A filmmaker's quest to honour Gene Clark, the Byrd who flew alone

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Originally published at ABC Arts Online, April 2014

"I think he is legitimately at least the equal to Gram Parsons, and should be better remembered as the father of Americana."

Those are the words of Gene Clark's former manager Saul Davis in the opening moments of British directors Paul and Jack Kendall's elegiac music documentary The Byrd Who Flew Alone: The Triumphs and Tragedy of Gene Clark. It seems ungraceful to position the two men in opposition, yet Davis's point is stark and compelling: Gene Clark, founding member of The Byrds and creator of some of the most sumptuous music ever recorded in the country-rock canon, saw the recognition his work deserved pass him by. Critical consensus today, it is fair to say, deems Parsons, also once a Byrd, as the genre's pioneer and most soulful voice.

Clark's story is unique even among the great 'lost' talents of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Unlike the likes of Parsons, Nick Drake, Tim Buckley, Jimi Hendrix and others, he did not die young (he died in 1991 at the age of 46 as a result of a bleeding ulcer, according to the coroner), yet today Clark's body of work has the aura of an artist whose light burned only briefly, and whose music has developed something of a cult following as a result.

As fan and member of the Coal Porters Sid Griffin says of Clark's career in the documentary, "He continually missed ships leaving the harbour". He was never able to mobilise himself to meaningfully synchronise with the movements and fashions of his day, due to his struggles with alcohol and drugs, an aversion to playing the promotion game and a chronic fear of flying (one of the reasons he parted ways with The Byrds in early 1966). He once floored record label monolith David Geffen in a Los Angeles bar. He did not, one might say, care for the business side of music.

A songwriter and singer of some profound depth, Clark's "earth music", as Taj Mahal puts it on screen, hit its peak on two magnificent solo albums No Other and White Light. His album with renowned banjo player Doug Dillard (The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark, 1968) is another astonishing collection, while in The Byrds he wrote none other than 'I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better' and co-wrote perhaps their most iconic track, 'Eight Miles High'. A thread through the documentary is the fact Clark was untrained in the technical arts of music and perhaps more bafflingly, achieved a singular mystery in his lyrics without reading books.

The documentary is a true passion project for long-time Clark lover, Paul Kendall and his sons Jack and Dan. Thanks to exhaustive trips to the United States, they managed to track down nigh on everyone who mattered, and surviving, in the Gene Clark story. Thus in the film we get heartfelt contributions from one-time Byrds Roger McGuinn, David Crosby and Chris Hillman, producer Larry Marks, No Other bassist Lee Sklar, singing partner Carla Olson, former wife Carlie and sons Kai and Kelly as well as admirers Griffin and Taj Mahal.

"There were undoubtedly some emotional moments during the interviews," says Paul Kendall, "particularly with people who probably hadn't had much opportunity to express or explore their feelings on the subject before – but I never detected any hint of anger or resentment.

"It wasn't the overriding feeling, but sadness was obviously present in all cases – sadness that he'd never managed to find lasting contentment or stability in his life, and that his work didn't achieve the full recognition it deserved. Along with that sadness, there was a lot of bewilderment about his mercurial temperament and his self-destructive demons. But there was also real affection for him as a man, and pride at being associated with him."

Kendall had interviewed Clark in 1977 for Zigzag magazine, and having remained a ardent fan, was moved to put the wheels in motion for the film after reading John Einarson's biography Mr Tambourine Man: The Life and Legacy of The Byrds' Gene Clark. From the start the project was completely independent and funded by the filmmakers, motivated by nothing but an obsession with Clark's back catalogue.

"Under normal circumstances, you'd probably put together a proposal and look for funding from a broadcaster or a larger production company. In our case, we felt that would be wasted time. Even if we could have got interest in the idea of a Gene Clark documentary, we certainly wouldn't have been the obvious choice of people to do it: no track record, no credentials, no obvious resources."

The key figures were Clark's sons. They had been approached on multiple occasions by "well-known filmmakers" but no films had come to fruition. It took the Kendalls showing the Clarks their initial interviews with Barry McGuire, from Clark's first singing group of note the New Christy Minstrels, and another former Byrd and bass player for Clark, John York, to convince the sceptical brothers of the film's potential worth. With the approval of the estate, everything else fell into place.

Naturally, in trying to fit Clark's enigmatic life story into under two hours presented Kendall with a series of excruciating editorial decisions: he admits leaving out details and songs that went strongly against his instincts. In addition, Kendall and his sons were keen for the film to be a celebration of Clark the artist than anything else.  That meant not looking too closely at the more painful aspects of his life: the drug and alcohol abuse, the erratic, sometime aggressive behaviour and ruptured friendships.

