Goanna teams up with Bob Brown Foundation to release song about the Tarkine

They haven’t released a single for 25 years, but now Australian band Goanna have a new song, and it’s a love letter to the Tasmanian wilderness. HEAR THE SONG >>

Australian songwriter Shane Howard – best known for Goanna’s anthemic Solid Rock which dealt with Indigenous land rights – is taking up the fight for Tasmania’s Tarkine wilderness.

Howard, the band’s lead singer, said ‘takayna’ was about the forest being under threat from logging and mining.

“40 years ago, I came to Tasmania and was so deeply moved by its natural wonder and awe inspiring majesty that I wrote ‘Let The Franklin Flow’,” Howard said.

“40 years later, the sheer breathtaking beauty of takayna moved me to write this new song and record it with Goanna.

Bob Brown with Shane Howard of band Goanna ahead of the Tarkine song launch. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

“It’s a hymn to the natural world and to palawa/pakana peoples long custodianship of country. “It’s also a cautionary tale in this era of climate change and continuing deforestation, of the need to pause and re-evaluate.”

The release of the song comes as Bob Brown protesters fight mining company MMG, which plans to build a waste storage dam in the tarkine for the Rosebery Mine.

“There are alternative ways of dealing with mine ‘tailings’ that will protect jobs, without building a 48 metre high dam of toxic acid right beside a magnificent river in pristine forest,” Howard said.

“Federal Environment Minister Plibersek has the power to act and protect.

“We have to fight like hell. We have to give our young people hope. The campaign to protect takayna is this generation’s Franklin River.”

Environmentalist Bob Brown said the song was a “good omen” for the Tarkine.

“40 years on, may it work the same magic as Shane Howard’s ‘Let the Franklin Flow’ did in raising everyone’s spirits as we battled to successfully save the Franklin,” he said.

Originally published as Goanna teams up with Bob Brown Foundation to release song about the Tarkine