ISSUE 16 - APRIL 2005

- Making Connections in Folklore -

THE MOE FOLKLIFE PROJECT (PART 3)

by Gwenda Beed Davey


CHILDREN'S GAMES

It is commonly said in the 1990s that television and video games have destroyed children's independent play culture. Whilst it is true that 'street play' is no longer as easy to observe as in previous generations, children's traditional play is alive and well in the Australian school playground, not least in Moe. For this project, more than one hundred and sixty traditional playground games and rhymes were documented in two schools, Moe Primary School (Albert Street) and Newborough East Primary School (see Appendix D). Only seven of these games involved commercially produced toys, namely bounce ball (super ball), Matchbox cars, POG, stunt planes, walkie talkie and of course basketball and football. POG stands for 'pineapple, orange and guava', a fruit juice produced in Hawaii in packs with decorated round cardboard tops. These tops quickly became children's collectables in Hawaii in the 1990s and the craze moved elsewhere in the world. The basic POG game involves throwing one POG into a group of others, a variation of much older games using (for example) cigarette cards.

Apart from these few games using commercial products, all others documented in the Moe Folklife Project were traditional games as described in classic works such as Iona and Peter Opie's Children's Games in Street and Playground (1969), or depicted even earlier, for example in Peter Breughel's 1560 painting Children's Games. Many of the eighty-plus games depicted in Breughel's Children's Games such as chasey, hidey, horses and 'mothers and fathers' were observed in Moe. The Moe games and rhymes collected during the project were classified according to headings used in the Australian Children's Folklore Collection at the University of Melbourne, as follows:

  1. games and rhymes
  2. clapping games and rhymes
  3. skipping games and rhymes
  4. counting out rhymes
  5. pursuit games
  6. using commercially produced toys or equipment
  7. imaginary games
  8. miscellaneous games
  9. miscellaneous rhymes

Children's playground games are one of the world's most ancient and interesting traditions, highlighting the power of oral transmission and the intriguing duality of continuity and change which characterises much folklore. A few examples and issues will be discussed below.

Pursuit games
Otherwise known as tiggy, twenty-six variations of pursuit or chasing games were found in Moe. The list of their titles is of interest:

  1. tiggy
  2. down tiggy
  3. chasey
  4. chicken poop (pole tiggy)
  5. chasey'gang tiggy
  6. octopus
  7. Gladiators
  8. and seek
  9. chasey
  10. tiggy
  11. off
  12. ground tiggy
  13. ground barrel tiggy
  14. ground pole tiggy
  15. tiggy
  16. Rangers
  17. letter
  18. regular tiggy
  19. releaso
  20. me
  21. tiggy
  22. stations
  23. tiggy
  24. tiggy
  25. are the children of the woods
  26. tiggy

Only two of these variations of tiggy borrowed from television programmes, namely Gladiators and Power Rangers. Gladiators also produced two miscellaneous games based on components of the Gladiators television programme, gauntlet and hang tough. Other pursuit games utilised physical features of the school playground, such as tyre tiggy, seat tiggy and pole tiggy. One of the chasing games, We are the children of the woods, has a clear resonance from former generations. We are the children is complicated, involving the selection of a person to be 'it' who is then engaged in dialogue:
  1. are the children of the woods -
  2. can you do?
  3. Anything!
  4. do it!

The children then act out a silent charade, until 'it' guesses what they are acting. If 'it' guesses correctly, all run and 'it' attempts to capture a replacement.


Miscellaneous games and rhymes
Like tiggy, miscellaneous games also showed an inventive use of the playground environment and a sense of contemporary life. Bunjee jump and Flush the dunny used the stacks of treated pine logs in the adventure playground, which is used for more than simple climbing. Children playing Bunjee jump took it in turns to jump from a fair height; Flush the dunny required children to press the bolts holding a square of logs together and then to 'jump into the toilet'. Children's earthy humour is ever present in their games and rhymes which sometimes challenge adult taboos with words like ip dip dog's shit or ugga bugga in two counting-out rhymes. Other counting-out rhymes have the characteristics of an incantation:
  1. bibble
  2. bubble
  3. bibble
  4. Out!


