Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Why do humans hold on to stuff, oddments we don't use, and yet can't quite throw out? It's not just you and me. Australia's oldest library is crammed with stuff that isn't books. Terrible paintings, old menus, human hair. Is this history or hoarding? I'm Annabelle Crabb. Come and have a rummage through the story of us told by our stuff.
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When George Palmer walked into university as a young man, he had dreams of becoming a renowned music composer. But it didn't feel like he belonged in the music department and he left after his first week. George ended up following one of his mates into studying law instead. And to his surprise, he ended up loving the human side of the law.
For the next 45 years, he climbed the ranks from barrister to Queen's Counsel and finally to judge in the New South Wales Supreme Court. But through all those years of his public life in the law, George had a secret. In every spare moment, he would return to his piano, scribbling down choral works, piano pieces, orchestral scores.
He had but no ambition for his music to ever be performed or heard by anyone. He never spoke about composing with his colleagues or friends or even really his family. Until one day, George's talents were uncovered here at the ABC, almost by chance. George Palmer is now one of Australia's preeminent living composers. His latest work is an operatic adaptation of Lea Purcell's The Drover's Wife.
Hi, George.
Hi, Sarah. It's a great pleasure to be here.
That's quite a journey. So let's start at the place it all began, Cairo in Egypt. How was it that you came to be born in Cairo?
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Chapter 2: What inspired George Palmer to leave music for law?
In the First World War, a lot of Australian soldiers in the First World War were stationed there and it was the hospital where my parents came when I was ready to pop out into the world.
What were they doing in a military hospital tent in the Egyptian desert?
Well, Dad was still in the British Army at that stage. He had risen to the rank of Major and My mum was in the military intelligence section throughout the war and they met in Italy in the Italian campaign. And then Dad was posted back to the Palestine campaign. Mum came back to Egypt. They married.
And when it was time for me to arrive, the only place that I could arrive was the British military hospital on the edge of the desert. So I was literally born in a tent.
Did your mum tell you much about what her role in the British intelligence was during the war?
Look, she wasn't a super spy.
That's what they all say, George. That's true.
Actually, knowing my mum, she could well have been a femme fatale super spy. What she said, though, was that she was in the intelligence gathering section because she spoke five languages fluently.
How was that? Why did she speak so many?
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Chapter 3: How did George Palmer keep his music passion a secret?
They met there and married and then came back to Cyprus to live where dad was brought up in a household where he spoke Greek to his father and English to his mother because his mother refused to learn Greek. And that was not by any means an ideal conventional background for British military establishment. Right.
So what was it that made your parents decide to leave that world and come out to Australia?
Well, firstly, they were sick of the war, as everybody was. And they could see that Europe was going to be a mess and it was going to be quite hard. My father did not have a university education. His family was too poor to send him to university. He worked in London before the war in banking, in the banking industry, but the war interrupted that.
So he had no qualifications and he certainly was not part of the establishment. And even though he ended up as a major in the British Army, that wouldn't have got him anywhere back in England.
Right.
So they were looking for some place where they could start a new life, bring up a family. without also the inhibitions of class restriction. I think probably my father was conscious of that, having worked in London, coming from Cyprus. So they wanted somewhere where they could make a fresh start for the family in the new world.
And so what sort of home did they find once they arrived in Australia? Where did your family set up home?
Well, we arrived when I was three months old. As soon as I was born, they tried to arrange passage to ownership. The first ship they could get on was to Australia. They arrived 1947, not very much money at all. No job, no connections for my father. They had just a little saved. You don't get paid very much in the British Army.
They found a house they could rent, a little old house in Rosebury in Sydney, which was then quite an industrial suburb.
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Chapter 4: What significant event led to George's music being discovered?
And I grew up there for the first four years of my life with my mother, father, my aunt and and my grandmother, and my uncle. So the family lived together in this little house, and my grandmother, who had a very comfortable life in Egypt, she had married a French engineer, who was in charge of a big cotton mill in Egypt.
So they had a very comfortable life in Egypt, servants and the whole business. But when she came here, she came with virtually nothing. And she worked and had to work to help support the family. She worked in the local chewing gum factory. which was nearby in Rosebury. Hardly any English. She worked, you know, on the production line.
Was she angry about that, resentful?
Not at all. My grandmother was a very strong and positive person. And she made the best of everything. And I remember the chewing gum factory so well because I remember sitting on the doorstep of the house in the afternoons waiting for her to come home. We were very close, my grandma and me. And she would arrive smelling of chewing gum.
Of course. Yes.
And she always managed to have a little packet of chewing gum for me. So my grandma working in the production line in the local... chewing gum factory, Wrigley's Chewing Gum, coming home, smelling of chewing gum, the little chewing gum treat, was a very vivid memory to me.
As you describe it, George, all the adults in your life had really had this huge disruption in your life, living through war, leaving their homelands, coming to this totally new place. What sort of environment did they manage to create for you and your sister?