"Everyone in the film has their own perspective," says Kendall, "and in some cases their own agenda. But I think the story and the picture that emerge are as accurate as we could make them.

"There are certain aspects of his life – and the aftermath of his life – that are somewhat murky. But we made an early decision not to delve into that too much. Many of the key players in those aspects are no longer with us to tell their side of the story, and we didn't want to get distracted away from Gene's music, which was always going to be the primary focus of the film."

Gene Clark's sound ripples poetically and sensitively through the film, from New Christy Minstrels songs right through to 1987's So Rebellious A Lover with Carla Olson. But the quality of the music alone is not enough to sustain such a documentary. Therefore we are left with the curious trajectory of Clark's life as a narrative, which is compelling in its marriage of melancholy and beauty.

"For me, two things above all [stand out about Clark's biography]: the complexity of his character and the contradictions in it, and the mystery of how a man who was musically untutored and unread, for the most part, could produce work of such melodic beauty and poetic lyricism. He didn't seem to understand that himself. I think the fact that his gift was god-given, and therefore beyond his control, was a constant source of turmoil for him.

"Perhaps oddly, the person he most reminds me of, as a character, is the footballer George Best – another man who encompassed both an inherent shyness and a love of success, or rather, some of its benefits, and for whom extraordinary talent seemed to be both a blessing and a curse."

The Byrd That Flew Alone: The Tragedy and Triumph of Gene Clark is available in Australia through Greville Records or from FourSunsProduction.com

In the shadow of empire: Chigozie Obioma and writing Nigeria

Originally published at ABC Arts Online, September 2015

Anyone checking the odds for the Man Booker Prize shortlist in the week leading up to the announcement of the final six novels on September 15, would have found Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen rather languishing as an outsider among the 13 long-listed works.

Many literary commentators, however, felt momentum was stirring around the Nigerian’s debut, and so it proved as the novel duly made the final six. This honour, which comes to Obioma when he is not yet 30 years old, positions him as among Africa’s most dynamic young literary voices, with The Fishermen lauded in critical circles in Europe and the United States, even if it did meet with some coolness from Africa itself, where the unfortunate suggestion of tokenism in relation to the Booker has emerged.

Obioma’s appearance in Australia in August for the Byron Bay Writers Festival came shortly after he had been named on the Booker long-list, news which he seemed to greet with smiling bewilderment, and which also ensured that one of the nation’s biggest regional writers’ festivals enjoyed an extra frisson of excitement over the nascent author’s presence. “I’m just looking forward to whatever comes, and enjoying the fun,” Obioma said at the festival.

Obioma was born and grew up in the southwestern Nigerian city of Akure in a large family, a fact that heavily informed the theme of brotherhood in his novel. He eventually left to study in Cyprus, his journey through academia resulting in his recent appointment as a professor of literature at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, via a stint living in Turkey. He confesses to missing Nigeria constantly and visits regularly, but his absence from his homeland has been essential to his fiction. “I think [being away] has shaped my perspective in a way it wouldn’t have been had I remained in Nigeria. As much as I miss home, there’s something about that view that I think I’d lose if I went back to Nigeria and became immersed in the society there.”

Originally a short story, The Fishermen was published in Australia in February. Set in Akure in the nineties, the novel’s premise is undoubtedly compelling: whilst fishing at a river, four brothers encounter a local madman, Abulu, who prophesises that one sibling will be killed by another. The plot that unfolds invokes myth and hints at magical realism and is sad, whilst asking questions of Nigerian identity, familial ties and psychological fortitude. 

The narrative is told from the perspective of a grown-up Benjamin, the fourth brother, while it is the eldest brother, Ikenna, who the prophecy most affects. However, it is the character of Abulu that is perhaps key to an understanding of The Fishermen. Abulu, a soothsaying mentally ill vagrant who commits shocking acts of sexual deviance and onanism, is employed by Obioma for reasons beyond merely driving the plot. Abulu represents a disturbing nationwide trend in Nigeria of dispossessed mentally ill people being “unclaimed”, roaming the street, feeding where they can and sleeping rough. The creation of Abulu was partly designed to draw attention to their plight.

“It used to bother me as a child,” says Obioma. “There were times when there were many of these people in Akure, and sometimes you’d even grow relationships with them. As children we’d be playing soccer and would see one pass and we would say ‘dance for us’ – we felt this was an adult that we could command and make requests of. We would play with them and mock them, but then you wake up one morning and see one of them dead in the road.”

