Larry Schwartz
The tongue flickers at the upper lip, opaque greenish eyes brighten. The mouth quivers on the verge of a first word that does not come. Eighteen seconds pass before Peter Garrett speaks his mind.
For these moments, he’s transparent. Every twitch of his famous features animates the thought process. Then a gush. The comment comes fully formed, with hardly a pause.
“Pauline Hanson’s support in opinion polls, to me, is less worrisome than the fact that the Government is unable to come up with coherent ways of describing why it thinks that what she says is wrong. We should think very seriously about applying formaldehyde to the hate merchants and
horrible xenophobic populace …”
On and on. A torrent in which Garrett holds forth on national identity, history, geography, the republic, relationships with Asia. Nor does he pull his punches, charging “people like” the radio broadcaster John Laws with a “poverty of compassion and narrow, selfish introversion which is not
Australian”.
He gives the impression of one who has waited a long time to speak out. “All you can do if you’re in this position I’m in,” he says, “is to be passionate, political, active and an entertainer. It’s a hope that occasionally the pundits and the scribes will give you a nod and a tick and that the
ordinary, thoughtful person will hear the message.”
The message. That’s the thing. It is little more than a decade since Garrett seemed poised to harness his fame and assert some influence in Canberra. As lead singer of Midnight Oil, a rock band that found international acclaim with some of the most overtly political music since the late great
folky Woody Guthrie, he embarked on a campaign for a place in the Senate in 1984.
Personal popularity and a groundswell of support reflecting early disenchantment with the Hawke Government took the two-metre tall, bare-scalped musician tantalisingly close to a political career.
He ran on a Nuclear Disarmament Party ticket and insists that, once it was clear that Labor would direct its preferences to the Liberals, and vice versa, he had no illusions about the outcome.
“I had never gone into it believing that I’d become a senator and wanting to become a senator. I was going into it knowing that it was going to be an interesting ride. Believing that it was worthwhile trying to pull out the torch and shine it on these things …”
Garrett was among the tallest of tall poppies. In a way, he set himself up for a lampooning by those who quickly dismissed him as a dilettante. Opponents took him to task for taking himself too seriously, for being too earnest.
Others made light of his joust. “I used to get up to surf in the morning,” he says, “and they’d say, `Ha, ha. What a joke this is. What happens when you get in?’ I said, ‘No worries, free surfboard wax. I hereby make the promise. You’ll never pay for wax again’.”
Garrett says he has always been suspicious of the personality cult, has even expressed such qualms in song. “Don’t want to be an advocate,” he once intoned in lines he says were initiated by bandmate Jim Moginie, “don’t want to be a monument”. Yet he had become, as `Time’ magazine
tagged him, the “walking icon of outrage”.
It was then, he says, “I thought I’d better creep back into my little hole”.
And so he went. The public’s fervor for the environment waned and the movement’s most conspicuous member seemed to disappear – an ideological dinosaur to those who saw him as a proponent of trendy issues. The impression of decline was reinforced by a fall in the popularity of
Midnight Oil, once among the biggest Australian acts overseas.
Seeing him surrounded by the faithful in Melbourne recently at a function to mark the 30th anniversary of the Australian Conservation Foundation, it was clear that he had not changed. Only the world about him had changed.
At 43, he is still in there, railing and flailing from the sidelines. Worrying over the threat to hard-fought victories of the 1980s by conservative governments, the “deregulatory zeal of today’s so-called reformers”, lamenting the lack of leadership to take us into a future in which he might have played a more central role.
“Hands up everyone who voted for Jeff Kennett,” he recently challenged his audience from onstage at the Palace in St Kilda. “We have some fascists here? You’ll need some political education, I see.”
Garrett still has an openness about him at odds with the tight, pinched look of those among us who have surrendered to adulthood. “I grew up as late as I could,” he says. “I had a very, very deep feeling when I was an early teenager that I didn’t want to be an adult too soon.”
It’s an attitude that explains his approach to his daughters, aged 10, nine and seven. Without shielding them from the world outside their home in the semi-rural NSW town of Mittagong, he and his wife, Doris, have sought to enrich their lives with fairytale, myth, stories and song.
“Let’s have as much good stuff going as we possibly can,” he says.
The son of a businessman and social worker, Garrett grew up on Sydney’s northern beaches. His mother, Betty, died tragically. “I sort of stayed away from talking about my mum’s passing for many years,” he says. “She perished in a house fire. The family home burned down.”
He finally found a way to face it, alluding to her death on a 1993 album, ‘Earth and Sun and Moon’. He sang: “When my mother went down it was a stiff arm from Hades.”
