Guitar, the Australian Journey
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Some Things are Worth
Keeping
A wonderfully visionary concept
of the musical instrument section of the
Powerhouse Museum’s basement vault helps paint a clearer picture of how
connected early Australians were to their guitars. Founded in 1879, the
museum obtained its first musical instrument in 1884 and now boasts an
amazing collection. Sadly, most of the artefacts will never be seen by the
general public. Floor space limitations as well as the delicacy of some items
dictate that all but ten per cent of the museum’s 900 musical instruments
are locked away in flat bed trays beneath the public galleries on Sydney’s
gorgeous Darling Harbour. Keyboards are kept in another location all
together at Castle Hill. To put that all in context, there are 400,000 objects in
the Powerhouse’s entire general collection but only three to five per cent of
them are on public display at any one time.
The museum’s curator of music and musical instruments Michael Lea,
a classically trained guitarist adept at most styles and playing in four different
bands, was my gracious host during a fascinating couple of hours’ venture into
A Personal Tour
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the basement (which is actually separated from the main public section of the
building). His love of job was clearly on display, even if most of the guitars he
knew so much about were not. But all were there at our disposal now. As we
put on white gloves and began the tour I was little prepared for the vastness
of the collection I was about to glimpse. I saw only a small selection of it—yet
so much more than public visitors to the museum are afforded. I was more
than aware of the privilege being granted me. And I quickly gained a healthy
appreciation for the work put in by the museum to keep a well maintained,
comprehensive website allowing the whole collection to be at least accessible
to the public remotely.
The Powerhouse Museum, or the Museum of Applied Arts and
Sciences, as it is officially titled, collects much more than Australian made
and it’s not just old stuff. A mission of the museum is to tell stories and
to preserve and showcase creative design from around the world which,
sometimes purely through an item’s acquisition by the Powerhouse,
has some Down Under connection. Examples of innovations in design,
technology, science and decorative arts are collected to help tell stories
through material culture. It was founded on a wonderfully visionary
concept. Guitars can certainly lend themselves to innovative design and
this museum bursts with fine examples of just how creative luthiers from
various cultures and eras have been.
A thought-to-be Russian made 10-string adjustable double-necked
guitar complete with its touching immigrant’s story is a great example of
what the museum is about. According to the documentation held by the
Powerhouse, Vladimir Gavnilov was the owner of this magnificent instrument
in Russia from about 1913. There are no maker’s labels or signatures inside
the guitar to reveal its creator’s name, and there is even a chance it could
have been made in Germany. Only the initials ‘ME’ are pencilled inside the
Guitar, the Australian Journey
The guitar in this Ilya Repin painting of Russian guitarist Vladimir Svarog is thought to
be the same 10-string double-necked guitar now in the Powerhouse Museum collection.
back of the instrument. According to Gavnilov’s daughter, who in 1994 sold
the guitar to the museum 20 years after her father’s death, Gavnilov insisted
the guitar once belonged to the Russian guitarist Vladimir Svarog. He even
claimed the guitar was the very instrument accompanying Svarog in the
portrait painted by Russian artist Ilya Repin.
The guitar’s double neck is fascinating in itself, particularly because of
the era it is from—long before Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page thought to go
electric with a twin-neck. However, the whole craftsmanship displayed in the
instrument is impressive. Its body is shaped somewhat like a shield, featuring
two rather modern looking, contoured sound holes in the upper bouts. It has
a rosewood back and ribs, spruce top and double ivory purfling on the back
and sides. Ivory or bone tuning pegs complement the brass machines on both
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Some Things are Worth Keeping
the fretted main neck, which holds six strings (although it once had seven),
and the unfretted bass neck holding four strings.
In 1918, Gavnilov fled his troubled homeland but he could not leave his
precious instrument behind. The guitar accompanied its owner to Shanghai.
Decades later, when migrating to Australia in 1947, Gavnilov crossed the
world with it once more. Every guitar has its own story.
An 1884 Chinese moon guitar, known as a yueqin, is also part of the
Powerhouse collection. Many of these instruments would have arrived in
Australia with their migrant owners, finding their way to goldfields, harbours,
cities, farms and communities everywhere that Chinese labour was hired.
The instrument I saw was only 35 cm wide, yet its width was more than half
the size of its length. It was completely wooden, even the frets. The round
body was only 5 cm deep. While its individual maker remains unknown, a
label on the back in Chinese characters reveals it was purchased from The
Old Shop of Jin Shang. Translated, the label goes on to read: ‘We specialise in
making traditional musical instruments and all types of exquisite strings.’ It
continues to inform the buyer that while the shop has no branches, ‘recently
some scoundrels have swindled for profit by counterfeiting our trademark in
selling their goods’ before issuing a buyer beware caution. The last line of the
label sharply criticises the offenders: ‘You are bandits and prostitutes if you
counterfeit our products.’ Wonderful!
