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"Sister Mary Koska then opened the piano and took out the sheet music
...It was the first Kiwi folk song I ever learned."
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"Sister Mary Koska then opened the piano and took out the sheet music
...It was the first Kiwi folk song I ever learned."
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Sometime about the 1850s a broadsheet was printed in England of Pretty Caroline. In 1908, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams collected the song Pretty Caroline from a Mrs Powell of Herefordshire. In 1923, he included this tune in his English Folk Song Suite, for military bands.
Brass bands gave concerts in New Zealand city parks in the 1920s, while Rudyard Kipling and Eileen Duggan both published verse about tuis and kowhai in that decade also.
Touch the tui with your mouseKipling -
Buy a blood-red myrtle-bloom,
Buy the kowhai's gold
Flung for gift on Taupo's face,
Sign that spring is comeDuggan -
Would you, remembering, tell them of the Tui?
Wild, wild and blinding is his lightest note.
They- they never heard him, swinging on a flax-flower,
Mad with the honey and the noon in his throat.
They say that in the old days stately rangatiras
Slit his tongue, and made him speak instead of sing;
We would rather see him shining and gold-dusted,
From a morning kowhai flinging wide the spring.
So my guess is that sometime in the 1920s A G Hall read these poems, heard a brass band playing Vaughan Williams' Folk Song Suite, and wrote the Homeland Aotearoa lyrics.
A handwritten choral score with harmonies arranged by N L Brownlee has been located by David Dell. Possibly this arrangement was made in about 1950 (?)
I have received emails from those who saw the sheet music and learnt the song at schools in the early 1950s. "I recall singing this at school (Richmond Road, Auckland) in 1953 and, I think, it was not new then."
This song was printed in the 1960 Pupils Song Book for the NZ Department of Education. A. G. Hall is given there as the writer of these words.
From: Convent Kid by Mike Subritzky"I was in about Standard II when I heard Sister Mary Koska running through a song about New Zealand with a senior class. The song had a beautiful harmony and ended with the words "Our Homeland Aotearoa".
Anyway, when it came time for my class to learn a new song we were taught another stirring British song and I rapidly lost interest to the point where I was made to remain behind after class, which usually signalled the strap. I was given the opportunity to explain myself and when I said that the song was boring and I wanted to learn the one about Aotearoa, there was a pause and then Sister Koska told me to report to the Convent after school...needless to say I thought that Father Hayes or Father Donnelly were going to deal with me.
After an entire day spent in silent terror I waited for the bell to be rung at three o'clock and then walked over to the Convent where the nuns lived. Sister Koska met me at the door and took me into the first room on the right, which was her music room.
She then opened the piano and took out the sheet music and taught me how to sing the song...It was the first Kiwi folk song I ever learned.
Thank you Sister Mary Koska."
FULL STORY
- Mike Subritzky who remembered the lyrics and wrote the story.
- Joyce Stewart, who went hunting for the lyrics, and found Mike's story.
- My wife Lynn, who remembered the tune and sang it to me for transcribing.
- The National Library people who provided the sheet music details.
- Jim Youngman, who learnt it at Richmond Road School in the mid 1953, and alerted me to the age of the song
- Ian Hood of Hamilton, who learnt it at Hillcrest Primary School in the mid 1950s, and pointed me toward Vaughan Williams' suite.
During a search for the origns of the lyrics sent in by Mike Subritzky, this 1950s Tui /Kowhai song also came to light.
Our springtime's golden shower
The brightest promise of July
New Zealand's national flower
Then rapidly does the Tui
The Kowhai nectar sip
Call, chuckle and flit with glee
And into each flower dip
With his tufted white cravat
Clear as a bell his notes are heard
For his mate to answer back
And as the buds appear
Our hearts are glad that soon there'll be
A Tui's call to hear
The Brewster family has given permission for this music to be used for private, non-commercial purposes. Sheet music and old Tanza 78 rpm recordings of the Brewsers' songs are available from Barney Brewster's Old, Rare and Interesting Books, Nelson - [email protected]
Edgar Roy Brewster b. Eltham 1905, d. New Plymouth 1978. He began keeping bees in Taranaki in 1927. He was interested in aviation, and studying the flying action of birds led him to develop an independant theory of flight. He made and flew model aircraft which demonstrated his theory.
Then in 1940, after a very successful bee-keeping season, he sold his business and devoted himself to building a full-size demonstration aircraft. He was a firm believer in the use of honeycomb construction, taken from his philosphy that there are no right angles in nature, which he applied to making a birdlike aircraft frame which can still be seen at New Plymouth.
Due to insufficient resources, and the death of his first wife, he returned to bee-keeping, and to the manufacture of bee-keeping equipment.
He also applied his honeycomb construction principles to house-building, which he saw as a possible answer to the post-war housing shortages, and he built a beatifully crafted hexagon-based house. He and his second wife Nettie opened it to visitors, and between 1953 and 1972 it was visited by over 250,000 people.
