Our man of note

Our man of note
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 13, 2013

Jack Harrison was eating oysters in the sunshine four days before he died. New to hospital life, he tipped his hat at the palliative care nurses and asked if he might enjoy the gift of a dozen molluscs in the garden. He wasn’t the Messiah, but he did reduce his last supper to a rubble of briny shells on Easter Thursday afternoon.

All week, the corridor outside room 29 was thick with his visitors. They took turns finding a space around his bed and huddled in twos and threes in the corridor. In the waiting room, more friends and family gathered – bewildered at the news Jack’s demise was imminent. At 81, the indomitable head of one of Australia’s musical families was mortal after all.

His two sons and daughter took turns at the bedside vigil. Accomplished musicians themselves, they propped against a chair a giant poster of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, their father’s other family for a record-breaking 42 years.

Only five weeks ago, Jack Harrison and my mother were babysitting our three children. We two parents arrived home from dinner to find Jack and Mum bookended on the sofa, breathing quietly in time. Jack’s sparse canopy of hair had gone wild, ruffled by sleep. My mother’s hair was a halo of white against the grey suede cushion. I made a secret wish for my husband and I to be such a picture of contentment at 76 and 81.

Only months earlier, Jack was perched on another sofa, this one at Mum’s house. Blowing and drawing on his harmonica, he crooned ‘Moon River’ to my small daughter. We had our own private concert as the orchestral accompaniment swelled from the speakers behind him. Our two-year-old, sitting beside her ‘Jackpa,’ was mesmerised. Jack’s sweet vibrato floated over us as I filmed the two of them on my phone – performer and pint-sized devotee  – eight decades apart. Was that Jack’s swansong?  “…dream-maker, you heart-breaker, wherever you’re going I’m going your way.”

Our Huckleberry Jack was one of the family; by mum’s side at every gathering and party. I would detect him fumbling in his pocket as the cake arrived. With ever-perfect timing, he and his mouth organ would strike up a jaunty “Happy birthday to you” urging on toddlers’ efforts to blow out the candles. How will we now have happy birthdays without him?

He was musical royalty in Perth. Even in 1941, when the country was fixated on the grim news overseas, Jack Harrison’s talent drew families around their Astors at 8pm on a Thursday. That programme was Australia’s Amateur Hour. Jack was hailed a boy wonder, aged 10, taking out the national competition with his mouth-organ.

At 12, his dad Bill suggested the clarinet. Jack, with his twin sister and elder brother became Jack Harrison’s Dance Band. After national radio exposure, pop-star status was theirs at dance halls everywhere. By the time the twins were 15, the quartet was earning so much money, Jack’s dad pulled him out of Scotch College. He’d been a ratbag there anyway: “They called me king of the cuts,” he recalled with pride.

At 19, Jack joined the WA Symphony Orchestra. Later, as principal clarinettist, his great set of pipes and rakish wit earned him notoriety and admiration. Never one to create a scene, he nonetheless had a gift for “a few short yet piquant words delivered with perfect timing at exactly the right volume.” The visiting Austrian conductor Henry Krips once asked him:  “Please, I want it again, Mr Harrison, I want a more peasant tone.”

Jack: “Sorry to disappoint – I think I left my peasant mouth at home.”

He was well known for waving a post-modernist score over his head and demanding the “asbestos test” when the jarring music made him grit his teeth.

Baffled conductor: “The asbestos test?”  

“Yes, let’s set it on fire and see if it burns.”

Jack was a sucker for his mum Edna’s speciality: crumbed brains in parsley sauce… In 1973, he donned a hard hat, lifted his clarinet and honked out the first note heard in the newly completed Perth Concert Hall… And his death reduced to tears the postie, Rob, who’d been stocking his letterbox in Claremont for five years.

Like so many others, I sat briefly by his gurney in the days before he died and held his hand. I left behind a hand-drawn card from my middle son: “To Ackpa, get well soon” – with three newly-mastered love-hearts. Jack’s body betrayed only subtle signs of his consuming illness: the constant tiredness, a cough, a temperature. For us, there was barely time for the shock to settle. How will we resume our lives now he is gone?

During one of his last lucid moments I whispered: “What will Mum do without you?” He squeezed my hand and with his eyes still closed, he replied: “I’m afraid I will have to do without her.”

Jack Harrison: 1931-2013.