Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  Rock stays

  Earth stays

  I die and put my bones in cave or earth

  Soon my bones become earth . . .

  Our story is in the land

  It is written in those sacred places.

  Kakadu had been recognised as internationally significant and listed as a World Heritage area due to its extraordinary natural beauty and important cultural values, but it was also the site of three excised mining leases: Ranger, Jabiluka and Koongarra, and the Ranger uranium mine sat smack bang within the park, courtesy of an earlier government decision, which in hindsight seemed indefensible. This was a place that would feature prominently in environmental and Aboriginal politics in the years ahead, and we’d be back before too long. But for now, after weeks of living rough and playing in places we could never have imagined, we were content to end our tour, with our antennae still quivering, in one of Australia’s most spectacular regions.

  14

  THE AUSTRALIA CARD

  WHEN OUT OF the blue the Hawke government announced in 1985 that it was going to introduce a national identity card for all Australians, I decided to get involved. I was deep in Oils mode, but the idea offended me so much—the possibility of greater surveillance of ordinary citizens, with a plan cooked up by technocrats without consultation—I was determined to be part of the movement opposing it.

  Decked out in green and gold, the card was to be called, predictably, the Australia Card. People would have a single identification number that could be used for Medicare, passport applications, driver’s licences and so on, with all the details held in a central registry operated by the Health Insurance Commission. The card would have to be carried by every member of the population.

  As in the debate concerning euthanasia, my view is that citizens should be wary about handing over too much information or authority to a bureaucratic entity. It is impossible to predict the future, but function creep is a fact of life in all bureaucratic systems, and the likelihood of inadvertent or intentional abuse by governments—the major source of human rights abuses, should they acquire additional power—is a given.

  The principal objection to a national ID card was that it created a massive, centralised database, in a system that allowed government departments to cross-reference personal information. It may seem quaint thirty years on, with concerns about privacy ebbing away in the age of social media, but a number of individuals and civil liberties groups were opposed to the idea of the government acquiring the means to track and monitor the lives of its citizens. However, we were in a minority.

  When the proposal was first mooted as a way of cracking down on tax cheats, there was hardly a murmur. But over time, as the details of the scheme became better understood, it gave rise to increasing disquiet.

  A joint select committee of the parliament examined the bill that proposed the introduction of the Australia Card and found they didn’t like it. Neither did the Opposition, who held the balance of power in the Senate. Bob Hawke decided to call an election in 1987, ostensibly to achieve a mandate for this and other reforms, but despite being returned to government, he failed to win control of the upper house. There was little discussion of the Australia Card in the campaign, but once the government was returned it was again presented to parliament.

  The re-emergence of the legislation stirred up a hornet’s nest of questions and increasing objections from privacy experts, and it wasn’t long before I found myself at the Sebel Townhouse—a familiar music-industry hangout—sharing a podium with Janine Haines, a moderate slightly left-of-centre senator who was leader of the Australian Democrats; Ben Lexcen, a conservative who’d designed the winged keel on the yacht that won the 1983 America’s Cup; and a raft of other strange bedfellows as the newly formed Privacy Foundation kicked off a campaign against the Australia Card.

  This really was a strange crew I realised early the following week, when we met at broadcaster Alan Jones’s warehouse apartment in Newtown to plot the details of a nationwide assault on the scheme. I was happy enough to be working with such a diverse group, given we had one aim in mind, but it would be an interesting journey.

  Jones had a ready view on what tactics the group should adopt and how the campaign should be run but, in the end, he was more talk than action. Haines and Privacy Foundation chief Simon Davies, along with University of New South Wales privacy expert Dr Graham Greenleaf, did most of the substantive work.

  Meanwhile, opposition to the card was increasing. Prominent judge and avowed monarchist Michael Kirby had gone so far as to claim: ‘What is at stake is nothing less than the nature of our society.’ I was inclined to agree. In Australia we were a long way from the excesses of one-party states, with their despotic leaders—Robert Mugabe, Joseph Stalin, Erich Honecker and, today, Vladimir Putin—but the slippery slope awaited. History is littered with the cruel abuses of governments, and for those in power keeping tabs on people—their movements, habits and views—was core business in each and every case. It was time for those who valued freedom to dig in. Former Communist Party member and author Frank Hardy came out against the card, as did conservative scions like businessman Hugh Morgan. Former Whitlam government minister Jim McClelland was opposed and there were last-minute rumblings in the Labor Caucus.

  Meanwhile, activist lawyer Tim Robertson, right-leaning Australian Medical Association president Dr Bruce Shepherd and I took to the campaign trail. We squeezed into Simon Davies’ car to drive to a meeting in Orange, a regional centre in the Central West of New South Wales, to find a river of people overflowing into the street. The locals were out in force: farmers, teachers, small business owners, families, the young and old and everyone in between.

  This kind of turnout was typical. The momentum was swinging in our favour, and despite operating with few resources and even less sleep for a couple of months, our disparate crew—different in all ways other than in our view of this initiative—drew energy from the positive mood and kept soldiering on.

