A crowd of more than
700 packed sardine-like into the refurbished splendour of Hawthorn Town Hall
in Melbourne on Sunday 14th August for one of the best afternoon’s entertainment
the grand old hall can remember. The balcony was full and the standing area
too, and it’s many years since that was last the case, so locals say. 
As part of an occasional series of concerts being put on by Boroondara Council, the Melbourne Scottish Fiddle Club put on a show to be proud of. The afternoon started with a queue reaching down Burwood Road long before the doors opened, to the sound of bagpipers rehearsing. Crowds poured out of packed trams onto the wintry street outside the front door.
The theme of the concert
– A Long Way from Home: Scots Music in the Antipodes - saw the inclusion
of a couple of songs by Robert Burns from the songbook of Georgiana McRae, who
came to Melbourne from Scotland in the 1840s. Her hand written song books still
exist. Jenny Thomas, one of Melbourne’s
most beautiful fiddlers, and also an astonishing singer, interpreted the songs
with great warmth and subtlety and the arrangements lent great poignancy to the songs.
How Jenny sings and plays at the same time, and sings so beautifully too, is
a source of some wonder.
(The picture below shows her rehearsing with the
club)
Alex Legg (pictured below)
is a Scottish singer-songwriter recently moved to Melbourne. Alex
joined the Club for a rollicking version of 
The Barnyards of Delgaty, a Bothy ballad from North Eastern Scotland,
and another beautiful arrangement of one of his own songs, Oh What A Day
It’s Been. The Fiddle Club starts recording its third CD soon, including
contributions from both these great soloists.
Ron McCoy, the MSFC token medical practitioner and Scots Gaelic speaker, sang some wonderful mouth music, accompanied by Pria Schwall-Kearney, one of the Club's best young fiddlers, who danced as Ron sang.
Between all the songs, the 30 fiddle players brought us medleys of fast Scottish dance tunes and heart-breaking slow airs. Joined by The Hawthorn Pipe Band, rousing sets of jigs and reels took the roof off the building, and what a spectacle, aural and visual, to see the pipers, drummers and the fiddle players and rhythm section playing up a storm!
Neil Adam sang Paul Kelly’s beautiful ode to Melbourne “ From St Kilda to King’s Cross”, accompanied by the beautiful harmony singing of Peter Dwyer, and fiddlers getting stuck into the tune, Flying Home to Shelley.
The
Pipe Band and dancers started off the second half after cups of tea all round,
and then Neil spoke about Robert Louis Stevenson and poems he wrote in Samoa,
and then the marvellous tale of the John Anderson fiddles.
John Anderson was a local
man who came to Melbourne from Shetland in 1912 and made a violin each year
till the 1970s. The whole story can be found elsewhere on this web site - essentially,
Judy Turner has got together more than a dozen of these fiddles, some still
in use, others stored in cupboards or on display as family heirlooms, had them
restored by one of the fiddle maker members of the group, Jim Vizard, and brought
back to life here at the Hawthorn Town Hall. As Jim led the group
through a tune from Shetland by Tom Anderson, The Slockitt Light
(The dying light, composed for his wife’s funeral) the hair stood up on the
back of many necks.
( Below: the Anderson fiddles in action, Big Matt
with little Matt, Jim Vizard, Pria and Angus)
The pipe band drummers and dancers joined the fiddlers again, for the biggest finale the hall would have seen in years, the band and fiddles marching out through the crowd into the street beyond. The session continued in the foyer and on the road outside, as the audience, loathe to leave, hung around wanting to take in more of the spirit.
Boroondara Council, who put the concert on, are to be thanked for supporting such a lively afternoon.