The atmosphere was contented, friendly, as lavish—to our eyes—evening meals were prepared on state-of-the-art barbecues, and small groups gathered to chat and compare travel notes. I closed my eyes for a moment. The sound of clinking glasses took me back to the Pymble Golf Club, caddying for my dad and sitting at the clubhouse once the round had finished. There, in the spiritual heart of the North Shore, genteel matrons and their businessmen husbands sipped their wine and beer after a day on the course. Back then, they alone would have been in a position to travel widely and enjoy retirement. But here in this camping ground I was witnessing an Australian success story: an economy that, with only a few blips, had remained strong, with ever-increasing house prices giving the downsizers a great launch pad for their senior years. Add to this the benefits of the Keating government’s superannuation reforms—what bounty. Now many more working people were in a position to enjoy the fruits of a lifetime in employment, and by the looks of it a fair number of them were taking the opportunity to travel around Australia. I was glad to see it, but at the same time had the worrying thought that this was what the Kimberley would face ten years hence, magnified ten times over.
If Broome could manage the pressures that come with intense growth and development, I pondered, then perhaps the south could learn something from this tolerant and vibrant northern outpost we left behind with much regret.
This meant recognising without reservation that it was Aboriginal people’s country, shared now by subsequent waves of visitors and settlers bound to respect the First Peoples.
It meant accepting that the area shouldn’t be worked over as though it was a southerner’s dream location or a miner’s feasting ground.
It also meant getting the nuts and bolts of planning right and making certain the locals benefited from the latest mining boom—whatever its size or duration—as people worked through the trade-offs that came with big numbers and big dollars.
These issues are not exclusive to Broome. They arise in different shades in many parts of the country, especially in the north. My hope was that here people of the land could build for a future that served their interests, not those of the powerful, nor the central planners in a distant city building making decisions from the comfort of their air-conditioned offices.
Meanwhile, taking the time to experience the sweep of the country, as people we bumped into along the way were doing—including families like us, with young children and their blotting-paper minds—could only help to deepen our appreciation of what was at stake.
We’d swum in swimming holes, creeks and oceans, camped in the desert, walked through wetlands and into caves covered in rock art, hung out with locals as our kids played together, heedless of colour or station. I tried to help my daughters understand the backstories of the towns and people we met. And we laughed and sang along the way.
When we finally got back to Mittagong, Doris and I planted three plum trees, clustered together in the front garden. Easily seen from the kitchen window, they blossom early, with a shimmering mauve that fades in a few short weeks. They sing out that spring is coming, with bursts of fresh growth that remind us of our daughters, who mean so much to us, who are always there in the still inner reaches of our hearts.
19
UP FOR GRABS
A BIT OF downtime had given me some space to think through some of the bigger questions that were lurking underneath the covers, but I needed clear air to chew on them.
When Emily and May were still very young, I’d push them in a double stroller up the hill to a tiny Uniting Church in Balgowlah. We’d sneak in after the service had started, filing into the back row, and the girls would play on the floor with a few random toys while the congregation got a dose of earthy common sense from a minister who’d grown up on a dairy farm and wasn’t there to judge anyone.
Stephen Hawking’s remark that ‘Now I understand a little of how the universe works, but I still don’t know why’ raises a big philosophical flag, but I never thought the ‘why’ was about escaping damnation. Over time I moved away from formal churches of any persuasion. There was an exclusiveness and punitive dimension to formal religious practice that turned me off. And the monstrous failings of church leadership, especially the Catholics and Anglicans, to protect children in their care—as would be revealed in years to come—made me furious. I had read and thought a lot about the early Christian church. The energy of its mission was an incredible enterprise, but the institution had drifted away from the core precepts, as evidenced in Jesus’ life and teaching. Better for me to give little thought to tomorrow, but rather to try to live each day with as little enmity and as much focus as I could muster. Aiming for love in the true sense of the word, no matter how difficult, wasn’t naïve, it was the only way.
