Solid Rock
Oztralya in the 1980s - just before greed became a full-time recreation - was a remarkably upbeat and creative place.
Computers were a novelty, unknown to the great unwashed (just like today!), and politics still had a fervent edge before bean-counting suits engendered apathy awash.
And, well, music!
AC/DC, Sherbet, Split Enz, Air Supply, LRB, Helen Reddy, Olivia Neutron Bomb, Peter Allen, Cold Chisel, Skyhooks roared from the 70s to join Divinyls, Men at Work, etc., storming the world. Kylie was just clearing her delicate young throat, as were Yothu Yindi.
In from the fringe came folk and protest bands like Redgum and Midnight Oil.
And of course - Goanna.
In 1982 Shane Howard and the band, including Sis Marcia, let loose one of Australia’s greatest musical experiences, Solid Rock, aka "Sacred Ground," lead single of their album Spirit of Place.
Commonly overlooked in favourites lists for an uncomfortable socio-political flavour, Solid Rock lives near the top of my shortlist of favs as perhaps the most evocative, emotional, and exciting roller-coaster of rock protest. Only several giants of dissent-music from the 1960s best it, and despite being passionately imprinted in a teenager’s heart, they’re no longer breast-stirring, more like fading antiquity (though not Verdelle’s Tar and Cement!)
But Goanna’s classic still - though it caught me in my thirties - rocks!
I heard it again today; first time in maybe a decade. Apart from its fabulous modern music, what grabbed my attention these decades hence are the words and what they stand for.
Sacred Ground’s naked-truth logic sets my hair crawling.
To what depths did Shane delve producing not only stunning timeless music but those chilling chiding words that paint us - we of the complacent shrugging variety - morally derelict.
I need to know more; how this incisive piece of pop art was forged.
A quick dash around the www seeking the tale of its composition found some Wikipedia trite and Shane’s lean website (but hey, that’s ok), a notable extract from which is his observation:
.. from a lyrical point of view you can see your moral universe that you’ve built and .. hope there’s some sort of consistency there.
And so to those lyrics.
Rather than reproduce them as colloquially sung, I’m after a reading experience. So, with apologies to both copyright and lyricist, here’s how I enjoy retelling Sacred Ground’s compelling parable.
Detaching words from music means extrapolating from vocals ideas that might have seeded them; rather a leap. The composer knows better, but we shan’t bother him right now, just amuse ourselves over here a bit.
Some phrases are moved to enhance timeline, some chorus dropped, though so powerful an admonition is worth repeating a tad.
Out here nothing changes
Not in a hurry, anyway
You feel the endlessness
With the coming light of day
Around the dawn of time
The Dreaming all began
A crowd of people came
Looking for their promised land
Running from the heart of darkness
Searching for the heart of light
It was their paradise
They were standing on solid rock
Standing on sacred ground
Living on borrowed time
And the winds of change
Were blowing cold that night
They were standing on the shore one day
Saw white sails in the sun
Wasn’t long before they felt the sting
White man, white law, white gun
Don’t tell me that it’s justified
Somewhere, someone lied
Someone lied
Genocide
And now you’re standing on solid rock
Standing on sacred ground
Living on borrowed time
And the winds of change
Are blowing down the line
You’re talking about a chosen place
You want to sell it in a marketplace?
Just a minute now
You’re standing on Solid rock
Standing on sacred ground
Living on borrowed time
And the winds of change
Are blowing down the line
What makes this 26 year old song still fabulous? It’s not just great music - it really means something.
It did then, does now.
So why not go to Shane’s Goanna website and buy the digitally-remastered real thing? [Oztralya is NOT an affiliate ~ just spreading the blogosphere love]. On the landing page, scroll down to find this, probably the best buy for earlier songs:
Retrospect 2004
"This stunning and long awaited double album collection spans
over 20 years of songs. Highlights include Solid Rock and Razor’s Edge from the GOANNA days as well as Flesh and Blood and other great songs from the RIVER & TIME WILL TELL albums that have been unavailable for years."
And I might be out of line here, but psst, here’s the link to the fabulous 1982 video on YouTube. How the hell else are you going to experience the earnest vitality of this decades-old phenomena?
Norm’s Inaugural
‘Ostrilia’ ~ It kinda sticks to yer shoes
We are all outsiders.
A touch of paranoia is a trait common to us all.
If you’ve never felt alone, unwanted, shunned in your own backyard, then probably you have never stopped to ponder your place in the world.
