Howard’s obduracy in refusing to countenance the claims of Aboriginal people stemmed the surge. He was like King Canute trying to hold back the waves, claiming at one point that reconciliation in the form of a treaty could lead to large payouts to Aboriginal people from the public purse. It was an utterly immoral position and futile to boot, considering the clarion call for acknowledgement and justice the previous prime minister, Paul Keating, had made in his historic speech in Redfern Park in 1992.
Seven years after the bridge walks and a host of associated events, when I was an MP, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took a positive step towards reconciliation with an apology to the Stolen Generations in the first year of the new Labor government. Despite my long association with Aboriginal people and the reconciliation movement, Rudd didn’t bother to include me in any of the meetings and proceedings that surrounded the event. I was bemused by the oversight—deliberate or otherwise—as I’d already served as shadow parliamentary secretary for reconciliation. This was a common trait in the parliamentary wing of the Labor Party: you don’t advantage a colleague unless you owe them, they bully you, or because the factional position they occupy means they have to be accommodated. I contented myself with handshakes and hugs with the elders I knew who had been invited to sit in the House of Representatives chamber, where alongside former prime ministers Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating, MPs listened to a speech that was the best of Rudd’s leadership by a country mile.
The symbolism of these reconciliation events was important. They were visual, collective strikes into the popular consciousness, while the hard work continued in the background: processing native title claims, ongoing efforts to improve Indigenous health and education, creating space for economic activity and jobs, and, crucially, adding measures that would enable a greater degree of self-determination and local control.
…
The struggle in Australia to achieve reconciliation at the end of the millennium echoed a struggle for justice that had played out earlier in the decade as we watched and hoped and agitated for a safe transition to a multiracial democracy and the end of apartheid in South Africa.
At the height of the struggle, I went with friends to hear the African National Congress leader Oliver Tambo address a crowd of fervent supporters at Sydney’s Trades Hall. Asked to explain the success of the campaign for equality in such difficult circumstances—armed struggle, riots, leaders jailed—Tambo replied with three words: ‘Organise, organise, organise.’
So determined and inspiring from afar were those campaigners—most conspicuously Nelson Mandela—that not even the most stubborn conservative politician could hold the gates closed on a multiracial polity forever. Still, like British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, whom he greatly admired, John Howard, before he secured the prime ministership, refused to support sanctions against the apartheid regime and did virtually nothing to bring it to a close.
The Oils finally visited South Africa towards the end of 1994, following Mandela’s election as president. It was a time of both exhilaration and sober appraisal of the task that lay ahead.
I stood for hours at the window of my Cape Town hotel looking across the harbour to Robben Island, where Mandela had spent much of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment. Sixteen floors below me, black taxi drivers sat on crates and boxes playing cards, as the lights twinkled in the gated estates nestled under Table Mountain. Having organised, the new government would now have to ‘educate, educate, educate’, to give the many impoverished young South Africans any chance of building a new life at all.
Meanwhile, the concerts, some with Sting and Johnny Clegg, a prominent South African singer-songwriter and advocate, were joyous affairs. For the first time, local audiences, both black and white, were listening to performers whose music they knew well (though they had never before had the opportunity to see them live) and who had, in some way or other, expressed support for a multiracial South Africa.
Along with millions around the world, we’d been waiting for this moment to come. In the mid-1980s, the Special AKA had released a single, ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, which went top ten in the UK. Following this, Steven ‘Little Steven’ Van Zandt, from Bruce Springsteen’s band, called to ask if I’d do some vocals on a track he’d written called ‘Sun City’. The chorus—‘I ain’t gonna play Sun City’—referred to a casino-hotel complex in South Africa where international acts were paid big money to play to select audiences as a way of legitimising the whites-only stance of the regime. It was a con, and yet performers like Queen and Rod Stewart had played there, giving the racist government a fig leaf of legitimacy.