Elastics is an elaborate game where girls stand up to two metres apart and loop a circle of elastic around their ankles, a position known as 'ground'. The height of the elastic moves to 'knees, under bum, waists and under arms', and the shape of the elastic loop is called 'thins, fats, ordinary and diamonds'. Elaborate patterns of jumping and catching the elastic are sometimes accompanied with a rhyme
  1. England
  2. Ireland
  3. Scotland
  4. Wales;
  5. Inside
  6. Outside
  7. Monkey tails!

Elastics is a relative newcomer into children's play, and has not been documented before the late 1950s in either England, the United States or Australia. Some folklorists believe the game came to western countries from South-East Asia, where the game is popular, perhaps as one of the few positive outcomes from the Vietnam War. There is, however, no known published evidence about the game in South-East Asia before the 1950s, so its sudden appearance at that time remains something of a 'mystery wrapped in an enigma'.

Folklore for children
Children's playground games, as described above, can be characterised as folklore OF children, their own lore which is passed down from one generation of primary-school-aged children to another. There are other dimensions of children's folklore, such as folklore ABOUT children, for example 'old wives' tales' such as 'if you tickle a baby's feet you'll make it stutter'. There is also a huge body of folklore FOR children, such as lullabies, nursery rhymes, fairy tales and games which adults tell to their children. For the Moe Folklife Project, a number of mothers and grandmothers were interviewed, both individually and in groups, in order to determine which traditional items they used with their children or grandchildren. Parents and grandparents were interviewed about lullabies, songs, sayings, games, customs and rituals.

The adults interviewed used few traditional lullabies, apart from 'Rock-a-bye baby on the tree top', but some popular songs such as 'Puff the Magic Dragon' were used. In contexts other than bedtime, more nursery rhymes such as 'Twinkle Twinkle' and 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' were common, as were advertising jingles from television and songs from children's television programmes such as Play School and Sesame Street. These results confirm other reports that parents use a wide variety of materials to sing to their children other than the traditional canon of nursery rhymes.

A number of family or baby games were reported, such as Peekaboo, Ipsy Wipsy Spider, Clap Hands or tickling games. Few family sayings such as 'little pigs have big ears' were noted, possibly because of the young age of the adults' children or grandchildren. Father Christmas and Easter Bunny rituals were very common, and a number of adults interviewed mentioned using these occasions as an opportunity to get rid of a child's dummy, telling the child that Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny would take it away and leave a present or Easter Egg in its place. No information was obtained as to the long-term success of these stratagems! Overall, unlike the rich proliferation of children's traditional games in the school playground, family folklore for children, in this small study, was fairly thin on the ground.

Customs and celebrations
The Moe Folklife Project began its researches in October-November 1994, before the project was formally established, with the express purpose of sampling Christmas and New Year customs in Moe. Interviews were conducted with persons of Serbian, Dutch, German, Italian and Scottish background, and a few examples of the project's findings are given below.

On 19th November 1994, the German Club Astoria held its Christkindl Markt in Morwell. Mr Rudi Hess, the president of Club Astoria, desribed this 'Christchild Market' as a traditional activity held to honour and celebrate the spirit of Christmas. As with many ethnic organisations in the La Trobe Valley, members are drawn from the region as a whole, including Moe. At the market, traditional German foods such as stollen, bratwurst and Christmas cookies are sold for consumption and to take away. The Club Astoria Arts and Crafts Club organises the market, and selects crafts people for invitation to sell their wares. Not all stall-holders are of German background although some have German connections through marriage. Traditional decorations are an important feature of the Christkindl Markt, and a large wreath or Adventskranz is suspended from the ceiling. Advent wreaths with four candles are featured in many German households in the weeks before Christmas, and one candle is lit on each of the four preceding Sundays.

