Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil to perform at WOMADelaide
Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil have been pushing for social change for decades. Now, they have a a new check list for society as they start a national tour.
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Peter Garrett agrees that the rhyming lyrics of First Nation, the opening song on Midnight Oil’s new mini-album collaboration with Indigenous artists, read like a “to-do” list for Australia: Explanation, invitation, conversation, compensation, reconciliation.
“There are a whole lot of things there that we talk about, that we read about, that we hear about, but they haven’t been attended to. The housekeeping hasn’t been done,” he says.
Garrett remains the gentle giant of Australian rock – despite his imposing 193cm frame and martial-arts like stage movements – as softly spoken and considerate as he is passionate about issues ranging from Aboriginal rights to the environment.
“We were just pretty unaware, middle-class white kids from Sydney, from the beaches and from the suburbs,” he says of the band’s origins in the late 1970s.
“Suddenly we were drawn into this other slipstream, which opened up our minds and our eyes and got us thinking.”
After a nearly 20-year absence from recording studios, the Oils decided to put down some new material after their 2017 international reunion tour.
The sessions resulted in not one, but two new bodies of work. The Makarrata Project, which features collaborations with Indigenous artists including Jessica Mauboy, Kev Carmody and the late Gurrumul Yunupingu, was released last October and will be followed by another, as-yet-untitled album later this year.
“Then the question arises of how and where to play it?” Garrett, now 67, says.
In response, Midnight Oil will perform not one, but two very different concerts at WOMADelaide as part of this year’s Adelaide Festival. On the Saturday, the band will play an exclusive set of its greatest hits.
That will be followed on the Monday by Makarrata Live, with special First Nations guests including singer-songwriters Alice Skye and Leah Flanagan, hip-hop rapper Tasman Keith, guitarist Dan Sultan, country star Troy Cassar-Daly and Bunna Lawrie from groundbreaking South Australian band Coloured Stone.
“WOMAD is such a natural fit for that, in as much as the commitment to world music … I’ve been as a punter there a couple of times as well and just really, really loved it,” Garrett says.
“Why not do an Oils thing as well, and really turn it into something quite special – make the whole WOMAD weekend into something where we get to spend as much time on stage as possible.”
Some of the material on The Makarrata Project had either been floating around in the individual band member’s heads or on past solo projects, and was reshaped with the new collaborators.
“When you’ve got a song which hasn’t quite landed, which is about Australia’s pre-colonial history or your experiences and interactions and connections with Aboriginal Australia, for the song to be real nowadays – given all the material that we have recorded in past – it became pretty obvious to us that the only way these songs were going to essentially justify their own existence was to have First Nations voices and performances on them,” Garrett says.
“There just wasn’t any other way to do them. We could have had a crack at them – but I don’t think they would have been anywhere near as strong or as poignant.”
Making those connections with Indigenous Australia had been a central part of Midnight Oil’s career and “our learning experience as Australians”.
“This time, the message had to be that we’re not going to speak for people … people will speak for themselves, and we will join with them.”
Garrett says that is not just because of greater awareness and concern about cultural appropriation.
“That’s part of it – although we’ve always been very mindful of those issues,” he says.
“I think the other part of it is that, it doesn’t matter from which point of the compass you come at it, the centrality of Aboriginal ownership and occupation of the continent, and the failure to properly recognise and take that into account in modern Australia, is unfinished business.
“If you are going to sing songs about it, then part of illustrating that aspect of our own history is to begin doing it hand-in-hand with our First Nations colleagues.”
Rock music put itself into the political arena in the 1980s, with artists like Live Aid organiser Bob Geldof and U2 singer Bono not only preaching from the stage but actually meeting with popes and presidents.
The Oils went on to famously perform outside Exxon’s headquarters in New York City in 1990, in protest at the petroleum company’s spill which had devastated the Alaskan environment a year before.
In 2004, Garrett made his full-time move into federal politics as a member of the Labor Party, winning the safe NSW seat of Kingsford Smith and going on to hold shadow and later Minister portfolios for the environment, arts and education during the next nine years.
Despite controversies, including what many saw as being made a scapegoat by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd over the Home Insulation Program scandal, Garrett says that effecting real change from within the party political system was not more difficult than he had previously thought.
“No, it was pretty much as imagined. Essentially, behind the banner headlines, in the nuts and bolts of parliamentary work, I think both governments – but especially the Gillard government and the work that I was a part of – will be seen in the light of history as having been pretty productive years.
“That doesn’t mean to say that everything I personally wanted to see happen, did happen. But certainly, there is enough … to make me value really highly the decade or so I spent in mainstream politics.
“I was very mindful that it’s not Hollywood, it’s not a game show, it’s not subject to the same whims and vagaries that … you may or may not want to say or do in entertainment. It’s a team sport, and only as good as when all the members play as team members. I was willing to do that, for that period of time. I’ve absolutely no regrets.”
However, Garrett is once again enjoying the freedom that the stage gives performers as a platform.
“In some instances, we (artists) can use the stage as a megaphone to express ideas, imagination, poetry, calls for action, political comment, whatever we wish.
“Business of government naturally involves taxpayers’ money, it’s a much more formalised, process-driven, big, lumbering thing. Putting the pressure on and trying to get stuff done is by no means easy.”
Garrett says there has been change, and “greater levels of awareness and understanding” about the plight of Indigenous Australians in the 30 years since Midnight Oil recorded songs like Beds Are Burning and Truganini.
“(There is) much greater prominence of First Nations’ voices in art and sport and politics, and increasing recognition of the need for a voice to parliament – constitutional recognition – and to empower First Nations communities to have control over their own destiny.
“But – and it’s a big capital B – statistically not enough has changed.
“Far too high numbers of young Aboriginal people are finding themselves unnecessarily incarcerated and in jail, and residual hostile and subliminal racist attitudes – as witnessed in the latest Collingwood Football Club saga – are still lurking around.
“This is where leadership in the country becomes the crucial component, in lifting Australia to the best place that it can be, by coming to a proper accommodation with its past.”
That is one of the key reasons why Midnight Oil included the Uluru Statement from the Heart, read by prominent Indigenous voices, on The Makarrata Project.
“We felt that Aboriginal people have produced a really compelling, poignant and deeply constructive – as well as challenging – document for the country. It’s one that we should be able to rise to, because we are at that point where we can’t continue to simply talk about these issues any longer – we must act upon them.”
Midnight Oil plays WOMADelaide at King Rodney Park on March 6 and 8. womadelaide.com.au
National tour dates at midnightoil.com/tour
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