The Oils were transiting through LA at the time so I took a detour and drove up to Jackson Browne’s house in the Hollywood Hills mid-afternoon, said hello to his girlfriend of the time, Daryl Hannah—sans make-up and famous-actress airs—and squeezed into his tiny home studio for a couple of run-throughs.
Van Zandt had asked numerous artists, including Browne, to perform and Run DMC, Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, U2, Bonnie Raitt and Miles Davis were already on board. There were only two lines of verse to sing plus a bit of scatting over the outro and, as sometimes happens when you’re fresh and you get lucky, it went down in one take. It took ten minutes, but could have been a lot longer if I’d missed the first pass.
The engineer was still sorting the mix and phoning New York to play it to producer Arthur Baker as I headed out the door to catch a plane home. With the fate of Nelson Mandela, then still in jail, starting to make front pages everywhere, I hoped this noisy declaration would push the temperature a little higher.
…
It may seem like an obvious thing to say, but I’ve always lived and loved music. I feel a stirring in my gut when the notes ring out, when the rhythm locks in and a song begins. At the same time, I don’t believe that music, by itself, changes the world. It’s people who make the changes—for better and for worse.
Music can be the soundtrack for the big issues of the times. It can be a powerful partner, providing the callout that a greater mass can respond to. Music can provide an emotional touchstone that sums up a mood or inspires a change in thinking. But by itself music doesn’t do the job of getting on the right side of history. While a world without music would be a barren, soulless place, it is people, through their sweat and commitment and sacrifice, who make the difference. Mandela didn’t have a tape recorder in his prison cell. He had a conviction he was prepared to die for, and those who worked with him, both in South Africa and in exile, along with supporters in other countries, spent long, difficult years bringing that issue home. The musicians’ efforts were an opportunity to join in and lend a voice to a worthwhile cause. Of course it helps to have songs that hit the mark, songs that you can sing along to, but music by itself doesn’t do the hard yards.
And so we found ourselves on the back of a truck on the streets of New York, interrupting the lunch hour in Midtown Manhattan with ‘Midnight Oil makes you dance, Exxon makes us sick’ after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on the Alaskan coastline in 1989, spilling millions of gallons of oil in one of the worst environmental disasters in history. People poured out of office blocks to see what was happening and stayed for the entire performance. The streets were closed, while the blinds were drawn in the Exxon building opposite.
Or deep in the forests of British Columbia at Clayoquot Sound, where several hundred activists had blockaded a clearcut. With a backdrop of amputated giant cedar and spruce trees, we played a concert that was broadcast uninterrupted across Canada.
As we were leaving the forest clearing, crossing over a small timber bridge, a group of burly loggers surrounded our van and started rocking it from side to side. Luckily they lacked either the strength or the resolve to tip us into the ravine below. Bones was filming the panic from inside the van on a hand-held video camera, and maybe that or the increasingly shrill cries from Jim’s wife of ‘Stop it, stop it! We’re going to die!’ gave the loggers pause.
Eventually a n
ew Native American Indian forest company instituted a much lighter cutting regimen, and in 2000 Clayoquot was declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
And then at the closing of the Sydney 2000 Olympics . . .
Years of culture jamming meant we were well prepared for this one and we were united in wanting to give expression to what, by our reckoning, was a giant log stuck in the eye of the leader of the nation.
We now knew a bit about the past, that the time for a fresh start had come. There was at last a growing movement for reconciliation with the First Peoples of the country—not on the scale of the struggle against apartheid maybe, but in our part of the world, equally important. Yet we had a prime minister who couldn’t bring himself to apologise for the hurt that every single Aboriginal person had suffered, to make space for some healing.
We ended up hightailing it back out to Papunya, in the Western Desert, where Warumpi Band guitarist Sammy Butcher lived and where, as a band, we’d last visited fourteen years before. Gary came too, and we camped on the side of a stony hill, looking out across the purple MacDonnell Ranges, sitting around a fire—out of range and out of mind—and talked through how to get it done: which words to use, which song to sing, what to wear, how to prepare and keep the surprise action under wraps for the night.
