The Forgotten Music Of Felix Ookean - liner notes essay

In 2011, Melbourne band The Cambrian Explosion released an album of their interpretations of Felix Ookean's soundtrack compositions. This essay was written for the liner notes of the release.

The Forgotten Music Of Felix Ookean

“Music and the natural world are not mutually exclusive magisteria; they’re two sides of the same coin,” – Felix Ookean, 1985.

Felix Ookean was a true original; as singular as the Australian fauna that he embraced so firmly. Never before has a man combined his seemingly disparate talents – musical and scientific – with such aplomb and enthusiasm. With his characteristic moustache and penchant for unusual hats, Ookean was once one of the most recognisable zoologist/musicians in Australia. And yet he is rarely remembered today by either the scientific community or the local music scene. However, an audience hungry for genuine, original talent is slowly rediscovering this charismatic figure. If one delves deeply enough, there they find Ookean, shining like a star within a sea of mediocrity.

The son of a Jewish Romanian mother and an Estonian father, Ookean was born in Bucharest in 1937. His family immigrated to Australia in 1938, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The Ookean family settled in Adelaide where his father worked as a freelance piano/accordion tuner while his mother looked after her young son. It was during this time that Ookean developed his love of the natural world, becoming an avid birdwatcher and collector of rocks and fossils. As a precocious teenager he accompanied geologist Reg Sprigg on a fossil collecting trip to the Flinders Ranges, which catalysed his decision to study natural sciences at university. He was also an extremely musically gifted child, learning the flute, celesta, guitar and the acoustic šargija.

In 1955 he was accepted into Melbourne University where he studied music and zoology, achieving excellent marks in both. It was around this time that Ookean formed his first musical ensemble, a country influenced exotica band called ‘The Banjo Sharks’. Amongst the players was fellow zoology graduate and well-regarded marimba player Robert Teal who would go on to become one of Australia’s foremost crypto-ornithologists. Ookean finished his studies in 1959 and began working at ‘Bluebottle Bay’ – an ill-fated local business that tried to emulate the burgeoning success of Phillip Island’s famous penguin parade by showcasing migratory jellyfish. During this time Ookean became interested in producing nature documentaries and began to recruit crewmembers for his nascent production company.

Ookean made his first documentary film in 1966 entitled The Southern Oceans – Life Without A Notochord, focusing on Australia’s native marine life. The film was unique in purposefully ignoring fish, mammals and birds and only featuring invertebrate animals. He felt that including more charismatic animals such as whales, seals or sharks was “too easy”. When asked about his motivation he replied that “anybody can film a dolphin and get a response from an audience. I wanted a challenge – I wanted to try and reveal the charm of the mollusk, the verve of the echinoderm.” The series was aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 1967 and was met with critical applause (and a modest, albeit enthusiastic, audience).

The soundtrack, entirely composed by Ookean, was performed by himself and a group of Melbourne's best jazz session players. The studio sessions were recorded at Ookean’s home studio which he dubbed ‘Sea Grass Meadows’. The personnel that comprised these ensembles were constantly evolving and Sea Grass Meadows was for a time frequented by some of the hottest contemporary jazz players and biologists of Melbourne. The soundtrack was an intriguing blend of avant-garde jazz-fusion, exotica/surf music and Romanian folk influences that perfectly complemented the visuals of the film and was to become his signature sound. Ookean was particularly influenced by the active music scene of his adopted hometown, Melbourne. His favourites were bands such as the all-girl exotica vocal band ‘The Sea Lilies’, Balkans influenced instrumental surf band ‘The Surfin’ Skuas’ and Australian jazz pioneer, “Dr.” Frank Wolfe.

The vinyl pressing of The Southern Oceans – Life Without A Notochord; The Music is notoriously hard to find today, even in Ookean’s native Melbourne, and a copy in good condition can sell for upwards of $20. A single was released from the album, ‘Five Step Waltz Of The Starfish’ which received limited airplay on local radio stations.

Soon after, Ookean headed inland and turned his attention to native bird-life. He took a job as a field researcher for Prof. U. G. Gould, a distant nephew of John Gould and an expert on subterranean bird species. Ookean spent his days cataloguing bird populations in South-Eastern Australia and concurrently collating material for a new documentary series. This culminated in his breakout 8-part series of 1969, Feathered Lives. He later described his intentions as “want[ing] to show the public what it really meant to be a bird. What they felt, how they saw the world. What life is like on two wings – or flippers in the case of penguins.” As with Ookean’s previous work it was picked up by the ABC and the soundtrack was composed him and performed by his collective at Sea Grass Meadows.

