On making noise at the edge of the world. On the cultural cringe and its refusal. On police states and pub culture, on bodies and borders, on the colonial gaze turned inward, on what it means to scream from a country that does not hear you — and what happens when the world finally listens.
The colonial silence, the cultural cringe, and the long work of convincing a country that it could hear itself
Terra nullius — the legal fiction that Australia was empty land, belonging to no one, available for claiming — was not merely a policy applied to indigenous Australians. It was a habit of mind that extended, in subtler forms, into the cultural life of the settler colony. The land was there but it did not signify. The people making things were there but what they made did not count. Meaning arrived by ship, from elsewhere.
Lobby Loyde was dismissed from Billy Thorpe's band in 1972. The stated reason varied depending on who was telling the story — too loud, too long, too inclined to extend guitar solos beyond what the venue or the booking agent or the other band members considered appropriate. Loyde's response was to form Coloured Balls, a power trio of such sustained volume that several Sydney venues asked them not to return after the first show. He considered this evidence that he was on the right track.
What Loyde understood — and what the pub circuit infrastructure of the time did not — was that Australian rock music had a capacity for extremity that had nowhere to go within the system that was supposed to contain it. The pubs wanted volume you could talk over. Loyde wanted volume you could not think through. This distinction, which seems merely aesthetic, was in fact cultural: it was the difference between music as accompaniment and music as event. The alternative scene that followed in the late 1970s and 1980s was built on this distinction, usually without knowing Loyde's name.
A.A. Phillips named the condition in 1950, but it had been operational since settlement. The cultural cringe is not mere self-deprecation; it is a structural disposition — a trained reflex that evaluates local production against an imagined metropolitan standard and finds it inherently wanting. The empire is always more real than the colony. The centre is always more serious than the periphery.
Paul Carter's The Road to Botany Bay (1987) proposed a different way of reading Australian space. Where conventional history asked "what happened here?", Carter asked "how was here constituted?" — how did the act of naming, mapping, and narrating the landscape bring it into a particular kind of being that served colonial purposes. The names the colonists gave to places were not neutral labels but instruments of possession, imposing English categories onto a country that was generating its own, entirely different, spatial meanings.
Carter's spatial history applies directly to the music. The Australian alternative scene was not merely making music in Australia; it was making music about the experience of being in Australia — the particular quality of its light, its distances, its social textures, its silences. The Triffids, the Go-Betweens, David McComb: they were doing for Australian sound what Carter was doing for Australian landscape — insisting that it had its own meanings, irreducible to the meanings imposed from elsewhere.
Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony — the way in which a dominant class maintains its position not through direct coercion but through the naturalisation of its values as common sense — is useful here. By the early 1970s, Australian popular music had developed its own hegemonic form: pub rock. The front bar circuit, the six-o'clock swill, the three-chord belt-it-out-for-drunk-blokes model had become, through sheer ubiquity, what Australian music simply was.
Cold Chisel, Skyhooks, Midnight Oil: these were not the enemy of Australian alternative music, but they defined the gravitational field against which alternatives were constituted. To make something different — something quiet, or literary, or abrasive, or experimental — was to position yourself against an entire social infrastructure of pubs, booking agents, and radio programmers who knew what Australian music was for and would not pay for anything else.
Art historian Bernard Smith's analysis of how European painters distorted the Australian landscape — domesticating its strangeness, imposing European pastoral conventions on a country that was structurally hostile to them — has an exact musical parallel. The first Australian popular music had imposed imported genres onto a country whose sonic texture and social reality demanded something else. The bush ballad, the music hall song, the country and western appropriation: these were all forms of the colonial gaze applied to sound.
What the alternative scene began to do — haltingly, incompletely, sometimes without knowing it — was to look at Australia directly. To take the specific textures of Brisbane heat, Perth isolation, Melbourne drizzle and post-industrial melancholy, and make sound from them without the mediating filter of an imagined metropolitan standard. This was not nationalism; it was something more complicated. It was the beginning of the end of the cringe.
The Saints, the Queensland police state, and punk as civil disobedience in the subtropical dark
Queensland in the 1970s was a political anomaly within Australia — a nominally democratic state run as a personal fiefdom by Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whose National Party government maintained power through gerrymandering so extreme that a vote in the rural electorate of Carnarvon was worth seven times a Brisbane city vote. The police force operated as an instrument of political enforcement, supplemented by a network of informants and a Special Branch that monitored political dissidents with a thoroughness that would have impressed more overtly authoritarian regimes.