Many Serbian traditions are observed in Moe, and many centre around the Serbian Orthodox Church in Yallourn North. Researcher Sally Grant wrote of her visit to the Christmas church service:

  1. Everyone stands for the two-hour service, even an elderly man who looks to be in his seventies. Three women sing hymns almost continuously throughout the service from behind a podium...children play in groups outside running around the small church, climbing the fence that surrounds the grounds and overlooks a valley. The priest chants...through the mass. Candles are for sale on a table inside the church door...of different sizes, colours and prices. Further inside the church, a large two-tiered candelabra is holding thirty or forty lit candles. The walls of the church are painted a pale blue and covered with framed prints of Serbian Orthodox icons. Behind the church is the altar...Inside the altar, the priest and local altar boys perform ceremonies and rituals allowed only to male members of the church. The boys are wearing cloaks embroidered with a large cross. The priest is dressed in a heavily embroidered cloth robe.

Following the church service, the congregation takes part in a meal in the church hall. The Christmas tree, decorated in Serbian national colours, is oak, and surrounded with hay. After the meal, children pretend to be chickens pecking through the hay, to find the sweets and nuts which have been buried in the hay. Each family takes home a small branch of the tree, in a local modification of the original Serbian tradition. A further modification of tradition was the holding of the Serbian Orthodox Mass on Christmas Eve rathr than Christmas Day. The Yallourn North church does not have its own priest, and the priest's Melbourne commitments prevent his coming to Moe on Christmas Day. Mrs Borka Milenkovich is a key figure in the maintenance of Serbian traditions in the La Trobe Valley, and an article about her activities as documented in the Moe Folklife Project was written by Catriona Pollock for the Gippsland Journal, published by the Centre for Gippsland Studies at Monash University, Churchill (see Appendix E).

The Dutch Christmas Mass and children's party was also visited on 11th December 1994 at St Kieren's Church and hall. The Mass was conducted by the Irish-born Bishop Coffey, from Sale, and children participated in the service. Girls wore white 'First Communion' type dresses and veils and many boys were dressed as shepherds. The highlight of the Dutch Christmas party was the appearance of St Nicholas, in his red cloak and red papal-style hat, and the two Black Peters. All children received a gift. A secular celebration of importance to Moe's Dutch community is Karneval. Each year, the Karneval Club organises a fancy dress ball and selects a 'prince' for the year. A medal is struck for the prince, and medals are exchanged with visiting clubs.

As with the German Christkindl Markt which is held in Morwell, other special events of importance to Moe residents may be held outside the town, usually because of the small size of a particular community in Moe. Kevin Cassar is a member of the Moe (Maltese) Bocce Club. He spoke of the Feast of St Joseph's held in Morwell, where the statue from the church is taken through the streets with a brass band which plays Maltese marches. He also described his family's annual visit to 'Port Arlington in Melbourne' for a Maltese celebration:

  1. lot of Maltese people get together and have bocce games and competitions and they have like a pole, greasy pole it's called over the sea set traight up and people try and climb up it and there is a flag at the top and whoever reaches the top and gets the flag wins a prize. It's a fiesta there is a Maltese band and like a Maltese ara, it's singing and they play acoustic guitars. People from Moe and Melbourne start singing which is not rehearsed and they have a comedy song which rhymes. Malta is celebrated also because when Malta was in war and the Turks tried to take over malta. There is a fortress which surrounds Malta and when it stopped the enemy it was a victory for Malta. They celebrate the Fortress Victory.


New Year's Eve in Moe is celebrated with many parties and gala events in restaurants, clubs and private homes. For Moe residents of Scottish descent this time is Hogmanay. Mrs Irene McGarrity and Alec and Babs Bathgate were among a number of Moe residents who spoke of the observance of Hogmanay in Moe among Scottish immigrants in the 1950s, when walking to visit friends after midnight was common. The First Footer was an eagerly-awaited visitor. A dark-haired person was preferred as the first person to step over the threshhold in the new year, as a sign of good luck. Many Scottish (and other) persons still sit up at home until midnight to see in the New Year, and further research is needed to establish whether 'first footing' is still practised in Moe. There is greater certainty about Burns Night, a gathering of (mostly) Scottish folk to celebrate the poetry of Robert Burns on January 26th. Andrew and Davina Mackie described the event, where whisky is drunk, bannocks (oat cakes) are eaten and the haggis is piped in before it is eaten. Burns' poetry is, of course, recited on the occasion.

