Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  The Surfrider Foundation Australia was established around this time with a specific focus on the health of the coastal environment and threats to local surfing spots. I spent some time with Surfrider early on. The interesting question was whether the huge constituency of surfers and beachgoers around Australia could be mobilised. Given the right information and some encouragement, this group could become a formidable political force. But in the main, surfers, especially the younger brigade, are a hedonistic, anarchic bunch and their potency as a pressure group has never been fully realised. Just like the volunteers who always show up for community fundraising work, those who labour in the Surfrider Foundation are few in number but big of heart.

  The task of stopping the idiocy of pouring raw sewage onto the beaches meant taking on the various water boards and local councils, where authorities were wedded to an engineering solution for treating waste and struggled to get their heads around reuse and recycling. The public campaign came to a head on Good Friday, 1989. A quarter of a million people marched down to Bondi Beach to support POOO. Midnight Oil played on a rudimentary stage at one end of the beach, along with Dragon, Noiseworks, Rose Tattoo and a bunch of others. I could see across to the gentle waves of one of Australia’s most notable tourist attractions as we sang our hearts out. There wasn’t a place like it anywhere else in the world that I knew of: a panorama so fetching, yet so close to millions of city dwellers.

  The concert marked a turning point of sorts as governments promised to deliver cleaner beaches. But undoing a hundred years of engineering and short-term thinking will take time. Heavy metals still end up in the ocean off our cities and after a big downpour Sydney’s beaches can be unsafe for swimmers for days. Still, the upsurge of community sentiment that peaked on that day saw partial progress, as secondary treatments became the norm and rubbish traps were installed at the ends of the giant stormwater drains that emptied straight into the sea up and down the coast. The water utilities and governments were on notice that the habits of the Tank Stream era were over.

  Ultimately, a bigger transformation in the way we treat water will be needed. We know hotter days and tougher droughts will hit the continent hard, so water use in our cities and suburbs needs to be properly priced. And instead of losing millions of gallons through the deep ocean outfalls, built to reduce the pollution levels on our beaches, more of that water should be captured and recycled for the future when it will be more precious than ever before.

  18

  BROOME TIME

  THE TUG OF war between the Oils’ overseas career demands and the siren calls of home had been temporarily settled when the band decided to take 1991 off (prompting the industry to ask: ‘Are you trying to shoot yourselves in the foot again?’).

  The answer to that question was no. We were merely applying some self-preservation thinking to the career. We’d gone out to give the seventh album, Blue Sky Mining, a decent shot, and it did well, surpassing Diesel and Dust in the end, but we were longing for family and familiar neighbourhoods, and jumping off the conveyor belt was one sure way of getting home.

  The title track, concerning the effects of exposure to asbestos dust, and the fact that the companies mining and manufacturing the material knew it could kill people, had been one of the last tracks to go down. Based on a demo called ‘Dust’ that Jim had brought in, it got the marriage of music and lyric right.

  Up to that time there was a lot of strong material already recorded, but much of it was evenly paced, with careful vocal harmonies and layered keyboard parts that didn’t set me on fire. At one point, coming in to see how the sessions were faring, I amped up, convinced we needed something that sparked, and so work started on a more up-tempo tune.

  I’d sit downstairs in my study trying to stitch the verse, playing it over and over again on the same old crappy mono cassette player I’d always carried around with me, while fending off requests for ACF to jump into new hot spots. This was typical and unexceptional; the juggle between music and politics was a fact of life for me. But if we were going to actually experience our kids growing up and share at least some of the joys and tribulations that went with it, we simply had to stop at home for a while.

  Part of the success of both albums was due to the series of film clips that accompanied the singles and found their way on to the screen at a time when music on television, in particular the MTV channel, was a dominant marketing force in the US and Europe.

