Roots. Craig Horne
rugged mountains of Greece danced with their sweethearts like there was no tomorrow. In a boiling whirl of organic sound, they lost themselves for a few stolen moments in multi-dimensional, unembellished madness, a madness hotter than a Vickers machine gun.
Aside from Harry Stein and his comrades at the Eureka Youth League, the Bell boys were also hanging out with Melbourne’s modernist, artistic avant-garde, led by John and Sunday Reed at their Heide farm in Heidelberg. It was at Heide that the aristocratic Reeds and their painting protégés (such as Sidney Nolan, John Sinclair, Joy Hester, Daniel Vassilief, Adrian Lawler and Albert Tucker) read and dissected modernist authors like Dostoyevsky, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The assembled patrons with their artists, writers and musicians in tow, pored over art books that reproduced the European modernism of Braque, Matisse, Cézanne, Gauguin and Picasso. At the same time the modernist painters were also creating their own Antipodean artistic revolution: think Nolan’s Ned Kelly series and Tucker’s Images of Modern Evil exhibition, not to mention John Perceval’s Survival, to name a few. They drank wine, ate Sunday’s roasts and listened to recitations of works by Rimbaud and Eliot by modernist writers like Max Harris and Michael Keon. All the while, Nolan, Tucker, Counihan and others painted and fought and fucked and created an always unique, often disturbing artistic Australian voice. It was a voice that was underpinned by Bell’s jam sessions, a voice that still resonates today.
My uncle Alf Roberts and aunt Jean lived on a dairy farm next door to the Reeds in the ’30s; in fact it was Alf who sold them eleven acres for 1314 pounds in 1934 allowing John and Sunday access to the Yarra River. I’m not sure if my farmer uncle’s family were fully prepared for their neighbours’ exuberant bohemianism, the visual and sexual experimentation of John, Sunday, Sidney Nolan and their various modernist acolytes. Nor would they have fully grasped the shock and spark of the blazing art and literature exploding under the roof of the Victorian farmhouse next door just off Bulleen Road. My cousin John however fully understood the lascivious behaviour he observed his neighbours engaging in all those years ago:
There were wild parties, jazz bands, with drinks running freely … and in summer there were always nude men and women swimming in the river or luxuriating under the shade a red gum. I was a teenager and wanted to see more of what went on under those trees.’ But Uncle Alf knew what was going on in the shade of those arching red gums, ‘He nailed hessian bags to the fence separating our farm from the Reeds, hoping to block out the view. But us kids just went swimming in the river and all was revealed!
Graeme and Roger Bell were in the eye of the intellectual storm surrounding Heide. The Bell boys’ band played at swing parties hosted by John Sinclair in a converted garage owned by the Reeds and over the road from their Victorian farmhouse. As well as the Reeds, communist intellectuals and fellow travellers, modernist artists, writers and their satellites explored the universe and the inner substance of things, got off on cheap booze and each other while the Bell band supplied the musical backdrop. To quote Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan ‘Roger Bell’s soaring trumpet was heard across the empty farmlands …’4 up and down the Yarra Valley.
The Bells also played ‘hot jazz’ at the Reed-supported Contemporary Art Society’s exhibitions, where the living art of Nolan, Tucker, Noel Counihan, Adrian Lawler and Joy Hester was first displayed, much to the horror of Melbourne’s conservative right wing art establishment. Bell, in his autobiography Australian Jazzman quotes Melbourne’s Truth, describing, in modernist terms, the scene at the October 1941 CAS exhibition, held at the Hotel Australia on Collins Street and featuring the Bells’ band, Graeme Bell’s Jazz Gang:
‘Long-haired intellectuals, swing friends, hot mommas and truckin’ jazz boys rubbed shoulders on friendly terms. While swingers hollered ‘Go to town!’ and jitterbugged in the aisles, the intelligentsia learnedly discussed differences between the rhythms of hot jazz and the pigment of Picasso.’
The close association between jazz musicians and artists was seen as decadent by Melbourne’s conservative art establishment. J.S. McDonald, then-Director of the National Gallery is quoted by Bell describing Melbourne’s Modernist Art movement as the:
‘Product of a generation revelling in jazz, jitterbugging and the elevation of the dress model to stardom … [they are]committed to ungainly attitudes … the exalting of the discordant and ugly!’
Bell himself described his association with the Contemporary Arts Society as ‘a most important event’ that not only led to further gigs, but also cemented close political and personal relationships for a new generation of artists and musicians. As Bell wrote:
‘We jazz musicians and the contemporary artists discovered that we were in the same camp. To be modern or anti-conservative during the prevailing climate was to be anti-fascists and therefore left wing. If anything was anti-conservative in the early ’40s it was jazz. It was a matter of record that the conservative forces in the arts were linked to right-wing politics … leading writers like Max Harris saw jazz as part of the total art phenomenon …’
The connection between these artists and left-wing politics (via Graeme Bells’ association with Harry Stein and the Eureka Youth League) was cemented when the two men co-produced shows at The Stage Door in Flinders Street under the heading ‘Young Jazz Lovers’. The partnership between modernist artists, writers, jazz musicians and progressive politics was unique within Australia. As Bell wrote: ‘Other [Australian] cities, however, particularly Sydney, had nowhere near the rebellious vitality in art, jazz or literature that there was in Melbourne.’
The artistic rebelliousness of the ’40s could be at least partially explained by the psychology of ‘the outsider’. Melbourne’s young, bohemian subculture ran in counterpoint to the suburban cultural establishment. This establishment was led, at the time, by the likes of media giant and father of Rupert, Sir Keith Murdoch, J.S. McDonald and Murdoch’s artistic acolyte, the soon to be National Gallery of Victoria Director, Sir Daryl Lindsay. At this time these cultural troglodytes were busy digging a hole to nowhere in their conservative suburban graveyards, while trying desperately to dismiss the politically progressive, polyrhythmic dynamism of Nolan, the Reeds, James Gleeson, Max Harris, Michael Keon and jazz musicians like Graeme Bell and his Gang. Lindsay refused to buy any modernist paintings for the NGV, and Murdoch dismissed the whole movement as debauched.5
The real action was not at Lindsay’s Toorak mansion, or Murdoch’s bucolic spread on the Mornington Peninsular, but out in Heidelberg at the Reed’s joint, where guests found release letting the Bells’ music dump them like a wild wave. That barn sure rocked; not only was it the scene of wild modernist mayhem, but also the venue where Graeme Bell and his newly acquired young wife, Margo Byass, held their wedding party. Bell writes:
‘The rort …was held in John Reed’s barn … all the artists, writers and jazz musicians of note were there … for the all-night jam session … it was a mad and restless night.’
Another modernist clique descended on the Bell’s new South Yarra apartment, where artists, musicians, racing drivers, sportsmen, writers and African-American servicemen would participate in Saturday afternoon drinking and jazz jam sessions. It was all about trying to escape the general gloom of the war years …
As the war progressed Graeme Bell’s Jazz Gang continued to wail away in subterranean university college jam sessions, and four nights a week at their residency at the Swing Inn coffee house on Flinders Street, above the Young and Jackson’s Hotel. At weekends the gang played the Pacific Hotel in Lorne as well as other regular jazz gigs all around town. The band at this time featured Graeme on keys, Roger on trumpet and Ade Monsbourgh on trombone. It was a line-up that, although still somewhat fluid given the demands of the war effort, remained largely intact until the end of hostilities.
Jazz, parties, dances, art shows; ’40s Melbourne would have been, compared to the rest of world, a surrealist daydream largely untouched by the horrors of the past six years. When the war ended in September 1945, Europe and much of Asia lay