Unlike his previous work however, it was a resounding success appreciated by critics and viewing audiences alike. The Radio Times called it “a soaring eagle of a series”. Antipodean Geographic commended it for “finally giving a real bird’s eye view of Australia”. It garnered very impressive ratings for the ABC and turned Ookean into something of a minor celebrity, causing him to remark wryly at the time, “I’m more popular than Darwin now.”

The soundtrack was very popular and was his highest selling release, peaking at #4 on the national soundtrack charts. The album spawned 4 singles: the mournful, Eastern European themed ‘Mynah Key’, the swinging bossa nova of ‘Eatin’ Honey’, the chaotic and experimental high-pitched noise of ‘The Lorikeets Are Restless’ and the minor hit, ‘Twelve Apostlebirds’ – a sweeping orchestral piece which conveyed Ookean’s religious-like respect for his winged subjects. This is one of the few albums of Ookean’s that was re-issued on compact disc and his most easy release to find today. The 45RPM singles are highly valued by collectors however, due to the b-sides containing the birdcalls of each song’s subject species.

The success of Feathered Lives filled Ookean with confidence and an ambition to achieve something truly monumental. It was at this point that he started planning a series that would comprehensively document the entire natural history of the Southern Hemisphere. The project took him seven years, covered almost 50 countries and resulted in his most contentious work yet, Australis – The Other Half. The series was broadcast in 1977 to mixed reviews, but to a predominantly positive public reception. A contemporary review in The Age slammed it for being “pretentious, overblown and unnecessarily grandiose. Ookean’s constant claim that the Southern Hemisphere is the ‘better’ hemisphere only serves to make us all look foolish”. Ookean conceded that the series had suffered many conceptual problems and attributed its more questionable moments to a bout of quollpox he contracted during a tree-climbing shoot in New Guinea. He added “perhaps Australis just wasn’t quite ready for television. Maybe it was too big a series for just one hemisphere.”

Nevertheless, the soundtrack Ookean created for the series was incredibly well received and generated much-needed sales for his production company. The release, a double-LP entitled, Australis – Four Sides Of The Other Half, was an epic and ambitious quasi-concept album that was hailed as his greatest musical achievement. The second LP contains one continuous piece, ‘The Antarctic Suite Parts I-XXIV’, a 43-minute epic that, despite the inconvenience of having to turn over the record halfway through the song, many consider a prog masterpiece. Amongst them is Nick Moody – amateur teuthologist and lead singer from neo-prog band Brontotheramin, who describes the album as “[t]he most fully realised Austral aural approximation ever attempted. When listening to the 7/8 section of ‘Cries From The Giants Of Gondwana’ one can almost see the Diprotodonts”. There was even talk of a rock-opera adaptation, but this was quickly dismissed due to Ookean’s strong personal distaste for musical theatre.

Following the completion of Australis, Ookean found himself, for the first time in his life, unable to decide what to do next. He still had a good standing with the viewing and listening public, but he was simply unable to obtain the big budgets he was used to. In early 1978 he followed his restless muse to his birthplace of Romania and traveled Eastern Europe searching for inspiration. During a dinner party with acclaimed palaeo-ursinologist Baron Béla Nopsca he was introduced to Erich Von Daniken and, for better or worse, Ookean was inspired by his ideas of extra-terrestrials visiting ancient civilisations.

He soon returned home and organised an expedition to central Australia convinced that Uluru was constructed by aliens in prehistoric times as a UFO landing base. It’s easy to judge this notion as ridiculous in retrospect, but the Australia of the late-seventies was far less sceptical than it is today – one need only look at the baffling success of Daryl Somers – and the series, Monoliths From The Heavens? was produced in 1979. However, due to some unfortunate wrangling with his creditors over unpaid debts combined with production delays, the series was not aired until 1985. Although Ookean’s more hard-line scientific friends balked at the series, the space-obsessed public of the time barely batted an eyelid. Neither, it seems, did they watch it. It was to be Ookean’s most poorly received series, and his last major project.

