So, you’ve seen what I think about the songs of our nation and what they say about us. But what do you think? What songs did I miss – or get wrong?
Let me know.
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In an earlier installment of this series, I mentioned Cold Chisel’s “One Long Day”, which I find myself terribly sorry there wasn’t a place in this list. But I promised myself only one Chisel song, and as brilliant as that one is, it loses out to “Bow River”. They both have a similar subject matter, but one is a mellow bluesy piece and the other one is rock’n'roll – no contest, really. Urbanisation is a fact of life in this country, particularly when you look at how many of us live in our cities compared to the vast expanses of rural land and wilderness that make up our nation. Cities, as I’ve already noted, force us into contact with each other, and where there’s contact, there’s friction. And cities also have their own traditions and feelings associated with them. As Cold Chisel put it in “Flame Trees”: ‘we share some history, this town and I, and I can’t stop that long-forgotten feeling…‘ Possibly the most fundamental conflict in Australian society – more than any question of morality or ethics – is one particular social divide. It’s the one that lies between the two groups characterised by TISM as the yobboes and the wankers. Between the university-educated and the trade-school-educated; between the book reading and the Herald-Sun reading; between chardonay and beer drinkers. It had already been a long voyage – the Endeavour had been at sea since August 1768 – when the eastern coast of Australia was first sighted. Lieutenant Hicks made the sighting, and Cook named the point he had discovered in Hicks’ honour. Point Hicks is located near the eastern extremity of the state of Victoria, between Orbost and Mallacoota. Although he had been aiming for Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Cook quickly realised that he had found a separate landmass to the north of it, based on the the south-westerly trend of the coastline away from Point Hicks. From here, Cook and his crew proceeded northward along the coast of Australia. Ten days later, he made his famous landing at Botany Bay and encountered the Australian natives for the first time (members of the Gweagal tribe) – although from observations of their many campfires, Cook had been aware of them (and presumably, they of him) for several days by that ppint. Referenced in: Solid Rock — Goanna
I doubt that Garry Frost and Frances Swan intended to create the absolute anthem of the Howard years when they set out to write “What About Me?” but they succeeded admirably. For song inspired originally by empathy for “a little boy waiting at the counter of the corner shop”, it became the absolute opposite: to most people listening to the song, it invokes little more than their own sense of self pity. To most of Australia, this song is one the few really well-known flower child anthems. It represents free love and hippie shit and all that. The other side of the Sixties from songs about Vietnam. There are other songs that deal with the life and leisure of the working class – “Friday On My Mind” by the Easybeats, for example, or the execrable “Working Class Man” by Jimmy Barnes – but none of them capture the sense of the treadmill that is the working week as well as this song does. “Still Hanging Round” is an anthem of the pointlessness of it all, both of working and of what we work for, of the fact that Friday nights spent drinking are not sufficient reward for Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays spent working. And yet, the song seems to ask, what else is there? It’s a seven day long cycle that never seems to change, and who has the time, the money, the imagination and the will to break out of it? What sets this song above most others of its ilk is the fact that it does not counsel going along with this state of affairs. Where the Easybeats and Barnes each in their own way seem to accept an underpaid working week as the normal state of affairs, Marc Seymour (lead singer and lyrcist) refuses to. He proposes no alternative, to be sure, but at least he asks the question – could it be different and better? (On this level, its closest competitor is Cold Chisel’s superb “One Long Day” – but I’ll talk more about that in a later post.) This is an overlooked song in the Hunters & Collectors output, mostly, one suspects, because most people don’t look below the surface and lump it in with those other songs I’ve mentioned above. But if “Say Goodnight”, “Holy Grail” and “When The River Runs Dry” show the band for the poets of the working class they surely are, it’s “Still Hanging Round” that really demonstrates those class credentials. The Vietnam War didn’t get nearly as much play in Australian media as it did in American, but those occasions when it did come up tended to pack a punch. The 1983 Australian