 |
| Ann, Uncle Peter, Auntie Dot - 1970s |
As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, we sent our piano off to be turned into something new. The Carl Ecke piano was made in Germany in the early 1900s and came to us via our Auntie Dot. The wonderfully named Dorothea Mary Magdalene Mackay was part of a working class family and had left school at 13 to be apprenticed to a tailor. She made, often with hand stitching, exquiste men's suits in the Gledden Arcade building in Perth for decades. In my younger thinner days, I wore both a pair of cricket creams and a pinstriped suit she had made for her brother, our Uncle Pete.
I remember Humphrey McQueen talking about the role of pianos as social artifacts in colonial Australia in his book A New Britannia. As a teenage, I was amazed that there was so much culture in Dot's working class world when so many of my middle class peers's parents didn't have shelves of books or eclectic collections of records, let alone a piano.
Dot passed the piano onto us when she moved down to the Porongorups in the 1960s and I learnt on this piano up to the end of high school. Although I passed all the exams at a high level, it was through hard work rather than natural flair. I could never just sit down at a piano and riff the way my mother could. I tried to teach myself again when I left MTC but the results were underwhelming so the piano sat there unused but not unloved.
When Susan discovered a company that recycled pianos, I was thrilled to think that all the memories embedded in the wood of this 120 year old musical instrument could be preserved in some way. We headed out to Braeside, met Peter, one of the owners, and decided to have a hall table, some bedside tables and a box created out the walnut and spruce of the piano with some of the ebony keys used as handles. And we love the results.
Comments
Post a Comment