HE SEEMS not to have lost the optimism he must have had as a gawky kid at prestigious Barker College on Sydney’s north shore. His late father persuaded him to study law. “I asked my parents, ‘What do people do who aren’t very good at maths and science? My dad said, ‘Son, be a lawyer.
Talk’.”
He studied at the Australian National University, completing his postgraduate law degree at the University of NSW after band commitments drew him back from Canberra. “I did 20 minutes of advisory consideration for another lawyer and saw what I was doing and didn’t like it.”
Garrett says he had his hair shaven off in the ’70s because the blond locks got in the way while surfing. Others in the band insisted then that the hair remain off. Has he been at liberty to grow it back again? “Well, well,” he laughs. “This is a question we shall not speculate on!”
The band began as The Farm, playing Sydney’s northern beaches. In the early days, Garrett would sing with abandon until, near collapse, roadies dragged him off to an oxygen tent. “They were the most full-on thing I’d ever seen,” says a friend, Peter Farnan, guitarist with the pop group
Boom Crash Opera, who was then with the short-lived Serious Young Insects.
Intimidated then by Garrett’s fierce glare, Farnan years later found him cool and canny at Parliament House after he had enlisted his support in lobbying against moves by the Prices Surveillance Authority to dismantle the Australian music industry’s copyright protection from imports.
Midnight Oil refused to go on ‘Countdown’ because it deemed the ABC pop show too sanitised. Legend has it that band members would trash inadequate fixtures to force an upgrade at venues. They once declined to play at Bombay Rock in Sydney Road, Brunswick, until the management
agreed to transform its VIP lounge into a stage. “It was pretty hard to be where they were back then,” Farnan says. “It was a closed shop.”
The Oils blazed the trail where others followed. When Garrett talks of being a “godfather” to younger musicians he’s probably not overstating the case. He probably is, though, when dismissing the music scene at the time.
“When we started to make music and talk about stuff that we thought was really important, the Little River Band was singing songs about America, the Bee Gees were dominating with disco, ‘Countdown’ was a continuous succession of one-hit wonders, boy-girl groups.
“And nobody had a sense of rage. Nobody had a sense of yearning. There was no grief. There was no celebration. There was nothing. It was dead. And it was real sugar-coating stuff. And I think we put on our Doc Martens and away we went.”
Midnight Oil’s first, self-titled album, was released in 1978. Four years later, their third, ’10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1′ (the title refers to a nuclear countdown), reached number three and remained in the Australian Top 20 for close to a year. ‘Diesel and Dust’ made the US Top 20 and sold three
million copies there. The 1991 follow-up, ‘Blue Sky Mining’, brought the band five ARIA awards. The Oils, of course, declined to attend.
‘EARTH’ sold significantly less but the latest, ‘Breathe’, debuted at number three two months ago. Garrett remains disparaging of “the successive waves of musical genres and types and personalities that keep on coming at us ever increasingly – just this blur of blancmange and smeared lips
and sneered lips and dead people ultimately. Or dead careers”.
The Oils may have sold 11.5 million albums in 17 years and achieved near superstar status but they have not sold out. Garrett has never been some pouting popster on the world stage. At the height of its fame, the band got up on the back of a truck in New York’s Wall Street during the lunch
hour to rail in song against Uncle Sam. He remembers the occasion as “a very physical way of saying we thing what you’re saying sucks. Stop crapping all over the planet.”
Garrett insists the band’s commercial ambitions were always restrained by a sense of purpose. “Midnight Oil never expected to sell a lot of records,” he says. “It’s not the kind of thing we talked about. When the Columbia executives came back handshaking and clapping and photographs
and everything we were a little bewildered at what was going on.
“And they were even more bewildered that we were bewildered and there was this terrible sort of silence. Somebody said, ‘Do you know how many records you’ve sold?’ and somebody said, ‘Who cares’?”
He saw little choice in retreating from the level of success that seemed within their grasp. “I think your own makeup determines it. We’ve always been determined to be Australian, which may sound like an ad, but really it’s just a case of saying these are our suburbs, these are the landscapes
that make sense to our eyes, these are the sounds that make sense to our ears.”
PETER Robert Garrett strides through the foyer of Rockman’s Regency in familiar, broad-brimmed Akubra, extending a hand in greeting. You come expecting him to be formidable, guarded. He turns out to be genial and accommodating.
We speak in his hotel room after a day in which he has attended the launch of Alan Gray’s ‘The Earth Garden Book of Alternative Energy’, for which he had written a foreword. On the bedside table is another book, on language, a gift to his wife, who shares his fascination with the subject.