The soundtrack built upon Ookean’s trademark style with the addition of more synthesisers and judicious use of the theramin – indeed some critics described it as ‘overkill’. In reference to Ookean’s use of electronic instrumentation, Trent Skinner of Sci-Fi Hi-Fi Magazine wrote; “Of all the uncertainties surrounding space travel, the one thing Felix Ookean seems certain we will encounter is an abundance of high-pitched whistling noises.”

To compound matters, the indigenous inhabitants of central Australia were so incensed by the series’ claims that a landmark legal case was outlined in which Ookean would be charged with libel, misrepresentation and ‘wanton disrespect of accepted historical fact’. The court-case lost steam however when it became known that, according to the Australian Broadcasting Bureau’s estimation, less than 1000 people actually watched the series. In light of this information the plaintiffs were satisfied that the series would have no lasting effect on the Australian public and withdrew their case. Ookean’s financers came to the same conclusion. Monoliths From The Heavens? was the last moderate-budget documentary series of Felix Ookean’s career.

Felix Ookean was never exactly a household name, but then neither were Wallace, Cropp or Libaek. His influence may have been subtle, but he managed to unite the natural sciences with music in a more invigorating and thought-provoking way than any Australian before or since. He is largely reclusive now, reported to be living somewhere in far-north Queensland, and shuns public appearances. He summed up his own feelings on his work in a rare interview with Antipodean Geographic in 1985: “What could be more in synch with nature than music? Birds were singing long before we ever did. All I’m trying to do is to illustrate the music that is already present in the natural world. To highlight it and bring it into the foreground. If I have managed to achieve that – if only for a moment – in any of my films, then I consider that to be both a scientific and musical triumph."

- Rohan Long, April 2010

An extract from an unfinished biography of Australian electronic musician Bronzewing.

(The following is an extract from an unfinished biography of little-known Australian electronic musician 'Bronzewing' (born Logan Horn; 21st April 1959) written by Nick Moody in 2001. Although they never met, Bronzewing worked closely with Ookean's longtime collaborator James Bell and shared with Ookean a desire to depict the Australian natural landscape with music.)

Australia has always been a land of contradictions but never more so than in the 1980s. We were insecure about our place in the world even as we exported our culture – a version of it, anyway – on a bigger scale than ever before. We, as a nation, were realising the enormous value of our natural heritage and of our culture, both European and indigenous. It seems only fitting then, that the musical voices that defined this era were often a contradictory mix of the natural and the synthesised. And although he was never a well-known artist, no one typified this more than a Melbourne-based electronic musician known as Bronzewing.

Bronzewing’s sound was as organic as the Australian bush, even though it was predominantly made on electronic instruments. It had a sweeping, expansive quality that immediately evoked the outback and yet the composer had rarely ever set foot outside of the greater Melbourne area due to, in his words, an ‘intense allergic reaction to sand’.

The music was sylvan yet urban. European in origin, yet embracing of the unique Australian landscape and ancient culture. Over the course of a handful of self-produced records Bronzewing created a sound which in many ways was definitive of the Australian experience in the late twentieth century.

Bronzewing was born in 1959 in the Melbourne suburb of Eltham. His parents were both active in the arts; his mother was a moderately well-known sound installation artist, his father a passable painter*; and he grew up amongst the bohemians of sixties and seventies Melbourne. 

Questioned by an interviewer about his ‘real name’, Bronzewing replied, “This is my real name, my true name, bestowed upon me by the Wurundjeri elders. The land itself named me and schooled me in its knowledge and history.” Official records however, indicate that Bronzewing’s real name was actually Logan Horn and that he was schooled at Scotch College in Hawthorn.

He regularly claimed to be ‘1/18th Indigenous’ on his mother’s side, and a direct descendent of Simon Wonga – a respected elder of the Wurundjeri clan who was present during the first white settlement of Melbourne. The Wonga is a type of native Australian pigeon and this was the inspiration for Logan’s own pseudonym, derived from the Common Bronzewing Pigeon (Phaps chalcoptera)**.

Bronzewing was accepted to the University of Melbourne in 1977 to formally study music but dropped out after less than a year. He was highly critical of his time at university, saying; “I am glad that I was able to have that experience, brief though it was. To see that totalitarian, musical sweatshop from the inside, but still escape with my spirit intact. There’s nothing that those Eurocentric fascists could possibly teach me that I couldn’t learn from listening to the rhythms of the Australian continent and the lessons of our indigenous elders. Plus, with the latter, I get to sleep in.”

