While far from universally known, some of my songs and poems are fairly well known around some folk music circles around Australia, particularly among those who like political music. Some are rowdy and raucous and quite politically pointed ('ANZAC Day', 'Boring yuppie fuck', 'Monuments for the victims'); others are in a more meditative political vein ('Song to a frightened man across a room', 'Prayer for the power to resist', the 'Croc' cycle). Others are only vaguely political ('The fern uncurling', the 'Germbag' set).
In places a bit of explication helps. To that end, where appropriate I've added a few notes - either immeditely after the piece, or - if a few go together - with a group title.
Good luck, and any comments will be appreciated. Most, anyway. And for those interested, hopefully a CD will come out...well, one year, and a book too. Perhaps.
Songs
ANZAC Day: Australia's real national day is ANZAC Day, named in particular for the event that grounds Australia's military self-image - the fruitless invasion of Turkey in 1915. But I don't think soldiers are the only ones that defend Australia.
Arse-lickers United Front: To be sung rousingly. It's directed at all of those parliamentary representatives who seem to think that it's their prerogative to dip their hands into the public trough, to clip the odd law here and there, to manufacture party branch members and so on.
Ballad of Jean McLaren:Jean is a Canadian powerhouse. I first met her on a peace walk through Palestine immediately after the Gulf War in 1991. She was 65 then. She has subsequently trained as a witch with Starhawk, been a main organizer of the Clayaquot Sound protests in Canada, and Goddess knows what else. She is also a member of the Raging Grannies, who do terrible things to the US and Canadian military.
Boring yuppie fuck: Ever been on a march to save a forest and somebody on the pavement has shouted "Get a job" or similar? This is what one might like to say but of course never does - nor should one. But it's remarkably cleansing to the spirit to sing among friends....
Earthing: A call-and-response song. An attempt to place us, wherever we are (but perhaps especially here in Australia) in the context of where we have been and where the place has been.
Elegy for Petra Kelly: Petra Kelly, a founder of the international movement of Green Parties, was found shot in 1993, apparently victim of a double suicide perpetrated by her partner, a former general. A great loss. I think it important to memorialize our losses. The tune is borrowed from Mikis Theodorakis ('Asma Asmaton' from 'The Ballad of Mauthausen': I wrote and asked for permission, but never got an answer).
The fern uncurling: My attempt to say thanks to the universe for an experience all men should have - that of sleeping sexually with another man. It turns out not to be what does it for me - or maybe I just need more practice. But there is certainly nothing disgusting or 'filthy' about it.
Ghosts of the future: One of a number of songs brought on by participation in organizing the Woodford Folk Festival in Queensland. I recommend it - helping organize it, that is. More specifically, I recommend helping with toilet cleaning. The original idea, that of us being 'ghosts of the future', comes from Peter Auty. This was recited at the foundation of a grove of instrument-wood trees. The poem is now a song, with a lovely tune by Lonnie Martin.
I am: Don't know where this one came from. An attempt to self assert? Tune by Lonnie Martin.
I dived into a golden pool: This song is all mystical-looking, I know. For those of a profane cast it is actually about the process of seeking wisdom in the bottom of a large jug of a particularly cloudy ale called Coopers. Not a profitable exercise.There is a tune by Lonnie Martin and Helen Rowe, if you're interested.
In praise of impotence: I, like virtually every other man - if they're honest - am occasionally impotent. This song suggests treating that as an opportunity rather than a threat.
Lantana:Another
attempt to talk about issues of politics and peace in terms of the realities
of the Australian landscape.Music
(again) by Lonnie Martin.
Now that we've got your full attention: A song to do with the fact that as soon as anti-corporate-led globalization protests began to have any effect, leaders of the WTO and major capitalist states began to complain that they'd got the message, and the protests should stop now. The term "weapons" is used here in the figurative sense - that is, in the same way as it is claimed to be used in "free trade is a weapon in the fight against poverty".
