New South Wales, Australia, west of the Sydney central business district. It is one of the most multicultural places within Sydney, Greater Sydney. History Before the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, the area of ...
. The ''
Sydney Morning Herald ''The Sydney Morning Herald'' (''SMH'') is a daily tabloid newspaper published in Sydney, Australia, and owned by Nine Entertainment. Founded in 1831 as the ''Sydney Herald'', the ''Herald'' is the oldest continuously published newspaper in ...
'' newspaper report of the incident stated that the friend, Ron Carley, had some of his fingers amputated so presumably both boys were holding the cylinder at the time it exploded. During a lengthy recuperation period getting used to his new metal arm (which, true to character, he wrapped in
goanna A goanna is any one of several species of lizard of the genus ''Monitor lizard, Varanus'' found in Australia and Southeast Asia. Around 70 species of ''Varanus'' are known, 25 of which are found in Australia. This varied group of carnivorous r ...
hide) McMahon reactivated his earlier interest in didgeridoo playing, this time as therapy. At the same time he concentrated on previously neglected school work. During study breaks McMahon used to relax by going off to the sand flats of the Windsor River with his bongo playing brother Phil and some mates and the "westie tribe" would dress up in loincloths, paint their faces and have a
corroboree A corroboree is a generic word for a meeting of Australian Aboriginal peoples. It may be a sacred ceremony, a festive celebration, or of a warlike character. A word coined by the first British settlers in the Sydney area from a word in the ...
. With the wild side of his nature given an occasional outlet McMahon settled into study and won a university scholarship, achieving an honorary degree in Arts and
Town Planning Urban planning (also called city planning in some contexts) is the process of developing and designing land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportatio ...
which led to him becoming, for a year, a lecturer and tutor in Town Planning at
The University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD) is a public university, public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in both Australia and Oceania. One of Australia's six sandstone universities, it was one of the ...
. McMahon has said he became interested in studying town planning as a possible future way of correcting the all too obvious mistakes he found in the running of Blacktown. He wrote a treatise on the subject but became disillusioned when he realised the many political and vested interests trying to prevent the ideal becoming a reality. One fateful weekend at Australia's equivalent of Woodstock, the 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival, McMahon found himself intrigued by the performance of The White Company an experimental Theatre Troupe featuring a number of alternative culture artists including one Peter Carolan, a 25-year-old actor with roles in Australian TV's ''Skippy the Bush Kangaroo'', ''The Rovers'', and stage productions such as ''Servant of Two Masters'', and Graham Bond's Drip Dry Dreams. Carolan came from a musical family. His mother played classical piano; his father was a professional jazz musician who performed on accordion, piano, organ, and synthesiser; and his paternal grandfather, Bart Carolan, was a composer and arranger who worked for a time at the
BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
. The Carolan family had immigrated to Australia from England when Peter was 18. At the time his gift for creating flowing melodies "with spine" was noticed by McMahon, Carolan was playing lap dulcimer, an instrument to which he was attracted because of its simplicity – "a primal drone, a strummed rhythm and a monophonic melody that could change mode by tuning". No direct communication between the two musicians was made at the festival but they had both noticed each other's presence. In 1974 a three-day arts festival season by the White Company at Sydney's Arts Castle venue included a performance by McMahon. After a productive post-show dulcimer and didgeridoo improvisation session in a dome on the roof of the venue the two players realised they had many attitudes towards music in common: McMahon was attracted to music with "atmosphere" while Peter had become interested in composing music that evoked a sense of "place" after hearing Maurice Jarre's 1962 score for the film '' Lawrence of Arabia''. The two players made a vague promise to "do something in music together sometime in the future. In 1974, back at his day job, McMahon was growing increasingly disillusioned with what he later described as the "too much talk" atmosphere of campus academic life. During one particularly stifling lecture in a dungeon-like library basement with no windows and bare walls McMahon and his assistant interrupted their discussion of map interpretation with the impulsive act of encouraging the students to join them in painting the walls. This behaviour was seen by the University Chancellor as the ultimate act of confrontation and defiance of authority by an untameable teacher and McMahon was dismissed. He decided to do something more practical so he bought a property in a thickly forested valley on the south coast of
New South Wales New South Wales (commonly abbreviated as NSW) is a States and territories of Australia, state on the Eastern states of Australia, east coast of :Australia. It borders Queensland to the north, Victoria (state), Victoria to the south, and South ...
with two of his brothers and settled down to building a house the hard way by hand (and hook), all the time learning more about bush craft and living in a natural environment—skills that would come in handy for his next cycle of experience in the desert regions of Central Australia. In early 1978, McMahon jumped on stage during a
Midnight Oil Midnight Oil (known informally as "The Oils") are an Australian rock band composed of Peter Garrett (vocals, harmonica), Rob Hirst (drums), Jim Moginie (guitar, keyboard) and Martin Rotsey (guitar). The group was formed in Sydney in 1972 by H ...
performance at French's Tavern in Sydney and added his didge sounds to their song "Stand in Line." This marked the beginning of a friendship that was to last throughout both their music careers (in 1978 Midnight Oil had only played a half dozen or so gigs under that name). After two and a half years of labouring and living on his diminishing savings he finished his bush retreat and was fortunate to be offered a job working for the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs in the position of a Development Coordinator in the
Northern Territory The Northern Territory (abbreviated as NT; known formally as the Northern Territory of Australia and informally as the Territory) is an states and territories of Australia, Australian internal territory in the central and central-northern regi ...
, supervising outstation work grants to tribal people living hundreds of kilometres west of
Alice Springs Alice Springs () is a town in the Northern Territory, Australia; it is the third-largest settlement after Darwin, Northern Territory, Darwin and Palmerston, Northern Territory, Palmerston. The name Alice Springs was given by surveyor William ...
at the settlements of Kintore, Kiwirrkurra Community, Western Australia, and
Papunya Papunya ( Pintupi-Luritja: ''Warumpi'') is a small Indigenous Australian community roughly northwest of Alice Springs (Mparntwe) in the Northern Territory, Australia. It is known as an important centre for Contemporary Indigenous Australian ar ...
(the 1971 birthplace of the Australian Aboriginal dot painting revival). An important part of McMahon's initial work program to supervise the building of a store and meeting place for the local people as the levelling of an air strip for the
Royal Flying Doctor Service The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS), commonly known as the Flying Doctor, is an aeromedical retrieval service in Australia and the largest of its kind in the world. It is a non-profit organisation that provides urgent and emergency medica ...
. He also helped construct a 400 km chain of windmills and water bores in the
Great Sandy Desert The Great Sandy Desert is an interim Australian bioregion,IBRA Version 6.1
data
area, many times driving a three-ton water truck with only a thrown right hook to stabilise the steering wheel in rough country. Because of his obvious sincerity and work for the tribal communities McMahon was sometimes invited to observe traditional ceremonies held under the resplendent starlight of nighttime Central Australia. After 18 months he took some time off to gig with
Midnight Oil Midnight Oil (known informally as "The Oils") are an Australian rock band composed of Peter Garrett (vocals, harmonica), Rob Hirst (drums), Jim Moginie (guitar, keyboard) and Martin Rotsey (guitar). The group was formed in Sydney in 1972 by H ...
, where he learned set dynamics and the art of talking to an audience from watching frontman Peter Garrett.