  The clips for ‘Beds Are Burning’, directed by Andrew De Groot, and ‘The Dead Heart’, directed by Ray Argall, featuring us interacting with Aboriginal people in outback scenes enhanced by the great Australian light, were different from anything else that was showing at the time. They were expertly made, and we were lucky to have the services of a group of highly creative and committed local filmmakers, including directors like Argall, John Whitteron, Paul Elliot, Tony Stephens, and Claudia Castle, who filmed ‘Blue Sky Mine’.

  Shooting the ‘Blue Sky Mine’ film clip in Kalgoorlie saw half the town turn up to dance in the main street as the fire brigade showered us with water on a day that was so hot the runway at the airport had started melting.

  But it wasn’t a case of relying only on exotic Aussie locations. Claudia Castle, with her sister Jane on camera, also directed Rob’s anthemic plea, ‘Forgotten Years’, which sits with Eric Bogle’s ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ and John Schumann’s ‘I Was Only Nineteen’ (recorded with Schumann’s band, Redgum), as one of the great anti-war songs of our generation. We filmed it in the middle of winter in a sea of white crosses at the huge war cemetery in Verdun, France. The images embellish the message and cleave to the music, adding another dimension to the song, which is what you hope for in a clip.

  …

  Towards the end of 1991, I visited Broome for what was advertised as an informal bush meeting. It had become increasingly evident that while continuing to campaign on issues the membership deemed important, like native forest protection, the ACF had to build its capacity and develop stronger relationships in the remote north. As it turned out, much of the foundation’s involvement in these distant areas would be initiated during my second stint as president, in the late 1990s. It was then that we launched the Northern Project specifically to address environmental issues across the top of Australia.

  The purpose of this early bush meeting—which included representatives from the Yawuru Aboriginal Corporation and the Kimberley Conservation Group—was to sit with local Aboriginal people to follow up on a resolution that had been passed by the General Assembly of the World Conservation Union—the UN equivalent of an international environmental organisation—recognising the ‘relationship between living Aboriginal culture and the Kimberley landscape’. The resolution had been sought by long-time Wilderness Society campaigner Peter Robertson, and detailed the ecological importance of the region and the lack of participation by Aboriginal groups in decision-making about land use. It identified the need for conservation reserves and protected areas, and renewed involvement of Aboriginal people in active management of their country.

  As a rough rule of thumb, the further away from the axis of political power and the concentrations of population in the south-east you travelled, the more opportunity you had to adopt sound conservation practices and keep country in good condition. But it wasn’t just the notion of a fresh start that drew me to the Kimberley, even though I had a strong attraction to remote and unspoiled places. Even though my western eyes couldn’t easily see the many layers of history that had impregnated the land, I knew people had been here for a very long time. Here you could breathe deeply, dream and sense the possibilities. Maybe the future wasn’t bound to follow the brick-and-tile pattern, the beaten-field past. Maybe there could be practical reconciliation in the real sense of that term. People might get moving with a new vision. In Broome, the landscape wasn’t drained—it was still singing.

  Here is what I saw for the first time: massed gorges and mountain ranges, wide savanna grassland
plains, a profusion of plant life, including the distinctive boab tree (that featured so heavily in Baz Luhrmann’s film, Australia), and a coastline of exquisite beauty. After the wet season, huge waterfalls cascaded into the gorges, sending great pulses of water rushing into hundreds of creeks winding down through stone and sandhill country. The mighty Fitzroy, the main river that flows north-east to west, would rise by up to ten metres, spewing billions of litres every hour from its mouth into the sea near Derby. Immense volumes of this precious liquid would spill into wetlands and billabongs pulsing with birdlife, native fish, freshwater crocs and yabbies, replenishing the aquifers below ground that continue to seep ever so slowly, resurfacing as mound springs that extend to the drier desert country further away from the coast.

