Hidden Canberra by John Shortis and Moya Simpson as Shortis&Simpson at Smith’s Alternative, Canberra City, Saturday, September 6, 2025.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
I
feel somehow like an archaeologist discovering a new site in a cultural
landscape, digging up a cultural artefact, recorded in mystery as a
‘Shortis&Simpson’.
Whatever it is, it’s equally funny and
fascinating. Radiocarbon datings of Shortis&Simpsons show them
going back nearly 30 years to a site then known as the School of Arts
Cafe, Queanbeyan, and they have been found in many similar cultural
sites over the years.
Smith’s Alternative – the one-time bookshop, now arts coffee-shop – have provided an accurate rundown of this new example:
“John
Shortis and Moya Simpson moved to the Canberra region from Sydney in
1996. John fell instantly in love with a place where history and
politics popped up everywhere he looked. For Moya it was where her
passion for world music and voices flourished.
“Hidden
Canberra is their tribute to the city and environs, where their
creativity has been able to blossom for nearly 30 years.
“With a
bunch of original and collected songs, an array of projected images, and
a witty and informative script, the wildly interesting and quirky depth
of the capital region comes to life.
“Stories of a rainbow
coloured airport, a right wing pollie once a serious Canberra punk,
public art, musical street names, Lake George as a capital city, and
much, much more. And you thought you knew Canberra…Hidden Canberra is Shortis and Simpson’s funny, moving, surprising love letter to the weird and wonderful town that they proudly call home.”
Ken
Behrens all will remember the Artificial Intelligence that produced
that wonderful failure to translate the spoken word into digital text.
It wasn’t done originally as the joke it became, but in their song about
its history, Canberrans John and Moya tapped right into the mix of
feelings we have about ourselves at home in Australia’s National
Capital. Outsiders, who send their parliamentary representatives here,
wouldn’t understand how we combine the serious matters of state with a
sense of Australian ironic humour about ourselves that the song sparked
in the audience. What an exciting archaeological dig that was. We
found a road warning sign: STAY SAFE KEN BEHRENS.
The script for
Act 1 is 22 pages long; and 23 pages for Act 2. So I can only reveal a
few snippets. This is how the story begins:
We talk of a city that’s freezing and hot,
Where threads of progressiveness thicken the plot
Where humour and hist’ry and knowledge are not
Forbidden…..
We walk through a city where legends abound
Gleaming and dreaming, both light and profound
Where the heart of a nation is beating its sound
In hidden…Canberra
It’s
a gentle beginning, but notice rhyming the slightly syncopated “not /
Forbidden” with “In hidden...Canberra”. This is John’s so-called
‘quirky’ song writing, particularly familiar to those, like myself, who
have followed Shortis&Simpson since 1996. It’s not just the words
of the songs, nowadays sung with even more variety of character and
clarity of articulation as Moya’s voice has matured, but it’s the
oddities of rhyme and rhythm in John’s essentially jazz-based approach
in his music that keeps us on the qui vive.
So the singing of Section 125 of the Australian Constitution with lines like
The seat of government of the Commonwealth
Shall be determined by Parliament.
Such territory shall contain an area
Not less than one hundred square miles,
And such portion thereof
As shall consist of Crown lands,
Shall be granted to the Commonwealth
Without any payment therefore,
The Parliament shall sit at Melbourne
Till it meet at the seat of government
(i.e. Canberra, which didn’t exist when the Constitution was written)
in John’s musical hands comes to seem like something from Gilbert and Sullivan.
Then the show takes us through a series of songs which reminded me of the weekly Tim the Yowie Man (in the Canberra Times’
Panorama) quest for people to identify a photo of somewhere obscure,
often resulting in a hidden historical story – such as this weekend as I
write, about Is this the smallest railway platform?
There’s
the story of how the Australian Capital Territory voted, on a metre
long ballot paper full of party names like the Warm Tomato Party, or The
Party Party, against self-government (eat your heart out, Washington, in your days of Donald Trump).
Politicians’
Statues are a big thing – especially the very few of women: the first
to be elected, not until 1943 mind-you, Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney,
facing the lack of women’s loos in Parliament House. The theme was
developed in the much later story of the Canberra Alpine Club’s Mount
Franklin Hut on the Brindabella Range border with New South Wales, where
for sewerage reasons - to keep Canberra's water clean - the women had
to walk interstate:
But if you stay
At our Chalet,
Be sure your pissport’s up to date
‘Cause you’ll be headed interstate
To have a spray
Heed what I say
Show your I-Dee-ee-ee
Whenever you wee-ee-ee
Show your I-Dee-ee-ee
When you leave the A-ay C-ee-Tee-ee
Enough
for now I should say, except for the one song, about the invention of
the QASAR electronic keyboard, first shown in the 1970s at Llewellyn
Hall at the School of Music, which the Australian National University
seems likely to close down very soon. There was no laughter this time:
John sings -
A centre of sound
Climbing
Careering
Bathe in a wave
That’s never disappearing
(Moya oohs in background)
Ground breaking
Risk-taking
Trail blazer
QASAR
Save the ANU School of Music! says everyone.
Though
there’s another hour to go in the show, I shall come to the end here,
with the beginning. Near the ACT, on the Sydney side, is Lake George,
famous for its rapidly changing water levels from undergound sources.
I’ve seen it almost entirely dry, or flooding onto the main road, the
Federal Highway, in different years. Here’s the script:
John speaks –
Back
at the beginning of the 20th century, when the call was made for
nominations for Australia’s capital city, Lake George was actually
proposed. Here’s an artist’s impression of what the lake could look like
in that role- Venice meets Lake George.
Only problem being that
when a team of senators came to inspect the site, the enigmatic lake did
its thing and the water that is so prolific in that design was
virtually non-existent.
Fortunately, instead of looking like a European city of long ago, we now have a pristine and important part of our environment, sacred for the indigenous people of our district.
This is the song John wrote for The Universal Lake in 1998.
Moya sings – of the traditional custodians of this land, the Ngunnawal and Ngamberri peoples, who know Lake George, named after King George IV, as Weereewa. You see the origin of the name, Canberra, right there.
Ancient lake, eight million years,
Ancient land, salt in the tears,
Grassy bank, inland sea,
Stone unturned, mystery,
Ngunnawal, Weereewa,
Ngamberri, Weereewa,
Muddy bed, emu bone,
Bogong moth, pumice stone,
Sudden squall, choppy sea,
Waterweed, eucalypt tree,
Ngunnawal, Weereewa
Ngamberri, Weereewa,
Ngarrigo, Gandangarra, Wiradjari,
Walbinga, Wandandian, Wiradjuri,
Level fall, level rise,
Frozen death, boat capsize,
Charcoal burn, kangaroo,
Mine the sand, steal the view,
Ngunnawal, Weereewa,
Ngamberri, Weereewa,
Ngunnawal, Weereewa,
Ngamberri, Weereewa
 |
| Moya Simpson and John Shortis in love with Canberra |
©Frank McKone, Canberra