Michel Foucault's Surveiller et punir (1975) — published the same year The Saints were rehearsing in a house in Petrie Terrace — describes how modern power operates not primarily through spectacular punishment but through pervasive surveillance and the internalisation of the observer's gaze. Brisbane under Joh was a Panopticon with a suntan. You didn't need to be arrested to be controlled; you needed to know you might be. The Saints' response was to make noise so confrontational that it forced the issue: look at us. We're here. Now what are you going to do?
Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper began writing and recording what would become (I'm) Stranded in 1974 — the same year that the Ramones were playing their first gigs at CBGB, the same year that the Sex Pistols nucleus was forming around Malcolm McLaren's shop on the Kings Road. The astonishing fact is that The Saints arrived at essentially the same sonic solution — fast, loud, stripped, confrontational — from entirely different directions, in almost complete isolation from what was happening elsewhere.
In September 1976, the NME journalist Giovanni Dadomo received a copy of "(I'm) Stranded" by The Saints in the post. It had been sent from Brisbane by the band themselves — a self-financed pressing, five hundred copies, mailed to UK music publications with a cover letter explaining that The Saints were a rock and roll band from Queensland, Australia, and would appreciate any coverage. Most copies went into bins. Dadomo played his.
He named it Single of the Week. His review described it as "one of the best things I've ever heard," noted that it predated the Sex Pistols' debut by several months, and expressed bewilderment that it had come from a country most British music journalists thought of primarily in terms of the Sydney Opera House and Foster's lager. The Saints had mailed those five hundred copies with money they did not particularly have. The return on that investment — in terms of what it proved about where serious music could come from — was incalculable.
The isolation argument cuts two ways. On one hand, it demonstrates that punk — if we understand it as an attitude toward velocity, simplicity, and urgency — was not a British or American invention but a response to specific conditions that could arise anywhere those conditions existed. On the other hand, it meant that when (I'm) Stranded was released in September 1976 — months before Anarchy in the UK, two years before the British punk deluge hit Australian shores — it was received, locally, as the work of lunatics.
Albert Camus argued that the absurd arises from the confrontation between the human need for meaning and the world's silence on the subject. Sisyphus, condemned to push his boulder up the hill for eternity, is the emblem of this condition — and Camus's point is that Sisyphus must be imagined happy. The act of continuing, of refusing to be defeated by meaninglessness, is itself the assertion of dignity.
The Saints in Brisbane were Sisyphean. The city offered no infrastructure for what they were doing — no venues willing to book them consistently, no radio that would play them, no critical apparatus that could articulate what they were. They rehearsed in a house. They self-financed a single. They sent it to record labels. They were, by every rational measure, wasting their time. And yet.
There is a deterministic version of the Brisbane punk story that reduces everything to the police state: oppression produces resistance, restriction generates energy. This is too simple. Plenty of oppressive environments produce nothing but oppression. What Brisbane produced also required specific individuals — Bailey's melodic intelligence, Kuepper's guitar ferocity, later McLennan's poetic delicacy — who happened to encounter each other in the right sequence at the right moment.
But the environment is not irrelevant. Joh's Queensland was a pressure cooker. The heat was literal and political simultaneously. The sense that the dominant culture was actively hostile — that noise, in every sense, was unwelcome — created an energy that had nowhere to go except the music. The Saints didn't just make punk. They made Queensland punk: which is to say, punk made with the specific fury of people who had been told, by everything around them, that they didn't exist.
Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, and Nietzsche in the gutter — Melbourne suburban boredom exploding into London extremity
The Birthday Party were, at their peak, the most confrontational band in the world. This is not hyperbole — it is a statement about function. Their music was designed to produce discomfort, to make its audience question whether they wanted to be in the room, to push sonic and performative extremity to the point where the distinction between entertainment and assault became genuinely unclear. Nick Cave screamed from stages like a man on fire who had decided to enjoy it. Rowland S. Howard played guitar like he was trying to get something out of it that the instrument was withholding.
The Boys Next Door — as they were initially named — began at Caulfield Grammar School in Melbourne in 1973, assembling from the children of suburban professional families who had nothing in common except boredom and records. The specific records matter: the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Alex Harvey, Captain Beefheart. A curriculum in controlled extremity that would eventually produce something uncontrolled.