This nation, barely two hundred years old, comprises entirely foreigners, the majority of whom alive today are - within a generation - recently arrived immigrants.
The traditional custodians of this beautiful ancient gentle paradise, a noble people downtrodden and forgotten in their own home, patiently revere and nurture the spirits and dreamtime that stitch the very fabric of our delicate environment beneath the feet of this noisy irreverent swarm of strangers … who dare to call Australia home.
As is our mission here at Oztralya, I extend the warm hand of friendship with a welcoming clasp, as I know you would welcome me, for our journey into an understanding and celebration of the Australian psyche.
Most likely you are a curious stranger, perhaps occasional visitor or intending migrant, and stand gazing from afar hesitating even as your gut feeling is to commit, to ‘take the plunge,’ ‘go for broke,’ and buy that air ticket to launch yourself at a new life in this friendly yet faintly frightening land.
I know why you hesitate. It’s that strange, disturbing dialect, the accent, that greets you from across the vast distances. Australian film and television assails your ears while the nasal nastiness of spoken Aussie-English, confirmed in a passing Down-Under tourist, confirms the unbelievable: a totally mangled version of that finely tuned international tongue - spoken English.
The accent both tantalizes and offends sensibility - as ammonia stings eyes and nose yet finds you clutching the bottle for another sample.
Our diction, delivered with childish enthusiasm overlaying subtly-sinister overtones, an intonation as lulling as the blue Pacific ocean and the shimmering vast inland plains, with ever so slight a hint of prowling predator.
‘Oztralya’ is what ‘Australia’ becomes in our lazy guttural parlance, in which the simplest expression of greeting leaves you fazed between incredulity and aghast.
"Gidday, ‘owya goin’ ter die?" means simply "Hello, how are you going today?" and not demanding to know how you would perish. It’s the universal howdy around the land, as is "Gidday, ‘ow aaar ya?" or perhaps "Gidday mate" if yer a bloke (hence not a sheila).
Live twenty years in Oztralya and you might ‘cotton-on’ to the the oddly bent acoustics but without devout study you will probably never master the plethora of colloquialisms that just keep on coming out of the woodwork. Those bizarre obliquely-obtuse utterings can be utterly baffling utterances. At least with rhyming slang there are loose rules and clues to reverse-engineer meaning, or intent.
And it kinda sticks to yer shoes
What sticks?
Mud, excreta?
That is only a metaphor of sentiment. Stay here too long and upon leaving you will feel a tugging of the heart. The ambience of any nation become part of your soul. You get used to its tonal lighting, softening warmth or invigorating freshness, rain-sodden skies or pale desert blues. So too with this ’sunburnt country.’
My ’specialty’ (that which makes me and Oztralya.com a natural coupling) is a delicate finger on the pulse of this nation’s rust belt. From the smart but inarticulate loners managing sheep stations the size of Texas, to the quietly-invisible souls dwelling in sad little nondescript wood and iron huts in meaningless orphaned villages, and the social outcasts dredging the dumpsters of suburban malls, there is a commonality, a bond, stretching back to incarcerated First Fleet forebears.
Neither immigrants of the twentieth century nor their children will likely be found amongst this sub-class. Typically rural-bound in their slow generational drift down the social scale, the introverted quiet people of inland Ostrillia remain rooted in remoteness and stoic acceptance.
The trait of those British who felt outcast in their own land, that drove them seeking their dreams to the other side of the Earth, is now the albatross about their necks that quietly suffocates them in forgotten realms of this changeling brash, rude upstart of a country that is 21st-century Oztralya.
Like most every country on Earth, Ostrillia has two populations. The noisy movers and shakers "it’s all about me" city-slickers - and the quite silent by-no-means-majority who, like fine aggregate of concrete, hold the nation and culture together, seamlessly joining the disparate cultures and wild ideas of entrepreneurial diversity.
There is the A-list and its infrastructure - and everyone else, the ‘filler material.’
As one moves further from the white-hot core of each Oztralyan city - each legend-in-its-own-lunchtime social circus - and though the wannabe wastelands of deep suburbia, you meet finally, in nether desert regions, a true-native population, rooted like Mallee scrub to the land of their birth, adoption, … or inheritance.
Their eyes turn towards the city and part of them yearns for the glitz - at least a facile, shallow, childish part of them does.
An emergent controlling facet of personality - that binds city folk to their dastardly life style while blinding them to the ugliness of their turbulent futile quest - is dully buried in our regional hero folk and their true selves, that deep serene inner-life, allows them to see the day’s progress on the walk to finality in this profoundly spiritual illahie.