Done with formal education and fed up with the city, Bronzewing moved to Healesville, a rustic town surrounded by bush, just north of Melbourne. He rented a crumbling Victorian-era house nearby Badger Creek and cobbled together a home studio in the lounge room. Although his time at university had been difficult, he had forged a rewarding friendship with one of his lecturers, ‘Savage’ James Bell. Bell was a respected studio guitarist who was mainly known for his work on the recordings of eccentric soundtrack composer Felix Ookean. Bell started working as a full-time session player in his early twenties and he sympathised with Bronzewing’s naivety and inexperience in the studio. He provided the budding composer with some basic recording gear and unused synthesisers obtained from the university.

One of Bronzewing’s early home recordings, Menura’s Rainforest was released as a private press 7” record in 1981 and distributed amongst friends and family of the artist. It was well-liked by the Melbourne alternative music scenesters and became something of a minor hit on community radio. Despite repeatedly and stridently opining that, “success is the swiftest route to mediocre art,” Bronzewing quietly reveled in his newfound popularity and it energised him to create more music. (He later clarified that this corollary only applied when the success befell other musicians.)

Notwithstanding this taste of mainstream acceptance, he remained fiercely independent and suspicious of authority, flatly rejecting any suggestions of record contracts or even influences from popular music. Bronzewing imagined a purity to his music that would only be sullied by elements from outside of his bushland microcosm. He insisted that “any interference from the ‘official’ music industry would be a dilution and a poison to [his] art. Can a platypus live in a creek that has been polluted by industry? I think not.”

Due to this modest success, in late 1982 Bronzewing was offered a spot on the staff of the ABC Natural History unit as a documentary soundtrack composer. For many musicians this would be a dream job, but the imposition of a work routine was too much for Bronzewing’s free spirit and he withdrew from the unit, and then the Australian mainland, without telling his employers. In fact, the ABC only became aware of his disappearance due to a news report on the blockade of the proposed Franklin River dam, where Bronzewing could clearly be seen on the front-line of the protest waving a placard that read, 'WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CRAYFISH?' The musician was arrested by Tasmanian police shortly after the broadcast, and once released, was too embarrassed to return to the ABC.

All of Bronzewing’s albums from the eighties and early nineties were recorded with the team of producer ‘Savage’ James Bell & multi-instrumentalist Sebastian Barbat. Barbat was an accomplished world musician who was well-versed in Middle Eastern instrumentation. Although he is credited with playing various ethnic stringed instruments and additional keyboard parts on these LPs, Bronzewing’s explicit and recurring instructions at the mixing desk were to increase the volume for his own parts at the expense of all others and Barbat’s playing on them is essentially inaudible.

When asked if the use of electronics was at odds in depicting the natural world, he famously scoffed, “There are rays living in the Tasman Sea that can generate 200 volts of electricity. There are insect larvae in Victorian caves that can emit powerful beams of light. I suppose you would ask them if what they are doing is at odds with nature.”
                                                                                                      

* Cornelius Henry Horn – Bronzewing’s father – was embroiled in controversy in 1997 when it was found that he was responsible for countless forgeries of 19th century artworks from the Heidelberg School. He was initially going to be charged with a criminal offence until art historians testified that ‘no reasonable person’ would have assumed the pieces were genuine, saying, “even the most casual glimpse should have indicated these were not authentic [...] In many cases the artist has added anachronistic flourishes in the background such as power lines and digital clocks and in one painting, although he has attempted to obscure it after the fact, the artist has obviously signed his own name.”

** Older members of the Wurundjeri clan told me that within Melbourne’s indigenous community,  Bronzewing was only ever “begrudgingly tolerated – like a stray dog who hangs around so long, you've got to take him in,”

Marine Theology

“Surely it is obvious to any thinking person that the old schools of religious thought (and their modern antecedents, for that matter) are failing us morally and practically. I have long proposed a new ontological framework that rejects the pointless worship of confected books and dusty shrines and instead focuses on something real; the animals, the plants, the microscopic organisms – in which you truly perceive the essence of divine creativity. And where do these elements shine their brightest? Where is this sense of a transcendent presence most intensely felt? The ocean, of course. It is time for us to embrace this, through a kind of Marine Theology, if you will.” – Felix Ookean, 1967.

Ever Since We Left The Water.

