The Origins of Wayfarers

I spent the first 45 years of my life ignorant of Rudolf Steiner. I knew what I felt was important – I knew that choral music and other artistic endeavours are wonderfully humanising activities, which should be accessible to everyone, but which sadly are not – and so I was doing my best to help a wide range of humans discover the joys of creating and receiving beauty, mostly through community organisations which I founded and directed. (My experiences in a range of school systems had taught me that, while perhaps some primary schools can appreciate the sort of music and related arts which excite me, many do not, and most high schools either offer nothing or else cater only to the teenage love of loud noise and, to me, disturbing content).

And so when, in 1991 I began teaching music at the fledgling Orana Steiner School (at that point only up to class 6), I was overjoyed to discover a school system which accorded with my view of the world. Teachers were humans, who could be addressed by their first names. Uniforms were unimportant. The relationship of every teacher with the children in her/his class was paramount, just as important as the content of a lesson. All the teachers were sincerely on their own life journeys, regarding the children as fellow travellers they could learn from, as much as teach. Steiner’s three large dictums - truth, beauty and goodness - resonated with me. I felt as though I had come home.

After 3 years at Orana, where I had loved every minute, I moved to South Australia, and taught at the Mt Barker Waldorf School for three years. And there, as the school was K-12, I was able to develop a high school choir, and an orchestra, and to enthuse students with composition and with music theatre. When I had to return to Canberra in 1997, I was determined not to lose the teenagers who had so clearly loved what I had been doing. And so I started Wayfarers, as a platform on which students from Mt Barker or Orana or other Steiner schools could come together in holidays, rehearse together, and enjoy offering performances and workshops. I saw this as being particularly helpful for teenage boys, who, because of the year or more during which singing is a painful process for them, can so often give up and be lost to the world of choral music. Because Orana had commissioned me to write books of songs for Steiner schools, I was developing relationships with a wide range of Steiner schools around Australia, as I discussed my books and offered workshops to students, teachers and parents. And this is how Waldorf Wayfarers’ membership grew.

Initially, Wayfarers tours were low-key, offering schools and community audiences a range of short, not too complex part songs to learn and/or listen to. We usually slept on hall floors and made our own meals. Participants paid for their travel and food. If we ever ended up with a profit, we ploughed it back into music, travel and food on the next tour. And for 29 years at least one tour per year has taken place. I spent most of 1998 and 1999 travelling to Steiner schools all over Australia, whipping up enthusiasm for Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb. Our first overseas tour, in 2000, took 76 performers, almost all Steiner students or teachers or parents, to UK and western Europe, where we performed the Britten and sacred music in many of the most beautiful Gothic cathedrals in the world. We also performed my music theatre work, Kakadu, and my adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, in a wide variety of halls and theatres.

As the members have matured, with so many who started off as children becoming proficient teachers, performers, conductors, composers and backstage experts, the level of our performances has risen. The 2003 group of ten who spent three months in the UK and Europe came back not having spent a cent more than on our basic return air fare. And the 2012 eleven-month tour opened Wayfarers up to the glories of Asia. Since then, Steiner schools in Taiwan, China, India, Japan and Korea have welcomed us with open arms, organising our accommodation and meals, and sometimes offering extra help, such as hiring theatres or making programs, in return for the workshops we have given to their students, teachers and parents. It is a win-win. All of us feel blessed.

Wayfarers Australia is inextricably connected to Rudolf Steiner’s vision of what makes us truly human. Every Steiner school which offers us hospitality and/or audiences and payment treats us like colleagues – which most of us are. Wayfarers around Australia at the moment comprise at least 32 graduates or current students of Steiner schools, 9 Steiner teachers, and 11 Steiner parents/grandparents. There are, of course, many more overseas Wayfarers in these categories. We are absolutely open to people with no link to the Steiner world joining us, and we certainly aim to perform to audiences from as wide a background as possible. Our hope is that what we offer, both to participants and to audiences, is seen by all as a humanising experience, countering, we hope, a little of the current plethora of dehumanising influences plaguing our world.

- Judith Clingan AM

• Explore past tours
• Read about Steiner education

• A Chorus of Women: Events by year
• Explore the life and work of Judith Clingan