About Me
In three independently organised Melbourne events, musicians, artists, unionists and street people paid tribute to Rex McLean, who died aged 69.
McLean was not known widely, but he was understood by a significant minority to be a true folk hero. Four days before his death, McLean travelled from his hospital bed to the Railway Hotel in North Fitzroy, where more than 200 well-wishers had gathered to raise money for hospital expenses, and to see him perform one last time.
The benefit was organised by a founding member of the Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band, Mick Fleming, and Mark Ferrie of the '80s band the Models. Two days later, former Daddy Cool guitarist Ross Hannaford loped into McLean's hospital room to play softly at his bedside.
Rex McLean was the assumed name of Ava McColl, born in Ararat, the son of Myrtle (Ord), a piano teacher, and a Scottish immigrant, David McColl, a gardener and an adept fiddler, banjoist and harmonica player.
McLean married Barbara Abernathy in 1957 and they had three sons, but the marriage did not last. After giving up the grog in 1973 he described his earlier self as "a mongrel drunk".
The story of McLean's early working life is peppered with tales of the prawn trawlers and canefields of the far north. Later, he worked in the building industry as a rigger, the most dangerous job in that business. He suffered a severe back injury in one of a number of near-fatal falls.
On October 15, 1970, he was on site when the West Gate Bridge collapsed, killing 35 workers. Frantic members of his family were unable to identify him among the victims and he was given up, presumed dead. However, McLean had simply fled the horror, escaping at the same time the acrimony of his failed marriage, to return to a past life as an itinerant cane cutter in Queensland and to prawn trawling in northern NSW.
His unannounced reappearance at his mother's house in Stawell on Christmas Day the following year is part of the McLean legend.
McLean's performing style was distinct. He stood with head bowed and arms folded until his stark presence brought silence. "More like a preacher in church than an entertainer," says the roots music virtuoso Andy Baylor.
He picked his old guitar with his bare thumb in a fashion favoured by the old Australian "hillbilly" stylists. He sang songs of long ago in a pure, high, bitter-sweet tenor; the working-man's blues of Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family and Merle Haggard.
Yet he made them sound like freshly conceived, hard-won truths. He was a fine musician, but never saw more in his talents than pleasure in the release of emotion and the witness of listeners to his strong beliefs and loyalties.
On the day of his funeral, traffic in St Kilda was stopped by mourners carrying his ashes to the Greyhound Hotel. An oil painting of him hung in the public bar. The speakers included John Cummins, the Victorian president of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, who was an official in the now deregistered Builders' Labourers Federation, of which McLean was an active member.
Cummins spoke of McLean as an "industrial warrior", of his time as shop steward, and his frequent performances on community radio station 3CR's union program, The Concrete Gang.
McLean was not overtly political, but he was fiercely loyal to his fellow workers, and always insisted on confronting management on matters of rights and pay rather than deferring to an intermediary.
One old workmate, Jim, told of the sacking of McLean and another younger man when the boss felt too much time had been spent rolling smokes and drinking at the pub. The younger worker began begging for a second chance, but McLean growled with tribal pride: "Quit yer snivelling and stand up and take it like a man!"
Following his "reincarnation", McLean resumed work as a rigger, continuing to play at BLF fund-raisers and picnics. But with deregistration in 1986, he retired from the construction industry and turned to his music.
He moved into the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda, where he performed regularly and became an unlikely favourite among the die-hards of the thriving rock scene.
On the day of his last public appearance, three members of the indigenous band Yugul, down from the Northern Territory, sat close by. "We just wanted to pay our respects," one said quietly.
Their presence was evidence of where a real assimilation of black and white culture lies in this country - in the close identification of working people, on both sides of the rabbit-proof fence, with country music.
The jazz trumpeter Sandro Donati said: "Rex McLean? As soon as he opened his mouth, you knew he was real."
He is survived by his three sons, John, Graeme and Mark, his brother, David, and sister, Margaret.Obituary by Rick Dempster. Published in The Age 18 Dec 2004.