A newer tradition in the Moe distict is the Thorpdale Potato Festival which is about fifteen years old, and is held on the March Labour Day weekend each year. Mrs Patricia Ingleton described the events which take place at the festival to celebrate Thorpdale's potatoes:
  1. a small band of people started it...it's a big day, all the activities are around potatoes, little kids baking up potatoes, adults; men see how high they can throw a bag of potatoes - two fellows get each end of a bag and throw it up. Potato peeling - they have potato competitions with cooking - the activities are around potatoes as much as possible.

She also described the 'Blessing of the Plough' ceremony which she was instrumental in starting ten years ago on the family property 'in the spud shed'. It is now a 'family picnic day' with an Anglican church service and blessing of the plough, and an 'old-fashioned country sports afternoon'.


Mourning and celebration are the two characteristics of the Christian Easter, which is widely observed throughout Moe. Easter is also heavily secularised through the sale of chocolate eggs, rabbits and other products, and a campaign to substitute an 'Easter bilby' for the rabbit is gaining some momentum in Australia. The Moe Folklife Project recorded Greek Easter customs in the Greek Orthodox Church in Morwell and in the home of Moe resident Soula Kanellopoulos and her family. After forty days of fasting where no meat or animal by-products are eaten, daily masses are held in the week leading up to Easter Sunday. On Good Friday, the flower-decorated epithafios representing Christ's bier is carried around the church grounds and returned to the church. Church-goers take home one of its flowers, considered to be blessed. Saturday midnight mass is a time of anticipation, leading to the joyous event of Christ's resurrection. Churchgoers light a candle from the priest's candle and take it home to burn all through Easter.


On Easter Sunday, family feasts are held. Soula and George Kanellopoulos's three daughters have come home from Melbourne for the occasion. The table holds a platter of meat, a Greek salad, coloured eggs, tsoureki, the special Easter bread baked by Soula with a coloured egg in the centre, shortbread, biscuits and fruit. An Easter custom is for two people to crack the coloured, hard-boiled eggs against each other, as a symbol of Christ's resurrection. The candle from the church is burning in a small shrine containing holy pictures, crosses and candles.

Unlike the dual themes of death and resurrection which characterise the Christian Easter, the Hindu festival Diwali, the Festival of Lights, is a celebration of joy and enlightenment. Gippsland's Indian communities came originally from Fiji, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysis and Singapore, and in September 1995 celebrated Diwali at the Lowanna College in Yallourn. Dances, instrumental music and songs and Indian snacks and sweets were featured at the celebration.


A particularly interesting tradition of British origin is the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day on November 5th, and Moe is one of the few places in Victoria where the Guy Fawkes Day bonfire is still held. Forty years ago bonfires were built by a number of neighbourhoods on vacant pieces of land, but today the Moe Apex Club organises one event. Some local schools make guys for the bonfire, and fireworks and other entertainments are provided by Apex. In 1995 Moe's Murray Road Primary School won the award for the best guy.


MUSIC AND DANCE
The documentation of music and dance in Moe by the Moe Folklife Project was marked by bad luck; two successive research assistants appointed to work in this area of folklife had to leave the project due to serious ill-health, early in their appointments. Subsequently music and dance were divided amongst the remaining five research assistants.

Music
Bands, choirs and jazz are conspicuous forms of music in Moe, and although the music which some groups perform might not be described as folk music, the practices of singing and instrumental music-making are truly folkloric. The La Trobe Community Concert Band grew out of the Moe City Band, itself formerly the Yallourn Brass Band. Mr Eric Lawton is a trombonist in the band, and told of the band's history and current activities. Many of its members are young people who are music students, and according to the program notes for a concert in the Moe Golf Club on 23rd September 1995, the band also includes 'music teachers, semi-professional musicians and other interested people'.