The Birthday Party's final Melbourne shows before their departure for London in 1980 were, by most accounts, chaotic even by their standards. At the Crystal Ballroom, an audience member threw a bottle at the stage during "Cry." Nick Cave picked it up and threw it back. This led to a brief standoff that the rest of the band continued playing through, Mick Harvey reportedly not breaking the beat once throughout the exchange.
The audience at these shows was deeply divided: friends and early supporters who understood what was happening, and people who had come expecting a rock band and received something that seemed intended to make them feel unwelcome. Cave later said this division was not accidental. The Birthday Party were not interested in audiences that needed to be comfortable. They were interested in the ones who moved toward the stage when things became difficult. Those were the only people worth playing for, and by 1980 in Melbourne there were enough of them to fill a room. In London, there would be more.
The move to London in 1980 — via a brief stop in Hong Kong — was the necessary catastrophe. In Melbourne they were a cult act on a small circuit. In London they landed inside the post-punk moment precisely as post-punk was exhausting its own conventions, and their Australian otherness — the strange grammar of their violence, the way it didn't quite fit any available category — became an asset. They were nobody's scene. They were their own scene.
Nietzsche's distinction in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) between the Apollonian and Dionysian principles in art provides the Birthday Party's most precise philosophical frame. The Apollonian is form, measure, individuation, the beautiful image. The Dionysian is excess, dissolution, the ecstatic destruction of boundaries between self and world, intoxication as a mode of access to deeper truth.
The Birthday Party were Dionysian in a way that most rock bands only perform being. Cave's stage behaviour — the convulsions, the screaming, the physical extremity — was not theatre designed to communicate Dionysian energy; it was the thing itself. The problem Nietzsche identified with the purely Dionysian is that without Apollonian form to contain and shape it, it is merely chaos. The Birthday Party's greatest records — Prayers on Fire, Junkyard — work because Howard's guitar provided a strange, fractured form within which Cave's formlessness could operate. Remove Howard, and the music becomes more conventional. Remove Cave, and it becomes too controlled. Together they maintained an unstable equilibrium that was the condition of the work's power.
The critical history of the Birthday Party is disproportionately a history of Nick Cave, which is understandable given Cave's subsequent career but analytically distorting. Rowland S. Howard's guitar is irreplaceable and unreproducible: a style built on wrong notes that turn out to be right, on feedback used melodically, on a relationship between silence and sound that was genuinely innovative. His solo records — particularly Teenage Snuff Film (1999) and Pop Crimes (2009) — confirm that the intelligence was his own, not borrowed from the Birthday Party context.
Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead — that the metaphysical foundation of Western meaning has collapsed — produces two possible responses: nihilism (there is no meaning, therefore nothing matters) or the creation of new values (there is no given meaning, therefore meaning must be made). Cave's entire career is an extended argument with this choice. He cannot believe in the old God; he cannot accept nihilism. His music inhabits the space between, making that space habitable through the sheer force of the aesthetic commitment to occupy it.
This is, when you think about it, a very Australian predicament. A settler culture that destroyed one world of meaning and couldn't quite inhabit the replacement. A people living in a landscape that refused to confirm the meanings they had imported. Nick Cave from Warracknabeal, via Caulfield Grammar, via Fitzroy, via London, via Berlin, via Brighton: always the displaced consciousness seeking a home in language and sound that geography cannot provide.
Robert Forster & Grant McLennan — literary intelligence in an unliterary country, and the tenderness that survived the cringe
Robert Forster and Grant McLennan were, as individual songwriters, among the most gifted of their generation anywhere in the world. That this claim still requires defensive qualification — that the phrase "for Australian songwriters" still wants to insert itself — is itself evidence of how thoroughly the cultural cringe survived the era nominally devoted to defeating it. The Go-Betweens' failure to achieve the commercial success their work merited was not an accident; it was the systematic consequence of making music that was too intelligent for the infrastructure available to receive it.
Gramsci distinguished between traditional intellectuals — whose class position is legitimated by their role in existing institutions — and organic intellectuals, who emerge from within a particular social class and articulate its experience and world-view in ways that the class itself recognises as authentic. The Go-Betweens were organic intellectuals of a peculiar middle-class bohemia: educated enough to have absorbed the European literary tradition, alienated enough from its social implications to make something genuinely personal from it.