On the way back we played a wild night at the Todd Tavern at Alice Springs with local band Nokturnl. The audience was delirious with grog and excitement, and after logging thousands of kilometres in three days, we were delirious too. The smell of bodies—black and white, some of which hadn’t seen a shower in weeks—dust and beer and desert air clung to our clothes all the way back to Sydney.
I called Mandawuy Yunupingu to touch base. Yothu Yindi would also be at the closing ceremony, performing the hit song ‘Treaty’, a potent attack on the failure of an earlier prime minister, Bob Hawke, to honour his promise to begin treaty negotiations. They may have thoughts about how they wanted to present themselves and a view about the Oils’ proposal, and they did—‘Go for it!’
We would be playing to over 2 billion people, at that time the largest global audience in history, so it was critical everything was in place before the lights went up. We expected the director of the TV broadcast, David Atkins, would probably guess the Oils would try something on, and so the outline of the plan would have to be shared with him—the cameras had to come in close. Otherwise it was a closely guarded secret.
The dress rehearsals were a simple matter. I was away at the time and the band showed up in black overalls and went through the motions, accompanied by much official head-nodding.
On a balmy Sydney evening in October 2000, the Olympic complex was alive with an expectant crowd. Our stage manager, Michael Lippold, blocked the dressing-room door as we geared up, first one pair of black overalls emblazoned with ‘Sorry’, sewn in white in different places, and over those overalls a second plain pair. We did a quick undress rehearsal and timed how long it would take to get the second pair off—about ten seconds.
As we stand in the race with a loud hum coursing through the building and around the stands, the Olympics official party, with President Juan Antonio Samaranch in their midst, sweeps past, all smiles—the Sydney games have been judged a success. But there’s just one thing.
‘Midnight Oil, one minute!’ shouts the marshal. After silently counting down for 50 seconds we start undoing the buttons, casually. I step out of the first pair of overalls and hand them to the unsmiling detective assigned to keep an eye on us, standing next to me in the race. ‘Can you mind these for me, please?’
And then out we jog, across the sports field and onto a high stage, with the giant props—goolies, cartoon figures, weird space ships—made by Reg Mombassa (our old touring comrade from Mental as Anything) swaying over us.
The boys are miming in case the wind blows an amp over, but the vocals are live. I glance across the massed spectacle as the first three chords of ‘Beds’ sound out: E, G, A.
Athletes from all around the ground charge towards our stage, waving their national flags and jigging furiously.
There’s a split second of calm as the sound revs up, the giant screens flicker to life and then, with a roar, the entire crowd is on its feet.
Everyone, that is, except Prime Minister John Howard and his wife, and the governor-general, Sir William Deane, and Mrs Deane; Deane, one of our most compassionate elders, is obliged to sit solemnly alongside one of the worst deniers of our history while a stadium full of people dance and sing around them.
Back in the green room we caught our breath, towelling ourselves dry as the hubbub died away. On the opposite side of the room other performers were sitting quietly having a drink. Slim Dusty, still wearing his Akubra bush hat, was there with his wife Joy and a few members of his band. They had also been part of the closing ceremony’s entertainment. He looked across, nodded his head slightly, and then gave the double thumbs-up—we’d passed the Slim test at least.
We’d decided that I wouldn’t go out the next day and add to the gesture with endless media interviews, unless it was needed. In the event it was, but only for a brief rejoinder to Howard. The prime minister made it clear on morning radio that he was ‘disappointed’ by the performance. This wasn’t an occasion for mixing politics and sport, he chided.
The last time Australians heard these words was during the apartheid era, when the South African rugby team came to play. When people spoke out against the tour they were criticised for mixing sport and politics. Twenty-three years later, Nelson Mandela was elected the first president of a multiracial South Africa.
