After a harsh upbringing, Smoky Dawson became a country star

Anyone whose life started the year before the First World War saw a lot. But the kid from Collingwood saw more than that. Smoky Dawson’s story is truly extraordinary.

Dot and Smoky in later years.

Smoky Dawson’s family didn’t make old bones. His mother died when she was 39 in 1919. His eldest brother drowned on Christmas Day the following year, aged 16. But Smoky and his wife Dot lived 198 years between them – decades more than Smoky’s four brothers combined.

Anyone whose life started the year before the First World War and spanned close to a century saw a lot. But the kid from Collingwood saw more than that. His dad, Parker, fought at Gallipoli. Drunk and violent, Parker brought the fight in Europe home and made life hell for Smoky, who was born Herbert Henry Brown in 1913.

His refuge was music and it led to an extraordinary life in which he spent years in a South Melbourne orphanage, worked on farms, sang at country dances on Saturdays, and performed at rodeos throwing knives, axes and tomahawks.

He became a radio star and at one point his show was relayed to 69 stations, while wife Dot had her own show. They still had one in 2004. He toured Australia eight months of the year, played across the US, sang at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, and appeared in Kiss Me, Kate in New Jersey.

Dawson with fellow country greats Reg Lindsay, Slim Dusty and Chad Morgan.

He met the Ned Kelly family, once did a country pub crawl with the last Cobb and Co coach drivers, old timers who told him of being held up by masked bushrangers, and rewrote The Wild Colonial Boy for Glen Campbell.

His life story – illustrated by Pro Hart and with a foreword by RM Williams – was published back in 1985. “Had I known I was going to live this long, I’d have held off,” he said decades later. Finally, the full story is told in the updated volume, and it is of a simpler, often more abrasive Australia that slipped away while we weren’t looking.

When Herbie’s father was medically discharged from the army in 1917, the boy was just four. Parker suffered from depression and he made life hard for the family. Herbie once asked his grandmother about his father and she described him as having been a “loving and helpful” son. “I hope he gets to love me one of these days,” Herbie said to his gran. She understood the ways of her changed son. “Ah, get along, you silly rabbit. Of course he loves you. It’s just the war that’s twisted things up in his head.” Years later, Parker sobered up, turned to religion, made himself some sandals and a long brown monk-like vestment and set off from remote South Australia to walk without provisions to Derby, more than 2600km away on the West Australian coast. He was found near death, dehydrated and with a leg injury, in a dry outback waterhole and was not expected to survive, but he did.

“I did what I set out to do,” he ­insisted. “I proved God exists.”

Ned Kelly's mother, Ellen Kelly, and his brother, Jim, outside the family homestead at Eleven Mile Creek. Dawson met the family.

Herbie’s siblings left home when they could. Sister Laura to a convent: “Gran says it’s best.” A little later is was brother Pete. He was off to the bush. Herbie and Ted, two years younger, remained. By now the boys’ mother had passed away. Herbie had kissed her face – looking so worn and tired for someone so young – in hospital on her last day.

Their dad’s drinking and violence was a constant threat. Their meagre home on the outskirts of Melbourne was not much more than a lean-to with flattened kerosene cans for a roof and hessian ­dividing the “rooms”. It was windy, cold and wet and would smell. The boys were mostly barefoot – shoes were for school and sissies. Before dawn one day, Herbie rose with a plan: he looked at the sleeping Ted, silently wished him well, and, with some shillings in a small tin saved from his newspaper round, headed off to catch a train to a new life.

He spent time in the Catholic St Vincent de Paul orphanage in Cecil Street, South Melbourne, which still stands and operated until 1997 and these days is named after Australia’s first saint Mary MacKillop. Dawson had been born a few hundred metres from her birthplace, less than four years after her death. Herbie stayed three years there and each Christmas was farmed out to a Catholic family for the summer holidays.

Herbie and a friend got to stay with the Carews outside Colac in Victoria’s western districts. As their steam train travelled across Melbourne’s western suburbs, Herbie would put his head out the window and, while getting covered in soot, imagine the flapping washing on backyard clothes lines to be waving the city goodbye.

Smoky and Ted Dawson.

Like Herbie’s father who, before alcohol took its toll, had been a popular baritone singer, the Carews were musical. Jack Carew played accordion and wrote poems, and had memorised many by the likes of Banjo Paterson. Old Jack showed Dawson some songs on accordion and harmonica “and sometimes, towards the end of a session, Jack would pass me the ­accordion and I’d play something slow and tender like Mother Machree, and thrill to the feeling of having that wonderful loving family all with me, caught up in a musical moment”.