  By the campaign’s end, so many people had joined the dots that 90 per cent of the population was now opposed to the Australia Card—an incredible turnaround and a victory for people power. As historian Geoffrey Blainey said at the time, it was a eureka moment.

  On its way back into the Senate, a technical glitch was discovered in the bill and the government retreated—the national ID card was dead in the water.

  Since then, of course, the information and technology landscape has been transformed beyond recognition, and the bureaucracy’s desire to have a national identifier hasn’t gone away. The internet is now universal and the use of social media so commonplace that the line between public and private has all but disappeared. In western countries, at least, many people don’t appear to value their privacy at all. Private information is willingly shared and easily accessed, so much so that some figures in new media characterise privacy as outdated, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who then retreats to his walled estate to protect his own privacy.

  The revelations, in part triggered by former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, that the NSA had a system that could spy on everybody, sucking up data from people’s phones, email and Facebook accounts, highlighted how far some governments can reach.

  Reports that the Australian Signals Directorate had offered to share private information—metadata—with other nations with whom we have close intelligence ties, if true, raises very serious issues about the incursions by our government into its citizens’ lives. The outcry following these revelations was limited to writers and intellectuals, who glimpsed what was at stake: our freedom to think and act without a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

  A healthy suspicion about what modern governments and corporations might do if they had easy access to the personal details of citizens seems reasonable to me. There are very good reasons to keep what some have referred to as an invisible guardrail around your innermost self. Our thoughts, habits, opinions, fears and beliefs are all that we ha
ve. These are the non-material components of our character: the elements that make up the core of any individual’s identity.

  Surrendering these aspects that constitute an individual is a bigger step than most people think. For citizens living in a one-party state like China, where censorship and surveillance are a way of life, it’s a corrosive reality.

  Ai Weiwei, the renowned Chinese artist and critic of the communist state, has fought a long and exhausting battle with the Chinese government. The relentless monitoring of him and others who question the accepted party line has been a central feature of that struggle.

  Recently enacted laws in Australia that give greater powers to security agencies, and those that punish whistleblowers, and the ease with which metadata records, especially those of journalists, can be tracked, already provide a barrier to the transparency of government actions.

  The bottom line is that putting a white flag above the door on this issue is contrary to one of the basic tenets of our society: our inherent right to freedom of expression.

  The price of liberty is still eternal vigilance, and always will be. But I wonder if we would get such a range of political opposites into the same room on this issue today, as we did when Australians first rose up against the plan for a national ID card.

  15

  THE TIME HAD COME

  A YEAR BEFORE the Blackfella/Whitefella tour, Doris and I got married—twice: first in our backyard and then in a church. The Oils were off to South America to tour, so as an insurance policy for what we hoped wouldn’t happen—revolutions, plane crashes, piranha attacks—we stood under the clothesline at our house in Fairlight, a suburb close to Manly, and exchanged vows, with my brother Matt and Louise Douglas, an old gigging friend from the Lower North Shore, as witnesses. The celebrant who presided over the ceremony asked for a reference before the ink was dry on the marriage certificate.

  A couple of months later, when I’d returned from South America in one piece, we got married again. This time we exchanged our vows in the old stone Presbyterian church down the hill in Manly, with a full house of friends and band mates, and my sweetheart more beautiful than any bride has ever been. We floated above the ground right through the day and into the evening on clouds of pure happiness, in love and at one with the world.

  Then came the girls, in quick succession. First Emily, then May sixteen months later, and Grace followed two years after. I scribbled a few words in the diary announcing Em’s arrival into the world: ‘Now we are three.’ Words can seem trite when trying to describe something as momentous as this: seeing the surrender to great forces that happens to a mother in childbirth, then coming face to face with the miracle of a new life arriving—it’s an indelible image, one that sticks with you forever.

  Of course this meant looking after the wonderful new arrivals—all in nappies, for years in a row. It was a demanding job, especially for Doris when I was away for long stretches, all the more so as we didn’t have any parents or close relatives to come by and give us a break.

  On the few occasions we escaped out for a meal or a movie, it was getting harder to catch our breath and share a quiet moment. More and more people were coming up to say hello and get an autograph, which was fine, and a compliment, and definitely not something to object to—except when it’s your first night out in weeks and all you want to do is huddle with your wife, who you haven’t seen for two months, in a quiet corner of a restaurant.

  Of course it was my decision to jump onto a stage and I was up for whatever came with the job. I’m in the Sinatra camp on this: if you can’t stand the heat, then get out of the kitchen. But every outing had suddenly turned into a public gathering, which wasn’t much fun for the family. And given my intentionally distinctive looks, it was all but impossible to travel incognito.

  Fame is something I’ve always found bemusing. I like the ‘all of us are bloody well equal and by the way it’s your shout’ Aussie attitude; it helps to keep society on a more even keel. The English have their class system, and the Americans their star system, but I value the easygoing, egalitarian nature of Australians. It should go without saying that everyone deserves to be treated the same, irrespective of wealth, colour, belief or nationality, and if someone eats from a bigger table on the basis of merit and effort, fine. But that doesn’t mean they’re better than people who have less.