Obioma has established, with some friends, a website – and potentially a campaign – to draw attention to and help ‘Abulus’ across Nigeria.

Obioma’s other, more complex, intention for Abulu reflects another essential theme of The Fishermen: that of colonialism and its lingering legacy in the author’s homeland. The story is an explicit allegory for Western influence on Nigeria, which, he says, “came in from the outside and altered the unity and civilisation of things”. Obioma cites American historian Will Durant’s oft-quoted words, “A civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”. So as the British Empire infiltrated Nigerian culture and society to transform it from its insides out, Abulu’s portent of tragedy for the young brothers works in similarly destructive ways for this family.

“I wanted an external force that could come in from the outside and sow a seed within a structure so that the destruction begins from within, and in the book that seed is of course the prophecy.”

A further layer in this, Obioma says, is that in other Nigerian literature, most notably Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), perceived madness is aligned with colonial forces. Obioma says, “Anything that comes in and disrupts what is happening is labelled a madman in African culture. In Achebe’s book, the white man was foreseen as crazy, but at the end of the day they were successful in overpowering the tribes.

“The symbol for the West was the madman, who has entered our house, claiming the single truth of the universe.” Abulu’s impact on the brothers represents, in essence, the encroachment of Western imperialism on Africa, complete with its far-reaching and long-term consequences.

Though the book’s socio-political priorities are overt, The Fishermen is also a novel about childhood, family and, importantly, recollection and memory. The story is told by an adult Benjamin remembering his youth, with all the unreliable, ambiguous literary qualities that come with that. Yet it is also a paean to Obioma’s own nineties childhood, with its madmen, brothers and fishing, and it is into the vat of memory that he has plunged for his material and inspiration, rather than any more academic or journalistic form of research. This inexactness and freedom to embellish and exaggerate personal experience, is partly what defines Obioma’s style.

“I have come to prefer relying on hindsight, or just what I imagine something was, more than a complete snapshot of things,” he says. “Recollection works in strange ways, and it’s good to have it malleable, so I can fill in the blanks. All you need is the tip of the iceberg and you can draw a massive portrait from that.”

“I still think fiction is an untrammelled zone, you can do whatever you want with it, even if you want to write historical fiction.”

As a Nigerian author writing about colonialism, it is arguably inevitable that comparisons with the late Achebe, who for many shaped and defined Africa’s literary identity, will arise at some stage. The New York Times review of The Fishermen went as far as to dub Obioma as Achebe’s direct heir. It is an unfortunate yoke for him to carry – though deeply respectful of Achebe and flattered by the comparison, Obioma’s more seminal influences include other Nigerians such as Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and younger writers Chimananda Ngozi Adichie and Helon Habila.

In the critical response to The Fishermen, the spectre of Achebe shows no signs of going away, however. The New York Times’ pronouncement, Obioma says, has aligned him with Achebe to the point that “nobody wants to listen to what I have to say”, while he also points out important differences between The Fishermen and Achebe’s most celebrated work, Things Fall Apart.

“Although we both tackle the effect of colonialism on Africa and Nigeria, Achebe did not have the mythic dimension that my book has, and his setting is very different – mine is set in contemporary Nigeria and his was historical.”

Achebe never won the Man Booker Prize for one of his novels, though he was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, for a body of work, in 2007. The only Nigerian to date to take the Man Booker Prize was Ben Okri in 1991 for The Famished Road. The 2015 prize is announced on October 13, and though the odds on his winning will probably be long once again, Obioma will surely focus on simply enjoying the swell that propels his novel toward further acclaim and a wider readership. It is conceivable that The Fishermen’s journey could surprise even its author yet.     

The Fishermen is available through Scribe Publications.

Parables from some weird new bible: Poet Robert Adamson and his love of Bob Dylan

Originally published at ABC Arts Online, September 2014

The great ideals have turned into a plea.
Middle of the night… on the stereo a longplay record turns
around. Its tracks are scratched: Dylan's singing burns
suppressed scars. We hardly listen as we justify a fallen hero.
It was Dylan's dream that taught us all we know.

That is an extract from a poem written by Robert Adamson in 1970. 'Elegy For Bob Dylan's Dream' was composed for his then wife in response to the disappointment they both felt upon Dylan collaborating with Johnny Cash on the former's 1969 album Nashville Skyline. It was a brief moment of recoil in the poet's deep, abiding reverence of Dylan, who had such a profound effect on Adamson, one of Australia's most majestic poets, that the word 'influence' seems inadequate.