  In the past Europeans had travelled north from Perth, bringing cattle to the Kimberley. However, the extremes of weather and the vast distances made it difficult to establish viable enterprises. And there was resistance to the early European forays by Aboriginal clans living in the region. One notable figure was the Aboriginal warrior Jandamarra, who fought a valiant three-year guerrilla campaign against the European incursion. On the coast, the saltwater people—referenced in the song ‘Saltwater Cowboy’ by notable Broome identities the Pigram Brothers—lived peacefully, enjoying plentiful resources with which to feed their families.

  The town of Broome itself, with two long beaches splayed out to the north and south, a collection of turn-of-the-century cottages, a tiny Chinatown and the Kimberley region at its back door, set my imagination alight. A long way from anywhere and cut off in the wet, its isolation could send you mad, but Broomites were creative to the core and the town had a well-developed cultural scene. There were great musicians, including Jimmy Chi, the songwriter who’d written the musical Bran Nue Day, and Scrap Metal (who, as the Pigram Brothers, would later feature in the film clip for the Oils track ‘In the Valley’ from Earth and Sun and Moon). Magabala Books, a local publishing house, promotes local writers and illustrators, and Kimberley painters such as Rover Thomas and Jimmy Pike were conjuring works of great power and beauty, rendering their stories and country on canvas to great acclaim.

  Broome seemed more tolerant than most isolated places I’d visited, due to intermarriage between local Aboriginal people and the Malaysians, Chinese, Timorese and Japanese who’d come in the early 1900s to work as indentured labour in the burgeoning pearl industry. That Broome was also awash with itinerant people—some from the desert, some from the coast—was a reminder of how recently a way of life common across Australia had been uprooted. Forced removal of Aboriginal children from their parents led to terrible misery for many in the local community, compounded by the many grog camps that had sprung up in the area.

  There were so many ifs: if the Kimberley clans and local leaders could assert their authority and chart their own course; if the cultural and natural inheritance of the region was protected; if young people gained a full education, thus increasing their chances of work . . . If these aspirations could be brought to fruition, then Broome’s future as a vibrant fishing and pearling centre, and increasingly a must-see destination for tourists, was gold-plated.

  Like much of Western Australia, parts of the region were also rich in mineral deposits. Judiciously exploiting these resources, and providing long-term benefits to the local people without spoiling the Kimberley’s intrinsic beauty, would require great care. For this to happen, active participation in decision-making by the Aboriginal community and the locals of Broome—often one and the same—would be necessary. Dictating policy and exercising control from Perth and Canberra wasn’t going to serve the region well, a fact that had long been communicated to both sides of politics by prominent Aboriginal leaders like Patrick Dodson and Peter Yu.

  I have a map given to me by Paddy Roe, the custodian of the Goolarabooloo clan, who I met on my first trip to the region. It shows the dreaming path that bisects Cape Leveque, north of Broome. I kept this map as evidence of the long-standing ties people have to their land, and as an important reminder that any exploitation of the area can only happen with the full cooperation and consent of traditional owners. In the event, it wasn’t until 2010, following a long hiatus, that a land-use agreement between government and the local clan group, the Yawuru, was finally concluded, providing a role for the Yawuru in future development and setting aside areas for conservation and residential use.

  I would return to Broome and the Kimberley many times after that first bush meeting. A year later, the Oils appeared at the open-air Stompin’ Ground concert with our old mates the Warumpi Band and Scrap Metal, who’d previously toured with us on a few legs back east. And that bush meeting proved to be a precursor to the campaign that sprang up twenty years later to oppose the siting of a gas hub at James Price Point on Cape Leveque, just north of Broome, a project vigorously pushed by the Western Australian premier Colin Barnett and one that split the harmonious town in two. In one of the many instances of synchronicity that I experienced while environment minister for a time, I ended up with carriage over the approvals process for the siting of the plant.

  The trip that had the greatest impact, though, was the one I took with my three daughters in July of 1991. Mindful that high school wasn’t far off for Em and May, and with Doris back at university studying to become a psychotherapist, I took the girls out of school, packed my swag, a small tent and some basic supplies into a four-wheel drive, and set out to see the country at a slower pace.

