The ‘Sunshine Song’: The Biography of an Australian Imperial Force (AIF) Soldiers’ Chorus

Abstract

The deep links between music and war demonstrate the centrality of music in wartime. However, most soldier compositions are ephemeral, lost because of their topicality and limited circulation. This article explores the history and significance of the ‘Sunshine Song’, a popular chorus with Australians in World War I. It further distinguished itself by making the transition to the civilian repertoire, something few war songs accomplished, remaining in circulation until at least the mid-1960s. This article offers an analysis of its merits, and its place in history as a rare surviving successful Australian wartime chorus.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Chris Bourke, Good-Bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand's Great War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017), 77; Brian C. Thompson, ‘Empire, Nation, and Music: Canada's Dominion Songbook’, in Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I, eds William Brooks, Christina Bashford and Gayle Magee (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 159.

2 Michelle Meinhart, ‘Tommy Critics, an Unlikely Musical Community, and the Longleat Lyre during World War One’, in Brooks et al., Over Here, Over There, 111.

3 Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 64; Bourke, 3; Robert Holden, And the Band Played on (Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2014), 75.

4 Bourke, 4.

5 Ibid., 84; Watkins, 64.

6 ‘Marching Songs’, Newcastle Morning Herald, 23 February 1916, 4.

7 Joan Beaumont, ‘“Unitedly We Have Fought”: Imperial Loyalty and the Australian War Effort’, International Affairs 90, no. 2 (March 2014): 399, 411.

8 ‘Marching Songs’, Newcastle Morning Herald, 23 February 1916; Archie Barwick, Diary, 2 September 1915, MLMSS 1493, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Australia.

9 4th Battalion Solider's Diary 1918, among the papers of Warrant Officer John Green, 3DRL6046, Australian War Memorial Archives (hereafter AWM), Canberra, Australia.

10 Thomas Richards, Diary, 15 February 1915, 2DRL0786, AWM.

11 See, for example, Amanda Laugesen, ‘Boredom is the Enemy’: The Intellectual and Imaginative Lives of Australian Soldiers in the Great War and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004); Holden.

12 Brooks et al., Over Here, Over There; Watkins; Bourke; Holden; Georgina Binns, ‘Patriotic and Nationalistic Song in Australia to 1919: A Study of the Popular Sheet Music Genre’ (MA thesis, Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, 1988); Emma Hanna, Sounds of War: Music in the British Armed Forces during the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

13 Bourke, 3.

14 Thomas James Richards, Diary, 21 March 1917, 2DRL0786, AWM.

15 Holden, 20.

16 Hanna, 81.

17 Warren Fahey, ‘The Songs the Diggers Really Sang’, parts 1 and 2 [Speewah, September 2000], republished on Simply Australia, www.simplyaustralia.net/article-wf-diggerssang.html (accessed 29 September 2021).

18 Watkins, 10.

19 Ibid., 74–7.

20 http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/education/tutorials/intro/trench/songs#three (accessed 6 April 2020).

21 Laugesen, 97–8.

22 Daniel Reynaud, Anzac Spirituality: The First AIF Soldiers Speak (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018), 268–9.

23 Daniel Reynaud, The Anzacs and Religion: The Spiritual Journeys of Twenty-Seven Members of the AIF (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2019), x–xiii.

24 Watkins, 6.

25 Hanna, 4; ‘Corporal Geebung’, ‘The Songs We Sing’, Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 December 1918.

26 Hanna, 5.

27 Eric Evans, Diary, 14 July 1917, So Far from Home: The Remarkable Diaries of Eric Evans, an Australian Soldier during World War I, ed. Patrick Wilson (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 2002).

28 Frank Valentine Weir, Letters, 16 July 1916, 21 July 1917, MLMSS 1024, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

29 Barwick, Diary, n.d., circa early 1915.

30 Reynaud, Anzac Spirituality, 265–9.

31 Atasa Williams, ‘Let Our Voices Ring with Pride’, Fiji Times, 10 October 2021, https://www.fijitimes.com/let-our-voices-ring-with-pride/ (accessed 1 September 2022).

32 Cecil Woodward, ‘Fighting Mac's Sunshine Song’, Australasian Journal of Salvation Army History 7, no. 1 (2022): 10–11.

33 Bourke, 5.

34 Daniel Reynaud, The Man the Anzacs Revered: William ‘Fighting Mac’ McKenzie, Anzac Chaplain (Warburton: Signs Publishing, 2015), 60–1, 65–6, 235–7.

35 Compare Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1974), xiv–xv, and H.S. Gullett, The AIF in Sinai and Palestine (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1944), 551, with Robert D. Linder, The Long Tragedy: Australian Evangelical Christians and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Adelaide: Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity & Open Book Publishers, 2000), 12–17; Michael Gladwin, Captains of the Soul: A History of Australian Army Chaplains (Sydney: Big Sky, 2013), 75; Laugesen, 27; Colin Bale, A Crowd of Witnesses: Epitaphs on First World War Australian War Graves (Sydney: Longueville Media, 2015), 168.

