The Great Morton

April 11, 2009
Those who knew him reckoned Tex Morton was Nelson's greatest son, so why doesn't the city care? Geoff Collett reports. -------------------- If ever a larger-than-life character emerged from the sleepy streets of Nelson, it would be Tex Morton, aka the Yodelling Boundary Rider, Dr Robert Morton, the Great Morton, or just Bob Lane to his family back home.
Maybe some parts of his extraordinary life are larger than truth, too, but even leaving aside the more outlandish bits, there's ample evidence that there aren't many - maybe any - other sons or daughters of the city who have made as big an impact on the world outside Nelson as Morton did in his 66 years.
At the very least, he was an entertainer extraordinaire, setting up and running one of the biggest circuses seen on this side of the globe, and becoming an enormously influential force on musical culture in his adopted Australia. Some call him the father of country music there.
He may never have lost his affection for his hometown - but, as he discovered early on in his life, there was a much bigger world, hungry for his many and varied talents.
Depending on which bits of the legend you accept, he is said to have hung out with Hollywood's elite, broken box office records with his stage shows, sold more records in Australia than such titans as Sinatra and Crosby, pioneered hypnotherapy, tutored the FBI in sharpshooting, dabbled in the supernatural, and became blood brothers with the "king" of the Romany people, the gypsies.
That he was a wandering, restless soul might help to explain Nelson's, and New Zealand's, tardiness over his memory - embarrassingly summed up by the experience of folk from the city's country music club a few weeks ago.
Finding themselves with an Australian musician to host, they wanted to show their visitor how the birthplace of the late, great Morton celebrated his memory. They headed down to the Trafalgar Centre to show off the plaque the club had mounted there years ago in tribute. But it was gone - stolen, stripped from its concrete base, maybe chucked in the river or souvenired. Nobody is sure how long it hadn't been there - months, maybe.
That it hadn't been noticed simply reinforces how Morton's repute has faded from the public consciousness. Without the country music club plaque, there is nothing. The Nelson Provincial Museum says it has some Morton memorabilia in its collection but no displays and no immediate plans for anything. The public library doesn't even hold the couple of books that tell Morton's story in any detail, such as Gordon Spittle's Tex Morton Songbook (as near to a biography as you'll find, although it doesn't profess to be anything like a definitive account).
The lack of attention hasn't always been for want of trying, by one or two individuals anyway - principally Alan Turley, a history buff and former Nelson city councillor whose experience of seeing Morton in action on a visit to his hometown 60 years ago was a seminal moment of his youth.
Turley is about as near to a champion for Tex Morton as you could hope to find in Nelson, although, as he puts it, "I haven't been running around frantically over the years espousing the cause of Tex Morton - I just think he deserves greater recognition".
Turley has done his bit, writing the odd article, preparing a display on Morton at Nelson College as part of a wider tribute to notable old boys, and, during his years as a city councillor, pushing for the city to somehow immortalise the Tex Morton name - maybe naming a street after him, for instance.
At one stage, there was an idea that a Tex Morton Terrace or something could be included in the "poet's corner" of Stoke, before councillors decided that it might be a bit silly including a pioneer of hillbilly tunes alongside Homer St, Keats Crescent and Wordsworth Place. They looked at naming the walkway running along the city's eastern hills for Morton. Again, it went nowhere.
Turley admits to feeling a bit deflated about his past failures. But he's willing to have one more go, and may finally be making progress.
The loss of the Trafalgar Centre plaque has pricked the city council's community services chairman, Pete Rainey. Turley and Rainey have chatted about the possibilities, and Rainey says he is keen to see something happen - perhaps a more detailed display panel in a more prominent place - but so far, it remains more talk.
Both the birthplace and the resting place of Tex Morton can be found in Nelson, if you know where to look. The latter is in the Marsden Cemetery in Stoke, alongside the graves of his parents, Bernard and Mildred Lane, and is said to have attracted the occasional pilgrim over the years, with its inscription that Morton was "a millionaire in the experience of life" on his death in 1983.
The former is the family home, where he entered the world as Robert Lane in 1916. It is still occupied by his sister Barbara Lane, who was almost 20 years his junior but speaks fondly of big brother Bob's memory and maintains a sizeable collection of Morton memorabilia. She talks of him as only one of his own kin could, poking a bit of gentle fun at aspects of his behaviour but with clear pride in what he achieved.
She suspects that some of his stories have been embellished down the years, and is vague about some of the grander claims - such as that he became a blood brother to the Romany king (cited by Turley, who says Barbara Lane was his source, although she says she doesn't know the truth); even the details of the PhD he is said to have acquired, apparently into the Aboriginal Dreamtime legends. Turley is adamant that the doctorate came from Canada's prestigious McGill University; Barbara Lane is not so sure. There has been the odd throwaway comment by others that it was a mail-order degree, but that's long been disputed by the family.
What's beyond dispute is the level of celebrity Morton achieved, particularly during the pre- war 1930s and post-war 1940s.
He was born to be an entertainer, running away from home as a teenager during the Depression to pursue his dreams of making it big in the world. According to Turley's research, that's when he adopted the Morton pseudonym, the result of some quick thinking when a policeman suspected he was a runaway.
He worked his way around the countryside, recorded his first music at 16, made his way to Sydney and hooked into the world of circuses and travelling shows. He learned sharpshooting, whip-cracking, yodelling and the general skills of the showman, and further honed his songwriting and guitar playing.
Country music fans loved him for his songs inspired by his life as a wandering man of the land, but his talents were far wider.
Success came quickly, as he built up his own travelling show and later added hypnosis to his repertoire, grew a natty beard and became The Great Morton. His success at working hypnosis and other mind games into his performance brought him his greatest success, including popular tours across North America. He claimed to have ESP (extra-sensory perception), and banked on such stunts as announcing his arrival in a new city by walking blindfolded around the top of the tallest building in town. He could shoot a cigarette out of a man's mouth and a hole through a coin, and could supposedly put a young woman into a trance for days.
Then, when the public appetite for vaudeville-type shows waned, he reinvented himself for a career in front of the camera, principally as a presenter of a country music show on TV but also acting in movies.
He made plenty of money, but holding on to it wasn't among his strong points - as his sister says, he made two fortunes but was a soft touch and gave most of it away, whether through generosity to his family (such as paying for her to join him for several years in North America) or falling for the hard-luck stories of passing acquaintances.
Turley argues that Morton was never much driven by money anyway - he was more interested in the nomadic life, and was fascinated by the Aborigines. But his sister says he always stayed in touch with Nelson, making occasional visits and, in later years, religiously phoning every Sunday to keep up with his ailing parents and share his latest news.
That Nelson never stayed in touch with him is, she admits, a bit of a sore point. Her brother would be "tickled pink" if there was some kind of decent memorial to him, and it rankles when she hears locals getting excited by other, lesser sorts who hail from the city and have gone on to make a name for themselves.
In Turley's mind at least, nobody else who was born and bred in Nelson city can claim quite the degree of achievement and fame as Tex Morton achieved in his lifetime. He's happy to stick his neck out and count him as New Zealand's greatest entertainer. But just not the most revered.