23
INTO THE RING
THE ANSWER TO the question of which was more important, the music or the politics, had, up to now, been easy to answer—they came together. I’d poured into both as much energy as I could summon. Enervating, exasperating, exhausting—strapped into the rocket, the journey had been a blast.
Now, in the music world, we were in a state of suspended animation. When we came off the road to activist politics, by contrast, there was a lot happening and it looked like things would only speed up from this point on. It wasn’t as if I was torn between the two vocations; rather, the gravitational pull of requests, new campaigns, ACF business and associated work just kept getting stronger.
The 2002 run Midnight Oil did around Australia before I finally said goodbye to the band distilled some of the elements of my predicament.
Returning to venues we’d played twenty years before—Revesby Workers’ Club, Manly and Parramatta leagues clubs, the Darwin Botanic Gardens—was a reminder of how tricky it can be to keep things fresh when the setting is so familiar.
Activist groups setting up in the foyer of a big room we performed at in downtown Perth, and then crashing backstage to continue the conversation about the future of Ningaloo Reef, the home of the Great Whale Shark.
Flying across from Emerald to Rockhampton in Central Queensland in a tatty twin-engine aircraft, only to discover later that Gary had asked for the ‘cheapest’ charter.
Launching the new Northern Australia office for the ACF the night after a steamy Cairns gig in another blighted footy club full of pokies. There, pressed against the stage, was Margaret Thorsborne, the seventy-year-old conservationist who’d fought off the developers near Hinchinbrook Island and was now in danger of getting trampled by the young men around her. I spent half the night willing them to notice her.
Nearly walking on water at the Forum in Melbourne as we lifted off, and went higher than ever before, and the sound was so ripe you could taste it and it made you swallow hard, and the crowd, the names and faces of the front row as familiar as extended family, which was what they’d become, refusing to let us leave the stage.
I’d already told the Oils I wanted to move on. I wasn’t the only one who’d considered getting out—just about everyone had countenanced pulling up stakes at one point or other—but I’d been holding back, acutely aware of the weight of a decision that would affect a lot of people a
nd bring something too special for words to a halt. It ended up happening by phone, which was not the best way, but no one would have been surprised.
We played our final two shows at Twin Towns Services Club, on the border of New South Wales and Queensland. At the last minute, Jim and Martin decided they would do the set lists. We would play two songs from each album, starting at the ‘Blue Meanie’ (the name fans had given to the first album, because of the LP’s blue cover). I managed to record the experience in a few lines in the diary, noting that it was ‘still exhilarating to hear the brash explosiveness of the early songs, compared with the more steadied craft of the later’.
It’s an iron law of rock that fans say: ‘I like your old stuff better than your new stuff.’ Except this judgement isn’t about the quality of the songs; it’s about memories. ‘Star of Hope’ from Capricornia or ‘Concrete’ from Redneck Wonderland are of equal weight to ‘Back on the Borderline’ from Head Injuries or ‘Bullroarer’ from Diesel and Dust. Except they don’t carry as many associated experiences for listeners because they arrived when everyone, band and audience, had a few more years under their belts. When you’re young and chafing at the bit and you fasten on to a song, nothing a band does later will come close. That song partnered your salad days, when you were experiencing the tribulations and ecstasies of growing up, and it will always sound better than anything that follows. Your memories are vivid and you still want to hear that song years from then, and remember—that’s an iron law of getting older.
On the final night we finished a four-song encore with ‘Redneck Wonderland’. What more was there to say? The audience was morose, confused, and the two Capricornia songs marked for a possible second encore remain unplayed—‘A metaphor for the career,’ said Jim. Afterwards, we hung around till late, talking and drinking beer.
The next day I flew down to Melbourne for ACF executive and council meetings, while the band flew back to Sydney and the crew, with trucks full of gear, wended their way down the coast for the last time.
Big Blue Sky Page 28