"She was a full-on socialist, a union leader and she loved Dylan," says Adamson of his first wife Denise when we meet at his home on the Hawkesbury River. "He brought out a record before Nashville Skyline [John Wesley Harding] and she was disappointed in it, and I was too, and she said 'next he'll be singing with Johnny Cash', which was unthinkable. And then on the next record, he did.

"To Denise, Johnny Cash was this right-wing, Christian enemy to socialism and people like herself, though he's not seen like that anymore. Dylan brought out Nashville Skyline and Denise said 'that's it, he's sold out big time'."

Such a reaction is only possible if one cares deeply about such an artist, and Dylan has been a guiding preoccupation for Adamson since the mid-sixties – these days he loves both John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. The beginning of their relationship is an oft-told story: whilst in Long Bay Gaol, the song 'Only A Pawn In Their Game', from The Times They Are A-Changin' was played over the radio into Adamson's cell (as an example of a 'hideous song' by the rather less than progressive DJ John Laws). Upon leaving prison, Adamson gorged on everything Dylan had released, striking up friendships with folk singer Michael Driscoll, young poet Michael Dransfield and eventually artist Brett Whiteley, all of whom placed Dylan on a heroic pedestal. "I think I wanted to be a folk singer, I wanted to participate in that adventure. But I was alienated in every way, I just didn't know what to do or how to talk about it."

Despite Adamson's early attempts at poetry whilst incarcerated, and his work for some years afterwards, being infused with Dylan-esque imagery and energy, Dylan is not a figure who immediately comes to mind upon reading Adamson's recent work, particularly collections The Goldfinches of Baghdad and The Kingfisher's Soul. Dylan's signature surreal passages through history, literature and art, as well as his early political screechings, seem in a different domain to Adamson's elegant mood-pieces filled with microcosmic impressions of the Hawkesbury's wildlife, poems rich with species of bird, fish and marsupial.

Indeed, it was not Dylan's subject matter that first shook Adamson, as much as it was Dylan's wilfulness, the force of his persona and his sheer otherness – his representing a potentially different path, rather than that of the 'delinquent', a label he was tarred with during early adulthood. It was an alien voice that boomed over the radio in his cell, and Dylan was able to maintain his unusualness to Adamson due to the fact he would make a serious about-turn in style, approach and image every couple of albums. Not that this always met with approval from the poet, hence poems like 'Elegy For Bob Dylan's Dream'.

"When I heard Dylan for the first time, I thought 'what a great singer' I didn't even think about those incredible words or that 'Only A Pawn In Their Game' was an amazing message. It was the best thing I'd ever heard because it was so different. It amazes me when people say Dylan can't sing.

"I never thought of him as a political commentator. I didn't care about that, I liked him for his incredibly strange phrasing and his singing. Often I don't care what it's saying, it's pure poetry. It's like parables from some weird new bible."

The question of Dylan's credentials as a poet has filled meaty tomes by the likes of heavyweight critics such as Christopher Ricks and Clinton Heylin. Adamson, who included song lyrics by Paul Kelly when he edited the Best Australian Poems anthology in 2010, is better qualified than most to evaluate. Naturally, his bookshelf contains volumes of Dylan's lyrics, as well as pretty much every notable critical work that has been written on the folk bard.

"If you look at it on the page, it's great but it's not exactly Wallace Stevens. It's better than most poetry.

"The songs [on the page] come across as really good, strange stuff I think. If you were an editor of an Australian poetry magazine and a batch of these came in you'd think 'f***, what's this?' But it's impossible for us to know how they'd stand up as poems if we'd never heard Dylan sing them. It's like reading the text of a Shakespeare play if you've never heard it performed."

The influence of poetry on Dylan, however, is indisputable. The fact he took his artist name from Dylan Thomas, and his friendship with Allen Ginsberg, need not be dwelled on here. There is also William Wordsworth, Adamson saying, "Dylan took from the vernacular and made it work in song, in the way Wordsworth would have done in his time – probably better than Wordsworth, I think Dylan's done it on a more drastic level."