The O'Dowd Family Show Band was for more than thirty years a prominent feature of musical life in Moe. Although it finally stopped playing in 1987, the band reformed in 1995 for the fortieth anniversary of St Mary's Church, and the Moe Folklife Project made a video-tape of this event. Paddy O'Dowd Junior told the Moe Folklife Project about his extraordinary musical family and the band. Paddy O'Dowd Senior was an Irish immigrant who came to Newborough after World War 2, and 'to create entertainment ran dances in St Teresa's Church in the old township of Yallourn'. According to Paddy O'Dowd Junior, his father became tired of the unreliability of his musicians:

  1. other musicians used to let him down so he decided to teach his children, so since he had six and there's a few more coming on the way there's thirteen children altogether in the family and each one of us he taught us, he started teaching us music and then we picked it up from there and he'd take us for lessons and in fact at one time he was taking about four or five of us to Melbourne say about once a month for lessons.


Paddy O'Dowd described the band's efforts to raise its standards; 'until I bought a tape recorder nobody would give us a job - we sounded awful!'. His father ran dances for the church, then ran his own dances and played for weddings and parades. Today Paddy O'Dowd Junior is the head of the Music Department at the Central Gippsland College of TAFE, at Morwell, which specialises in Music Business Management. Paddy O'Dowd has also been involved in the Moe Jazz Festival, one of Victoria's major events on the jazz calendar.

The St Cecilia Choir of Gippsland is conducted by Joe Franssen who spoke to the Moe Folklife Project. The choir was formed in 1977 by the Catholic Dutch Migrants' Association, but is now a multicultural and interdenominational group which sings at concerts, festivals, masses and eistedfords. The choir's performances include opera, leider, popular and folk music, although little of Dutch origin. Given the choir's origins and the fact that about half its membership are Dutch, it would seem desirable if the choir could increase its Dutch repertoire.

Of considerable interest to the Moe Folklife Project has been the number of contemporary songs written about Moe and Yallourn. On 4th February 1996 the Gippsland Acoustic Club organised an evening in its regular meeting hall at Tyers where musicians presented songs written about the La Trobe Valley. The number of these songs confirms the findings from the storytelling component of the Moe Folklife Project about the importance of the Yallourn story in Moe's folk memory. The songs were written and presented in a variety of musical styles, including rhythm and blues and a capella. John Wolfe's Yallourn includes the following first and last verses:

One day when I was feeling blue, I thought that I would go
Back to my home in Gippsland where the mountain rivers flow,
In my old hometown called Yallourn I hoped that I might find
Some of my friends of bygone days that I had left behind.

  • Chorus:
    Yallourn, Yallourn, town where I was born
    In the valley of lignite coal;
    Nothing is left of old Yallourn
    But a big black empty hole.

    I found the power station still, beside the river side;
    The rolling foothills swept away up to the Great Divide;
    But where my town Yallourn had stood was neither heart nor soul;
    Instead of digging coal for people, they dug people up for coal.


    Dance
    Ballroom dancing and ethnic dancing were the two most notable dance traditions documented in Moe. Merve Burrage spoke about his many years of involvement with ballroom dancing. Merv and his wife Clarice turned professional and started the Moe School of Ballroom Dancing. Beginning at the old Fire Brigade Hall on the corner of Kirk and George Streets, their school moved to Shaw's Ballroom, now the Gala, a noted entertainment venue in Moe. Ballroom dancing is still popular in Moe. Gwen Callaghan spoke founding the old time dance club which meets weekly in Newborough, with more than one hundred and fifty dancers. The club uses eleven different bands from all over the La Trobe Valley. Supper is provided by a roster of charitable organisations, who receive a substantial donation for their club funds.

    Many ethnic groups teach national dance. At Old Gippstown's Multicultural Festival in 1995, German, Filipino and Serbian dancing was observed. Moe residents are active participants in ethnic dance groups, which may however include members from all over the La Trobe Valley. Soula Kanellopoulos from Moe South spoke about the efforts of the local Greek community, about two hundred and fifty families, to teach dancing and other traditions to their children:

    For years my husband tried to get a qualified teacher from Greece to teach the children here Greek - the [Greek] government sent a teacher here - a fella - and his wife came with him and it was lucky enough that she was qualified as a teacher as well so she is teaching traditional Greek dancing to our children.