36 ‘Fighting Mac Meets Old Comrades’, Sydney Sunday Times, 31 March 1918, 2.

37 Reynaud, The Man the Anzacs Revered, 79.

38 Barwick, Diary, 18 July 1916.

39 William McKenzie, Letter, 2 August 1915, PR85815, AWM.

40 McKenzie, Letter, n.d., circa Christmas 1915, PR84150, AWM.

41 Ronald R. Austin, The Fighting Fourth: A History of Sydney's 4th Battalion (Melbourne: Slouch Hat, 2007), 138–9.

42 ‘Troubadour for Christ’, The Musician, September 1947, 8.

43 Reynaud, The Man the Anzacs Revered, 145.

44 Woodward, 6–23.

45 Ibid., 6–7.

46 Jim Daughters, Quick Reference Performance Guide for Marches, https://www.fillmorewindband.org/docs/march-guide.pdf (accessed 24 September 2021).

47 Jeremy Day-O’Connell, ‘Pentatonic’, Oxford Music Online, https://doi-org.databases.avondale.edu.au/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.21263 (accessed 24 September 2021).

48 ‘Corporal Geebung’, ‘The Songs We Sing’, Kia Ora Coo-ee, 15 December 1918, 18.

49 ‘The Thomas Steane Louch Memoirs’, http://11btn.wags.org.au/index.php/chronicles/ts-louch-memoirs (accessed 14 August 2020).

50 Binns, 160–1, 165–7.

51 Richards, Diary, 8 June 1916.

52 Ivan Chapman, Iven G. Mackay: Citizen and Soldier (Melbourne: Melway Publishing, 1975), 75.

53 Letter dated 30 August 1916, published in War Cry, 28 October 1916, 3.

54 ‘Fun for Fighting Men’, London Times, 4 January 1918, 9.

55 ‘Glossary’, Jazz in America, https://www.jazzinamerica.org/JazzResources/Glossary/q/zz (accessed 22 June 2021).

56 Reynaud, The Man the Anzacs Revered, 233–43.

57 Chapman, 96.

58 ‘Marching Songs’, Newcastle Morning Herald, 23 February 1916, 4.

59 Hanna, 78–9.

60 ‘More Musical Memories’, Western Mail, 7 December 1933, 2.

61 Watkins, 64, 69; Bourke, 77.

62 McKenzie, Letter, in War Cry, 13 January 1917, 3.

63 Woodward, 11.

64 Seal, 61.

65 Laugesen, 97–8.

66 Watkins, 3.

67 ‘A Soldiers’ Hero’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 1933, 14.

68 Watkins, 62.

69 Holden, 13–15; Laugesen, 100; Watkins, 69, 73; Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 17.

70 Watkins, 3.

71 Ibid., 6.

72 Meinhart, 121–2; William Brooks, Christina Bashford and Gayle Magee, ‘Introduction’, in Brooks et al., Over Here, Over There, 8; Bourke, 9; Holden, 16.

73 Laugesen, 104; Watkins, 64, 69; Bourke, 77.

74 Holden, 16, 76.

75 ‘A Service Sing-Song’, Western Mail, 26 April 1934, 14.

76 Les Cleveland, quoted in Bourke, 85.

77 Beaumont, 411.

78 Holden, 76.

79 Watkins, 3; Meinhart, 121–2.

80 Les Cleveland, quoted in Bourke, 85.

81 ‘Men of the Fourth’, Daily Telegraph, 24 April 1918, 10; Adelaide Ah Kow, William McKenzie M.C., O.B.E., O.F. Anzac Padre (London: Salvationist Publishing and Supplies, 1949), 54; ‘Happy Hours for “Diggers”’, Horsham Times, 29 April 1932, 6; ‘“Fighting Mac” Welcome at Sydney’, Western Star and Roma Advertiser, 18 February 1933, 3; ‘Commissioner McKenzie Welcome by Returned Soldiers’, Singleton Argus, 7 March 1934, 2.

82 ‘My Sunshine Song’, Dubbo Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, 5 September 1931, 7.

83 Ah Kow, 71–2.

84 Woodward, 11.

85 Jen Rosenberg, email to author, 21 July 2016.

86 Stephen A. Chavura, John Gascoigne and Ian Tregenza, Reason, Religion and the Australian Polity: A Secular State? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 4–5, 8, 11, 96, 102, 157, 254; Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder, The Fountain of Public Prosperity: Evangelical Christians in Australian History 1740–1914 (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2019), xv, 61–7, 388–90; Adam Possamai and David Tittensor, Religion and Change in Australia (London: Routledge, 2022), 41; Wayne Hudson, Australian Religious Thought (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2016), xiii.