The musical instrument that balanced a boy’s love of rugged footy

A couple of years ago, I had the piano from my mother’s Wollongong home shipped to my place in Melbourne, and it survived the journey without a scratch. This was a relief, for in the four decades prior to its big move, the compact, upright Yamaha remained in almost pristine condition. Almost, because its ivories are discoloured now, like the “before” teeth in a tooth-whitening commercial.

“With its always-open lid displaying its smiling keys, it is perpetually inviting you to sit and play.”Credit: Miguel Manich

Its age-defying good looks were not just a consequence of my mother’s care, but that it was quarantined from the Connolly kids’ radius of destruction, one marked by broken toys, scuffed furniture, and games and puzzles stripped of vital pieces. The piano’s home was in what we grandly called the music room. This was the “good room”, a sitting room my siblings and I rarely used outside of piano practice because it didn’t have a television.

Its new home, by contrast, is against the wall of my family’s open-plan kitchen-living area, an arrangement that makes it less in the house than of the house. With its always-open lid displaying its smiling keys, it is perpetually inviting you to sit and play. My two daughters take up the offer regularly. I sometimes do, too, aided by sheet music I pilfered from Mum’s: compositions by Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Mozart, Joel. You know, the big five. I can still read the music, but far from fluently. So my playing comes with numerous bum notes and long, annoying pauses, while my brain catches up with my eyes.

“What’s that one called?” my youngest once asked me. “The Entertainer,” I replied.

With its always-open lid displaying its smiling keys, it’sperpetually inviting you to play.

“That can’t be right,” she said with a look. I first started playing piano – this piano – in year 4. My brother Niall started at the same time. Neither of us was particularly keen on the idea if I recall, but it’s a rare kid who says, “Formal music lessons and hours of practice every week? Sign me up!” When it came to the piano, I’m not sure we had a lot of choice in the matter. I suspect my parents thought it would be good for us, seeing it as a cultural, brain-expanding exercise that would provide a counterbalance to our studious devotion to the hyper-masculine and thrillingly violent world of 1970s and ’80s rugby league: Leipzig’s Johann Sebastian Bach as a kind of antidote to Manly-Warringah’s Lesley William Boyd.

It must have been fairly obvious early on that while we got steadily better, neither of us was a gifted musician, but that wasn’t seen as any reason to end our lessons. That we can’t all be geniuses doesn’t mean there’s no pleasure or purpose to be gained by becoming competent. Of course, it’s hard to convince a child of this, as I now know myself. It’s also hard to know when, as a parent, your necessary push becomes more like a shove.

Over the years, we had a host of teachers who made their mark on us. Sometimes literally. There was a dishevelled Miss Marple type who couldn’t hide her existential sighs when we admitted how little practice we’d done. Then there was the passionate Polish woman who used to whack us on the back or bare thighs if we made a careless mistake, or succeeded in making each other laugh during a lesson. Our first teacher was the inaugural director of the Wollongong Conservatorium of Music, who indulged us at Gleniffer Brae, a kind of stately manor atop the city’s Botanic Gardens. Through this accident of fate, we can claim to be contemporaries of Richard Tognetti and Anthony Warlow, other Wollongong Conservatorium alumni.

Niall and I were given every chance to become competent and we played long into our mid-teens, long enough for me to pass my year 6 piano exam, which seems incredible to me now. I sometimes wonder if Mum kept us going for so long because she’d somehow managed to convince me not only to do my practice at 7am every other morning, but to wake her with a cup of tea in bed before I started.

When I negotiated with my siblings and mother for the piano, my idea was that my daughters would see it every day and fall into it all on their own. What I didn’t consider was that it would prove to be a touchstone to the past, a repository of memories. Though I’ve a sentimental streak in my Irish genes, I’m not someone who is particularly attached to stuff. Once asked by the kids what I’d rush into the house to save if the place was on fire, I struggled to think of a single thing.

Now, however, I’d probably say it would be the piano. Getting it out on my own, however, would be a challenge. Harder, perhaps, than a Beethoven sonata.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.