Bonzer Words!: The Flying Wombat
Mike Larder, who writes for Bonzer! magazine www.bonzer.org.au tells of the children's entertainer Mike Jackson.
He's played to over 2,500,000 people. Has produced 26 albums, CDs and videos. He's been nominated for an Aria Award. Had hits that went gold and platinum and has been delighting Australian audiences for almost 25 years but mention the name Mike Jackson to anyone without children and it's a fair bet that they've never heard of him.
Mike Jackson aka The Flying Wombat is the elder statesman of Australian children's entertainment. He has travelled the length and breadth of Australia and has lost count of how many schools he has visited. He counts Aussie kids as a priceless resource and will go out of his way to deliver his unique miscellany of jollity and entertainment to them, wherever they are.
Mike, along with as many as 80 other entertainers, are the unsung ambassadors of Queensland Arts Council's policy that decrees that every child no matter where they are will receive high quality concerts at least once a year and all for the princely sum of $3 per child.
The Queensland Arts Councils School Touring Program ensures that 650,000 primary and secondary students will participate in a school touring performance. The program is in its 37th year and is the largest of its kind in Australia, giving 5,400 performances a year.
"They're a lean, mean and tight organisation," says Mike, of the Council. "And are unique to Australia in that they receive little subsidy. In NSW for instance, city schools tend to get more quality shows than country schools. Private enterprise is more in evidence, so naturally entertainers will go where the money is."
He arrived in Australia from Lincolnshire, England in 1970 as a 'ten pound' refugee. He sold electrical connectors, hair care products and finally Selley's glue. In his spare time he performed comical ditties and bush ballads on a weird and wonderful collection of instruments in the Gunderoo Pub near Canberra. Some of his regular audiences were local teachers.
"I kept being asked to entertain their classes and it took off from there," he chuckles. "I wasn't giving Mr Selley my full and undivided attention so I handed in my tube of glue and hit the road."
Mike's self-taught ability to play a diverse and unusual ensemble of instruments ensures an enchanted audience wherever he performs. Even at 30,000 feet.
"I was travelling to Canada once and there was a crying child on the jumbo so I broke out my squeeze box. The next thing I knew I was being passed around the plane. I made so many friends that when I reached Vancouver I had $3,000 worth of work". Mike suggests that flight attendants should have an ocarina and a piece of string in their pockets for just such occasions. "It works every time," he laughs. "Parents get as much fun out of it as the kids do."
He plays hammer dulcimer, hurdy gurdy, mountain dulcimer, accordions and an assortment of harps, Irish drums and harmonicas. His pockets are full of assorted bits of string, juggling balls and a rubber hedgehog that are his ever-present stock in trade.
Mike, when not travelling, lives in Melbourne and is married to Rowan, a British commercial airline pilot, and has two boys from previous marriages. "We enjoy an extremely long distance love affair," he laughs.
He says he would rather spend time entertaining a child than have it left frustrated and ignored. "Too many kids today are denied the simple pleasures of life and to feel that they matter. Television becomes their minder and educator," he says. "I love to watch wide-eyed kids pick up one of my instruments and try to play it. Their eyes light up and they have fun."
Mike's first audio-cassette, Bunyips, Bunnies and Brumbies went gold and several more followed. His TV show Playmates, aired on the ABC, was immensely successful and the cassette went platinum. He also publishes instructional music and games books.
Mike rates Noni Hazlehurst, Franciscus Henry, Monica Trapaga and Peter Coombes as superb family entertainers. "But there are many more extremely talented and dedicated musicians who do a fabulous and unsung job," he says. Parents who have ever spent hours travelling with bored and fractious children have probably offered up many a thankful prayer to the likes of Mike Jackson and his gifted colleagues.
And Mike's advice to would-be children's entertainers? "Never play down to them. Be child-like but not childish. Play the clown and they will enter your fantasy. And above all have fun with them."
© Mike Larder
Mike Jackson http://www.mikejackson.com.au/flying_wombat_band.php