Well, they loved being here from the moment they arrived. We had wonderful next-door neighbours in Rosebury, next door, typical like fifth-generation Aussies, who made the whole family feel very welcome. I was often there. Their teenage daughters would babysit me. Arriving there and finding such wonderful people who were so welcoming and
made them fall in love with the country, and they never lost that love affair with the country. So it was a very warm and stable environment within the family, even though they had come from such fracturing experiences in their lives.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did George face as a composer with hearing loss?
Never say no to George. Always approach it from the other direction. So Dad said, look, that's fine. That's fine. But you'll have to bear in mind...
Chapter 6: How did George Palmer's father influence his music career?
that the life of a musician and particularly a composer is very precarious, very precarious. And if you want to eventually have a family, be able to educate your children, provide for them, you're going to find that very, very difficult if you're a full-time composer. Now, My father was perfectly correct in that and I think I did appreciate that at the time.
What well-known composers were around in Australia in the 1960s, there was no household name on everybody's lips and the few people I did know as musicians, I could see from them that it was in some cases a hand-to-mouth existence going from one gig to another. So I thought seriously about that. So I signed up for arts law because a mate of mine, my close friend from school, was going to do that.
I thought, well, that's something I can do probably. But for the first week or so on the campus, I'll go in and sit in on the music composition classes, which I did, thinking if I really have a passion for this, I can always change courses.
And what did you find when you sat in on those classes?
I found Peter Skullthorpe. Australia's most preeminent, deservedly and internationally acclaimed composer there lecturing in the music composition class. Now, Peter Scullthorpe was then in his Indonesian mood or mode stage.
I'm hearing the gamelan.
Gamma Lan was everywhere. It was compulsory to learn the Gamma Lan. And Gamma Lan had not been a major part of my experience up till then, I have to say, my musical experience. That was Peter. And the other composers whom I won't mention my name were of the fingernails on blackboard screeching type music. Now, that wasn't part of my experience either.
So I had gamelan music on the one hand, screeching fingernails on blackboard music on the other hand, and a cap at all...
One of the senior lecturers there was very into recorder and medieval music and she established an annual Runnymede Festival, right, which involved scattering rushes all over the Great Hall of Sydney University and the whole of the music staff and students dressing up in tight red tights and colourful things and playing the recorder and capering around. And this wasn't what you dreamt of?
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Chapter 7: What was George's experience composing for the Pope's mass?
LAUGHTER But they were immensely proud, immensely proud. I was very, very happy that they were there to see it.
You were put in charge of something called the protective list in the Supreme Court. What's that?
That is a traditional jurisdiction that the Supreme Court, every Supreme Court has. It's an inheritance from the English system when the church courts... we're in charge, this is from medieval times, we're in charge of protecting the weak and vulnerable in society. That then later translated into a compartment of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.
Now, it might be those who have a mental illness, those who are particularly vulnerable to undue influence or scams, or it's also to do with having overall supervision of the adoption process involved. the Supreme Court has to approve every adoption. Now, there's obviously a process where that goes through many, many, many layers before it actually comes up for final approval.
But as the judge, you have to make sure that all the procedures are followed and properly followed. And if there's anything that catches your attention, something might not be right, something might be amiss, then you have to investigate and find out. And if an adoption is contested by the natural parent, then that case comes into the Supreme Court.
And this is a very important jurisdiction because, as you can imagine, there are quite a few cases where children are taken away from a parent, often a single mother. And the mother has probably been experiencing enormous difficulties in her life. There's a common pattern, unfortunately.
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Chapter 8: How did George transition from law to writing opera?
Often the single mother has been abused as a child, has a drug problem or had an alcohol problem, and the child is born and the social workers in the hospital immediately say, this mother is not going to be able to look after this child properly. And so the system is alerted.
So you can imagine how a mother who has been through that experience feels being told you are not even fit to be the mother of your child. It is devastating. And so some of them oppose the adoption. What usually happens is social workers take the child, the child is put into foster care. And at a certain stage, often the foster parents apply for the adoption. At that stage, the mother opposes.
The child has been living with the foster parents perhaps for years, for five, six years. A close bond is formed with the foster parents. The mother has seen the child perhaps occasionally before. But the mother cannot bring herself to consent to surrendering her child, and so she opposes. Now, they are some really heart-rending cases to decide.
Podcast and broadcast. This is Conversations Live.
George, you were describing your time in charge of the protective list, one of your duties as a Supreme Court judge in New South Wales, where you had ultimate responsibility for all adoptions in New South Wales. What is it like to be in that position, to have a kind of ultimate decision-making power? What's that like morally for you, emotionally?
Well, it's very difficult, often, emotionally. But you have to apply the law. And the law says that of paramount interest, the paramount importance is the welfare of the child. while the natural mother might be grieving to the point of destruction, You can't give her feelings priority, nor the feelings of the foster parents who have been attached to the child. It's the child's best interest.
So you have evidence from social workers, from psychologists, from any person that you feel can help you to make the right decision in the interest of the child.
Would cases stay with you, George?
Oh, yes, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. One case that has never left me is a case of a young girl who came to Australia as a refugee. She, as a child, had seen her family killed in front of her. She came to a refugee camp and shortly before she left... She was going to get water from a well not far from the camp. She was attacked and raped. When she came to Australia, her brother came with her.
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