    Before the arrival of the teacher from Greece, Soula Kanellopoulos stood in as the teacher on two afternoons a week, teaching children 'reading, writing, a bit of history, and religion', and also helped to establish the club and the dancing group. The community also made some costumes, 'we all got together and worked day and night', as well as paying for eight evzones costumes to be sent from Greece.

    GUIDELINES FOR FUTURE PROJECTS.
    Professional quality equipment and expertise are needed for recording music, if the recordings are to have long-term or archival value. This observation confirms the earlier comment about the difficulties of using untrained research assistants, despite their enthusiasm, local knowledge and real achievement. In recording children's games, permissions need to be obtained from school principals and, if they wish, parents. In view of some causes celebres including one in Western Australia, where a male researcher was accused of child molestation, this project would recommend that males should not document children's games, for their own protection.


    PUBLICITY
    In one sense, the Moe Folklife Project did not need publicity, since it had chosen to seek individuals who could be considered 'key tradition bearers'. Once an initial body of names had been provided by the Multicultural Resource Centre, most informants were found through word of mouth. At the conclusion of the research, many additional individuals were known but not recorded. Nevertheless, publicity was sought in order to keep the community informed about the project.

    The local newspapers, the Moe-Narracan News and the Latrobe Valley Express were of great importance to the project, both as a source of information and for publicity. Journalist Megan Neil wrote a number of pieces, although a frustrating lack of detail was provided in the articles. Attempts were made to place articles in the local papers, with little success.

    At the beginning of the Moe Folklife Project, in late 1994 and early 1995, the project director provided a number of interviews for local radio stations. It is probable that regular use could have been made of local radio, but the limited time available to the project director made this impossible. Most of her time was spent in training and developments of networks. On 2nd March 1996, ABC radio's Music Deli broadcast a programme of songs written about the La Trobe Valley, recorded at Tyers on 4th February 1996.

    The project director spoke twice to the Moe Development Group, an important community and business activist body which has about one hundred and fifty members. The second meeting on 4th February 1996 presented a number of recommendations to the Moe Development Group.

    Some publicity for the Moe Folklife Project was obtained in academic and professional circles. One of Monash University's publications, Montage, ran an interview with the project director who also presented two conference papers at Monash University. These papers were presented to the Orff 100 International Music Conference and the Centre for Migrant and Intercultural Studies 25th Anniversary Conference. They are being published in revised versions in National Library News and Australian Folklore. Reference has also been made earlier to another article written for the Gippsland Journal by Catriona Pollock. Two articles were also published in the Victorian Folklife Association's newsletter.

    In August-September 1995 a brochure was written by the project director and designed at the Yallourn TAFE college. The final design and printing were done during Gwenda Davey's absence overseas in October 1995, with unsatisfactory reproduction of photographs included. Despite representations to the printer by the project director and members of the Advisory Committee, the printer's costs for a reprint were prohibitive, leaving the Moe Folklife Project with an unsatisfactory brochure.

    On 15th November 1995 the Moe Folklife Project inserted a questionnaire in the Moe-Narracan News. The aim of the questionnaire was to provide an opportunity for all Moe residents, not yet interviewed, to contribute to the Moe Folklife Project. To encourage maximum participation, a 'lucky draw' was held, with two $100 prizes offered. Seventy questionnaires were returned, and the results confirmed the clear importance of both handcrafts and gardening among Moe residents.

    GUIDELINES FOR FUTURE PROJECTS:
    Given the slender resources of the Moe Folklife Project, both human and financial, as much publicity as possible was obtained. Clearly this was insufficient, as little project recognition was found among (for example) local persons and organisations approached for financial support. The wider implication of this situation is that greater community support is needed before such a project is commenced. A brochure should be produced early in the project.


    OUTCOMES

    Gains for individuals

    One of the objectives of the Moe Folklife Project was to 'provide employment and new skills through the training provided by the project director', an objective of considerable importance in view of Moe's high rate of unemployment.

