CLINTON WALKER Buried Country: The story of Aboriginal country music. Reviewed by Annette Hughes
Clinton Walker takes the reader up close and personal in this seminal work on Aboriginal country music.
In 1960, the year I was born, ‘Little Boy Lost’ by Johnny Ashcroft was the top Australian hit song. It tells the true story of Australia’s greatest land and air search. For four days and three nights, Aboriginal tracker William Stanley, together with 5000 other people and seven aircraft, searched the rugged New England Ranges of New South Wales for a four-year-old farm boy, Steven Walls.
They found him alive and well.
At exactly the same time as that song was flooding the airwaves, another woman wept for her four-year-old little boy lost, Archie Roach, and no one gave a rat’s arse. Exactly 30 years later, Archie released his own hit, ‘Took the Children Away’, about his forced removal from his family. To add irony to irony, Aboriginal country star Jimmy Little recorded his version of ‘Little Boy Lost’, which, given what we know now of the stolen generations, gives the song a whole other layer of meaning.
Bob Randell’s seminal ‘Brown Skin Baby’ was the seed of Roach’s ‘Took the Children Away’. A man of the previous generation, Randell searched for his mother all his life but never found her. Of this song, Walker writes:
The song remains so potent, such an archetypal folk-country classic, because it grew so organically out of personal experience … it so powerfully captured that truth; but also because its intentions were never compromised or sullied – it was only ever used as pure expression, as a salve and a protest, and not for any commercial purposes.
At its best, a great country song is a container for the contents of the human heart. And country music is not passive; I know all the words to ‘Little Boy Lost’, still. In the 1950s and early 1960s, before the disposable sugary pop industry took music by the throat, the folk boom was in full bloom, everyone was playing a guitar and the masses sang along with the radio to songs composed of simple chords and meaningful lyrics, rejoicing in the pure pleasure of participating in the music. Just knowing you are not the only one can comfort the pain the song describes. It gets all our hearts beating in time, gets us breathing in time.
Initially, country music arrived in the bush sporadically and infrequently, hitched to the remnants of boxing tent shows and travelling vaudeville troupes. Songs were learnt in church, on long road trips or during stints in prison, and beat-up guitars passed though willing hands from father to son, teacher to pupil. It is astonishing to see how these artists forged careers across vast distances, miraculously migrating across country like birds.
Great songs force open your empathy valve, and by telling the real stories behind them in Buried Country, Clinton Walker takes the reader up close and personal with the Aboriginal artists who found solace and also joy in sharing songs around campfires, making music, playing it for their peers and finding a way to tell their stories of the loss and the hardship of rural poverty in a language whitefellas can no longer ignore. Walker traces the artists’ careers against the backdrop of the social, economic and political racism impacting black Australia and:
… how they built a sense of community with their own dispossessed people by singing their ‘sorry songs’, and also offered the possibility of common ground – before there was anything else – in a divided country.
While historians were digging through dusty archives, researching the spate of forthcoming books on what really took place on the Australian frontier, Walker was in it, on the road, out in country, in communities, town camps, small towns and suburban back yards, interviewing the legends of Australian Aboriginal country music, gathering the ‘songlines’, and joining the dots. Inspired no doubt by Rolling Stone rock journalist Nick Tosches’s Country: The biggest music in America (1977), and the much earlier work of the Lomaxes, who discovered Leadbelly while in search of the folk traditions of the American South, Walker took director Andy Nehl and a whole film crew with him to record the hidden history of Australian county music. The book will be released in the US in this new edition and should find an interested audience there.
In the years since Buried Country was initially published in 2000 (along with the documentary and the release of the soundtrack), it has been recognised as a groundbreaking work of cultural history. It is ‘a great book’ as Paul Toohey says, ‘a necessary book to counter the blinking, slack-jawed ignorance of the reality of our history’. This new edition updates the work to include a new crop of stars, profiling major figures in Aboriginal country in depth in its 16 chapters, with many more covered in its sidebars, and offering detailed analysis of the origins and context of the music.
In a Monthly article in 2012 Paul Kelly gave his own account of the rich seams of Aboriginal talent he’d seen and heard in the desert, which he described as a ‘thousand flowers blooming’. He acknowledges Buried Country as:
... a monumental labour of love and research, celebrating even earlier pioneers from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, such as Jimmy Little, Roger Knox, Vic Simms, Col Hardy, The Mills Sisters and Bobby McLeod, who undeniably influenced the ’80s generation.
As well as chronicling the lives of the musicians, the book gives an insight into Australian music and showbiz from the 1950s to the present. But the best thing about it is that now, with the magic of the interwebs, readers can hear the music, which was not readily available in the mainstream. A wealth of material exists on YouTube and a generous selection is linked to the Monthly article here.
In researching the book, Walker was conscious of being thought of as a whitefella ‘stealing the stories’. Perhaps because of that self-perception, he does a wonderful thing; he disappears himself from the narrative and gives full voice to the artists. Occasionally, his laconic authorial voice will emerge with a paragraph of context or clarification, but he plants the reader in his place, in the presence of those country stars, respectfully listening to their stories. His eager enthusiasm for the project charges the narrative with irresistible impetus and he has done a remarkable job of making each story fresh and vibrant. The book canters along.
Buried Country first emerged hot on the heels of Bringing Them Home, the report of the Royal Commission into the Stolen Generation, and remains as important a contribution to the historical record as Bill Gammage’s Biggest Estate on Earth, Bruce Pascoe’s Convincing Ground, Henry Reynolds’s Why Weren’t We Told? and Forgotten War, Chloe Hooper’s Tall Man, Alexis Wright’s dazzling novels and a host of Aboriginal memoirs, starting with Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town – books that invite us to imagine a different reality from the delusional fantasy of white invader culture.
Midnight Oil dragged us from our burning beds two decades ago, but we seem to have forgotten why, as yet another conservative Australian government perpetrates yet another round of bastardry on Aboriginal people. It is time to open our hearts again and Buried Country might just find its well-deserved mainstream audience this time round.
(Walker is at present working on a companion volume about Aboriginal women singers, called Deadly Woman Blues, to be published later this year.)
Clinton Walker Buried Country: The story of Aboriginal Country music (updated and expanded 2nd edition) Verse Chorus Press 2014 PB 368pp $45.00
Annette Hughes is the author of Art Life Chooks and a writer/singer/songwriter who will be releasing a double album in 2016 with DATSON+HUGHES.
You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
Yes. Only have the original but it was a cracking read and the soundtrack and doco were great, too. Stranded similarly excellent.
But to me the Football life about country Victoria iced the cake.