(Originally published in Pelagic Ontology Letters Spring, 1981)

Earlier this year I was standing on the Victorian coast enjoying a scene of breathtaking beauty. The site has no official name on the maps but is found near Cape Otway, a few miles from the wreck of the 19th century cargo ship, Eric The Red. It’s a rocky shoreline carved from a blue-grey sandstone conglomerate decorated with ribbons of anthracitic coal and studded with barnacles, shipworms and multicoloured starfish (Meridiastra calcar). As I gazed into a rock pool full of huge kelp blades undulating back and forth agreeably with the constant pull of the tide, a thought hit me. It was a sudden thought but one of such truth and simplicity that I have been unable to disavow it: Ever since we left the water, our problems started.

The vertebrate lineage began exploring the terrestrial realm in the late-Devonian (~370 million years ago) and humans, the most self-consciously conscious of tetrapods, have been filled with a sense of longing for the marine world ever since. Early in our family’s history, our ancestors the noble fishes, enjoyed the constant warmth and buoyancy of our maternal ocean. For millions of years, not a single vertebrate* deigned to drag themselves into the infernal terrestrial realm and deal with it’s painful temperature fluctuations, unforgiving gravity and constant barrage of deadly ultraviolet radiation. Until one day, an obscure, opportunistic amphibian ruined everything by hauling themselves out of the sea and wedding our destiny to dry land.

It’s evidently not just old scientists musing on obscure philosophical concepts who feel this existential yearning for our saltwater birthplace**: look at any beach, any point where the terrestrial world meets the ocean and you will find scores of people throwing themselves back in. Humanity has branched out into a multitude of highly varied cultures and societies, and yet almost every one of them has spent a considerable amount of time and energy to situate themselves as close to the ocean as was possible. The sea is only partially acquiescent with this - constantly sending us back - but we continue to embrace her as if acting out the communal regret we feel in leaving, begging to be taken back.

As I write this, I feel a familiar ache in my back - the inevitable curse of the middle-aged Homo sapiens. I am condemned to experience this dull agony due to having descended from quadrupedal forebears who’s own body plan was jerry-rigged via evolution with what they had inherited from the aquatically adapted fishes. The end result for me is that instead of being in the centre of the human torso, the load-bearing spinal column is positioned at the back; an architecture unacceptable to even the most amateur of home handymen. If the creator deity designed my patio, I would have had him fired. In reality, all land dwelling vertebrates are imperfect, modified fishes; just barely getting by with limbs that are merely refashioned fins, lungs that are inverted gills.

And the gravity! Without the support of the dense seawater, the gravity pulls on me like — but before this becomes a tedious list of pathological complaints from an old fart, we must acknowledge the spiritual loss due to our emigration from the ocean. Who doesn't feel that they are missing out on something terribly special when they gaze down into the kaleidoscopic world of the deep? The corals, the mollusks, in the oceanic world, even the algae*** are vibrant and beautiful. On land we are stuck with a dull, dichromatic palette of muddy browns and greens with only rare glimpses of real colour and its effect on the soul is draining. I am certainly an appreciator of all facets of the natural world, but nothing on the land can possibly compare to the sheer otherworldliness and majesty of the undersea realm.

Well, tides go out and tides come in again. Other members of our mammalian tribe such as the whales, dolphins, seals and sea lions, dugongs and manatees returned to sea; why not us? Perhaps the future direction of humanity’s ongoing evolution is a homecoming to the environment that we so unwisely spurned around 370 million years ago. The terrestrial experiment has been successful in many pragmatic ways, but we are metaphysically poorer for it.

- Felix Ookean, Cairns, December 1981.

                                                                                                      

* Although the invertebrates had us beat onto the land by over 50 million years! A hollow victory if ever there was one.

** I, in particular may be thought of as having a personal stake in this as my family name, you may have guessed, translates as ‘ocean’ in my father’s native Estonian tongue.

*** In fact, the colouration of our oceanic algae is so distinctive, that many major divisions within the group were originally elucidated on the basis of these characteristics. Every layman has heard of blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria), but it is worth exploring all the families in their variously hued glory; Chlorophyta (green algae), Rhodophyta (red algae), Phaeophyceae (brown algae), Chrysophyceae (golden-brown algae) and Xanthophyceae (yellow-green algae).

A letter to the Creation Science Foundation.

(A letter addressed to the Creation Science Foundation, June 1983. This transcription was taken from a carbon copy; it is unknown if the original was sent or published.)