    Among the research assistants, Sally Grant obtained a full-time contract for six months with the SEC Archives and subsequently left to travel overseas. Nancy Schakau went into a full-time training position provided by the Commonwealth Employment Service and Robin Begalo into a full-time position in community services. Soula Kanellopoulos continued her part-time work as a psychiatric nurse, and completed a training programme as a tutor in migrant English. Peter Morrison travelled overseas for several months and has enrolled for a university course in public history at Bendigo, where he is now living. The two assistants who had taken early retirement from their positions as a nurse and teacher respectively are both actively employed. Marie Smith is completing her honours year at Monash University (Gippsland) and Fay Pollock has part-time employment. The professional photographer Jennifer Aitken was helped to obtain a commission from the National Library of Australia's Towns project. All the research team spoke warmly of the increase in their confidence and skills as the result of their work with the Moe Folklife Project, and several have found a lifetime interest in local heritage and folklife. Three of the assistants travelled to Melbourne weekly during first semester in 1995 to attend Gwenda Davey's classes in Australian Folk Culture: a Multicultural Perspective at Monash University.

    The Director of the Moe Folklife Project, Gwenda Davey, provided one full-day and one half-day training sessions in oral history to two community projects, the MYACRE art project and a LEAP scheme. Both projects produced significant concrete outcomes; MYACRE produced a major art exhibition and the LEAP scheme a book Voices of the Valley. Gwenda Davey also held numerous consultations with a wide range of individuals in Moe and the La Trobe Valley as a whole.

    Gains for Moe
    Several of the objectives of the Moe Folklife Project concerned the possibilities for enhanced cultural and economic development which might follow from the project, and a number of these were presented to the Moe Development Group on 5th February 1996. These possibilities are discussed in more detail below:

    Tourism
    The Moe Development Group, Moe's main activist and promotional body since the amalgamation of Moe into the La Trobe Council, has already targetted tourism as a major community objective. Their plans focus mainly on Moe's geographical position in relation to snow fields (eg Mount Baw Baw), Gippsland beaches and heritage towns such as the old gold mining town of Walhalla.

    The Moe Folklife Project has indicated additional possibilities. It is abundantly clear from our researches that the Yallourn story is a powerful force in Moe and Newborough, and has great potential for industrial heritage tourism. The life and death of Victoria's garden city, Yallourn, coupled with the story of brown coal mining in the Valley, is in many ways as exciting and moving a story as those told about the Snowy River Scheme. The Yallourn Heritage Trail, an embryonic tourism project, needs support which should include a permanent exhibition in Moe itself. Since the company Yallourn Energy now occupies the former Moe City Offices, company sponsorship and space could be sought for such an exhibition. Some additional possibilities to enhance the Yallournness of Moe were put to the Moe Development Group, and included renaming the town Moe-Yallourn, recreating Yallourn in Moe through extensive planting of the colourful deciduous trees for which Yallourn was reknowned, and creating a town square (Yallourn Square?) in Albert Street Moe.

    A further tourism possibility involves linking Moe with the existing Gourmet Deli Trail which at present is mainly to the west of Moe. The Trail at present directs motorists mainly to commercial cheese, venison and berry farms in West Gippsland, and it could include Moe potatoes and fruit. The town of Thorpdale in Moe's hinterland is a centre of potato growing, and hosts the annual Potato Festival described earlier in this report. There is clearly in Victoria a market for a variety of potatoes, as there is for tree-ripened and old-fashioned varieties of fruit. The exploitation of the latter for tourism purposes could involve either (or both) the establishment or encouragement of community or private orchards and the collection and sale of back-yard fruit. A parallel to the latter is the mechanism whereby Melbourne's suburban grape crops are purchased door-to-door for wine-making. In earlier years Moe was rich in orchards, many of which were sold for pine plantations.

    Moe, like the La Trobe Valley and Gippsland as a whole, has a rich Aboriginal history and presence, with important educational programmes at the KODE schools, TAFE colleges and Monash University (Gippsland). Some important Koorie crafts such as basket-making are still practised. Koorie, heritage and tourism organisations might profitably engage in discussions to determine if and how Moe's Koorie heritage might be presented to provide both educative and economic benefits through tourism.