We meet again the next evening at a function at the Melbourne’s Lower Town Hall to mark the 30th anniversary of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF). More than 300 conservationists have packed the venue by the time he arrives with his wife.
Garrett wears a summery lime-colored suit. He moves around the room on big, black shoes. Stooped in conversation. This is his constituency. Here, he is revered as an elder statesman, though he’s only in mid-life.
A young ACF officer, born in the very year the organisation was founded, talks of Garrett’s impact on young campaigners during a tour of Australian university campuses.
Garrett is to be the second of two guest speakers tonight. First up is Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, the youngest woman ever in the Senate. Still in her 20s, she recalls that the Midnight Oil singer inspired her activism. ACF executive director Jim Downey introduces Garrett – to the sound of whistles and cheers – as “a great Australian”.
Garrett was the foundation’s president from 1989 to 1993. He then began a stint on Greenpeace’s international board and spent six months in Amsterdam, where it has its headquarters. His successor as ACF president, Professor David Yencken, speaks of the passion that Garrett has brought
to the organisation.
Garrett has been ACF patron since 1994. His predecessor was the controversial Governor-General Sir John Kerr. “My taking up the role can be seen as a way of rehabilitating it,” Gerrett tells the crowd to much mirth.
He will also tell you that taking the stage for a live performance has become as routine as punching the clock. But he seems keyed up in front of the crowd. He has removed his jacket and wears a white open-necked shirt with a broad yellow stripe down the middle. The left hand is in the
pocket and out, the right clutches prepared notes listing the ACF’s successes and failures over the decades.
Earlier, Garrett had dropped in at the Esplanade Hotel, in St Kilda, to check out the music scene. The ACF speech over, there are whoops and whistles, a muted version of the kind of applause you might encounter after some entertainment. People gravitate to shake his hand. A young woman walks away, still smiling minutes later. He remains an emblem.
With Garrett the message rules. Not the singer but the song. “It always seemed to me that it was desirable to try and take away the person and put in the politics. So that politics could be the thing which people could say yeah or nay to.”
It is hard to tell whether he is comfortable in the spotlight, but he does not seem to be about self-aggrandisement. He has courted the media with a purpose: as a vehicle for his views.
He has a charisma (there is no other word) that enables him to venture where others draw back. Some have remarked on “an ingenuous child-like quality” to explain why, for instance, he alone was invited to visit an area otherwise taboo to the uninitiated on the mid-1980s Midnight Oil-
Warumpi Band tour of remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.
“The Pintupi elders were obviously aware that they weren’t dealing with someone who was just a larrikin rock’n’roll singer,” Andrew McMillan has written in his book, ‘Strict Rules’. “One cannot overestimate their perception of his chosen path: a sense of right and wrong, a vision of a future and far better world.”
HE HAS headed a seven-year campaign to protect Jervis Bay, on the NSW south coast, which was declared a national park in 1994. He has written and narrated the film, ‘Shoalwater Bay Up for Grabs’ and co-written the ABC radio drama, ‘Outlanders’. He has assisted the Cape York coalition
of Aboriginal land councils and environmental groups seeking to preserve this wilderness area.
Garrett is an avowed Christian in the sense, he says, of faith rather than adherence to a dogmatic line or specific church. “And one of the notions that I have very strongly is about service. So I guess I think that I’ll be active in some area in some way in my life.”
A little more lined, the face remains emblematic of a time when it seemed possible to find a common ground in polarities. He epitomised a melding not just of politics and song but mainstream and counterculture. His Senate bid may seem audacious now but for a while it seemed he was
about to break the political mould.
Garrett frets that Prime Minister John Howard has failed to articulate a vision for the next century and his Government is not up to the task of addressing vital questions on issues such as the republic or our relationship with Asia.
“Keating was bold and his natural intelligence and the audaciousness of his character led him down some of those paths really quickly. But the current Government are not equipped to lead the country into the 21st century and this reflects itself on their approach to the environment as
much as anything else.”
He still wants to deliver a message. But is anyone listening?
Perhaps, after all, he is a performer and a political wannabe who has already peaked. It’s hard to imagine his re-emergence as a force in mainstream politics. But a friend of his isn’t so sure. “Watch this space,” he says.
Meanwhile, Midnight Oil plays on. Garrett may not pursue commercial success but in other ways his ambitions are vast. “We’ve just been digging a narrow trench, covering ourselves with words and songs and occasionally emerging and sticking our heads out and saying, by the way, blah,
blah, blah.
“That’s what we are. We’re the moles of Australian rock – the political conscience.”
The message. Always the message.
The Sunday Age, 15th of December 1996
Larry Schwartz Writer 