These ARE The Good Old Days

This last weekend I attended the Kennedy Awards, a New South Wales-based peer-awarded recognition of excellence in journalism, in the role of handbag to my journalist husband (who also happened to be nominated for, and go on to win, an award). Many stories were shared over the course of the night – events that had transpired behind the headlines, hair-raising exploits of reporters whose recklessness was matched by their journalistic brilliance. At some point in the evening, my husband noted that, for all the journalists in the room, these were ‘the good old days’ that would be recounted 20 years, 30 years, 50 years hence. From the premier undone by a bottle of wine through to disgraced former policemen being arrested for murder; from pervasively corrupt infrastructure deals involving Sydney’s water supply and regional mining leases through to politicians being handed paper bags of $10,000 cash just prior to elections; these are the good old days these journalists will look back on.

This last weekend also saw the passing away of iconic Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe, a man whose music and mentorship has defined much of what it means to express oneself as an Australian composer. Anyone whose lives were touched by his has found themselves complicit in communal remembering of various good old days and decades with Peter: former students, editors, performers, pop musicians who enjoyed drinking/collaborating with him, friends. Peter Sculthorpe’s death has suddenly rendered a whole suite of musical and human experience as part of the fondly remembered past.

The present becomes history so rapidly.

In my first year at university I was studying composition and the general music subjects one studies in one’s first year. But on the side I was taking a course in 20th century literature. This was 1984, and I was just 16 years old. The first term’s lectures were devoted to poetry, and the lecturer started with Gerard Manley Hopkins and took us the way through to boot-legged recordings of the then still (comparatively) nascent hip hop and rap that had been developing in New York. “This is your time,” the lecturer told us, “this is the time of your contemporaries. The art that will be talked about in 50 years time is the art being made around you right now. One day you will realise that you were here. Pay attention.”

I couldn’t believe how exciting it felt. I felt so privileged to be experiencing the living of history when I was still so young! Things that had already happened, that were already over, notated, documented, recorded – they weren’t the limit of what counted. Yesterday – this morning – this afternoon – mattered, too. It was all important. Suddenly, as I walked down the hill to catch the bus, the very atmosphere was heavy with all the creating that was possible, all the contemporaneousness that was.

In shaping learning experiences for my piano students I am always aware that as much as the past informs the present, so the present will soon be that past that informs future presents… How am I teaching my students about the past they are a part of? How am I helping them connect with contemporary experience as future memory? As future history?

I was gloriously fortunate in my teachers, both at university and at high school – teachers who understood that they were building the past even as they were building the future. I don’t just honour them by maintaining that tradition in my own teaching – I honour my students, present and yet to come, who are only just beginning to realise that these are their good old days.