A 1930s Australele autoharp with its 11 strings and three buttons
stands out as a unique guitar-ish designed creation held by the museum.
The autoharp is actually a zither and it is clear that this one used to have 16
strings. It is a small wooden shellac sound box shaped a little like Australia.
It was made in the Sydney factory of the Australele Company of Australia
sometime between 1930 and 1939. Its three buttons sit on top of a tiny
wooden platform and press down onto key rods whose felt dampers mute the
Guitar, the Australian Journey
strings not needed in a certain chord. It was a fascinating sight, but I am more
attracted by the metal resonator of a 1930s American-made Dobro shining
from the wooden body encasing it. The curator gently slides the instrument
from the shelf before handing it to me. Exquisite!
Another iconic US brand model is part of the collection too. A
steel-stringed six-string built sometime in the twentieth century’s second
decade at the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Company’s Kalamazoo factory
(the Powerhouse also has a gorgeous matching 1914 mandolin from
the same factory on public display). Before Gibson’s bigger flattops
popularised the market, this slightly arched-top model is from another
era. Its label guarantees against faulty workmanship or material and
offers to repair or replace free of charge ‘should this instrument, with
proper care and usage, go wrong’. To this day, Gibson offers lifetime
guarantees with the sale of all their fine guitars—whatever that actually
means, particularly considering the number of conditions attached. This
instrument has a maple back and sides, pine top, cutaway body, scrolled
‘Florentine’ shoulder, and a floating bridge and tailpiece.
There is a French made maple harp guitar, a Levian from the early
1800s. It has seven strings, yet plugged holes betray that it once had more.
An 1822 salon style guitar from Vienna, also made of maple, stands out
because of its brand name—Stauffer. Stauffer was Christian Frederick
Martin’s guitar-making teacher. C.F. Martin, as all guitar enthusiasts know,
went on to build one of the world’s most successful guitar making empires
and a true American story. And it all began in Vienna under the masterful
guidance of Johann Stauffer.
Gypsy jazz legend Django Reinhardt played a Maccaferi guitar but
not one like the Maccaferi the Powerhouse owns. From the 1920s Mario
Maccaferi made beautiful and experimental guitars, further encouraged
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Some Things are Worth Keeping
through a brief partnership with France’s Selmer instrument company. By
the 1950s Maccaferi, in the USA, had tried making plastic guitars, describing
the material as ‘Styron’. This one, an arch-top, is quite unusual. Its body is a
plastic mould, pioneered long before Ovation started using fibreglass. It has
the shape of the old f-holed jazz instruments, yet the only wood on the entire
guitar is in the core of the neck. It sounds great, but it obviously can’t be left
on hot surfaces or dropped on hard ones. What guitar can?
Another radical design is to be found in the museum’s 1988 Jose
Ramirez III classical De Cámara model. Made in Madrid, this guitar looks
like any other finely crafted six-string—from the outside at least. It has a
cedar soundboard and Indian rosewood back and sides. It is inside where the
experimentation took place. This Ramirez features a second soundboard
inside the body of the instrument. Selmer and Maccaferi had toyed with this
concept some years before. The idea is that the internal soundboard eliminates
so-called wolf notes (unwanted, artificial howling overtones created when a
played note matches the natural resonating frequency of the instrument—
more commonly noticed with violins). The result on this particular Ramirez
is a crisp, beautiful sound, extremely clear in the high registers.
London-made Panormos from the 1820s and later are part of the
collection, including a particularly nice fan-braced 1840 model. There
is a bizarre and ornate lute-shaped hurdy gurdy made in the 1980s by
Australian Bob Meadows, who kept faithful to the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries’ French designs. An 1840 Austrian lute guitar is there,
as is a late nineteenth century small bodied guitar from Buenos Aires. A
Spanish flamenco, a Portuguese 12-string. Too many to mention and too
many for me to have seen them all.
There are many more Australian-made guitars in the Powerhouse and
they form a considerable portion of the collection.
Guitar, the Australian Journey
A 1976 Roger Buckmaster steel-string acoustic beams with decoration.
Carved gum leaves and blossoms adorn the sides and a lyrebird carving
beautifies the back. Ornate mother of pearl inlay along the fretboard, which
includes spelling out the Buckmaster name, completes the individuality of
the instrument.