    Cultural development
    Although the subsequent discussion has tourism implications, it is considered separately here. It is not wished to imply in this report that all of Moe's future should be geared to tourism, nor that it is the solution to all the malaise which grips the town. Moe's folklife has a great deal to do with the people of the town themselves, and with the sense of communitas (The term was coined by Victor Turner) which holds the town together.

    Moe needs an organisation such as a Moe Folklife Research Group similar to the Patrick Mogen Cultural Center formed in Lowell Massachusetts as an outcome of the American Folklife Center's twelve-month study of the area. There are many folkloric traditions in Moe which are well-worth attention of the type proposed in the 1989 UNESCO Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, such as identification, conservation, preservation, protection and dissemination. Two examples alone are Moe's celebration of Guy Fawkes Day on 5th November each year, with a bonfire, guys and other entertainments, and Moe's multicultural Christmas and New Year celebrations, with its trees and foods, with St Nicholas and New Year first-footing at Hogmanay. The new grants programme of the Australia Foundation for Culture and the Humanities may provide opportunities for a Moe Folklife Group to continue research and promotional activities in the area.

    The extensive range and quality of handcrafts documented by the Moe Folklife Project indicates that Moe is indeed a talented town. There appear to be greatly increased economic opportunities available through exhibitions or markets, and a project under discussion at the Moe Development Group is the reopening of the Moe-Narracan Railway with a large craft market at Narracan. Encouragement is needed for some of Moe's most talented craftspeople to teach their skills to a greater number of others than at present. It is hoped that promotion of Moe's rich folk culture to the town itself will help to promote a more positive self-image in the town. Many Moe residents spoke to the Folklife Project about Moe's poor image as a working-class, publicly housed, violent town. The Moe Folklife Project has indicated that there is a rich, exciting and creative side to Moe's cultural life, and that a change of image is long overdue.

    The Moe Folklife Project produced 118 recorded interviews, and several hundred photographs, including colour slides and prints, black and white prints, and exhibition-quality black and white prints. About twenty interviews conducted by Gwenda Davey are housed in the National Library of Australia, and the rest of the original tapes and transcripts and the colour slides will be stored at the Centre for Gippsland Studies, Monash University (Churchill), where they will be professionally archived and available for research. Copies of all tapes and colour prints will be held at the Moe Library where the tapes may be borrowed. It is hoped that the ready availability of this material at Moe and Churchill will encourage further research and interest in traditional culture and folklife.

    One of the project's objectives to produce a calendar of the traditional year in Moe could not be achieved because all funds were exhausted. It is however hoped that the calendar will eventually be produced in Moe by a local folklife research group, founded by some of the former research team plus others.

    National outcomes
    The original objectives for the Moe Folklife Project included two of national significance, namely the objectives that the project should:
    1. Demonstrate a methodology for documenting folk culture in Australia, and
    2. Demonstrate that further, similar projects can evolve from the Australian Cultural Development Office's cultural mapping projects.


    It is believed that this report conclusively demonstrates a methodology for similar and further projects.

    This report is written for the two major funding bodies for the Moe Folklife Project, the National Library of Australia and the Department of Communication and the Arts. It has discussed honestly both the successes and the difficulties encountered by the Moe Folklife Project. It is anticipated that the material in this report will be used to produce a different, public document which will emphasise, in a positive way, both methodological issues and research findings.

    An important outcome, of national significance, is the award of a grant by the Department of Employment, Education and Training to the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University to develop a Graduate Diploma of Australian Folklife Studies. This Graduate Diploma is currently being written and researched, and is hoped to start in 1997. It will be Australia's first programme to train folklorists and persons able to carry out community folklife studies like the pioneering folklife project in Moe, Victoria.

    ENDNOTES

    ".... According to the 1994 Profile of the City of Moe, a publication of the Latrobe Regional Commission, 'Moe has a lower workforce participation rate [45.6%] of those aged 15 years and over compared to the Latrobe Region [53.8%] and the state [54.7%]. This is indicative of the high numbers of elderly people and the growing number of unemployed in the City' (p.18). Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics.