Dennis O'Keeffe will be inducted as a "Lake School Legend" to recognise his contributions to the Koroit-based Celtic music school
Singer songwriter Denis O'Keeffe was busy with his usual array of musical and historical projects when his world came crashing down in late 1999. On top of working for his optometry business, performing gigs and writing his novel, he was up to his neck in developing a film version of the Waltzing Matilda story from a script by late screenwriter John Dixon (who also penned The Man From Snowy River). "We'd brought a producer over from the US and flown him up to Mildura and up the Darling and around the sheep stations where the shearers strike was (that helped inspire the writing of Waltzing Matilda)," he said. "There was real a lot of activity with the film." Meanwhile, O'Keeffe's hearing was seriously deteriorating, he was experiencing balance problems and the muscles in his upper body were knotting up. He put it down to stress from his busy schedule but a check-up to see if he needed a hearing aid suggested otherwise. Within two weeks he was in a Melbourne hospital having the brain tumour operated on, but complications led to the development of meningitis. "I was off work for probably four months - it was very heavy," he said. It would be almost 12 months before O'Keeffe even considered playing again, but getting back on to a stage was harder than he imagined. "I had some facial paralysis - I still can't play the mouth organ. It was very hard. I couldn't remember songs, which was the most difficult thing. I'd get halfway through a song and the words would just drop out." He said he would have really struggled to return to performing were it not for his oldest son Joel. Together they began performing under the name of Father And Son. "After the brain tumour, I helped Joel get out and play and he helped me get back out and perform," O'Keeffe said. "It gave him experience at getting out and setting up PAs and booking gigs. It was good - it gave me a focus." "Joel was the most confident and supportive musician I've ever played with. He'd never shirk at playing anything. We did quite a few festivals w together - we played pretty solidly for about 12 months." One of the many positives to come out of the Father And Son duo was the formation of Joel and Ryan's first band Airbourne, whose career has taken off since they traded their Warrnambool garage and gigs at the Criterion Hotel for the Melbourne rock scene. Airbourne is moving so fast that O'Keeffe can no longer manage them and the band is now in the hands of Grinspoon manager Greg Donovan. "His first task will be to sort through the recording contracts they've got from almost every major label", he said with obvious fatherly pride. O'Keeffe's journey to becoming a music-historian and respected Australian folk singer began "at home where there was always music". "I never had any formal training. At our family gatherings there. was music and singing in one form or another," he said. Like most musicians who grew up in the south-west, he eventually progressed to Warrnambool's Tatts Hotel playing "a mix of my own stuff and early '7 Os- American -soft-rock -sort-ofstuff'. "I started playing at the Tatts about 30 years ago. It was hard to see that go - most Warrnambool musicians would have cut their teeth at the Tatts." Eventually he headed to the big smoke, spending time in Geelong and Melbourne, but after almost a decade he and his wife Anne decided to raise their sons Joel and Ryan back in the country. The Irish blood coursing through his veins finally took over and the pop gave way to the Celtic, the colonial and the folk. With his wife Anne, brother Colin and Warrnambool musician Dennis Taberner, he formed O'Keeffe Slide to tap into their Irish heritage, and he also began delving seriously into Australia's true musical roots. With a move to Geelong fast approaching, O'Keeffe has been working flat out in to try and complete the expansive first draft of his Waltzing Matilda novel before he leaves (he's got one chapter to go, he confessed). "Amongst the body of work, I've been trying to bring out the relationship between western Victoria and north-west Queensland - many of the families involved in and around the writing of the song came from Warrnambool and the western district," he explained. For more than 15 years O'Keeffe has delved into the Waltzing Matilda story, following the tale through south-west families moving to Queensland in a land grab to a girl hearing the tune for the song at the May Races and passing it on to Banjo Patterson. The song's grip on O'Keeffe has also seen him record what he described as "the most complete recording made of the musical history of Waltzing Matilda" as well as joining in the tough task of turning the song and the events that inspired it into a movie. "It's not hard to get fascinated in this story," he said, adding the movie was just starting to get moving again. O'Keeffe's fascination in Waltzing Matilda extends to other colonial Australian songs, which he has been attempting to preserve. "It's been lost. (Australian folk music and culture) was just developing its own identity at the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s. "Then we had two world wars, a depression and television in the space of 40 years - that almost completely wiped out the Australian identity that was being formed." O'Keeffe's efforts to save some of colonial Australia's oldest original compositions from extinction led to him compiling a CD and accompanying book for school history classes in the south-west - yet another contribution he has made to the region. O'Keeffe confessed he would miss the support he has received across the district. "There's a real nucleus of different styles and good musicians here, (especially) for the size of the town," he said. And while he is certain he wants to retire back here, he has just one regret upon leaving. "You know, one of the sad thing is I've never done a concert down here of my own stuff, the stuff I've done all around the place," he said. Maybe it will take moving away for him to be able to come back to his hometown and do that, he laughed.
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