Beats, Bards and Bongos - Sydney Stories with Warren Fahey

Stories from the Sydney Push and early folk revival where ‘critical drinking’ joined critical thinking and music. This episode is part of the 'Sydney Stories with Warren Fahey' series.
Sydney abounds with curious history. Some stories are known and many have disappeared over time. Cultural historian and storyteller Warren Fahey has created a dozen video stories of the city's past; each offering a unique slice of Sydney’s hidden history.
Visit Warren's website: www.warrenfahey.com.au/
Sydney Stories with Warren Fahey features footage from the collection of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. It was created with assistance from the City of Sydney Creative Fellowships Fund and support of The Vine Foundation. The grants were under the auspice of the Folk Federation of New South Wales.
BEATS, BARDS & BONGOS
- The curious history of Sydney’s libertarian movement and the emergence of beats, bodies & widgies, and folk music.
Synopsis
There was a time in Sydney’s past, in the post WW2 years of the late 1940s and through the 1950s, when the sounds of bongos, beat poetry and passionate debate echoed across the city. Sydney was a much smaller world and it was easier to identify an intellectual sub-culture - in this case the self-proclaimed Sydney Push, a libertarian movement which would persist through to the early seventies.
In the late fifties and sixties the conversation over coffee tables changed to equal rights, censorship, Ban the Bomb, and, later, the rights and wrongs of the Vietnam War. The music changed too, for it was the sound of folk music that best accompanied talk of protest and social change.
The late seventies witnessed more change as pub rock shattered the conversation. Television also seized the minds of the masses as Australia quickly moved from a nation of people who once entertained each other, to a people who ‘got entertained’, mainly from television. Even hotels installed television sets - sealing the fate of both conversation and music.
The Sydney Push, possibly taking its name from the rebellious larrikin street gangs of the past, who called their gangs ‘pushes’, was a fluid clan of left-wing intellectuals and philosophers, mostly arts and philosophy students, rebels and creatives, who frequented Sydney coffee shops and pubs.
The Sydney Push coincided with the arrival of the beat generation.
In 1959 the Australian Women’s weekly announced: Call them another lost generation, call them junior existentialists, call them beatniks - they're still the most colourful band of scatterbrained adolescents ever to appear in Sydney.
Folk music is also part of this story. Sydney experienced a decade of popularity for folk music between 1955 and 1965 with many now legendary performers like Gary Shearston, Marion Henderson and Declan Affley emerging to sing down through the years. This program celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Folk Federation of NSW and its role in the story of our city’s musical life. The beat goes on.

[@casscumerford5886]

thanks Warren---love it

[@davechristian7543]

Wat u say is so true, i love theses videos.