  At this time we were living in Balgowlah, close to many of our early haunts and the Oils’ office in Kangaroo Street, Manly. I liked being part of a neighbourhood, and we’d made some good friends in the street, including Damian Trotter, who worked for our record company, and his wife, Suzannah. I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that people wouldn’t take the Oils’ newfound fame too seriously; no one close to us did. I couldn’t fathom why we were put up on a pedestal simply because we’d worked hard at something we loved, got lucky and broken through. But it was increasingly clear that the family needed some kind of escape hatch. So, with the help of a couple of industrious locals, we began work on a small weekender in a patch of bush in Kangaroo Valley, a couple of hours south of Sydney.

  It was as far from the thunder and lightning of my day/night job as you could get, and I relished getting my teeth into this project. We camped in a forest glade, surrounded by eucalypts and with a permanent creek on one boundary, as we ferried tools onto the site and started building.

  Constructed on the cheap, using second-hand materials we’d sourced from demolition yards and junk shops, it was an ideal hideaway.

  Once it was finished, we were proud of our little corrugated-iron eco-cottage, replete with solar panels and a composting loo out the back. Doris and I could sit out on the rough wooden deck looking across the valley while the girls roamed free, content to play with sticks and rocks and a few old saucepans. In the early morning we were serenaded by birdsong, with eagles hovering above and lyrebirds scratching in the bush. During the day we’d take bushwalks under the craggy escarpment, occasionally chancing on foraging kangaroos, wallabies and echidnas, or we’d venture down to the creek to try to spot a shy platypus. In the evenings we were enveloped by stars—bliss.

  I envisaged buildings like this being a model for rural housing in the future. The cottage was well off the grid, and sited to the north, with the layout based on a typical three-bay farm shed, a familiar design in farming communities. Because of the simple passive solar design, the cost of power was negligible. We used a lot of recycled materials, apart from the concrete slab, so construction costs were also low. Here was an affordable way for anyone looking to build outside the city to make a start.

  Coming back into Sydney after a week away, with honking horns and high-fives at every turn, was always a reminder of how restricted our lives in the big smoke had become. Restricted—and potentially vulnerable. When a stalker left a suspicious-looking bag at the front door of our home in Balgowlah, it threw us into a panic.

  It turned out to be a hoax of sorts: a weird package and some bizarre scribble from someone who was mentally ill, but the writing—in bold letters—was on the wall. We rolled down the shutters, figuratively speaking. I removed myself from the electoral roll (an action that would rebound on me down the track) and some off-duty police we knew moved into our home to keep an eye on the family, as the Oils were due to go back out on tour.

  When I returned, after a restless six weeks in Europe and Canada worrying about how things were going at home, we started looking for somewhere quieter to live. We ended up buying an old house from the state government. Rowe Cottage had been used as an orphanage for decades. It was located within easy reach of Sydney in the Southern Highlands, where my mum had grown up; it was like a return to my roots.

  Sitting on a gentle rise, with an oak tree outside the bedroom window and a giant eucalypt in the front garden—a mix of Doris and me that we laughed about—the original Queen Anne federation cottage had been all but obliterated by various toilet-block-style additions and bureaucratic fumblings. Inside, it was filled with broken furniture,
partitions and tattered carpet tiles—all the detritus of an institution . . . but it called to us.

  Before we finalised the purchase, I took my swag down, slipped in through a broken window and slept there overnight to see how much of the past had stuck to the graffiti-covered walls. The power had been turned off and I lay there in the pitch black, listening for crying in the night, but all was quiet. Unlike my old family home in Lindfield, it appeared to be ghost-free. (We later discovered that for some kids it was a refuge and, depending on the staff, a happier place than where they’d come from. For others, though, it had been like a prison, a place of cruelty and suffering.)

  Here we would have a bit more space and some privacy, and the girls could have a more regular upbringing. When I was home, we could just be a family, not a sideshow. It would take a while for our new house to be repaired and made good, and for the past to be exorcised a little. In the meantime, more music was on the way.

  …

  Diesel and Dust, the easiest and, in retrospect, probably the most important album Midnight Oil made, was recorded at a time when several of us were expanding our families, and the thought of leaving home filled the new fathers in the band with dread. So we decided to go with Alberts, where we’d recorded our first album. They’d since moved from the city to the Lower North Shore, with the studio hidden away on the first floor of a brick office block alongside a shopping centre in Neutral Bay.

  It would be hard to imagine a more modest enterprise for a label that had launched AC/DC to worldwide success. If you wanted to get out and take a breather, the only option was to walk around the leafy streets of Neutral Bay: not very rock-edgy, but highly conducive to work.

  Warne Livesey came across from England to work the machines and mix. He was a low-key, music-focused producer and presided over a tight recording process. ‘Peter, let’s just run that again, can we? And this time, just concentrate on hitting that last note, please.’