1980s

In 1980, encouraged by Tony Walker, an announcer from
Triple J Triple J is an Australian government-funded national radio station founded in 1975 as a division of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It aims to appeal to young listeners of alternative music, and plays far more Australian conten ...
(an Australian alternative music radio station), McMahon sold his
Toyota Land Cruiser The , also sometimes spelt as LandCruiser, is a series of four-wheel drive vehicles produced by the Japanese automobile manufacturer Toyota. It is Toyota's longest running series of models. , the sales of the Land Cruiser totalled more than 1 ...
work truck and embarked on a two-month exploratory holiday to the United States starting in San Francisco, then going on to Los Angeles and
Fresno Fresno (; ) is a city in the San Joaquin Valley of California, United States. It is the county seat of Fresno County, California, Fresno County and the largest city in the greater Central Valley (California), Central Valley region. It covers a ...
. Some soundtrack work beckoned in Hollywood on a 1981 horror film called '' Wolfen'' but a musician's strike delayed the recording and, returning to San Francisco, McMahon, in the same week, missed his plane flight home and had his wallet, containing all his money, stolen creating the urgent need to find some way to earn a living wage and save for the air trip back to Australia. He found gigs on the daunting (and taunting) San Francisco punk club circuit and survived spectacularly with an improvised solo act alternating original didgeridoo compositions with stories based on memories of his desert experiences. He also involved himself musically on stage with whoever else was performing at the same venue. One such partnership resulted when McMahon was invited to join
Timothy Leary Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from "bold oracle" to "publicity hound". Accordin ...
's 1980 lecture tour for a few gigs. McMahon formed a band with some musicians he met in San Francisco:
Mark Isham Mark Ware Isham (born September 7, 1951) is an American musician and composer. A trumpeter and keyboardist, Isham works in a variety of genres, including jazz and electronic music, electronic. He is also a prolific and acclaimed composer of Film ...
, Kurt Wortman, and Pat Cooley. They performed under the name The Yidaki Brothers and they did their own improvised
acid rock Acid rock is a loosely defined type of rock music that evolved out of the mid-1960s garage rock, garage punk movement and helped launch the psychedelia, psychedelic subculture. While the term has sometimes been used interchangeably with "psyc ...
take on the subjects of some of McMahon's stories. Another notable combination was with punk electronics group Indoor Life whose songs of urban frustration "buried in cement" were dominated by the sound of a trombone fed through a synthesizer. After five months of work he found himself earning about 500 dollars a week and quickly developing a fan base but, having reached one goal, financial, it was time to aim for the next one, creative, which for McMahon meant the recording of an album which he felt could only be done in Australia, the source of his musical inspiration. McMahon returned to Sydney and, in 1981, received his first major Australia-wide publicity when the
Adelaide Adelaide ( , ; ) is the list of Australian capital cities, capital and most populous city of South Australia, as well as the list of cities in Australia by population, fifth-most populous city in Australia. The name "Adelaide" may refer to ei ...
music paper ''Roadrunner'' published a lengthy article with the intriguing heading "This Years Thing? One Armed Didgerdu Players? It's No Joke! Says Miranda Brown." As McMahon later stated, "I realised what I wanted to do was work with a good synth player – a very good synth player. So I mucked around with a few guys in Sydney but their range was too narrow then I remembered hearing Peter Carolan's playing ten years ago. He was playing a dulcimer in the bush and when I heard he was now playing synth I knew straight away this was the melody man to compose that key part of Gondwanaland." They worked on their first composition, "Pulse," inspired by the sound of a heartbeat. In the following months Carolan continued to create ideal music settings for McMahon's didgeridoo and expanded on his key image ideas such as an
emu The emu (; ''Dromaius novaehollandiae'') is a species of flightless bird endemism, endemic to Australia, where it is the Tallest extant birds, tallest native bird. It is the only extant taxon, extant member of the genus ''Dromaius'' and the ...
running, a drought, an eagle flying, and a landscape stretching beyond the horizon. Carolan's use of simple but powerful melodies linked to intelligently emotional arrangements openly conveyed in sound those poetic moments "when time stops and the joys, and mysteries of life are felt." 9 In 1984 McMahon and Carolan assembled a small studio band of musician friends and recorded the first Gondwanaland album under the title ''Terra Incognita''. When released on the small independent Hot label it was a critical and popular success. In October 1984, shortly after the debut of the first album, McMahon went "on the swag" again, only to be caught up in a sensationalist media drama when a group of nine Aboriginals, known as the
