Composer , poet , singer , actor, radio announcer and Townsville chartered accountant, John Ashe , campaigned to counter Australia being flooded by wailing American singers . In the process , he wrote many songs about Australian subjects , from Aborigines, the Great Barrier Reef to bushranger Ned Kelly . Conversely , he composed a distinctively special musical tribute to America during WWll.
Ashe was aided and abetted in his drive to counter the flood of Americana by a retired former magistrate , Reginald Arthur Vivivian , who lived on Magnetic Island . Vivian , born in Melbourne, had moved to Queensland in 1900 and worked in mining districts before going to New Guinea ,where he became a magistrate . Retiring in 1942, he moved to the island ,writing books of verse under the name Aldus Thurian , about bunyips, rabbits, wool, White Australia , published in the l940s in Townsville ,one below , which may have included Bluey the cattle dog and the Devil ???? in the cover illustration .
During the war, Ashe worked as an accountant for the US Army Finance Department in Townsville and often took American Servicemen home to listen to records . He composed the wartime tribute to the Americans , Ain't It Grand to Have a Rich Uncle Sam, the sheet music decorated with the flags of the two countries .
One of the Americans was Gabriel Jacoby , possibly a colonel, who had worked for the New York music publishers , Leo Feist Inc . In l942 Jacoby was sent to see Ashe after he told a Townsville music shop proprietor he had a song in his head that he wanted to put down on paper.
From a jungle in New Guinea , Jacoby sent Ashe lyrics for Memory Hill , which he turned into a catchy, slow foxtrot. The song was sung to troops in New Guinea by Lanny Ross with the backing of a band . Ashe and Jacoby collaborated to produce other songs-,Dream In Your Heart and Convicted and Sentenced.
Another friend of Ashe's on Magnetic Island was a retired Royal Navy captain who had been in the 1916 Battle of Jutland . He introduced schoolteacher Margaret Mealy , from NSW, to Ashe , and they married , the naval captain , wearing medals , giave her away at the wedding ceremony. This week , during all the concerning news about domestic violence, a John Ashe poem glorifying his wife was rediscovered in the Little Darwin files and passed to Special Collections , Eddie Koiki Library, James Cook University .
The Magnetic Museum staged a John Ashe display several years ago .
Ashe is shown above on the cover of a record album with Gordon Parsons and Chad Morgan . His clients included graziers who came to see him in Townsville . He took them out to lunch for drinks during which there was much swapping of yarns , telling of jokes , laughter , providing material for songs and poems .
( By Peter Simon , more details about Ashe available in Little Darwin blog online.)
