Introducing Murray Dowsett & Jeremy Levi and the "Ballads of the Golden West"

Murray Dowsett (left) and Jeremy Levi are both graduates of the prestigious Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, the alma mater of the likes of Hugh Jackman, Frances O'Connor, Lisa McCune and Marcus Graham.

Both are talented actors, singers, composers and musicians, with a long list of credits encompassing stage, film, television and radio. Jeremy is about to commence rehearsals for Black Swan Theatre's The Carnivores http://www.bstc.com.au/ and is also preparing for a new motion picture titled The Eleventh Soldier.
http://www.cinemascorestudios.com/theeleventhsoldier/home.htm. Together, Murray and Jeremy will star in Poseidon Unlimited! at the Boulder Town Hall on July 22, 2006.

Ballads of the Golden West is a CD recording featuring fifteen of the finest poems of Western Australia's gold rush era, set to music and performed by Murray and Jeremy.

During the 1890s, gold discoveries miraculously transformed Western Australia from a struggling colonial backwater into ‘an El Dorado blest’. From Cue to Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie and beyond, ‘her wondrous wealth bewitched the world, towards her turned the human flow ... hearts with lust of gold aflame’.

But ‘the race for gold that charms the bold, finds toil for man and beast’. Many did not survive their golden quest in a land where ‘the gaunt earth gasps beneath the sun that breathes hot Hades down’. Heat, thirst, typhoid, alcoholism, misadventure – all took their toll, with hundreds of fortune seekers ‘gold-lured to death’.

The bards of the gold boom years both celebrated and cursed the Golden West. Thanks to the many newspapers that published their work, some became household names, including ‘Dryblower’ (Edwin Greenslade Murphy), ‘Bluebush’ (John Philip Bourke), 'Prospect Good' (Francis Ophel) and ‘Crosscut’ (Thomas Wilson).