Paul Robeson, the ‘Last Tour’ and Australia’s lost history

Paul Robeson was an enormous figure. The son of a minister who was a minister, a productive screen and stage player, a professional -level American football player, a multi -language and internationalist, civil rights campaignist, a deep thinker about music and a representative leftist.

He had a velvety bass baritone he used as the singer and hateri of extraordinary depth and wealth. The celebrities disappeared slightly as they did inevitably, but was undoubtedly one of the great superstars of the first half of the twentieth century, and I haven’t mentioned the most famous black American in the world for that time.

Robeson had the most rare ability of any singer: making any songs, no matter what Provenans, is coming, just written for him. The repertoire of traditional spirituality – in which the web Dubois calls “sad songs veya or“ John Brown’s body ”(“ Zafer, Şan Hallelujah ”melodiye” (first recorded in the early days of the American civil war) is being.

Not to say anything of these songs there Written for himRobeson’s law will change in subsequent performances to delete any beggar tendency in the narrator, but the challenging “Ol Man River ((ım I’m tired of living, but I’m afraid of dying”, ım I have to continue to fight, until I die ”).

Great West Indian Writer CLR James Robeson tagged “The most extraordinary man I’ve ever met” New Yorker Journalist Alexander Woolcott said that the world is made of original things ”. His wife, Eslanda Goode Robeson, was a groundbreaking figure on his own – a journalist, anthropologist, the first black woman working in the Surgical Pathology Department at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, and then the manager of her husband.

Australia and New Zealand in 1960 were the last places visited by this extraordinary couple, an event that was captured in Ann Curthoys’ live, stable new book Last round. Interviews with people faced by Robesons, Contemporary Media Scope and ASIO records (later), Last round It covers Paul’s concerts, Esland’s speaking engagements, and the interaction of couples with Maori and local groups.

Robesons’ public support for the Soviet Union – at least partly from the experience of visiting Russia in 1934 and “I am not a person here, I am not a person for the first time in my life… I am walking in full human honor” – always controversial and eventually cost them expensive. Curthoys states that this support is even in the face of the first-hand knowledge of what happened there through Paul’s friend, poet and Jewish anti-fascist committee member Itzik Feffer.

Both were withdrawn in front of the communist witch hunting by Senator Joseph McCarthy and their passports were canceled. In 1939, Robeson was chosen to represent the real voice of America with all various, scattered, inspiring and horrifying for the patriotic song ”Ballad for Americans“. He was in 1950 Subject to what will be the longest Hollywood black list Any mccarthyism victim.

When they took back their passports in 1958, they immediately went to Europe and finally went to Australia and New Zealand in the late 1960s. The first visits and the last round they will undertake.

Robesons’s visit during the visit of the couple with the Australian media. For example, Robeson receives too many sticks from the conservative press after being angry at a badly thought -out press conference to Sydney after long journeys, but still receives consistent praise about his performances.

In addition to printing and radio interviews, Paul taped the appearance of a TV in Australia – a deep starting point in the Variety series Hal Lashwood’s loversA group of children spoke about peace, music and poetry. Lashwood was a peace activist who watched ASIO before his own show was given, and apparently managed to convince Robeson that the black face of the show came from a place of love and respect. The past is a really different country.

Indeed, you can map most of the history of Australia through the figures opposed to the journeys of the Paul and Esland brush. In Sydney, Robesons, after the 1946-1949 strike of Pilbara Pastoral workers, said, “The tribe is shown by Elders’ Pindan Mining Cooperative by the Pindan Pindan Pinden Pastoral Workers, as well as Clancy McKenna and Doley Box, as well as Pindan Pastoral workers.

In Adelaide, the couple was thrown into a party that was thrown by the Eureka Youth League for the first concerts by Graeme Bell Jazz Band in the 1940s and changed the way of the species to the perception of the species and changed themselves to a writer called “the biggest jazz group ..

At Perth, the communist and leading writer Katharine meets Susannah Prichard and Hugo Throssel’s widow. Throsell won a Victoria Cross for his mortal courage in Gallipoli, one of the founding myths of White Australia, but fell from goodness with Australia’s military organization and returned when he gave up the war and returned to the left. A broken and free man killed herself in 1933. You can learn a lot about the effect of Australia, which was once forgotten in Australia’s mainstream of Australia.

Curthoys’ straight approach to Prose allows Robeson’s slightly numerical presence to speak for him – whether people are young idealists or former construction workers, Robeson’s song sound.

Somewhere else Last roundLike Robeson Undefined performance for workers At the site of the Sydney Opera House, I expressed myself a wider appearance of this lyrical moment: the first concert in an opera house, which furnished the foundations of the most iconic turning point of Australia, celebrating the stolen land, still more than ten years. Similarly, it may be inevitable that ASIO has sent spies to most of the events that Robesons participated, but Curthoys is still in a strange way that Curthoys deals with revelation.

However, these are discussions on style rather than matter. The book is a great scholarship and a significant corrector-a noble attempt to ensure that these moments and movements do not go out of our feelings, gathered them before the sacrifice of the memory after the fedation.