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Charlie McMahon (born in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, 1951) is an Australian didgeridoo player. The founder of the group Gondwanaland, McMahon was one of the first non-Aboriginal musicians to gain fame as a professional player of the instrument. He is also the inventor of the didjeribone, a sliding didgeridoo made from two lengths of plastic tubing and played somewhat in the manner of a trombone (hence its name). ==Early life== In 1955, ''Jedda'', the first Australian feature movie filmed in colour, was released, and the McMahons, living in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney, were just one Australian family among many who went to see it. The film was notable for being the first mainstream Australian movie to have Aboriginal actors in the lead roles and characters that acknowledged the existence of, and identification with, an indigenous culture. Jedda, in the screenplay, is an Aboriginal girl adopted by a white station owner's wife to replace her own child that had died (coincidentally, the station owner's surname, McMann, is a variation of the Irish surname McMahon). Deliberately isolated from all contact with her birth family and relations, Jedda, is unsure of her identity until she meets Marbuck, a tribal Aboriginal man in trouble with the European system of justice. She is seduced by his intense didgeridoo playing but their elopement into the wilderness ends in tragedy when Marbuck's tribe rejects him for having broken its own laws regarding marriage. Marbuck, spurned by both the old and the new cultures, jumps off a cliff and takes Jedda with him. The movie was also significant for its presentation of panoramic outback scenery and its mixture of documentary and fiction (curiously, the destruction of the last reel of the film in a plane crash meant the movie's dramatic climax had to be refilmed in McMahon's home environment, the Blue Mountains). After the show young Charlie McMahon had been so absorbed by his cinema experience he tried to imitate the gut-stirring didge sound he heard in the movie by blowing into a garden hose and various hollow household objects like vacuum cleaner nozzles. He also developed an ongoing fascination with Aboriginals and their lives an unlikely interest for a four-year-old as "there weren't any black fellas living near us". He also took to running away and wandering in the scrub for comparatively long periods. Later, when he got older, he used to live off the land for a night and generally "went native" whenever he could.() During 1958, when he was 7 years old, the McMahon family relocated from the Blue Mountains to the tough outer western suburb of Blacktown near Sydney, but McMahon still managed to find ways to "go bush" regularly.() In 1962 a single by the British instrumental group The Tornados opened both his emotional (the melodic A side "Telstar") and his tribal imagination (the heavily rhythmic B side "Jungle Fever").() In 1967, McMahon blew off his right arm experimenting with a homemade rocket in a friend's backyard at Seven Hills, a neighbouring suburb of Blacktown. The ''Sydney Morning Herald'' newspaper report of the incident stated that the friend, Ron Carley, had some of his fingers amputated so presumably both boys were holding the cylinder at the time it exploded.() During a lengthy recuperation period getting used to his new metal arm (which, true to character, he wrapped in goanna hide) McMahon reactivated his earlier interest in didgeridoo playing, this time as therapy. At the same time he concentrated on previously neglected school work. During study breaks McMahon used to relax by going off to the sand flats of the Windsor River with his bongo playing brother Phil and some mates and the "westie tribe" would dress up in loincloths, paint their faces and have a corroboree.() With the wild side of his nature given an occasional outlet McMahon settled into study and won a university scholarship, achieving an honorary degree in Arts and Town Planning which led to him becoming, for a year, a lecturer and tutor in Town Planning at The University of Sydney. McMahon has said he became interested in studying town planning as a possible future way of correcting the all too obvious mistakes he found in the running of Blacktown. He wrote a treatise on the subject but became disillusioned when he realised the many political and vested interests trying to prevent the ideal becoming a reality.() One fateful weekend at Australia's equivalent of Woodstock, the 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival, McMahon found himself intrigued by the performance of The White Company an experimental Theatre Troupe featuring a number of alternative culture artists including one Peter Carolan, a 25-year-old actor with roles in Australian TV's ''Skippy the Bush Kangaroo'', ''The Rovers'', and stage productions such as ''Servant of Two Masters'', and Graham Bond's Drip Dry Dreams. Carolan came from a musical family. His mother played classical piano; his father was a professional jazz musician who performed on accordion, piano, organ, and synthesiser; and his paternal grandfather, Bart Carolan, was a composer and arranger who worked for a time at the BBC. The Carolan family had immigrated to Australia from England when Peter was 18. At the time his gift for creating flowing melodies "with spine" was noticed by McMahon, Carolan was playing lap dulcimer, an instrument to which he was attracted because of its simplicity – "a primal drone, a strummed rhythm and a monophonic melody that could change mode by tuning". No direct communication between the two musicians was made at the festival but they had both noticed each other's presence. In 1974 a three-day arts festival season by the White Company at Sydney's Arts Castle venue included a performance by McMahon. After a productive post-show dulcimer and didgeridoo improvisation session in a dome on the roof of the venue the two players realised they had many attitudes towards music in common: McMahon was attracted to music with "atmosphere" while Peter had become interested in composing music that evoked a sense of "place" after hearing Maurice Jarre's 1962 score for the film ''Lawrence of Arabia''. The two players made a vague promise to "do something in music together sometime in the future."() In 1974, back at his day job, McMahon was growing increasingly disillusioned with what he later described as the "too much talk" atmosphere of campus academic life. During one particularly stifling lecture in a dungeon-like library basement with no windows and bare walls McMahon and his assistant interrupted their discussion of map interpretation with the impulsive act of encouraging the students to join them in painting the walls. This behaviour was seen by the University Chancellor as the ultimate act of confrontation and defiance of authority by an untameable teacher and McMahon was dismissed.() He decided to do something more practical so he bought a property in a thickly forested valley on the south coast of New South Wales with two of his brothers and settled down to building a house the hard way by hand (and hook), all the time learning more about bush craft and living in a natural environment—skills that would come in handy for his next cycle of experience in the desert regions of Central Australia.() In early 1978, McMahon jumped on stage during a Midnight Oil performance at French's Tavern in Sydney and added his didge sounds to their song "Stand in Line." This marked the beginning of a friendship that was to last throughout both their music careers (in 1978 Midnight Oil had only played a half dozen or so gigs under that name).() After two and a half years of labouring and living on his diminishing savings he finished his bush retreat and was fortunate to be offered a job working for the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs in the position of a Development Coordinator in the Northern Territory, supervising outstation work grants to tribal people living hundreds of kilometres west of Alice Springs at the settlements of Kintore, Kiwirrkurra Community, Western Australia, and Papunya (the 1971 birthplace of the Australian Aboriginal dot painting revival).() An important part of McMahon's initial work program to supervise the building of a store and meeting place for the local people as the levelling of an air strip for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. He also helped construct a 400 km chain of windmills and water bores in the Great Sandy Desert area, many times driving a three-ton water truck with only a thrown right hook to stabilise the steering wheel in rough country. Because of his obvious sincerity and work for the tribal communities McMahon was sometimes invited to observe traditional ceremonies held under the resplendent starlight of nighttime Central Australia.() After 18 months he took some time off to gig with Midnight Oil, where he learned set dynamics and the art of talking to an audience from watching frontman Peter Garrett.() 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Charlie McMahon」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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