Dear scoundrels of the Creation 'Science' Foundation,

I am writing in regards to the spurious material that you are currently disseminating and to set you straight on a few matters regarding the creation of the universe. I was made aware of your fatuous organisation by some of my younger associates who were passing around your pamphlets for a lark; giggling at your childish inaccuracies. I, on the other hand, find nothing even remotely funny about scientific illiteracy.

Your asinine claims of a 'young earth' are so readily dispelled, I am not going rebut them in a letter – do your own damned research! But if you want to persist with this vacuous notion, I challenge you to invest the bulk of your life savings in a mining venture which must be helmed by a 'young-earth' geologist, mapping the rocks using only the scriptures as his guide. Mining in Australia is a multi-billion dollar industry (and that’s just through the utility of geological assumptions which you claim are wrong by many orders of magnitude), one can only assume that your new creationist company will make more money than any geological enterprise in history! Any hesitance on your part to do exactly as I've just outlined will be interpreted as intellectual cowardice of the highest order.

I was almost unable to believe that your organisation is apparently unaware that the tale of old Noah and his boat is a trifle concocted for the amusement of children and not a serious biological text. As you are neither zoologist nor shipwright I can’t fathom as to how you feel qualified to have an opinion on the matter at all. And how are we even supposed to incorporate this hogwash into serious scientific research? Should we relocate the universities' zoology departments into the shipyards? A boat is merely a boat, and scrawling 'SCIENCE' on the hull does not transmute it into a coherent, logical hypothesis.You're jejune approximation of scholarship is embarrassing to the onlooker and you should be made aware of this in no uncertain terms.

You have been indulged by well-meaning, misguided peers for far too long. At the risk of shattering your clearly tenuous grasp on reality I nonetheless feel obliged to point out to you that Jack and the Beanstalk is not a treatise on botany and that Star Wars should not be consulted for matters astronomical.

I was vaguely aware that these anti-evolutionary ideas had become worryingly established amongst our American cousins, but I always thought that the Australian race were naturally selected (ha!) for a strain of common sense that inoculates us against this sort of nonsense.

Hang your head in shame sirs, your buffoonery is an affront to us all.

Yours in anger,

Felix Ookean

E. J. Banfield Marine Research Fellow
James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville

An interview with Felix Ookean about his documentaries from 1985.

(Originally published in Antipodean Geographic, 6th August 1985.)

Q: You’ve just aired Monoliths From The Heavens – a controversial documentary series that suggests that ancient Australians were visited by extra-terrestrials. What lead you to embark on such a project?
FO: Unfortunately I am unable to talk about Monoliths due to a pending court case. Next question.

Q: Really? Can you describe the nature of the case?
FO: The indigenous peoples of central Australia, for whom I have immense respect, may I say, are unhappy about the central thesis of my series and are hoping to redress this in a legal setting. That’s all I can really say at present.

Q: Can you tell us about your earlier projects then, what precisely were you trying to get across with your documentaries? They always seemed to be just a little left of centre.
FO: Well, if I may begin at the beginning, let’s talk about Southern Oceans, my first series. I wanted to show a side of the ocean that is so ever-present and yet so infrequently focused on. The invertebrates. This is the most significant portion of our marine fauna and yet everybody seems to want to focus on sharks or seals or that sort of nonsense. Anybody can film a dolphin and get a response from an audience. I wanted a challenge – I wanted to try and reveal the charm of the mollusk, the verve of the echinoderm. So we got the most high-tech close zoom cameras of the time and filmed around the Victorian coast and a couple of days in Tasmania. For the abalone footage.

Q: What was the highlight for you during these shoots?
FO: Probably the elephant snail shoot. Did you know that we were the first people to ever film mating elephant snails? Even today I meet malacologists who, once they find out who I am, are just overwhelmed with gratitude for what we did on that shoot. The amount of times I’ve been approached by marine biologists of a certain vintage saying ‘Oh, you’re the guy who filmed the mating elephant snails!’…you know, it still happens today.

Q: And how did you go about producing the soundtrack?
FO: That was my first soundtrack, so everything was a learning experience back then. I was just rather fortunate to have a lot of very talented people on board from the Melbourne jazz scene. I had written a lot of melodic themes but without very much structure and just sort of threw them to my players and we all worked it out in the studio through improvisation and modification. It evolved.

