Charlie McMahon

Charlie McMahon
Charlie McMahon playing the didjeribone in 2002. The microphone going into his mouth is the "Face Bass," a seismic microphone that captures the subtleties of sound inside his mouth while he is playing.

Charlie McMahon (born in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, 1951) is an Australian didgeridoo player. The founder of the group Gondwanaland, McMahon was one of the first non-Aboriginal musicians to gain fame as a professional player of the instrument.

He is also the inventor of the didjeribone, a sliding didgeridoo made from two lengths of plastic tubing and played somewhat in the manner of a trombone (hence its name).

In 1955, Jedda, the first Australian feature movie filmed in colour, was released, and the McMahons, living in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney, were just one Australian family among many who went to see it. The film was notable for being the first mainstream Australian movie to have Aboriginal actors in the lead roles and characters that acknowledged the existence of, and identification with, an indigenous culture.

Jedda, in the screenplay, is an Aboriginal girl adopted by a white station owner's wife to replace her own child that had died (coincidentally, the station owner's surname, McMann, is a variation of the Irish surname McMahon). Deliberately isolated from all contact with her birth family and relations, Jedda, is unsure of her identity until she meets Marbuck, a tribal Aboriginal man in trouble with the European system of justice. She is seduced by his intense didgeridoo playing but their elopement into the wilderness ends in tragedy when Marbuck's tribe rejects him for having broken its own laws regarding marriage. Marbuck, spurned by both the old and the new cultures, jumps off a cliff and takes Jedda with him.

The movie was also significant for its presentation of panoramic outback scenery and its mixture of documentary and fiction (curiously, the destruction of the last reel of the film in a plane crash meant the movie's dramatic climax had to be refilmed in McMahon's home environment, the Blue Mountains).

After the show young Charlie McMahon had been so absorbed by his cinema experience he tried to imitate the gut-stirring didge sound he heard in the movie by blowing into a garden hose and various hollow household objects like vacuum cleaner nozzles. He also developed an ongoing fascination with Aboriginals and their lives an unlikely interest for a four-year-old as "there weren't any black fellas living near us".