Jim Moginie book review: The Silver River, Midnight Oil and an adoptee’s questions
Jim Moginie was aged 11 when he learned that truth. One afternoon, while on a ship from Tasmania returning to the mainland, his mother found him playing with the on-board water dispensers.
If you were raised in a loving environment by your birth parents, attempting to put yourself inside the upbringing of someone who was adopted is as challenging and alien an experience as can be imagined.
By definition, adopted children are both outcasts and outsiders, no matter how warm the relationship they share with their adopted parents and family members. The knowledge of their origin, when learned, can cause a psychic rift that lasts as long as a lifetime.
If you are adopted and decide to write a book about your life, the first and most difficult hurdle to overcome is this: how do you explain what it feels like to the rest of us?
How do you render the internal torment and unresolved questions that spring, naturally and spontaneously, from learning the truth of where you came from?
Jim Moginie was aged 11 when he learned that truth. One afternoon, while on a ship from Tasmania returning to the mainland, his mother found him playing with the on-board water dispensers.
The boy was obsessed by these machines. He remembers the shiny blue button that, when pressed, caused liquid to flow into indigo-coloured paper cups embossed with a logo that included a yellow ship’s wheel.
He remembers this scene in vivid detail because for some reason, his mum picked this maritime journey as the moment to shatter his established sense of identity.
“Jamie. I have to tell you something. You’re adopted,” she said. The boy fiddled with the little cups. “Are you OK?” she asked. He nodded, not meeting her eyes, still fiddling with the cups, and she walked off.
“There was no lightning bolt or trumpet voluntary, but questions began to scamper through my mind,” he writes. “Why did my people give me away? Was there something wrong with me? Did they give me away without a fight? Wasn’t I good enough for them? I probably deserved to be abandoned. I felt like a fake, a mistake ... No questions were asked by me or explanations offered by my parents then, or for many of the years that followed. All I knew was that I had to get on board with the new paradigm.”
Moginie has long since become globally famous for fiddling with other machines: musical instruments, chiefly guitars and keyboards, as a co-founder of the Sydney-born rock ‘n’ roll band Midnight Oil.
The multi-instrumentalist is not the quietest member of the Oils – that mantle belongs to his fellow guitarist Martin Rotsey, who rarely speaks in public – but he has never been one to draw attention to himself, either. Perhaps this is because he was positioned between singer Peter Garrett and drummer Rob Hirst, two of the most articulate and charismatic musicians to have emerged from the primordial swamp of Oz rock.
It is that band’s long and colourful history that acts as the diesel engine powering Moginie’s memoir, The Silver River. The significance of whose title only becomes clear near the very end, when he makes a connection to his birth family’s roots near a river in Ireland.
For both casual and hardcore Midnight Oil fans, there is plenty enough musical meat on the bone here to sustain interest across The Silver River.
Relatively early into the band’s existence – after Moginie and Hirst had recruited a line-up that formed a five-piece fronted by Garrett – he makes this observation: “We had no time for the romance surrounding bands who wanted to be chic, take drugs, live in Melbourne squats or aspired to appear in indie films. F..k that. We had a team ethos and were willing to do whatever it took.”
In 1984, when he watched as Garrett almost became a Senator as a candidate for the Nuclear Disarmament Party, he noted how the wind had changed as far as wider public perceptions of the group were concerned.
“Midnight Oil were now a political entity in the eyes of the media,” he wrote. “I was happy enough to be behind the scenes and make the music as good as I could ... To me the world of politics appeared transient, alien and bereft, whereas a good song could live forever. Even so, I understood that to ignore the imperfect world of politics was to give up hope in humanity. Pete was born to it. Democracy is optimism in the face of despair.”
He writes movingly of the transformational experience the band undertook on its Western Desert/Top End tour into Aboriginal Australia in 1986, and how he has always considered his life split into two parts: before that trip, and after it.
What they saw, heard and felt there fed into the songs that became Diesel and Dust, the 1987 album that put the band on the world’s stage for the first time. The author admits that drinking became a coping mechanism as the pressure increased.
“There’s a line I was treading between feeling good and becoming a rock cliche, but it wasn’t possible to perform our music high on anything,” he writes. “I was playing guitar and keyboards simultaneously like an octopus to replicate the more layered sound of our recent records and would never allow myself to miss a cue.”
He found that success morphed into a trap of a different sort: once you’re in a hot band, the machinery of the record industry assembles itself around you to keep the temperature high for as long as possible, which often means long months on the road, estrangement from family and friends back home, and a desperation to escape.
Underpinning all of this was the musician’s upbringing, the truth he learned midway between Tasmania and mainland Australia, and those unresolved questions that had been preoccupying him since he was 11.
By 1994, eight albums into the band’s career, “I saw that I had abandoned my wife and children to go on an odyssey to conquer the world,” he writes. “I was now 38 and increasingly disconnected from my family. I couldn’t see myself at all. I’d never really known who I was. Was I the estranged adopted adolescent at school, the infant left in an orphanage?”
Eventually, Moginie reconnects with his birth mother and father, and meets his extended family, which includes five full-blooded brothers and sisters, with 11 kids between them.
These scenes of reunion are rendered tenderly, with great care and affection.
Of the day he met his mum, Moginie writes: “This was the person who had given me life 46 years before. But all I’d had until now was her name and vital signs recorded on those impersonal birth records. She was shivering, a bird fluttering. I walked up the path with eyes locked on hers and hers on mine. There seemed to be light radiating out of her in all directions.”
Most musicians of a certain stature to have achieved a certain level of global fame can punch out a book that sustains a narrative of their life in and around the spotlight, like a trench coat hung on a mannequin.
Those sorts of formulaic memoirs are commonplace, and populate the shelves at airport bookstores and beyond, if only for a few weeks around their release before heading for the remainders bin.
What elevates Moginie’s memoir onto a rare plane of literary achievement and impact is the quiet, calm and tentative manner by which he is able to translate adoption – that most alien of human experiences – into a form that can be easily perceived, understood and felt by the rest of us. It is a patient work of great beauty, and its final sentence is breathtaking.
Andrew McMillen is The Australian’s music writer, and the author of Talking Smack: Honest Conversations About Drugs (2014, UQP).
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