By Phil Jarratt
Around the surf beaches and points of Noosa he’s known exclusively as “Ranga” – a happy-go-lucky red-headed bloke with a repertoire of jokes that’s as long as his bushranger beard.
Only a few of his Noosa mates know that Brendan Dowd is a rock star in the esoteric worlds of blues and roots, Zydeco, bush and folk music, and that when he’s not surfing up here he’ll be saving historic churches in rural Victoria, appearing at folk festivals with his band of 20 years, the Hog Stompin’ Zydegators, teaching tai chi or breeding stumpy-tailed cattle dogs on the property he shares with partner Karen near Port Fairy. He’s a man for all seasons, our Ranga, a bard of both beach and bush.
But what only the innermost circle of those Noosa mates know is that underneath all that talent and never-ending good cheer, is a sometimes debilitating and life-threatening health condition that has plagued Ranga since infancy, and made him live each moment for all it’s worth.
Born in Warrnambool, south-western Victoria on the day the Beatles touched down in Australia for the first time, Ranga says he was destined to play music, but he was so busy playing three codes of footie and indoor cricket that it took a while to get a hold of him. Mum and Dad gave him a guitar one Christmas and he took it to school so that he could take lessons from one of the nuns. “As soon as I strapped it on, she told me to take it off and turn it around the other way or leave,” he recalls. “So just like that I became a right-handed guitarist, and that was a blessing.”
Still in primary school, Ranga began getting painful stomach aches and eventually a diagnosis of abdominal migraine. By the time he was briefly at high school, the pain had moved north, and he suffered migraine headaches that paralysed him for days, and probably contributed to him leaving school at 14 and taking up a printing apprenticeship. He worked as a printer for more than six years, but towards the end of that time his health problems had taken a new turn.
He says: “I started collapsing at work. At first the doctors just thought it was a more severe form of migraine, but my mother insisted they keep doing tests to get to the bottom of it, and they eventually put a holter monitor on me to test my heart. You’re supposed to just act normally while it’s on, and it’ll pick up any heart abnormalities, but my girl and I were walking through Myers in Melbourne and I had to grab this display unit to stop myself collapsing. There was a button you had to press if you were in trouble. So I ended up back in the hospital and the doctor walked in and told me I was booked in for surgery at seven.”
Ranga’s heart was slowing down and occasionally stopping for up to 20 seconds. At 40 seconds you might die, so they decided to put a pacemaker in. He recalls: “I was in shock. I thought that was for old people, and I was playing sports every night and surfing on the weekends. I couldn’t have been fitter. I was 20 and I thought I was bullet-proof, so it knocked me for six. But the doctors told me I’d go back to a normal life, and that’s pretty much what happened. I’ve had seven different pacemakers over 35 years and it’s never really stopped me doing what I wanted to do, although it probably changed the path of my life quite a bit.”
Coming from a big, loving Irish Catholic family, Ranga always knew that family meant everything, which was why he looked after his ailing grandfather for the last two years of his life. “My grandfather taught me how to die,” he says, “and fortunately I’ve never been scared of it since. There have been times when that was a very good thing.”
One of them came when he collided with a truck while driving from Victoria to Noosa. While he was being tossed around inside the vehicle, the seat belt pushed the pacemaker from his chest into his shoulder, fracturing the wiring. He survived that one, but even now, he’s had loose wires in his chest since before Covid and faces microsurgery after his Noosa winter. “The good thing is I’m not collapsing like I used to,” he says, “so I told them to turn the bloody thing off and save batteries.”
Soon after receiving his first pacemaker, Ranga went along to a tai chi class at the Warrnambool surf club. He says: “I’d done martial arts as a kid, so I was intrigued to see what this was all about, but I was in this hall looking out at the surf and thinking, I should be out there riding waves, not standing on one leg in here!” But the ancient art, sometimes known as “meditation in motion”, was to change his life. “I’ve been learning and teaching tai chi for more than 30 years,” he says. “It’s why I’m still here.”
Ranga came to Noosa for the first time in 1981, aged 17, and fell in love with the scenery and the warm water surf. The annual pilgrimages began not long after, but oddly enough, they were inspired not by Noosa but by Byron Bay. He missed the first Bluesfest and the cancelled one last year, but in between he did 28 years straight, and he’ll be back there for his 29th this year.
The blues and roots acts he saw there inspired his own musical career, and led him to the thriving folk and roots scene in Victoria, with the Port Fairy Folk Festival at its hub. Soon he was conducting packed-out tai chi classes in the mornings and playing the festival stages all afternoon and evening, either with his folk duo King Bees or his zydeco outfit the Hog Stompin’ Zydegators. (Zydeco, the totally addictive Cajun dance music of the Louisiana swamps, has become an abiding passion, for which Ranga has mastered the washboard which, alongside the accordian, gives the music its distinctive sound.)
Ranga also established his own festival, the St Brigid’s Blues and Roots Festival, which came about when he and musician mates Shane Howard (Goanna) and John Schumann (Redgum) decided to raise $400,000 to buy the century-old stone church at Crossley, near Port Fairy, when the Catholic Church put it on the market. Says Ranga: “The community gave them the land and all they wanted to do was make a buck out of it, so we bought it back.”
The St Brigid’s festival has become part of the musical landscape, and having to cancel it for 2021 earlier this year, when Melbourne went back into lockdown, nearly broke Ranga’s heart. But, as we’ve seen, it takes more than a setback or three to do that.
Covid also forced him to miss out on Noosa last winter, but he’s more than making up for that this time. He’d barely arrived when he was posted behind the microphone at last weekend’s Noosa Logger surf comp to entertain all weekend, while also slipping out for a surf in his age division to test the ticker. “All good so far,” he reported to Noosa Today as he shouldered his longboard ashore.