As to the why in Hawking’s question, I was convinced part of the answer lay in the purpose to which you addressed your life. Charles Birch, the eminent Sydney-based Christian philosopher, had written a great book about the subject. It was the act of living faithfully, diligently in the moment that counted. And then asking, what is happening to my neighbour? What is happening to the creation? And what, if anything (and there is always something) can I do to help? Not to advance my own interests but because I believe (and this can come through belief in God) that this is what humans are meant—‘called’ in the Christian tradition—to do. It might sound trite but when the act of cleaning your shoes is as satisfying as buying a new pair, and you make an effort to help people who can’t afford shoes at all, then I believe you can experience deep-rooted happiness.
…
Meanwhile, after a year off, it was time for Midnight Oil to get back to the long and winding road. Occasionally, though, we’d go the short route, for one-off events. In one instance, in early 1992, we ventured forth to play a major concert in Boston to coincide with Earth Day and the lead-up to the Rio Earth Summit. The meeting in Rio was the first major gathering of world leaders—joined by more than 15,000 members of civil society—aimed at reaching agreement on steps to help the world’s environment. Expectations were high for this hallmark event, which, among other things, established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that subsequently became the Kyoto Protocol. Paul Keating, now prime minister, was a no-show, which sent a worrying message about the new Labor government’s priorities.
We arrived in Boston on a freezing gloomy April afternoon to find that a huge crowd, undeterred by the weather, had gathered outdoors in the Foxboro Stadium. It was a national event and a squadron of broadcast vans was crammed into the loading dock—music and mainstream media lurked in every corner.
The long trek from Sydney meant getting everyone to the Northern Hemisphere was a costly, complicated exercise, no matter how important the cause. I was the last-minute man, impatient with the time it took to get there and then set up, the fiddling with gear that was a mandatory part of tour preparations. I was usually still catching my breath, trying to tie up the loose ends of other projects. And I liked to keep things fresh. If this meant flying by the seat of our pants, I could wear the odd mid-air collision. It gave the shows more edge, and even if I wasn’t being totally fair to the crew in expecting everything to be honed to perfection, it was preferable to doing things the same way every night.
Earth Day saw us huddled in a makeshift tent at the side of the stage, grey sleet turning the ground to frozen sludge. We were desperately trying to warm up, having arrived late and still jetlagged, as the patient crowd turned numb in the twilight.
We’d done only one manic warm-up the night before but could usually rise to the occasion. A lifetime of touring in all kinds of weather, often with our backs to the wall, was solid insurance for shows like these. As with many events of this ilk, it had been a long day. The audience had already been treated to Willie Nelson, the Violent Femmes, Joan Baez singing with the Indigo Girls, and Steve Miller rocking out in mild guitar-hero style.
We pushed our way through the set, full of longish songs about
the state of the planet, only to see four skinny little figures in charcoal and black zoot suits tumble out of a limousine and straight onto the stage, wired up and speeding like Formula One race cars—the Kinks blew the gig away. In rapid succession, ten three-minute radio classics were delivered at hyper speed, including ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘All Day and All of the Night’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and ‘Lola’. The crowd, growing warmer as each hit smacked them in the face, loved it. The wily old popsters then departed in the reverse sequence of their arrival without a word to anyone.
Somehow Willie McInnes had managed to get clam chowder delivered to our tent, which now resembled a tattered piece of North Pole infrastructure, and there we sat warming our lips and tending our wounds. We were rarely blown off the stage in nearly thirty years of touring, but Ray Davies and his band took the prize that afternoon without raising a sweat.
It was a relief, a week later, to return home from the icy wastes of north-eastern US. Back with my sweetheart, whose smile made me forget I’d ever had a bluesy moment, spending time with my daughters, and within spitting distance of mates and the ocean, I could repair my body and restore my sense of equilibrium—and my sense of purpose.