But there is one poet that both Dylan and Adamson share as a seismic, encompassing influence, a seminal visionary figure who explored and represented rebelliousness and amorality. Jim Morrison of the Doors, among plenty of others, was among those who appropriated Arthur Rimbaud in a posturing, limited sort of way. Dylan – and Adamson upon being exposed to Rimbaud by Driscoll – saw something more decisive, perhaps spiritual, in both Rimbaud's poems and famous letters, where he expounded his crucial adage, "I is someone else", and called for poets to become "seers" via a "derangement of the senses". The 19^th century symbolist hit Adamson at the same time as Dylan, setting fire to his imagination. Yet, now, he admits he "didn't put the two together" at the time.

In fact, Dylan was both living out a Rimbaudian sort of persona, and allowing his lyrics to be directly influenced by the dazzling Illuminations and A Season In Hell. I asked Adamson about how much of a connection he saw between "I is someone else" and Dylan's shapeshifting artistic identity.

"Dylan didn't just create music under a different name, but became a different person," says Adamson. "He took on this Woody Guthrie sort of persona, and became Bob Dylan, which he got from Dylan Thomas. So he decided to be a poet-singer like Guthrie, but of the world like Rimbaud.

"He wanted to broaden the Guthrie thing, and he already started ahead of it, as Dylan Thomas was from Wales. He wanted to get away from Hibbing, Minnesota really badly, and maybe he's still trying to get away from it.

"I see Dylan as getting lines like 'To live outside the law you must be honest' [from 'Absolutely Sweet Marie'] from Rimbaud. A lot of lines like that are Rimbaud-ish. There are Rimbaud-like lines in 'Chimes of Freedom' too, and particularly 'A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall', with its 'I saw this' and 'I saw that'. It's like A Season In Hell, where all these visions are piled up on each other."

If you visit the Brett Whiteley Studio in Sydney's Surry Hills, you will find lines by both Dylan and Rimbaud scrawled on the wall. It was at the studio where Adamson "kind of met" Dylan – as his international fame increased, Whiteley struck up a sort of friendship with the singer, based on Dylan's wish to learn to paint during his visits to Australia. In 1986 Whiteley organised a press conference for Dylan in his studio which Adamson attended, only for the poet to be both too shy, and too drunk, to engage with the visitor.

The experience left Adamson reflecting on Dylan's remoteness, and the impossibility of penetrating the man behind the art. As the father of pretty much all modern songwriting, and indeed the whole notion of the Romantic singer-songwriter or folk troubadour, the awe in which he is held might prohibit meaningful communication with others. Just watch any of his amusing but painful press conferences – including that at the Whiteley Studio, which is on YouTube.

"He's not the songs, he's this guy that you don't know," says Adamson. "And how do you get to know someone under these circumstances? If you met him some day out fishing you might be able to talk, but imagine the pressures on him as a person. How do you talk to him without hassling him or paying tribute to him? It's almost like he's not real."

And naturally, Dylan's distant, otherworldly mystique, and the barriers between him and others as a result, yielded a poem for Adamson, a kind of partner to 'Elegy For Bob Dylan's Dream'. His meditations formed the crux of 2000's 'Letter To Bob Dylan', an exquisite musing on Dylan's myth and unreality, in which he writes:

                         …I'll leave

this letter unposted – better you

find it by telepathy. It'll arrive

as a wince or little black chuckle           

or as a faint snatch of song perhaps

praising your singing – the one thing exempt

from the tax of memory and living out the days.

Buried Country and the history of Aboriginal country music

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Originally published at ABC Arts Online, May 2015

Two years ago during a visit to Alice Springs, I was invited to an open mic at one of the town’s few music venues, the Todd Tavern. Among a line-up of acts full of contrasts in terms of both style and quality, there was one smiling, fairly unkempt middle-aged man wearing a wide-brimmed hat and check shirt who played his own set of country ballads on acoustic guitar, before later joining several other musicians who performed as the night wore on.

This turned out to be Warren H Williams, one of the Northern Territory’s most treasured musical exports, revered nationwide for continuing the spirit of Indigenous country music, a movement documented with zealous passion and rigorous attention to detail in Clinton Walker’s Buried Country: The story of Aboriginal country music, a revised and updated new edition of which was recently published by Portland, Oregon-based Verse Chorus Press.

In the original 2000 edition of the book Williams is portrayed as a more nascent talent emerging from the fog of alcoholism. His late father, however, Gus Williams, is one of Buried Country’s stars, along with artists like the clean-cut, showbiz-ready Jimmy Little, the melancholic troubadour Dougie Young, boxer-cum-singer Lionel Rose, songwriter Herb Laughton with his more sensitive artistry, the combustible Bobby McLeod and many more.

