Grade 3 - 'Ave a Go!

‘Ave A Go is amongst the set of pieces I started writing several years ago when I was living in California. My young children would come home from school singing the American folk songs they had been learning in class - a great learning experience for them. However, I felt sad that they were not hearing the Australian stories and music that their friends were learning back at home. 

'Ave a Go started out as a tune I hummed one morning after hearing a story about Alec Campbell, Australia's last surviving soldier from Gallipoli. He joined the Gallipoli campaign as a 16-year-old and returned to Australia after the evacuation from there, injured but not defeated. He lived a long and productive life, becoming a carpenter, working as a jackaroo, winning a flyweight boxing championship, sailing the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race multiple times, earning an economics degree, and many other achievements and adventures. The part of the story I heard was Alec's advice to a young person to always "have a go" in life, and those were the words I hummed before they turned into this piece (with its Aussie accent of course).

‘Ave a Go started out as a march, a call to adventure if you like. It has several ideas from marches including a nod to Colonel Bogey with the whistling and falling minor 3rd. There is also a small reference to Waltzing Matilda in the final strains. However, I was also very conscious of Campbell's desire to resist “mythmaking”, as he disliked the glorification of war and the idea of being turned “into an icon”. For this reason, think of the piece as an old man reflecting on his life of having a go – where he just happened to be one of the youngest people to serve in a terrible war.  - Claire Petherick

Read more about Alec Campbell here:

https://www.centenaryofanzac.tas.gov.au/history/shared_stories/alec_campbell