Q: There’s a great sound on that album.
FO: That was brought about more by coincidence and necessity than by design. I didn’t really have an overarching aesthetic for the sessions, it just kind of coalesced through the idiosyncrasies of the players and the equipment we had access to at the time. For example we had a very adventurous young guitarist by the name of ‘Savage’ James Bell who used an early precursor to the wah pedal – he had constructed the thing himself, as he had most of his effects gear – which lent the soundtrack a very distinctive watery sound. Also my old friend Rob Teal, who is strictly speaking a marimba player by training, found an old vibraphone, which he was eager to try out with us. It provided a great exotica sounding, beachy vibe to the whole thing. No pun intended.

Q: None taken. After Southern Oceans, you moved on to the birds of Australia.
FO: Yes, I had been doing bird surveys at the time and was struck by this country’s amazing birdlife and the connection that so many Australians feel with these animals. I wanted to delve deeper than the superficial portrayal of our native birds that was so common on TV in the late sixties. I wanted to show the public what it really meant to be a bird. What they felt, how they saw the world. What life is like on two wings – or flippers in the case of penguins. We had a wonderful time filming it and the public was kind enough to turn the series into a rousing success. It was a great experience. We were probably single-handedly responsible for raising the profile of the Ruddy Turnstone – everybody talks about them these days but before we made Feathered Lives they were really only known by ornithologists and hardcore twitchers. And the music was some of our best and was also really successful which is always gratifying.

Q: It’s definitely the album of yours most commonly seen around these days.
FO: Well it sold quite well. Very well for a documentary soundtrack. I had a much bigger budget allowed for the recording sessions but I didn’t actually change the process much because I was so happy with the sound of the Southern Oceans sessions. Many of the same players were involved and so it has a very similar sound but I was able to procure the services of a rather sterling string quartet, which gave it a soaring, orchestral quality. Particularly on Twelve Apostlebirds, I don’t think that tune would have worked without them. I think also we were being very obviously influenced by some of the more avant-garde musicians in the Melbourne music scene at the time. That looseness of structure that was being employed by some of the jazz players was actually perfect for soundtrack music because it flowed more naturally and organically and suited the non-standard movements of the animals. And then of course on Australis we got even looser and avant-garde. That double LP is considered by some as a fine example of early Australian ‘prog rock’! [Laughs].

Q: Well, the 24-part Antarctic Suite certainly springs to mind.
FO: Yes, I suppose that one is certainly befitting of such a description.

Q: Australis – The Other Half was probably your most ambitious undertaking, but it wasn’t as well received as your preceding series. Why do you think that was the case?
FO: I think the whole thing was just too ambitious. Basically we were trying to document the entire natural history of the Southern Hemisphere, which in retrospect is just crazy. It turned into this Behemoth of a juggernaut and I simply had to see it through because there was so much riding on it and so many people involved… It was probably just too big, really. Perhaps Australis just wasn’t quite ready for television. Maybe it was too big a series for just one hemisphere. The music was good though, and people appreciated it. I must say though, it was rather a perplexing response. People will speak to me today and tell me how much they respect the music and I feel like demanding, ‘Yes, but what about the series?’ – nobody approaches me and compliments the series itself. But a small dedicated clique of clandestine record collectors have put the soundtrack up on a pedestal and I suppose I can expect some sort of obscure accolade when I’m a half-dead octogenarian, honouring my contributions to music that no one listens to. Frankly, I’d rather have the money [laughs].

Q: Do you think perhaps that there is an inherent disconnect between music and nature? Is it possible that most people just find the combination incongruous?
FO: I couldn’t disagree more. Listen – music and the natural world are not mutually exclusive magisteria; they’re two sides of the same coin. What could be more in synch with nature than music? Birds were singing long before we ever did. All I’m trying to do is to illustrate the music that is already present in the natural world. To highlight it and bring it into the foreground. If I have managed to achieve that – if only for a moment – in any of my films, then I consider that to be both a scientific and musical triumph.

Seeking out the Crustaceous Stigmata.

(Originally published in Animus Animalium Volume 27, Number 3, 1977)

Jack Haldane apparently once quipped to a group of theologians that his study of biology had taught him that any creator thereof must have ‘an inordinate fondness for beetles’. The fact that Haldane may never have actually said this appears to have deterred no one, in favour or against. Nevertheless, I’ll go one better than the old Cantabrigian and say this: if there is any sort of spiritual overseer of this planet (and there may well be) he is not only fond of coleopterans, he is an arthropod.