Pintupi Nine The Pintupi Nine are a group of nine Pintupi people who remained unaware of European colonisation of Australia and lived a traditional desert-dwelling life in Australia's Gibson Desert until 1984, when they made contact with their relatives ne ...
, were encountered near the last of a chain of water bores he had been overseeing between Kintore and "the remotest outpost in Australia"—Kiwirrkurra. A visiting journalist hyped the incident into a biblical "finding of the lost tribe" but the people concerned were not "lost" but had instead "gone walkabout" after rejecting attempts by 1950s Woomera rocket range personnel to resettle them at Papuna. The small tribal group managed to go through their usual birth, initiation, marriage, and death rituals for decades, living off the natural resources of their desert environment before "coming in" to face the anger, and relief, of their relatives. McMahon's diary at the time noted "Tomorrow 6 Oct 1984we will find the two men's tracks and maybe they will spend their last night free of the modern world". In April 1985 McMahon was flown to London to perform with the
London Philharmonic Orchestra The London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) is a British orchestra based in London. One of five permanent symphony orchestras in London, the LPO was founded by the conductors Thomas Beecham, Sir Thomas Beecham and Malcolm Sargent in 1932 as a riv ...
on the recording of Maurice Jarre's ''
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome ''Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome'' (also known as ''Mad Max 3'') is a 1985 Australian post-apocalyptic dystopian action film directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie and written by Terry Hayes and Miller. It is the third installment in the ''M ...
'' soundtrack. When he returned a month later an advertisement was placed in a music paper "Gondwana Wana Drummer." Only one reply was received – from an energetic multi – format percussionist called Eddy Duquemin as equally at home on electric pad drums as he was on acoustic "skins'. He joined the live Gondwanaland band and McMahon decided to make the group his full time occupation. Because of his restless stage presence, Duquemin was soon given the nickname "Brolga" by McMahon—the
brolga The brolga (''Antigone rubicunda''), formerly known as the native companion, is a bird in the crane (bird), crane family. It has also been given the name Australian crane, a term coined in 1865 by well-known ornithology, ornithologist John Gou ...
being an Australian outback bird that is renowned for its dancing; Carolan had already been dubbed "Lizard," although this was later changed to "Professor. In November 1985, Midnight Oil commenced a 26-date local tour starting in Dubbo with Gondwanaland supporting. As well as feeding them to the mosh pit, this gave the newly constituted three piece some "tour of duty" exposure f not exactly the type of audience they were hoping to attract In 1986, ''Let the Dog Out'', Gondwanaland's second album, was released. It contained a bracket of aggressive, up-tempo numbers followed by two extended compositions, the first of which, "Ephemeral Lakes," later became a regular choice for meditative ambient music compilations. Midnight Oil's Black Fella/White Fella tour of remote Northern Territory Aboriginal settlements in July 1986 recruited McMahon with the task of "co-ordinating the tour group's camping and guiding requirements and ontributingplenty of common sense and a touch of sanity as well" A tour book entitled ''Strict Rules'', by Andrew McMillan, and a video: "Black Fella White Fella," were subsequently released and McMahon features in both. In 1987, after a year of extensive live work in Sydney and an
Arts Council An arts council is a government or private non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts; mainly by funding local artists, awarding prizes, and organizing arts events. They often operate at arms-length from the government to prevent pol ...
-sponsored four-week tour of the Northern Territory, the third album, self-titled ''Gondwanaland'', was released. It had taken many months to record and while the prolonged touring helped tighten the arrangements some of the groups intense live energy was diluted by the usual studio technique of making a separate recording of each member's instrumental part before a final mix. Despite this limitation the album won the Australian music industry's
ARIA Award The Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards (commonly known informally as ARIA Music Awards, ARIA Awards, or simply the ARIAs) is an annual series of awards nights celebrating the Australian music industry, put on by the Austra ...
for best indigenous album of 1988. One track from this collection, the outstanding "Landmark," features a dramatic use of McMahon's re-invention of an instrument first made in the 1970s in the UK by Dr Peter Holmes, the multi-tone, slide didgeridoo called "didjeribone." In November 1988 Gondwanaland performed during the " Tomita Sound Cloud in Sydney – Hymn To Mankind," a A$3 million, Japanese government sponsored, light and sound, opera spectacular held on
Sydney Harbour Port Jackson, commonly known as Sydney Harbour, is a ria, natural harbour on the east coast of Australia, around which Sydney was built. It consists of the waters of Sydney Harbour, Middle Harbour, North Harbour and the Lane Cove River, Lane ...
as part of the Australian Bicentennial celebrations. The concert attracted an audience of over 120,000 an Australian record for a live music event.