Midnight Oil were gearing up to record the Earth and Sun and Moon album, but before starting in the studio I pitched in on a new campaign thrown together with my old uni friend, filmmaker David Bradbury.
There were only two locations on the east coast where defence forces could conduct air, land and sea exercises. One was Jervis Bay, the other the Shoalwater Bay training area, some 2000 kilometres north. The Shoalwater Bay area is massive, nearly 4500 square kilometres of the largest undeveloped tract of coastal ecosystem south of Cape York. It was in pristine condition, too, with a multitude of wetlands, mangrove estuaries spreading out from small creeks and, importantly, a series of vegetated parabolic sand dunes that run from north to south on the landward side of the bay.
When viewed from a distance, the dunes appear as a low forested mountain range. They’d been undisturbed for around 700,000 years and acted like giant water filters, in the wet season absorbing rainfall that eventually fed a small stream flowing from the southern perimeter of the hills and providing a year-round supply of clean drinking water to the coastal town of Yeppoon, fifty kilometres south. The entire area had been placed on the Register of the National Estate, a list of outstanding areas with high environmental values. Despite this, Graham Richardson, while still environment minister, had approved the issuing of mining leases over parts of Shoalwater Bay, including the sandhills.
I’d noticed the area while flying up to Cairns on a Midnight Oil tour. ‘Suddenly, a huge chunk of green and blue appeared below, nearly twice the size of suburban Sydney,’ I later noted in a press release, issued to alert people to the bay’s assets. The ACF had Shoalwater Bay on its watch list and, before moving on from the foundation in 1992, Phillip Toyne sought meetings with the new environment minister, Ros Kelly, to discuss its future.
As is often the case, a local community group had been trying to draw attention to developments at Shoalwater, but drumming up interest was all but impossible. The media in the nearest major centre, Rockhampton, were more interested in monitoring cattle prices than the antics of a small group of protesters a couple of hours’ drive away. And while there had been calls for the ACF and other national groups to get involved, the conservation movement was already occupied on a multitude of fronts. The issuing of the leases, after a number of false starts, was seen as a fait accompli, notwithstanding some dubious business deals that accompanied the process.
As it turned out, the threat of sand mining was worrying the commander of the training area as well. Major Sam Hassall was an unlikely ally who had come to appreciate the natural qualities of the lands and water for which he had responsibility. Crucially, he could facilitate access to the Shoalwater Bay training area. But how to derail the imminent arrival of men and machines set to denude the oldest undisturbed forested sandhills on the face of the globe?
David Bradbury was already well established as a documentary filmmaker; he wore his politics proudly on his sleeve, and was used to operating on a shoestring budget. His previous films—including his earliest, Front Line—had received numerous awards. He’d been made aware of the furore that was erupting in Central Queensland and, with researcher Helen Stickley-Thompson and editor Peter Scott, his small team was chafing at the bit to make a film to highlight what was at stake.
I agreed to come on board to push things along and help write and narrate the film, provisionally titled The Last Frontier, which we hoped would provide a powerful campaigning tool and alert a much wider audience to what was happening up on the Central Queensland coast.
Bradbury had secured funding from the Australian Film Commission with back-up from actor Bryan Brown if he blew the budget. But the film would have to be made quickly, given Richardson had already issued the leases. The only hope was that the Keating government could be persuaded to reconsider the decision before the project got off the ground.
A week after the film’s funding came through, I found myself at Rockhampton airport with a group consisting of a world-weary Sydney film crew, a young Aboriginal activist from the coast who’d been invited to provide a local perspective and a couple of committed volunteers. We were heading into the unknown, with half a script and even less of an idea about how the film would turn out. But in many ways the documentary made itself. Like Jervis Bay, or any other area with significant natural values, there was a backdrop of images of pristine environments that would translate powerfully to the screen.