The first words of Mother Machree are:

There’s a spot in my heart,

Which no colleen may own.

There’s a depth in my soul,

Never sounded or known.

It’s sentimental stuff. Herbie liked sentimental.

Working around the Carew farm, the boy now nicknamed Smoky after a harsh lesson in not smoking, for the first time understood confidence, and he had a sense of it. At 13, but claiming to be two years older, Dawson left the orphanage and set off to work on a sheep farm outside Benalla where one day he was taken to meet old Jim Kelly, Ned’s brother, who surprised the youngster with his gentle speech and feeble appearance. Jim was 68 then, but would live to almost 90. Dawson said a song about Jim once came to him and he would sing The Last of the Kellys when visiting Kelly country in later years. Tunes arrived in Dawson’s head regularly and he would write stories to fit them. He took up cycling during the Depression and leaned towards distance events – once coming 27th out of 400 in the 266km annual Warrnambool to Melbourne race, which two years earlier had been won by his hero Hubert Opperman.

By now he had bought a steel-string guitar from Harry West, who had a radio show on 3LO, for £5 and was taking lessons from West (who billed his band as Rudy Wayne and His Honolulu Boys).

Dawson entertains young patient Malcolm Davis at the Children's Hospital in Adelaide in 1954.

While on his long training rides on the bike, he’d practise ­finger ­positions for chords. When he settled into a steady rhythm cycling, he would work on variations of then-popular songs in his head. His unemployed brother Ted would sit in on Dawson’s lessons and soon had a cheap guitar, and while practising on their beds at home they became the Coral Island Boys.

They worked up a few songs and started busking outside a picture theatre. The manager invited them in to play and a customer booked them for a later gig. There was plenty of live music on radio back then, and the boys booked themselves to perform on a popular talent quest. They played the mournful ballad I’m Lonesome For You, Caroline. The announcer tried to “gong” the boys out, but Dawson had worded up his brother beforehand that whatever happened they were to just forge ahead. The listeners rang in to vote, the Coral Island Boys won, and were off and strumming.

Dawson hooked up with Florence “Dot” Cheers, another radio performer, and they would become radio stars, but not before Dawson volunteered to become a nursing orderly after the bombing of Darwin. He was commandeered to entertain the troops and sent on a US Liberty ship to Borneo and Morotai, ending any illusion Dawson may have had about the gentle South Sea islands where people sang and played ukuleles all day accompanied by the gentle rhythm of breaking waves.

Smoky sings for the kids at one of his radio shows.

On his return, he went back to being the singing cowboy who rode in tent shows – always doing his own stunts – and threw tomahawks and knives and cracked whips before rounding the show off with his songs. He explained his working day: “Except for the bigger towns, it was mostly one-night stands – pull in, water and feed the stock, race off to the nearest timber mill for a load of sawdust, mark out the ring, haul up the tent, then dive into the Chev and zoom off around town with speakers blaring out the news of the show and offering big prizemoney for the lucky one who could put a bridle on the Bogun Terror.” No one ever did.

By 1952, he and Dot were stars of their radio show The Adventures of Smoky Dawson. It ran for a decade and with it was published a comic book that recounted tales of Smoky’s bush adventures, along with newly written escapades. He and Dot set up a 10-hectare farm north of Sydney where his bands could perform, and they hosted camps for children, giving them the excitement of his early days in the bush. The kids loved it when their host would tell them bush tales studded with the sounds of Australian wildlife – Dawson could be a dingo, cockatoo, magpie and kookaburra in the same sentence.

The Dawsons.

Performers flocked to Smoky Dawson’s Ranch, including John Denver, Slim Dusty, Olivia Newton-John and Glen Campbell, who performed Dawson’s rewritten version of The Wild Colonial Boy, and TV series were shot there. He received an OBE from the Queen in 1982, and in 1999 an AM. He was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2005.

Dawson had sung at many people’s funerals – and in February 2008, many sang at his, ­including Beccy Cole, James­ Blundell, John Williamson, Lee Kernaghan, Johnny Chester and Normie Rowe. Dot lived on until 2010, passing away a fortnight after turning 104.

The childless couple’s estate and ongoing royalties from songs and music – and this book – are ­mostly directed to the Bear Cottage children’s hospice in Manly.

Smoky Dawson: A Life, $49.95, published by Imprint Inprint, is out now.