An interesting 1980 baritone Graham Caldersmith six-string impresses
with its fine woods—European spruce, Honduras mahogany, Australian red
cedar and Australian silver ash. This guitar is tuned a fifth below normal and
its lowest bass string (a bottom A) is a special bronze wound nylon, while
the other five strings are standard steel. Scottish-Australian folk legend Eric
Bogle played this instrument during the 1980s.
New South Wales luthier Jim Williams has a 1981 model of one of
his early handcrafted steel-string guitars in the collection. A King William
pine soundboard on top of tulip satinwood back and sides, attached to a
Queensland maple neck with Gaboon ebony fingerboard all add up to make
this one gorgeous instrument.
An autographed Lawrence K. Smith classical guitar built in 2000 from
cedar and native timbers is beautiful in look and sound. It has a cutaway body
and fan bracing. An adjustable neck with truss rod and a fret board extending
two frets over the treble side of the soundhole add to its appeal and playability.
One interesting instrument, although not Australian made, appears
to have been designed as a tribute to Aussie rock and roll pioneer Col Joye.
This acoustic steel-string has cracked varnish, a missing tailpiece, a warped
neck and a headstock label that reads: ‘Col Joye Model’. Believed to be built
sometime between 1960 and 1970, the maker is unknown although a sticker
on the back of the headstock reveals the instrument’s Made in Japan origins.
And another sticker, on the back of the neck, says: ‘Cash Converters $26.’ It
was gifted to the museum in 2007.
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There is one pedal steel guitar to be viewed, the standout 1948
Australian-made Kord King. This electric console guitar was designed by
Sydney’s Jack Richards from the Olson, Iverson and Richards partnership in
the early days of the marriage between guitar playing and electricity. There
were only 100 Kord Kings made. This one has eight strings tuned to an E
chord, four steel legs and five pedals. Fascinating!
On the way to the basement Michael Lea showed me some of the
instruments on public display at the museum and there, for the entire world
to see, stood Harry Vanda’s Maton 12-string semi-acoustic from the mid1960s. The Easybeats (Vanda’s band) were of course a huge Australian pop
band from 1964 to 1969. This red-bodied, black-necked electric was a treat to
see. The model was called a Sapphire and it looked very much like a Gibson
ES-335, except for the stylised ‘M’ on the metal tailpiece and gold lettering
‘Maton’ against the black headstock screaming it was Australian made.
Another thrill was to be found on display in the cabinet right next to
Vanda’s Maton. Another red guitar, but this one was a solid body electric,
not made in Australia but once owned and played by leading Aussie female
rocker Deborah Conway. Conway played a Gretsch Astro-Jet in the early
1990s following her split from the popular band Do Re Mi. And there I was,
staring at it in awe.
There was more electric fun to be had following the basement tour
when my curator-host said goodbye and pointed me in the direction of one
of the museum’s temporary displays. It was The 80s Are Back exhibition set up
to showcase Australian popular culture from the decade many say was just
one long party. I went straight for the guitars, some of which were only on
loan to the museum.
Calling me over was the 1963 Fender Stratocaster Kirk Pengilly played
on all INXS albums produced during the 1980s. Chris Bailey’s semi-acoustic
Guitar, the Australian Journey
Epiphone with its deep cherry finish was also there and it was the very one
he used when he reformed his seminal Brisbane punk band The Saints in the
1980s. Ed Kuepper had his post-Saints solid body aluminium Veleno early
electric on show. He played that during his post-punk Laughing Clowns
period.
Also part of the exhibition was a guitar-synthesizer like only the 80s
could have produced. This particular one belonged to Garry Frost of Moving
Pictures fame, although it was his later band called 1927 where this strange
instrument had its first public outing.
Even more strange was the keytar on display. Surely combing a keyboard
and a guitar in such a fashion was only ever destined to be born and killed off
in the same decade—the eighties. The one on display was played by Pseudo
Echo’s James Leigh.
A Stratocaster style electric custom-built for Ice House’s Iva Davies
around 1980 was a standout exhibit. But I couldn’t go past the special effects
guitar featured in the eighties cult classic movie Young Einstein. The 1988
film by Yahoo Serious centred on a whacky Tasmanian named Albert Einstein
who, according to the script, discovered rock and roll and invented the guitar.
And there it was on full display, complete with its built-in effects that aided
his time travel and which could only be played with a violin bow.
If reality can produce a guitar played like a keyboard, why not fiction
create a guitar played like a fiddle?
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