Consider the godly effort put into the stocking of this planet with suitable denizens. Given that arthropods comprise by far the majority of described animals – doubtless even more undescribed – what other conclusion can we draw but that this was the model that most interested the creator? Let’s say you enter a craftsman’s workshop; a wood turner or a shoemaker, and after seeing that 80% of their output comprised endless variations of the one theme, would you then point to an aberrant, one-off novelty and declare that this was his favourite design, above all others? Of course not! The breathtaking arrogance with which an obscure species of bipedal primate has erroneously declared that they and they alone were created in the great invertebrate’s image should be considered as evolutionarily excessive and unnecessary as their much vaunted intelligence*.

And yet this is what the ‘good’ books would have us accept. If ever proof was needed to show that the bible was an entirely man-made creation, it is surely the cavalier way its author refers to the creation of the bulk of metazoan life on this planet. The almighty, in his/her eternal creativity, and over a space of millions of years, creates infinite iterations of insects, countless classes of crustaceans, millions of makes of molluscs, and myriad other species of delightfully obscure and fascinating invertebrate phyla and how does the author of Genesis convey this? By describing the vast majority of life’s diversity as ‘creeping things’ and cramming them in amongst the equally uninspired groupings of ‘cattle’ and ‘beasts’ that were also apparently whipped up on the sixth day. It’s hard to imagine the creator’s hard work and artistic flair being described in such a pathetically understated and dismissive way if the book truly had any kind of authoritative input. The notion that cattle is a taxonomic division on par with the endlessly diverse creeping things of the invertebrata is an idea so obviously borne of ignorance; so obviously the product of a first-century mind bound to the immediate, prosaic concerns of an agronomic existence that it is astonishing to me that anyone ever reads past the first chapter of this mystic text at all!

Despite the celestial architect’s incontrovertible obsession with chitinous invertebrates, all we see of this in scripture is the woeful introduction in Genesis and then arthropods are barely ever mentioned again. Certainly, we are told that old man Leviticus warned us against eating shellfish (perhaps the only glimmer of real understanding of the almighty in the book?) but if we examine this verse we see that this is based on an instruction to avoid eating anything from the seas that ‘has not fins and scales’ – that is, anything aquatic that is not a fish. This is taxonomically lazy and theologically absurd. The eastern philosophies fare marginally better, but one still can’t shake the ever-growing understanding that organised religion is at best a comfortable refuge for those who would rather ignore the real details of the prime mover’s works. Go to the ant, o sluggards, and consider her ways!

So, why are these bookish aldermen pouring over dusty middle-eastern texts instead of scouring the beaches** for crustaceous stigmata, as I do? Why is it not considered blasphemy to remain so profoundly ignorant of the handiwork of a creator you claim to worship? These poseurs, on being invited to a comprehensive gallery of a master's life works, available for unlimited study, respond; No thanks – we'd rather read and reread a heavily edited biography of the artist's son written by men who never met him. For every Saint Francis, there are a million dreary Augustinians trying to achieve martyrdom by boring themselves to death through drudging catechism. These poor wretches will meet their maker in time of course, and when they gaze into his compound eyes, then will they realise their folly.

Only the ancient Egyptians (derisively dismissed by the monotheists as ‘pagans’) seemed to really grasp the empyrean nature of the beetles in their midst, stoically undertaking their Sisyphean task day after day. Where the vapid minds of today’s literalists see an insect rolling a ball of dung, the ancients saw rebirth and resurrection; sanctity and wisdom. We would be wise to emulate the Egyptians in their veneration of this dignified coprophage and its various family members; the insects, crustaceans, chelicerates, myriapods and the late trilobites. It is in their exoskeletal forms that you will truly see the face of god.

- Felix Ookean, 1977

                                                                                                      

*And, by the way, see how much that helps you if the cephalopods were ever to develop a colonial mentality. A slight rise in sea level (my friends in the Earth Science department inform me that this is inevitable) and we will all learn that while intelligence is a lovely thing, when coupled with eight arms and the physical flexibility that only comes with a lack of an internal skeleton, it’s nigh unstoppable.

** Another favoured design feature of the deities (particularly the native dreamtime gods of my adopted homeland) unforgivably and bafflingly underappreciated by organised religion.