Federal election was a smashing victory for the Australian Labor Party under Bob Hawke – which, as displaced ALP leader Bill Hayden commented, could have been led by a drover’s dog and still won. Sour grapes aside, the election was significant in that it ended 8 years of Liberal-National Coalition government, and also in that Hawke would go on to become the longest-serving ALP Prime Minister in Australian history. His right hand man, a tall fella named Paul Keating – a ten year veteran of Federal Parliament and a notorious smart-arse – would become Treasurer of Australia in Hawke’s new Cabinet, and preside over a tumultuous but overall successful period of dramatic economic reform. Referenced in: My Right Hand Man — Keating! The Musical original cast
Not actually written by a naturalised Australian rather than a native born one, Eric Bogle’s “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” grapples with the conflicting nobility and futility of war, with the ANZAC landings at Gallipolli and their annual commemoration as its particular focus. The incredible power of its simplicity and sentiments can be seen in how widely it has been covered – and the fact that not a few of those who cover it have no idea who wrote it, believing it to be a traditional folk song. Scottish-born Bogle moved to Australia when he was 25, and fell in love with the country – although his song-writing reflects the conflicting impulses that love arouses in him: pride in our acheivements and frustration with our national failings. His fierce idealism is tempered by an active sense of humour and a love of silliness, all three of which are features of many of his songs (albeit the first rarely found with the latter two). More than forty years after leaving Scotland, Bogle still has a strong accent, and like most Celts, a profound distrust for Saxons and Normans. Questioning the point of war is a common theme in Bogle’s work, with “No Man’s Land” a similar questioning of World War One in general, and “My Youngest Son Came Home Today” doing the same for the Troubles in Northern Island. He also has a great sympathy for the plight of the Australian farmer, as seen in “Now I’m Easy” and “Tenterfield Saddler” (the latter of which is about the grandfather and father of Peter Allan, and the quiet tragedies of their lives). Bogle has also taken potshots at Australian racism in “I Hate Wogs” (it’s not what you think from the title). For a man not born here, he gets Australia in a way that many who were do not. “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” is one man’s tale of naively volunteering for the Great War, getting both his legs blown off, and wondering why in Hell we celebrate as the birth of our nation a defeat created by our supposed superiors in the Mother Country. It was written long before the Howard years – in 1971, leading some to see it as a Vietnam allegory – and the glorification of the legend of ANZAC, but listening to it, it’s hard not to hear the song as a reaction to little Johnny’s aping of the 1915 British High Command. The convict era is not one of the brighter parts of our past, but for some reason, it’s one of the ones we’ve most chosen to romanticise, even though we have a pretty good idea of the truth behind it. Weddings, Parties, Anything’s classic song retells the story of one of the most infamous Australian convicts, Alexander Pearce (although curiously, the song never names him) from his own point of view. And in doing so, it shows us a microcosm of everything about the convict era. Pearce and his companions break free of their imprisonment in Macquarie Harbour, a lonely outpost on the western coast of Tasmania, and make a perilous journey across an uncharted and untamed wilderness to Hobart. The wilderness we’re discussing here is south-west Tasmania, still a wilderness even today. The men travel on, running out of alternatives for food until finally cannibalism is the only solution. After repeated incidents, it is only Pearce who survives to make his way to Hobart, where he tells his tale to the authorities after being arrested. They assume he is lying, and send him back to Macquarie Harbour – where a species of proof eventually comes to light, as Pearce has developed a taste for cannibalism now… The starkness of the wilderness, the isolation of Australia, the ever-present risk of starvation – and the thought that “death or liberty” are the only choices, and either of them better than imprisonment – are all very characteristic of the convict experience. No less so is the refusal of the authorities to listen to the truth if it will not conform to their prejudices – a quality which is regrettably still quite visible in our politics even today. And the simple-minded dream of freedom, of a better life anywhere but here… …this too remains a profound, if rarely acknowledged, part of the Australian psyche. |
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