1990s to the present

In 1991, Gondwanaland's ''Wide Skies'' was released. In 1992, McMahon appeared in a film with Indigenous didgeridoo master
David Blanasi David Blanasi ( – disappeared 2001), also known as David Bylanadji, also spelt David Bulanatji, was an Aboriginal Australian player and maker of the didgeridoo, known as master of the "Kunborrk, Kunbjorrk" or "Gunborg" style of playing. He is k ...
. In 1994, after the great leap forward of ''Wide Skies'', McMahon formed a second band, Gondwana, with an emphasis on rhythm and increasingly dominant bass and experimental didge sounds. The band released three albums: ''Travelling'', ''Xenophon'', and ''Bone Man'', with the last two featuring another McMahon innovation: the mouth-held use of a geologist's seismic microphone to amplify the growling subsonic didge dynamics. This approach to music gave McMahon a new audience: the trance/dance crowd. In 2005 McMahon experienced a bizarre case of déjà vu when he found himself, 20 years after his 1985 London ''Mad Max'' soundtrack work, in Russia with a new manager associated with a Mad Max Smash and Crash "theme park." The episode was made the subject of a quirky ''
Foreign Correspondent A correspondent or on-the-scene reporter is usually a journalist or commentator for a magazine, or an agent who contributes reports to a newspaper, or radio or television news, or another type of company, from a remote, often distant, locati ...
'' report in March 2006."Mad Max Goes To Moscow" Foreign Correspondent 7.3.2006 ABC broadcast transcript In 2006 Peter Carolan released a sampler CD called ''Overland'', collecting examples, old and new, of his various music explorations. In August 2008 McMahon released a DVD storage disc library of over 800 samples under the title "Rhythm Organism". On 24 April 2012 McMahon released a subdued and mellow Gondwana album called ''Didge Heart''. On 28 July 2012 Peter Carolan died at the age of 64.


Discography

*'Long Way My Country'' Journey Home; Blue Wren at Waterhole; Swooped By Eagles; Spirit Dawn cMahon Trek; Campsite cMahon / Yidaki BrothersRecorded San Francisco US Various Venues December 1980


See also

* Gondwanaland (Australian band) * Modern didgeridoo designs


References


References Footnote

Published information on McMahon's early life is elusive. Many of the press clippings cited are obscure and could only be found as a single copy in a casually collected fan archive. Most of these fan cuttings did not record full or part origin details but these will be added when they are known. If a date is missing the year the article was written is worked out from other references in the text.


External links


Official siteDidjeribone

Rhythmorganizm Facebass siteCharlie McMahon
on
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Land of The Lightning Brothers DVD
{{DEFAULTSORT:McMahon, Charlie 1951 births Living people Australian musicians Didgeridoo players