Forster's songs reference Brecht, Rimbaud, Jean-Luc Godard films. McLennan's reference the specific texture of Brisbane afternoons, the quality of light on the Story Bridge, the emotional temperature of particular love affairs in particular rooms. Neither approach is more "authentic" — together they constitute a hybrid intelligence that refuses to choose between the cosmopolitan and the local. This refusal is itself a political act in the context of Australian culture's demand that you either be serious (and therefore foreign) or be local (and therefore not serious).
The Go-Betweens are frequently discussed as Forster and McLennan with accompaniment. This diminishes Lindy Morrison, whose drumming was not merely technically accomplished but philosophically integrated with the band's project. Morrison brought a social consciousness — she was a feminist and an activist — that inflected the band's public presence and, in ways harder to trace but real, its music.
Morrison's playing had a rhythmic intelligence that consistently chose the unexpected accent, the delayed beat, the implied rather than stated rhythm. It was drumming that trusted the listener to find the pulse rather than being told where it was. In the context of Australian pub rock's demand for metronomic obviousness, this was a quiet radicalism.
Peter Buck of R.E.M. became one of the Go-Betweens' most vocal advocates after hearing Before Hollywood in 1983. He mentioned them in interviews throughout 1984 and 1985, called them the best band in the world on at least two documented occasions, and pushed their records on American college radio programmers with the persistence of a man who had decided this was a cause worth caring about.
In Australia, almost nobody noticed. R.E.M. were not yet famous enough in 1984 for their endorsements to carry commercial weight in their home country, let alone across the Pacific. The Go-Betweens remained on the margins of the Australian mainstream throughout their career, selling modestly, receiving respectful but unenthusiastic coverage from a music press that understood they were good but could not quite articulate why it mattered. Years later, Robert Forster was asked how he felt about this. He said he had found it clarifying. If your own country cannot hear you, he said, you find out very quickly whether you are making the music for the music or for the country.
The Go-Betweens came from educated, middle-class Brisbane families. This is not incidental. Their music is saturated with the anxiety of class — the discomfort of people who have been given cultural capital and find that it purchases nothing they actually want, who have been educated out of one world without being admitted to another. The recurring Go-Betweens theme — desire, specifically the desire for the unattainable — is also a class theme: wanting something that exists somewhere, just not here, just not for you.
"Cattle and Cane" is three minutes and twenty seconds of spatial and temporal memory: a return to Queensland childhood, the grandfather's farm, a world already departing. What makes it philosophically interesting is the tense structure — memory experienced as simultaneous present and past, the self both inside and outside the remembered moment. Paul Carter's spatial history argues that place is constituted by the stories told about it; "Cattle and Cane" constitutes Queensland as a place of longing, which is to say it makes the longing real by giving it a geography.
The song's final image — "I recall a time of cattle and cane / going north, my death to explain" — contains the whole Go-Betweens project in miniature: the journey away from the place that formed you, the awareness that the departure is also a kind of death, and the compulsion to make that death meaningful through narration. They were always going north. The song is the explanation.
Lisa Gerrard, Brendan Perry, and the Antipodean imaginary — music that refuses geography, time, and category
Dead Can Dance present the most philosophically complex case in Australian alternative music history, because they are simultaneously the most internationally significant act the scene produced and the one most fundamentally uninterested in being Australian. Gerrard grew up in Melbourne's Fitzroy — the same suburb as Nick Cave — and Perry in Dublin. They formed in Melbourne in 1981, moved to London in 1982, signed to 4AD, and proceeded to make music so geographically, historically, and culturally untethered that placing it within any national tradition seems almost beside the point.
Lisa Gerrard does not sing in any language. She sings in a personal glossolalia — a language she invented in childhood that carries the phonemic structure and emotional weight of language without its semantic content. The effect is uncanny: the voice communicates with the directness of music but the apparent specificity of speech, without the listener being able to translate or reduce what is communicated.
Julia Kristeva's distinction between the semiotic (the pre-linguistic, rhythmic, bodily dimension of language, associated with the maternal) and the symbolic (the structured linguistic order, associated with paternal law and signification) maps directly onto Gerrard's practice. Her voice operates in the semiotic register — it communicates affect, rhythm, bodily resonance — while refusing the symbolic reduction to meaning. This is not mystical: it is a specific aesthetic strategy that produces specific effects. The listener is held in a state of emotional engagement without the intellectual scaffolding of semantic content.
