PETER HAMILTON

 

Peter Hamilton: Wattle recordings Posted by: "mark gregory" mark@crixa.com Sun Oct 26, 2008 10:13 pm (PDT) Pioneer record and film producer PETER HAMILTON died peacefully at home on October 23rd. Founder of the Wattle Record label and Wattle Films, Peter started the company in 1954 in Sydney, with his friend and associate Edgar Waters. The label released the first commercially available bush songs including landmark recordings by The Bushwhackers Band, and their hit 'The Drover's Dream'. Two of the label's most important releases were field recordings of bush singers and musicians like Sally Sloan of Lithgow NSW and Simon McDonald of Creswick Victoria Peter was an extraordinary inventor in film and sound recording (see the Hindsight program link below) I don't have a complete list of Wattle recordings but here is a start (I think they say a lot about the breadth of musical interest among the early folk revival enthusiasts) The Green Bushes /Beth Schurr 1956 The Green Bushes /Beth Schurr 1956 Drovers' Dream /The Bushwhackers 1956 Black Velvet Band /The Bushwhackers 1956 Botany Bay /The Bushwhackers 1956 The Bullockies Ball /The Bushwhackers 1956 The Old Bullock Dray /The Bushwhackers 1956 Travelling Down The Castlereigh /The Bushwhackers 1956 Nine Miles from Gundagai /The Bushwhackers 1957 Australian Bush Songs / The Bushwhackers 1957 American Songs of Protest /John Greenway 1957 Workin' on a Building /John Greenway 1957 Irish Songs of Resistance /Patrick Galvin The Art of the Digeridu Music of New Guinea Australian Traditional Singers and Musicians /1957 Singing Sailors /Ewan MacCol and A L Lloyd 1957 Banks of the Condamine /A L Lloyd 1957 Convicts and Currency Lads /Ewan MacColl & A L Lloyd 1958 Across the western Plains /A L Lloyd 1958 The Old Bark Hut /The Rambleers 1958 The Shearers Dream /The Rambleers 1958 The Waltzing Matilda /The Rambleers 1958 Songs from Queensland / Morton Bay Bushwackers and the Bandicoots Billy Goat Overland /Stan Arthur and Bill Scott 1958 Traditional Singers & Musicians of Victoria Archive series no 1 /1962 The Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards /Dougie Young 1963 In 2004 there was an ABC Radio program about Wattle see Hindsight at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/history/hindsight/stories/s1157792.htm Peter Hamilton fought hard to get Australian folk songs taken seriously by the ABC as this quote from the program illustrates "The chairman of the ABC at that time was Sir Charles Boyer and I arranged a session with him and put to him that I thought it was an appropriate thing for Australian ABC to do what the BBC were doing in England and the Library of Congress were doing in America, that is that they had dedicated full time staff recording the folk music in England respectively and in America respectively and that was part of their charter to do that and they had a team of people and outdoor full facilities to go and visit old singers and collect material and subsequently have that aired. He was very interested in that and supportive of that as a concept but he had a music manager and he would need to consult him so he called him in to this meeting and he just said well in his view there was no Australian folk song and they were just popular songs that came from overseas and he then left the room and the chairman said well he would have to respect the views of his senior music authority and that was the end of that." regards Mark -- http://folkstream.com/