  We headed north-west, on a 4000-kilometre drive—after a slight detour to Geelong, 1000 kilometres south, to fulfil a long-standing speaking engagement (a detour that had the girls scratching their heads once they’d looked at a map!). We crossed into South Australia and tracked up to the Centre, with a night in Coober Pedy. We made a brief stop in Alice Springs, where the low arms of the MacDonnell Ranges stretch either side of a small gap in which the town is situated, then we set off across the Tanami Desert with extra fuel and water and, I noted in the diary, enjoyed ‘untroubled sleep on the road’.

  I exulted in the freedom, and loved the fact that the girls all took to the rough and tumble of travel off the beaten track without any qualms. It was a time of great happiness, exploring, singing and chatting as we went. In two days on the Tanami we saw only one other vehicle, a couple trundling along in a Kombi van—brave souls. There were long driving days, singing along to music to pass the time: Harry Nilsson, Aretha Franklin, Paul McCartney, the Jayhawks, Scrap Metal (in preparation for Broome), Crowded House, the Pretenders, the Hoodoo Gurus—a bagful of melodies in a landscape that went on forever.

  The girls each kept a journal detailing things of interest they spotted along the way: the huge expanse of flinty, treeless plains that make up the Pitjantjatjara lands; crossing the border as an albino dingo scurried behind the ‘Welcome to Western Australia’ sign which was covered in graffiti and surrounded by abandoned car bodies; a sole Japanese cyclist wearing a rising-sun bandana—not an especially wise choice of headgear—completely covered in dust and sunburned deep red, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, saddle bags swaying as he pedalled along in the dirt. Whatever my daughters decided to do with their lives, I hoped rough jaunts like this would go into their memory banks to be drawn on, if only for a laugh, in the coming years.

  There’s good light in Broome, according to Warumpi Band guitarist Neil Murray, as I’d come to appreciate on my earlier visits. The scale of the town felt right to me, as Broome sits on the rim of a massive desert and gorge region. On an unhurried holiday its charms seemed even more radiant, although we weren’t the first to appreciate its delights by any stretch. Only five years before, English property developer Lord McAlpine, who doubled for a period as a political adviser to Margaret Thatcher, happened on the Kimberley and returned, armed with a sizeable piggy bank, to build hotels, buy up houses and drag the picturesque outpost into the spotlight. Now Broome was being discovered, as tourist promotions and double-page spreads in newspaper travel sections e
xtolled the town’s delights.

  We hooked up with Damian Trotter and his son from the Balgowlah days. Dames then worked for Sony, which had taken over CBS Records. He was a laidback, wry travelling companion who came armed with a swag of new music. Our now overloaded vehicle lurched up to Cape Leveque as we explored the coast and tried out a few of the locally run camping grounds. It was so low key we almost disappeared off the map. The slow rhythm of the days—a giant meditation on family and place—meant our sojourn was turning into one of the best trips ever.

  Eventually we quit boab country, farewelling Damian, and drove across to Darwin, on the way checking in at one of the leading tourist spots, Katherine Gorge, in Nitmiluk National Park. In rugged sandstone country, Katherine is one of the best-known and biggest of the water-filled gorges that dot the Top End.

  Up to this point, I’d usually managed to find a quiet out-of-the-way spot in which to throw down the swags, but increasing numbers of fences and ‘Private Property—Keep Out!’ signs meant the official camping ground was the only option. I’d been cramming in the sights, wanting us to see as much as possible, and so by the time we arrived at dusk, the area set aside for camping was chock-full of grey nomads, retirees taking their time to potter across Australia. Trailers, multi-roomed tents and swish caravans, some with TV aerials, had claimed nearly every inch of space, and so we ended up on a low piece of ground in a far corner—exposed and vulnerable if it rained. In the background, the hum of generators, partly masked by the bland lilt of muzak, drowned out the calls of the park’s unique birdlife.