Lisa Gerrard began developing her private language as a child in the housing commission flats of Fitzroy. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants, surrounded by a community of Greek, Italian, and Turkish families, hearing fragments of languages she did not speak from the windows and staircases of her building. She found herself wanting to sing but having no adequate language — English did not feel like the right material for what she was trying to express. So she made one.
The language she developed had consistent phonemes, consistent rhythmic patterns, and what Gerrard has described as its own emotional grammar — certain sounds meant certain things, not semantically but tonally. She sang it privately for years. When she eventually used it in recordings with Dead Can Dance, she did not explain it or name it in sleeve notes. Listeners assumed she was singing in Persian, or Arabic, or an obscure Eastern European dialect. Several academics wrote papers attempting to identify the source language. Gerrard gave occasional interviews clarifying that there was no source language. The papers continued to appear.
Dead Can Dance's natural habitat was Ivo Watts-Russell's 4AD label — an institution that existed to provide a home for music that didn't fit anywhere else. Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Clan of Xymox, Lush: 4AD was a genre of one, a synthetic elsewhere where the rules of contemporary pop, rock, and even most avant-garde music were suspended. Dead Can Dance were its most extreme expression of the label's founding logic: music that could have been made in no decade, by people from no particular place, for an audience that existed nowhere but that turned out to exist everywhere.
There is a paradox at the centre of Dead Can Dance's Australian identity. The cringe logic says: real artists leave Australia. Dead Can Dance left. But they didn't go to where Australian artists were supposed to go — they didn't make music that fitted London, or New York, or any identifiable contemporary context. They made music from a self-invented elsewhere that had no address.
The fact that Dead Can Dance could emerge from Fitzroy — from the same post-punk Melbourne scene that produced the Birthday Party, the same city of tram lines and Victorian terrace houses and cheap rents and art school energy — and make music of such radical otherness tells us something important. The cultural cringe operated by insisting that Australia could not produce genuine originality. Dead Can Dance refuted this by producing originality so extreme that it barely registered as Australian at all.
This is its own kind of paradox. The cringe was defeated, but in a way that confirmed its deepest premise: the most internationally successful Australian alternative acts were those most successfully transformed by the encounter with elsewhere. Dead Can Dance didn't export Australian culture. They used Australian escape velocity to reach a place that had no culture, and made one.
David McComb, Perth isolation, and the Western Australian sublime — the scene's most undervalued voice
Perth is the most isolated city on earth by meaningful measure — closer to Singapore than to Sydney, separated from the eastern seaboard by two thousand miles of desert and the contemptuous attention of a media establishment that treats the west as a resource extraction zone with occasional sporting relevance. David McComb grew up in this isolation and made it his subject matter, his philosophical condition, and eventually — in the records The Triffids made between 1983 and 1989 — his most powerful artistic resource.
David McComb wrote "Wide Open Road" in a single sitting, immediately after a relationship ended. The accounts of where exactly this happened vary — some say his car, some say a kitchen table — but all agree on the envelope. He wrote the words on the back of an envelope he had in his pocket, the melody arriving at the same time as the words, the whole thing complete within the hour. He did not revise it. What exists on Born Sandy Devotional is essentially what he wrote that afternoon.
McComb later said he almost did not include it on the album, feeling it was too personal and too direct — that it gave too much away about a specific situation involving a specific person who would recognise herself immediately. His bandmates convinced him otherwise. The song became the most covered in The Triffids' catalogue, recorded by dozens of artists across several countries, translated into German and Swedish, used in films and television programmes. The specific person it was about heard it on the radio driving through Perth and pulled over to the side of the road. She has never said what she thought.
The pastoral mode — in its European literary form — idealises rural life as an alternative to urban corruption, projecting onto the countryside a simplicity and virtue that urbanites desire precisely because they have lost it. The Australian version of this mode has always been complicated by the actual character of the Australian landscape: it does not invite idealisation. It is vast, indifferent, frequently lethal, and possessed of a beauty that is more threatening than consoling.
