Roots. Craig Horne
association with the Contemporary Art Society and the modernist art movement in general had helped mould the band’s philosophical outlook and gave it cachet with a progressive, sophisticated audience in the first half of the decade. But it would be Bell’s association with the Eureka Youth League and the left wing political movement in the second half of the decade that would, as Bell himself wrote, ‘Launch us as almost a household name and [give] us international exposure.’17
The media had got hold of Bell’s imminent European tour. The Bell band would be the first Australian jazz group to tour overseas, a rarity for anyone from the performing arts, or really from any walk of life at this time. This gave the band huge publicity; it meant photos in the papers and radio and newsreel coverage. This generated a buzz which, in turn, led to massively increased audiences at places like the Uptown Club, as well as a five-night-per-week residency at the Manchester Café.
The tour may have also indirectly led to another huge leap in the career of the band: their first recording contract with Columbia Records, a subsidiary of EMI. In those times a recording contract opened many doors; airtime on city and country radio was guaranteed because of the small number of records released in Australia straight after the war. As Bell wrote, ‘Coupled with the overseas tour, this [recording contract] was a double that was hard to beat. It was like pressing two magic buttons simultaneously … and in the right place …’18
To say Graeme Bell and his Dixieland Jazz Band (as it was now known) was a hit in Prague would be an understatement. Crowds of six thousand people or more at their concerts were normal. Bell observed that ‘The audience reaction … was something none of us will ever forget … they threw their hats in the air, whistled and cheered as we went into our programme …’19
The band’s performances were filmed for newsreels and the footage was shown in movie theatres all over the world. Articles about the band appeared in Czech, French, English and Russian newspapers, with one paper declaring, ‘Usually we think of Australia only as the land of the kangaroo, emu or good sheep wool … none of us would have thought that Australia produced true, pure jazz …’20
Following the Prague convention the band stayed on to play a month-long, nine-show-per-week residency at the prestigious Fenix Club in Prague. This led to an invitation to cut six sides in the Rokoska Studios for the Czech label Supraphon; the tracks from these sessions were exported all over the world in later years. Bell was always proud of the results; he wrote that ‘Forty years later these records stand the test of time for balance and clarity and yet I think only two microphones were used, one for the front line and the other for the rhythm section …’21
The tour continued in Bohemia and Moravia, with a brief return to Prague for a one-night stand at the historic Smetana Hall. Featured on the bill was famed Czech poet Egon Kisch, well known in Australia for the dictation test imposed on him by the Australian government when he tried to visit before the war. Kisch had been asked to write out a passage in Gaelic, which of course he couldn’t manage; he was subsequently deported back to Czechoslovakia.
From Czechoslovakia it was on to Paris, where the band was a huge success. During this stint the band played an enthusiastically-received gig at the Hot Club of France and conducted a recording session for the French Pacific label; the tracks would be subsequently released on a Swaggie album some years later. Then there was a series of frenetic gigs and residencies all over London and Great Britain, including at the prestigious Leicester Square Jazz Club. As a result of this nearly six-month European tour, and later European visits, Graeme Bell and his Dixieland Jazz Band were credited by the American music journal Downbeat magazine as starting the European traditional or trad jazz revival, and being … ‘unquestionably the greatest jazz band outside America.’22
Trouble in Paradise
However, all was not well with the modernist movement at home. The Bells’ overseas absence had coincided with Australia descending into a cultural miasma of fear, conservatism and bigotry; the source of this crisis, in part, could be placed at the feet of the Cold War.
Australia had just emerged from World War II after experiencing the horrors of the Great Depression. Its people were exhausted, and looking to live out their life in a quiet, safe suburb. The desire for security replaced curiosity; pursuit of a career (for the male of the household), accumulation of assets, raising of children, and the keeping of an English-style garden were the matters of importance for most Australian families. There was, however, trouble in paradise.
The Atomic Age had arrived, bringing with it not only the promise of cheap power, fuelling a new industrial revolution, but also the possibility of annihilation. The Soviets had the bomb, so did America: it was a fight that could potentially kill us all.
Conservative state and federal governments and the right-wing press spread panic, fear and Cold War hysteria. The Minister for External Affairs Richard Casey fuelled anti-communist Cold War paranoia by bringing to the nation’s attention a ‘Nest of traitors in the public service.’23 Reds were everywhere, apparently: in trade unions, the teaching profession and universities. Nowhere was safe.
Additionally, as wool price plummeted and inflation rose, the economy slid into a recession. A horror deflationary federal budget followed, leading to a surge in unemployment, with wages stagnating and black smoke rising over the Bonegilla migrant camp near Albury as inmates rioted.
It’s all the fault of those wogs, we collectively screamed, and the Government agreed. Menzies responded to the economic crisis by severely cutting Australia’s migration program from Britain and Europe, much to the relief of many Australians, including members of Her Majesty’s Opposition. In the nation’s capital, the Honorable Queensland Labor Senator Archie Benn compared immigrants to cane toads, complaining they never should have been introduced in the first place.
This economic and political uncertainty resulted in many Australians turning on the Government. For a while it seemed the Menzies regime would come to an end — but they still had a trick, in the form of a communist threat, up their sleeve. Then on the eve of the 1954 election, they were handed a gift from the security-intelligence gods in the form of the Petrov Affair.
Vladimir Petrov was a minor Soviet diplomat who had been courted by ASIO for many years; they managed to convince Petrov to defect in the caretaker period before the election (fancy that?). When Petrov’s wife was being flown back to Moscow by Soviet officials it stopped in Darwin for refuelling giving an opportunity for our brave boys in blue to swoop; she was spectacularly escorted off her plane in the full view of the waiting Australian media (I wonder how they found out about it? Separation of powers; No?) by a couple of burly Federal Police officers and reunited with her husband in Sydney. The nation cheered and in the days leading up to the election, citizens devoured related stories of Soviet espionage on our shores — and then, wouldn’t you believe it, the Menzies Government was returned, with a thumping majority!
Anti-communist hysteria also led to a split within the Labor movement. It was led by arch-Catholic Bob Santamaria, the leader of a grouping of conservative, ALP affiliated trade unions known as the Grouper faction. Santamaria justified splitting from the ALP on the grounds that communists had infiltrated many of the trade unions associated with the party, and consequently wielded too much power. The split resulted in the formation of the ultra-conservative Catholic-dominated Democratic Labour Party that subsequently formed a close political alliance with Menzies’ Liberals, an alliance that kept the ALP out of government both federally and in Victoria for well over two decades.
These were indeed desperate times, and Melbourne’s progressive artistic scene was not unaffected. Albert Tucker was just one of the many artists to flee Australia at this time, stating:
‘The