An old fishing trawler, the Pearl Bay, had been hired at bargain-basement rates to enable the crew to film from the water, and we launched a runabout from the boat and set about exploring, filming as we went. It was hard work for the crew but for me idyllic: doing my pieces to camera, the days warm and still, the nights clear. And wherever we looked there was rampant life: rainforest thickets alive with birdcalls, mudflats and mangroves teeming with crabs and worms and tiny insects.
Despite its occasional use by the military, the bay was one of the healthiest waterways I’d ever encountered: crystal clear, with ample seagrass beds in the sheltered coves and inlets that were ideal hideouts for prawns to spawn and dugongs to feed and calve. It was gloriously free of any permanent moorings, with no run-off, waste or rubbish. The treasure trove of fish species explained why local fishing groups, usually no friend of the conservationists, were also trenchantly opposed to the sand mining.
By the time we finished filming from the boat we were knackered, running short of time and due to return south to Yeppoon. As the afternoon cooled, out of nowhere a gale blew up and strong winds raked across the bay where we’d moored. The temperature dropped abruptly—bad weather was on the way.
‘Should we stay or should we go?’ the ghost of Joe Strummer crooned in my ear as I sought out the skipper. I found him, a burly, unshaven fisherman in his mid-forties, slumped on what passed for the bridge of the Pearl Bay. He was listening to crackly weather updates on an old radio, periodically glancing up at the threatening clouds and then at the smallest radar I’d seen on any boat.
‘It’s blowing pretty hard and it’s meant to get worse,’ he offered before I could say a word. When I queried the seaworthiness of his distinctly ramshackle vessel, he just shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s been through worse, Pete. I reckon we’ll be fine.’
This wasn’t how most of the film crew saw the situation. After days of tramping along numerous creeks, through mud and sand, carting gear on and off boats and up and down hilly, heavily timbered ranges, with minimal breaks and catering that consisted of stale sandwiches, bottles of water and health bars—all of which they’d endured in good humour for a good cause—the increasing howl of the wind, and whirring and screaming through the mast and fittings, had cast a pall over the team and a minor mutiny erupted. There was a ‘meeting’, followed by an announcement. Some of the crew wanted to stay in the relat
ive calm of the bay, never mind the schedule and the extra cost. Besides, did we really trust this decrepit captain and his equally decrepit-looking boat? Were Bradbury and I really prepared to risk everyone’s lives by taking to sea in conditions as bad as these?
Our answer was equally brief—yes. As the more experienced hands might already have guessed, we couldn’t afford to stay. Hiring the trawler for an extra day or two simply wasn’t in the budget. And we had to trust our captain. If he was really in fear of his life or concerned for his vessel—most likely uninsured—then no doubt he would have expressed some reservations. He hadn’t. We were going.
We chugged out of the bay and rounded the point into open water, as the evening went gloomy and black and the wind blew louder.
It was a wild ride as the shallow waters in this section of the coast meant the big swells were hard to breach head on. Waves reared up at all angles, sending torrents of water across the bow. The captain, however, seemed oblivious to the trawler’s heaving and crashing, and to the uneasy mood of his passengers.
I knew I’d be sick if I stayed below deck and so stood at the stern, hanging on like hell as we pitched through the night, occasionally shouting out to the skipper: ‘Here comes a big one! Look, over there, there’s another one coming!’ But he just grunted and ignored me as we continued to smash through the swells. The voyage seemed to go on forever.
We eventually motored in past the breakwater at Yeppoon before midnight and jumped off the boat, swaying on our feet, giddy with relief. We reached the motel to find it in total darkness, but the owner had thoughtfully left the keys in each door before retiring for the night.
Lying in my room I couldn’t sleep; my head was still swimming after our gut-churning voyage and the wind continued to rage outside. Had this actually been the last-ever voyage of the Pearl Bay, I wondered? Other than the skipper there had been no crew, and I couldn’t recall any markings on the vessel nor any life jackets—or was I simply delirious? Still, we hadn’t blown the budget and we had the makings of a memorable documentary with some great footage under our belt—not to mention a hair-raising adventure to tell our friends about.
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