Published: 12 August 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
This time last year, Brian Jonathon - an Irish-born doctor/singer-songwriter who is also president of the Folk Federation of NSW - was chatting with an old mate.
Author, actor, singer-songwriter and cultural historian Warren Fahey AM (awarded for services to Australian music and folklore) and Jonathon lamented that Australia’s largest city hadn’t held a folk festival since the Port Jackson Folk Festival shut down decades ago.
Why don’t we start a new folk festival, they said (possibly over a pint of Guinness: Fahey’s father was Irish while his mother was Jewish)? And why not use it to showcase just how vibrant the folk scene is among young musicians and young audiences?
This weekend sees the results of that conversation. Jonathon is the festival’s executive producer, while Fahey is artistic director. “Normally folk festivals take people to the bush,” Jonathon says. “Our festival is taking folk to the city.”
Not that folk is foreign to Sydneysiders, he adds. There are at least half a dozen thriving folk clubs dotted around greater Sydney, plus multiple venues which regularly host folk artists.
If folk music isn’t usually associated with Jewish culture, Jonathon points out that Bob Dylan, the world’s most famous “folk singer”, was born Robert Zimmerman,
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Which raises the question: what exactly is folk music? “Folk can’t be defined,” Jonathon says. “It isn’t just singing songs around a campfire. It’s the music of the people, dealing with ordinary life.
“With this festival we cover the whole, big, colourful umbrella of folk genres.” That ranges from Australian bush ballads, English-style Morris dancing and Irish-influenced fiddlers to a jug band, Mali-born guitarist Moussa Diakite, and Balkanski Bus (playing folk tunes from the Balkans).
Most of the performers are Australian, emphasising the country’s multicultural character. Jonathon, for example, describes himself as “an Irish Jew”. (“Have you never heard of leprecohens?” is typical of his stage banter.)
His grandparents were Latvian Jews who escaped from Riga after a pogrom. Earlier, Jewish refugees seeking a sanctuary in the US were dumped by unscrupulous sea captains in Cork, Jonathon says. But Catholic Ireland proved a hospitable home for the diaspora.
“My parents spoke with a broad Dublin accent,” Jonathon says. “I grew up listening to Irish folk music, teaching myself the tin whistle listening to the radio.
“Both my grandfather and father sang Irish folk music.” Jonathon’s late cousin, Gerald Davis, was a renowned artist whose works hang in Ireland’s National Gallery.
“But he was also an actor who came to Sydney in his later years to play James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, Ireland’s most famous fictional Jew, in Bloomsday events at the State Library of NSW and the Gaelic Club.”
Jonathon, newly graduated as a GP from Dublin’s celebrated Trinity College, came to Queensland in 1976, initially intending to stay a year. Loving the lifestyle, he stayed.
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Both Jonathon and Fahey will perform at the festival (spread over four venues within a few minutes’ walk of Town Hall station), along with Grammy award-winning American folk guitarist and historian, Elijah Wald, son of a New York Jewish dentist.
But the headline act is the inimitable Eric Bogle, the Scots-born singer-songwriter whose compositions - including And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda and No Man’s Land - are among the greatest anti-war songs written by an Australian.
Bogle will be also interviewed on stage by an another eminent Australian - author Tom Keneally, whose 1982 novel, Schindler’s Ark (about Oskar Schindler, honoured as a “Righteous Gentile” at Yad Vashem for saving the lives of 1200 Jews from the Holocaust) was turned into an Oscar-winning film by Steven Spielberg.
But before Bogle steps on stage, Saturday’s audience will experience the six-piece band Chaika.
“That’s deliberate,” Jonathon says. “These four young women and two men are classically-trained musicians who have chosen to play in the folk/world genre.
“What Warren and I wanted to do with this festival is to introduce the younger generations in Sydney to folk. “We questioned whether we should even call it a folk festival because people tend to think folk is about older people with beards. I’m old with a beard, like Warren, but our goal is to spread the word.
“When you go to any folk festival, you’ll see plenty of young people, on the stage and in the audience. Those young people will develop where folk goes in the future.”
FULL DETAILS: sydneyfolkfestival.com.au