The new edition of Buried Country features a poetic foreword by Paul Kelly, as well as an updated introduction and afterword from Walker. The rest of the book, with each chapter dedicated to celebrating one artist or community of artists, remains largely as in the original edition. Its reprint comes as a timely, gentle reminder of this rich Australian musical tradition.

But to many, it may be strange – Aboriginals appropriating a music that is often associated with the white American South and the potentially dubious ideologies that come with that, seems like an odd match. But after 20 years of observing its ebb and flow, Walker remains as convinced as ever of the profundity of Indigenous Australia’s connection with country music. Of course, the soundtrack to Warwick Thornton’s wonderful 2009 Alice Springs-set film Samson and Delilah, with its Charley Pride songs, hints at this relationship too.

“I found, and still find, that the love for country music among Aboriginal people is genuine and incredibly enduring,” says Walker from his home in Sydney’s Inner West. “I understand why it can be seen as kind of bizarre – why didn’t Aboriginal people do, say blues music? One simple answer is that the exposure of Aboriginal people in Australia, or any people in Australia, to black American music was really limited. It just didn’t reach here. But country music was always popular.”

Sheer musical logistics is one reason for country’s popularity among Aboriginal musicians – the style was all that could be heard outside Australia’s cities for many years in the first half of the twentieth century. Other reasons, Walker notes in his new introduction, include that country music was dominated by story songs, something that chimed with Aboriginal culture’s oral tradition; the fact the style is played mainly on guitar, rendering it portable and accessible; the fact it allowed Aboriginal artists to utilise their tradition of mimicry and therefore “throw the white man’s songs back at him” and finally, and arguably most importantly, its rhythms and melodies were infused with a mournfulness and sense of loss that Aboriginal people could identify with all too easily.

Though Buried Country is a warm tribute to unheralded voices, as with any study that addresses Aboriginal culture in the twentieth century, there is a thread of deep sadness running through this tome. Walker tells some confronting, disturbing tales, including that of Herb Laughton, who was stolen when he was two years old and spent much of his early life trying to find his mother, leaving him with emotional scars that led to him to attempting suicide in the eighties. His music endured. Alcoholism, violence, mental illness and incarceration are all themes in the lives of Dougie Young, Vic Simms, Bobby McLeod and Roger Knox. The best of the genre’s songs, too, are infected with tragedy, none more moving than Bob Randall’s ‘Brown Skin Baby’ with its haunting wail and elegiac lyrics for the stolen generation (Randall’s death was recently reported).

Despite this, Walker managed to give the book a strong sense of hope, while still being unflinching about the injustices many of these musicians suffered. “Of course I wanted to keep the focus on the music,” he says, “but I had to put it in the context of the larger background, that’s how I tell a story.

“Many people comment that there is an uplifting nature to the book, though I don’t know if I set out with an agenda to have that. Obviously I didn’t want it all to be down, as it’s difficult to make that work as a writer, but I think this is a story about ‘doing it’, about not surrendering. That’s what’s so amazing about these people, the mere fact that they did it.”

Sadly, this perseverance did not lead to a recorded legacy for many artists. Walker’s favourite albums of Aboriginal country include Vic Simms’ The Loner, recorded in 1973 while Sims was in Bathurst Gaol (and recently reissued by Sandman Records); Olive Knight’s more recent Gospel Blues at the Edge of the Desert and Black Allan Barker’s Fire Burning, a cassette-only album that is now nigh on impossible to find. There are, however, countless artists who didn’t even get that far.

“There were lots of black artists that didn’t get through by dint of the way music in those communities worked – people just going around and playing little dos. There’s probably a lot of people we didn’t get to hear, and that’s a terrible loss.”

Another factor that contributed to Aboriginal country artists not achieving more success than they did is adroitly described in the book: “The very Aboriginal concept of collective ownership discourages self-promotion. Songs are shared around – only for the common good, not commercial gain.”

Bob Randall, for instance, insisted on not accepting royalties for ‘Brown Skin Baby’, while most performers profiled and interviewed in Buried Country exhibit a rare, soft humility. However, the issue of Indigenous culture being at odds with self-promotion and, let’s say, artistic ego, is one way the landscape of Aboriginal country music has changed since the book’s first edition in 2000. In short, the democratisation and self-publishing possibilities of the internet have determined that Aboriginal artists must now make at least some claim on their original work.

“Aboriginal copyright is a white-hot, or black-hot issue,” says Walker. “The Aboriginal artists that I’ve met and got to know, like any songwriters, have their identity threatened by the internet and the destruction of copyright.

