Oils on the Water (1985)

Here's the entire Oils on the Water concert from Goat Island in Sydney Harbour from 1985. I was 16 when this was broadcast. I had been listening to Midnight Oil for over a year. I had been introduced to them by a girl I had a brief thing with, and we went on to become lifelong friends (its been over 40 years now anyway). Midnight Oil changed reality for me. Prior to hearing their music I was a good little colonial boy. When I was 12 I wrote a 10 page essay on Winston Churchill, from an admiration. When I was 15 I won a school writing prize for a story about nuclear war being conducted like a cricket match. That change was largely due to the 1982 Midnight Oil album 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1. Songs like US Forces taught a generation of Australians about the history of their nation that was not being taught in school. I was told in school that Aboriginal Australians were an "evolutionary dead end" and they would die out. It was only a matter of time. My discovery of Midnight Oil was the beginning of my awareness. It was shown on national television and broadcast in stereo simulcast on Radio JJJ - it was the 10th birthday for the station. Enjoy and think of Rob Hirst the drummer who died yesterday.

John Berger and Susan Sontag / To Tell A Story (1983)

The power of stories, as modes of representation, as ways to understand ourselves and that which we experience as reality, including other people, is discussed in this highly engaging meeting between John Berger and Susan Sontag. Both of these thinkers and writers are now sadly no longer with us on this plain of reality. John Berger died two days ago, and Susan Sontag died in 2004. This discussion between them inspired so many thoughts in me, having found it on the wonderful Open Culture blog, I uploaded it here. Just so I know where it is if I ever need it...and I probably will from time to time.

One thing that struck me personally from this conversation is that the first stories I remember were told to me orally, about members of my family that I never met. Soldiers, farmers and explorers. It then occurred to me that my mother came from an oral storytelling culture - she did not go to school until she was 13, her mother did not go to school at all. They lived on a huge cattle property in central Queensland in Australia that had been in the family for over 100 years. My father on the other hand grew up in nearest big town, (5 hours drive on the sealed roads that had been created by the time I was a child, when they were kids it took a lot longer), which was becoming a city as he came of age. He lived in books and our house was literally a library. I once packed up my father's library to move him, and it came in at 300 banana boxes. That is a lot of books. But my maternal grandmother told me the stories of the bush, and the world that she remembered from the 1920s as a child.

Photograph taken the year before my maternal grandmother was born (1911) in Taroom, the nearest settlement to where she grew up. It was an oral storytelling culture, even when she was a young adult, although they read and wrote, the spoken story was the more common vehicle.

HARPO THEATRE / MUSIC EVENT (in Toowoomba, Australia, 1972)

The Super 8 film shows a team arriving from Brisbane to set up for a HARPO performance event at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education in Toowoomba in July, 1972.

HARPO was formed in Brisbane, Australia, in late 1971 as a counter cultural organization promoting alternative music, theatre, politics and healthy living. It had its roots in several earlier organizations.

Prominent HARPO founding members included Graham Cathcart and Bomber (Robert) Perrier. John Stanwell was an early and also influential member. Other active members included Stuart Matchett, Ken McSwain, and Colin Beasley (among many others).

The name Harpo was originally chosen simply because it was an interesting-sounding name. Then somebody joked H.A.R.P.O. stood for "How About Resisting Powerful Organizations." The acronym stuck, giving the appearance this was the original idea behind the group's name all along.

The first of the famed "Harpo's Nite Out" concert events was held in the University of Queensland refectory building in March, 1972. It featured a combination of political theatre and live music. The theatre performance was by the Laurence Brown Theatrical Troupe (another name HARPO chose because it had a nice ring to it - there was no Laurence Brown). The troupe had evolved from an earlier performance group, Romp Street Theatre.

The headline band was MACKENZIE THEORY from Melbourne. The band was so popular, they became a regular main stay of Harpo's Nite Out events. Mother's Lightworks (Phil Hutson) did the psychedelic light shows, and Peter Gray contributed to the atmosphere with his quadraphonic-sound system (Electronic Excursions), a forerunner to the DJ phenomenon.

A second "Harpo's Nite Out" followed at the same venue on 8 July, 1972, with even bigger crowds in attendance. The supporting act was Brisbane-based band, SHEPHERD, and THE CLITETES also appeared.

This second show was the beginning of a road tour sponsored by the Australian Union of Students (AUS). The tour helped spawn a newly evolving, co-operative, working relationship with Johnny Allen and Graeme Dunstan of Aquarius fame, key figures in AUS at the time.

The day before, 7 July, the tour officially kicked off with a show performed at the Toowong High School. The Toowoomba event, seen in this film, was the third engagement of the tour. Next stop was the campus in Armidale, and finally the tour continued on to campuses in Sydney.

The first two "Harpo's Nite Out/s" coincided with the publishing of a tabloid newspaper called, "HARPO: The Alternate Organ." A pile of these newspapers is seen stacked up in front of the spare tyre (tire) in the back of the HARPO van at 3:51, awaiting distribution during the tour.

Local Brisbane band, SILAS FARM, played before the regular headliners, the Laurence Brown Troupe and MACKENZIE THEORY at later Harpo's Nite Out concerts in 1973.

Harpo's Nite Out drew inspiration from Foco, a legendary, multi-media, cultural event started by radical unionists and students held on Sunday nights in Brisbane's Trades Hall in 1968 and 1969. Harpo's Nite Out, in turn, inspired the 4ZZZ Joint Effort, popular concert events showcasing emerging rock bands, organized by independent radio station 4ZZZ-FM in the mid 1970s as their main fundraising activity.

HARPO worked "organically" in a loose organizational structure with the attitude "we can do anything"......and they did. In June, 1972, HARPO took over the running of Wholefoods Organic Food Co-op in Milton Road, and for a time the running of Mr. Natural's Food Kitchen, a vegetarian restaurant on Schonell Drive near the university. HARPO headquarters were flats in an old house behind the Toowong library where Bomber Perrier and Graham Cathcart lived.

"Laurence Brown" developed the guerrilla street theatre troupe, the Harpo Super heroes with Steel Sheila, Wonder Wombat, Zap Crapper , Laughing K. Kookaburra, et al. One of the Super heroes (Bomber Perrier) managed to convince the iconic American beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, to do a concert of readings in Brisbane before returning to the US after the Adelaide Festival. Ginsberg appeared with visiting Russian poet, Andrei Vosnesensky. The Super heroes crashed their own press conference, and Ginsberg reportedly loved this because it reminded him of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

HARPO made a two-hour radio program called "The Whole Earth Radio Show" for the ABC, which was produced in the broadcaster's conveniently-located Toowong studios right near HARPO "headquarters".

This film is dedicated to Graham's memory. Also to the spirit of those times as the younger generation emerged from the oppressive conservatism and restricted thinking of post-war Australia.