WARREN FAHEY / MIC GRUCHY

Born 1946 (Warren Fahey) and 1962 (Mic Gruchy) in Sydney, Australia (Warren Fahey) and Bundaberg, Australia (Mic Gruchy). Lives and works in Sydney, Australia (both).

Warren Fahey. Image Courtesy of the Artist

Cultural and oral historian, folklorist, record producer, author and performer Warren Fahey (AM) is best known in Australia as the founder of Folkways Music and Larrikin Records in the early 1970s. A noted collector of Australian folklore, Fahey formed the Australian Folklore Unit in 1970, and spent ten months travelling throughout the eastern states of Australia in 1972 and 1973, making recordings using a Nagra reel-to-reel tape recorder and collecting material related to traditional and contemporary folklore. The collection of folk songs, customs, yarns, poetry, games, riddles and oral history stories is now housed in the National Library of Australia – a tribute to Fahey’s work to establish a professional approach to the collection and research of Australian vernacular culture.

Working in collaboration with Fahey is Mic Gruchy, a video artist, film and documentary maker who currently teaches at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Sydney. Gruchy’s work spans the fields of installation, feature film, television, opera, dance and theatre. Gruchy also has a long history of museum audiovisual installation production beginning with the ‘Eora’ installation at the Museum of Sydney in 1995, which he edited and production managed for the late artist and director Michael Riley.

Fahey and Gruchy have produced a new work for the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Damned Souls and Turning Wheels (2010). In this, songs and ballads are heard with rare projected images in a complex installation that tells Cockatoo Island’s history in the voices of the people who experienced it. Engaging with the island’s history as a former imperial prison, maritime port and dockyard, Fahey will sing rare convict and maritime ballads to a visual storyboard of six black-and-white films designed to summon the shadows of the past. Images of broadsides, early paintings, navigational maps, scrimshaw and colonial portraits, along with ephemeral documents such as union tickets, stamps and letterheads, will provide the fabric of this work. Damned Souls and Turning Wheels is a kaleidoscopic history of the island through words and music, and a salute to the soul of Cockatoo Island – to the people who broke the stone, carved the rocks, built the docks and made the giant wheels turn.

In 2009, Fahey released the first comprehensive anthology of authentic Australian folk music and bush poetry, Australia: Folk Songs and Bush Verse in two volumes – ‘Convict Stain to Shearer’s Blades’ and ‘Celebration of a Nation’. This collection of songs and poetry spans over 200 years of Australian social history, gleaned from a variety of sources including nineteenth-century sheet music, ships’ diaries, and reports from the goldfields and the vaudeville stage.

Fahey has been a presenter on Australian radio and television, a columnist and author of 18 books, and has been performing bush songs, reciting poetry and telling yarns for almost 40 years. His contribution has been recognised with an Order of Australia, the Prime Minister’s Centenary Medal, an Advance Australia Award and, in 2004, the CMMA Lifetime Achievement Award for service to the bush ballad. Fahey has regularly performed in Australia and abroad with his band The Larrikins, since 1969. He is a leading figure in the movement to revive and popularise Australian folk music and the keeper of a vast collection of vital artefacts of Australian cultural history.

(Warren Fahey) Selected Solo Exhibitions/Performances

2009 National Folk Festival Canberra and Commonwealth Festival of Arts, Edinburgh, Scotland
2009 ‘Celebrate Australia’, Manila, Philippines
2008 Brisbane Festival, Brisbane, Australia
2008 ‘MAHA Australian Week’, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
2006 ‘Australian Spotlight’ (artistic director and performer), Brittany, France

(Mic Gruchy) Selected Solo Exhibitions/ Performances

2009 ‘The Flowering Tree’, opera by John Adams, video designer for the Perth International Arts Festival, Perth, Australia
2008 ‘5BY7’, video installation commissioned by Accor Hotels Sydney Olympic Park, Sydney, Australia
2004 ‘Museum of Dreams’, The Brothers Gruchy, video installation, Sydney Opera House, Sydney Festival, Sydney, Australia
2002–10 Love in the Age of Therapy, Streetcar Named Desire, AIDA and Fanciulla Del West, video projection design, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia
1999 ‘Infinitude’, video art short film, Dart, d/Lux/MediaArts, Sydney, Australia (travelling exhibition)
1998 ‘Macbeth Project’, video interactive theatre piece, Performance Space, Sydney, Australia
1996 ‘Stelarc Psycho Cyber’ (director), video documentary
1992 TISEA Sydney, 3rd International Symposium on Electronic Art (technical director)

Selected Bibliography

Warren Fahey, Australia: Folk Songs and Bush Verse, ABC Music, Sydney, 2009
Warren Fahey, The Big Fat Book of Australian Humour, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2007
Warren Fahey, Great Aussie Yarns, HarperCollins, 2006
Warren Fahey, Tucker Track: The curious history of food, ABC Books, Sydney, 2005
Warren Fahey and Graham Seal, Old Bush Songs: The Centenary Edition of Banjo Paterson’s Classic Collection, ABC Books, Sydney 2005