“When Aboriginal people first came to modern music, it was indeed those old ways or principles that might have held them back a bit. But as soon as you hit the music business, you have to protect yourself because otherwise you're going to get ripped off, and that happens to white as well as black. So as much as promotion, it's protection, or self-preservation, and Aboriginal artists quickly adapted. I think most anyone who writes a song in this day and age will be trying to protect their creation to some extent.”

Readers of Buried Country will note that the history of Aboriginal country music is, largely, male – simply due to which artists were able to penetrate rather than any omissions on Walker’s part. The women featured in depth include Wilga Williams, the Pitt Sisters, Auriel Andrew and Ruby Hunter – all remarkable stories, yet the book is dominated by male talents. This is partly why Walker’s next book will be a history of black female singers in Australia. Entitled Deadly Woman Blues, it is set for publication in 2016.

“I realised there was this other whole story,” says Walker of his experience researching the music of Australia’s Deep North and discovering a diverse range of female sounds and characters, which then led to him delving into black female vocalists from across the country, dating back to the nineteenth century.

Deadly Woman Blues will be somewhat more adventurous in terms of format than Buried Country, in that it will be an illustrated, Robert Crumb-inspired piece of graphic non-fiction, “kind of like a comic book”. Walker has been an artist since childhood and cites Guy Peellaert and Nik Cohn’s 1973 book Rock Dreams, a seminal fusion of image and text as music journalism, as a formative influence along with Crumb. Over 100 singers will be covered.

“It will be a bit like a set of bubblegum cards – presenting an image and then you flip over the card and there’s a profile of your favourite footballer.

“There are amazing stories of Aboriginal women who filtered through the early days of jazz, blues, folk and serious opera singing. There were also black women who moved to Australia at the turn of the twentieth century and became big vaudeville stars.

“I suppose the centre of the book is the sixties and seventies, and maybe one way of describing it is that it will tell the story beyond the Sapphires. That was one Aboriginal vocal group that had its moment – and never cut a record – but there were many other women on the club circuit.”

Until Deadly Woman Blues is published next year, Walker will continue on the promotion treadmill for Buried Country – something of a challenge for an author working with an independent publisher based overseas – as well as work on his PhD, a cultural history of Saturday Night Fever.

The death of Bob Randall marks the passing of another important voice in this genre, yet this, and the new edition of Buried Country, can stand as impetus to revisit this desperately soulful, often heartbreaking trove that is Aboriginal country music.

“I can’t describe it in any other way than ‘sad ballads’,” says Walker. “There’s some kind of tone, it’s in the language, it’s in the rhythms, it’s in the textures that come through.”

Buried Country: The story of Aboriginal country music is available now through Verse Chorus Press.

Australian art from a British perspective: Landscapes at the Royal Academy

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Originally published at ABC Arts Online, August 2013

The Royal Academy of Art's exhibition of landscapes, Australia, will most likely be a spectacular guide through Australian art history. As a visual proposition alone, the sight of the uniquely Australian grains, hues and tints of some of the nation's most celebrated works surely cannot help but be enhanced, and benefit from added meaning, in the grand, regal surrounds of the Royal Academy's London galleries.

But at the same time, this landmark exhibition does give rise to some questions, and perhaps problems, regarding Britain's relationship with its former colony.

Australia was first announced in 2011 amid much excitement from the Academy, who crowed that it would be the "most significant survey of Australian art ever mounted in the UK". And indeed it is nothing if not comprehensive; included are Aboriginal artists Albert Namatjira, Rover Thomas and Emily Kame Kngwarreye, as well as early immigrant artists John Glover and Eugene von Guerard. Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin fly the flag for 19^th and early 20^th century impressionism. Modernism is represented by Grace Cossington Smith and Roy de Maistre among others, while 20^th century giants such as Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley and Sidney Nolan are naturally included. Modern practitioners such as Christian Thompson, video artist Shaun Gladwell and photographer Tracey Moffatt complete the line-up, which is defined by this flexible, wide-ranging notion of 'landscape'.

And it is this theme that hints at a telling attitude towards Australian art from Britain. To deem it patronising is perhaps too strong, but for Joanna Mendelssohn, Australian critic and associate professor at the University of NSW's College of Fine Arts (COFA), there is an undercurrent of a rather parental determination to project, and even smother with, a certain manner and values.

Noting landscape as an ingrained part of the British artistic tradition, Mendelssohn says, "What I find surprising about this exhibition is that the brief seems to have been fairly conservative. The landscape is such a very strong British tradition, and it seems when they look to the art of the former colonies they do tend to cast us as much as possible in their own image. When the British want to look at Australian art they do insist on the landscape.

