By Larry Schwartz
It was the end of a long afternoon. The promoter had offered coffee but Shane Howard had warned against it. The former Goanna frontman and singer-songwriter had come to town to record a few songs solo for radio in a high-rise in Bourke Street and was off to produce another musician in Broome the next day.
He talked about a time when he sat drinking whisky into the early hours of an autumn morning among shelves cluttered with books and manuscripts in the study of an Irish musician’s house on the border of Cork and Kerry.
About 4am, his host, Peadar O Riada, turned to him. “How far do your feet go down?” said O Riada, son of Sean O Riada, a key figure in the traditional Irish music revival in the 1950s and ’60s who wrote a major orchestral work, Mise Eire, ( I am Ireland).
“I said, ‘Pardon?”‘ says Howard. “He said, ‘How far do your feet go down to the earth?’ And I went, ‘Ah.’ He said, ‘Mine go all the way down.’
“It was a great question. I said, ‘Yeah my feet do go right down into the earth. But they are actually going down somewhere else’.”
Howard, whose forebears came to Australia in the mid-19th century from north of Dublin (his father’s side), Tipperary and Clare, said he had not connected with Ireland on a first visit in 1984, but he had changed his view during several trips there after Irish singer Mary Black, one of a number of artists to record Howard’s songs, invited him almost a decade later.
“I just absolutely fell in love with Ireland because I recognised that part of myself,” he says. “When I went back to Ireland eventually, everyone was mad. Everyone was like, ‘Let’s stay up all night and sing songs and go battle,’ and ‘Let’s not get up ’til late,’ and ‘Let’s live out some kind of bizarre kind of Celtic twilight.’ And yeah, I fell in love with that beautiful madness, that kind of Irish view of the world.”
His feet were hitched up on a guitar stool in an eighth-floor studio the day we met. He was strumming a steel-string guitar. He sang a ragged version of Goanna’s early-1980s protest hit, Solid Rock.
“Wasn’t long before they felt the sting, white man, white law, white gun.”
The lines still hit home: “Don’t tell me that it’s justified.”
It was the first Australian song that went all the way up the charts with that rhymed word, “genocide”.
Jamie McKew, director of the Port Fairy Folk Festival, where Howard was named artist of the year, said Howard “bridges the land between poet and songwriter; between prophet and singer; even between whitefellas and indigenous artists”.
Howard says: “I found that my experiences in Aboriginal Australia actually prepared me for the cultural dimension of entering back into Ireland … I was able to see the Irish world in terms of its ancient history, and the same with Australia.”
In the studio, he started with a song that sounded a bit like an early Bob Dylan track, Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance. It turned out to be from a new album, Howard’s eighth, Songs of Love and Resistance.
“They are either tender love ballads or they are kicking against the bastards,” he says. “Because we have to. A civil society demands that of us.”
This week he begins a national tour with Neil Murray, founding member of the Warumpi Band. Murray has said of Howard: “There’s been times when the Australian music landscape has looked pretty bleak, but I can always count on a Shane Howard song to make me sit up and say, ‘Yes that’s it!”‘
Howard returns the compliment: “Neil’s never opted for the easy road. The hard-edged reality of life on the fringes, as well as the poetic grandeur of the landscape, are all there in his powerful body of work.”
Inevitably, talk turned to the impact of a recent TV feature in the ABC’s Australian Stories series, detailing such difficulties as the breakdown Howard suffered after the release of Goanna’s second record, Oceania. He left the band and his wife and four children and ended up living in a caravan in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
He had another daughter there, whom he subsequently left to return to his older children when his first wife alerted him that she was dying of cancer.
He has since started a new life and reconciled with his family.
Howard found making the program a “really difficult thing”, at least in part because he had initially expected it to take a much broader approach.
“But towards, I suppose, the last few weeks I could see where they were starting to go with it. It was going to be deeply personal.
“In the end, I went, ‘I’ve got nothing to hide. I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t murder or rape anybody’. I talked with my family about it. We talked to other members of the band and I was pretty careful. I had to be really careful I didn’t hurt people in the process.
“I did ask the producer, ‘Why is this story important?’ I guess I wanted some justification. Is this uptown voyeurism? Is this uptown reality TV?”
He wasn’t sure how others had felt about it, though there were “plenty of unenlightened responses.” The feature was “part of something much more complex”, he says. “There’s 13 years that are just absolutely missing from the story … You can’t fit it all in in half an hour.”
The Age, 2 August 2006
Larry Schwartz Writer 