The People's data-hackers: Yes, I know some hacking is simply mindless destructiveness, and some is downright dangerous; but it's neither as destructive nor dangerous as the organizations hackers hack into: after all, virtually nobody dies from hacking. This is sung to a traditional Australian tune called "The Queensland Overlander". Feel free to substitute the names of companies as you see fit.
Prayer for the power to resist: My attempt to come through burn-out, to express hope for a sense of strength from the earth we're fighting for, and a response to a workshop by John Seed. Tune by Lonnie Martin.
Queen Elizabeth's baubles: The Queen of England probably does love her dogs, even though corgis are vicious little buggers. But the fact is that much of her revenue comes from investments - most notoriously in Rio Tinto. The BRA are the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, who revolted against Rio Tinto's Panguna mine project; Rössing was (and remains) a notoriously dangerous and destructive Rio Tinto uranium mine in Namibia; the Murris in Weipa, near the Gulf of Carpentaria: for any 'forriners' who happen onto this page, they are the Aboriginal people who waged a long hard struggle against a major CRA (= Rio Tinto) operation there.The Turrbal are the Traditional Owners of the Brisbane area, who suffered near-genocide in the early part of the 19th century .
The Quest:Seems to me we need a set of metaphors that describe some sense of sacrality that belongs here rather than just being imported from overseas. This is my sense of a beginning for that. Tune by Lonnie Martin: a very gospel-y or bluesy feel. This has been sung at the Opening Ceremony at Woodford Folk Festival a couple of times, and at special events there at other times.
St Valentine's Day, 1991: The sheer sense of powerlessness of January and February 1991 brought this song out.
The
slouching song of the BEAHFAG affinity group:In
1989 I went with a group of Brisbane-based activists to the National Action
for that year, at Nurrungar.They
were an amazing crew.The name of
the affinity group was reached after long and arduous debate: the Brisbane
Eco-Anarcho-Hippy Feral Affinity Group: BEAHFAG (“say it with feeling”).
It was the first such use of the term “feral” that I had come across, though
I’ve no doubt it was current before then too.A
longish song (no surprises there), it probably works for any fastish Irish
tune.
Song to a frightened man across a room: Ever heard that gorgeous song by Eric Bogle about South African prisoners being taken off to execution, and their comrades calling for courage, and "singing their spirits home"? Got me thinking about my fortunately limited experience with such things, in a guardhouse at the interrogation centre in Sulaimaniya (Kurdistan in Iraq) in 1991.
Stick me in that quicklime now: Death is gonna happen - might as well book your hotel....
The stomping song of the first Straddie blockade: Stradbroke Island is an incredibly beautiful sand island off the coast of Brisbane. It is being mined for mineral sands used for, among other things, hard alloys for war-planes. In 1997 a blockade was held on the island. It was remarkable in that extremely good and close relations were developed with those members of the local Aboriginal community who wanted to stop the destruction. The tune is by Wolf Biermann.
Visions of your hair:
We're
all just wormcake in the making: Look,
sometime's you've just got to laugh at Death: there's little else you can
do. Here's me, with help of a rather jolly (almost Country and Western)tune,
trying to make a virtue out of a necessity.
Poems: These are divided into categories, thematically.
Various topics
Al-Husseini
Mosque, Kerbala, 1991:This
is a bit difficult to describe.One
of the great treasures of Shi’ite Islam lies in Kerbala in Iraq: the great
mosque dedicated to Hussein, a grandson (I think) of The Prophet.Between
George Bush and Saddam Hussein, Kerbala was largely destroyed in 1991.In
the course of the insurrection the wire for the reading lights in the library,
one of the glories of Islamic high culture,was
pulled down to use as nooses.It
was quite horrific.
Monuments for the victims: In 1993, at the Mudjumba Folk Festival I heard this guy reciting a poem about soldiers being Australia's 'unsung heroes'. This struck me as simply wrong. Soldiers are, along with sports heroes, the section of Australian society that do get praised. Thee are statues everywhere. This struck me as unjust. This is not to impugn courage. But courge takes many forms, including standing up when you have no power.