"There's a particular British consciousness that doesn't seem to get over the fact we stopped being a colony some years ago."

Because of the colonial ties, it was inevitable during Australian art's formative years that it would reflect Britain's devotion to the beloved landscape before its own character and idiosyncrasies took shape. And while accusations of the exhibition's outdated premise are valid, the Academy is nevertheless embracing of the peculiarities of Australian art from the mid-19^th century onward, albeit within the boundaries of landscape.

Australia is curated by Kathleen Soriano, director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy. "Certainly the influence of English, French or German art is much more evident in the early periods, in the early 1800s to mid-1800s," she says. "What I wanted to show was how Australian art develops a real distinctiveness, associated with the landscape and the light."

The fusion of 'tradition' of the European kind with something more specifically Australian, and often personal, is crucial to the exhibition and extends particularly to some of the more contemporary artists involved.

Sydney-born video artist Shaun Gladwell is a neat example of these complications. A truly international, globetrotting artist practicing within a multi-cultural context, he still is able to locate his work within a lineage that goes back to British landscape art from the 19^th century. So while it may seem narrow for Britain to reduce Australian art to the landscape, there can be little denying British landscape painting is still relevant to a current generation of Australian practitioners, however indirectly.

One of Gladwell's most notable works is Approach To Mundi Mundi, which will feature in Australia. Arguably his most famous piece, however, is Storm Sequence, a video of Gladwell himself skateboarding on the Bondi seafront as one of Sydney's signature brutal storms lingers offshore. It is Gladwell's nod to the landscape (or seascape) tradition, tinged with his own individualism.

"I always thought my work was bad examples of landscape," he says, "particularly in terms of weather. Storm Sequence is a shocking postcard of Bondi, it's kind of the antithesis of advertising and tourism promotion images. This huge storm was blurring the detail of that space.

"To show my work in this show might make some sense because I was interested in Turner and the idea of atmosphere affecting vision, something I was really interested in around the time of Storm Sequence. I was thinking about this tradition of Romantic landscape but I wanted to make it personal, I didn't want to just embark on appropriating imagery from elsewhere. I wanted to bring it to my experience and my world through skateboarding and beach culture."

When visitors first enter the exhibition the first thing they will encounter will be Indigenous art, the idea being that these works warrant the prominent position because it was 'first'. Over the last couple of decades London has hosted many successful exhibitions of Aboriginal art in smaller spaces, but for Soriano, Australia represents an opportunity to place such art in a new context, and with new relationships to the art of the settlers and white Australia.

"One of the reasons landscape struck me as being the right theme was because Aboriginal art started in and on the landscape," she says. "[The exhibition] is a beautiful meshing of the two different kinds of art, that allowed me to bring them together comfortably and honestly with this theme. It was important for me to present Indigenous art to audiences at the Royal Academy, and I felt it was important that it was seen as part of Australian art history, rather than a separate exhibition on its own."

One way the Aboriginal art in this exhibition must categorically stand apart is that it is generally not beholden to a tradition or style from a distant land, nor cares about its approval. Another issue this exhibition seems to bring up is how Australian artists have, in the past, perhaps looked towards London or Europe for vindication, and whether anything like this still persists. For Gladwell, it is an emphatic no.

"Maybe that was an attitude or a reality before," he says, "but I guess I'm part of a generation of artists that is part of a few different scenes. I'm not really worried about trying to get recognition anywhere. You have guys in the Seventies like [art historian and critic] Terry Smith talking about provincialism [Smith's famous article, 'The Provincialism Problem'] but I really don't feel that's the case anymore. We're all so connected, in a different way.

"I don't have that thing that might have happened at some point in history where you try and erase your Australianness to become part of an international scene."

Mendelssohn also points out London's increasing irrelevance to today's generation of artists, somewhat undermining the pomp surrounding the impending exhibition in London.

"China is the most important art market in the world," she says. "If you've made it in Shanghai, you've made it. The world has changed. My students, who come from all over the world, really want to see Venice Biennale and Art Basel, but they're not fussed about going to London.

"When I was growing up, London was the destination, and then when I was at university all the smart young things wanted to go to New York. Now they want to go everywhere. There's no such thing as the centre and the periphery like there used to be, it's much more complicated. Part of that is the internet, but its also just the changing centres of economic power – art tends to hang around where the rich and powerful are."