Icebergs: Vatnajökull is Europe’s biggest glacier, in south-eastern Iceland.
The fishwife and the shark: Iceland retains a number of modes of food preparation that date from the days when food was scarce, particularly in winter; and the main ways to preserve were to sour by pickling or by fermentation, or to salt. This poem is based upon a way of pickling shark. But the story isn't rally about that, if you get my drift....
Mango:Tried
not to make this one too predictable. It actually is a poem about
a mango, not about the sequence leading up to oral sex. I think.Or
like to think, anyway.But read it
how you will. I enjoyed playing with form and tone, anyway.
Where safari suits go to die:What the hell did safari suits mean?Why did they ever exist?What was their function in the Australian psyche?Why on earth are young radicals wearing them again?These questions and more are answered – at the level of myth at least – in this much too long, much too rambling piece.If you get through it, let me know what you think.
Germbag: an image of humans as bags of conflicting chemicals
Meet Germbag
Germbag is all
Germbag at 40 (Herz): An attempt to explain to myself the sheer confusion of feelings that accompanied being 40 years old.
Oh, poor Germbag:Self-pity at one’s antics often accompanies such changes
Poems around Jabiluka:For people not
We walk through day's heat:Arrived for the start of the blockade in late March 1998. Very hot still. Everyone exhausted and frustrated. After a few days the organizers took us off to some pools. Absolutely gorgeous.
A night of beauty: A poem for Conway and Margaret in Jabiru, on the birth of their baby in 1999.
Couple
of nights before the full moon:The
meeting of the UN World Heritage Committee in June 1999 was potentially
a watershed for the Mirrar traditional owners.The
Committee had the previous year declared that the minesite pretty much
contravened Australia’s responsibilities under the World Heritage Convention.Here
the Australian government’s response was to be presented.
Token icon:At
the time of the1999 World Heritage meeting in Paris, I was working for
the Aboriginal organization set up my the Mirrar, the Gundjehmi Aboriginal
Corporation.I was on the phone over
most of that week.It has continued
to amaze me how ready whitefella activists have been to leap to accusations
of bad faith on virtually no evidence.It
seems to me that most whitefella activists prefer Aboriginal people to
be distant mythical reference points rather than living people with claims.
Barely a ripple: When I arrived to work in Jabiru, Eddie Hardy of the Bolmo clan took us fishing for the day. I only caught four barramundi. And a sense of absolute amazement at the sheer beauty of the place.
Meet Croc:I use the image of a crocodile to represent the actions of Energy Resources of Australia and their various parent companies in the Alligator Rivers region.It is the predominant predator lifeform in the area.
Thus
spake Croc: I
sometimes wonder whether companies actually prefer people to protest against
them so that they can see what and where the opposition is that needs to
be dealt with.
Croc
meets the alligators: Energy
Resources of Australia and North Ltd. may look big and tough, but
they ain't - not when it comes to the likes of Rio Tinto
Poems drawn from Old Norse themes
Audhumbla licks the world into meaning: Audhumbla, in the stories recorded by 13th century Icelanders, was a Creation Cow that licked blocks of ice for the salt. Struck me that the act of licking, being based on movements of the tongue, was not unlike the production of speech: especially as the shape she licked out of the ice was human.
Out
of the pit of this enmity:An
attempt to draw wisdom out of an Old Icelandic myth.In
Old Icelandic mythological stories the gods consisted of two tribes, the
Æsir (Óðinn, Þórr etc) and the Vanir (Freyr,
Freyja, Njördr etc), who had been at war.When
they tired of war, they made a peace, and to symbolise that spat into a
bowl and mixed it.From that came
a being called Kvasir ‘Quenching’, who came to be known as the source of
all wisdom.One day, walking, Kvasir
was killed by two dwarves.His blood
was brewed into a mead which, after various adventures, the gods stole
back.It had the reputation that
anyone who drank it would be able to speak in poetry, a story that enabled
poets to speak of poetry as ‘Kvasir’s blood’.