The Kantian dynamical sublime — the experience of natural forces so overwhelming that they exceed the imagination's capacity to comprehend them — describes the Australian interior accurately. The Nullarbor, the Pilbara, the Gibson Desert: these are not landscapes that comfort. They are landscapes that dwarf. McComb's great achievement was to make music commensurate with that dwarfing — music of genuine spatial scope that did not diminish the landscape by trying to match it but instead registered the human consciousness's relationship to the incomprehensible.
Born Sandy Devotional (1986) is the Triffids' central achievement and one of the great Australian albums by any measure. It opens with "The Seabirds" — a song of such atmospheric density and melodic beauty that it seems to contain an entire geography — and sustains its quality through nine songs of remarkable consistency. Graham Lee's steel guitar is used not as a signifier of American country music but as a sonic equivalent of the Western Australian light: warm, slightly distorting, stretching distances.
McComb died in 1999, aged thirty-six, from complications following a heart transplant. The loss was enormous — he was a songwriter still developing, whose later solo work suggested he had further territory to map. His death belongs to the specific tradition of Australian artists whose early departure left the field permanently changed: Lloyd Spiegel, Linda Perhacs, figures who might have shaped everything differently had they lived to do so.
But the work exists. "Wide Open Road" — written about a relationship ending, about driving away from something that cannot be repaired — remains one of the most devastating songs in Australian music. Its power is spatial: the road as the only available response to emotional devastation, motion as the only alternative to stasis. Paul Carter's spatial history again. In Australia, you don't stay and face it. You drive.
Eight anonymous Melburnians in balaclavas — Debord's spectacle attacked from the inside, and the refusal of identity as the only honest identity
TISM — This Is Serious Mum — were either the stupidest or the most sophisticated band in Australian history, and the difficulty of determining which is itself the point. Eight (more or less) anonymous Melburnians who performed under pseudonyms and ski masks, who wrote songs with titles like "I Drive a Truck," "Greg! The Stop Sign!!" and "Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me," who attracted and repelled audiences in almost equal measure, and who maintained their collective anonymity for nearly twenty years. The question is not whether they were serious. Obviously they were serious. The question is what kind of seriousness produces comedy this precise.
Guy Debord's La Société du spectacle (1967) argues that authentic social life has been replaced by its representation — that we live within a totalising system of images, performances, and consumable experiences that substitutes for genuine human relationship and activity. The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relationship between people mediated by images. Authenticity, in the Debordian analysis, is not available within the spectacle; the only available response is the détournement — the hijacking of spectacle's own forms to expose its mechanisms.
TISM were Situationists who had read too much Barry Humphries. Their anonymity was a Debordian strategy: by refusing to be celebrities — by preventing the spectacle's machinery from operating on them as persons — they foregrounded the machinery itself. But the Australian inflection matters. Where Debord was grave, theoretically rigorous, humourlessly committed to the revolutionary project, TISM were hilarious. They applied the Situationist critique to Australian pub culture, television, sporting celebrity, and political mediocrity with a precision that required deep familiarity with the targets. You have to love something, in a particular way, to mock it this well.
When TISM signed to a major distributor in the late 1980s, they presented a legal problem that the music industry had not previously encountered: the band members refused to provide their real names for the contract. After considerable negotiation, the paperwork was eventually completed using the pseudonyms — Humphrey B. Flaubert, Eugene de la Hot-Croix Bun, Ron Hitler-Barassi, and the others — as the legal signatories. Whether this constituted a valid contract under Australian law was a question that apparently nobody involved felt strongly enough about to test in court.
Their identities remained secret throughout their career and for years afterwards. Former schoolmates and colleagues of the members have said in retrospect that they were sometimes in the room at TISM gigs without recognising anyone on stage. One member's mother attended a show, failed to recognise her son behind the balaclava, and was later told by him that she had been there. She reportedly said she had enjoyed it. This may be the only documented case in rock history of a band member's parent attending a show without knowing their child was performing.
TISM did not emerge from nowhere. The Australian satirical tradition — from Henry Lawson's socialist irony through Barry Humphries' Dame Edna grotesquerie to Paul Hogan's larrikin self-mockery — had always used comedy as a way of negotiating the cringe. If you made fun of Australian mediocrity before foreigners could, you retained some control over the terms of the humiliation.
TISM took this tradition and ran it through postmodern theory, or perhaps — more accurately — through the sensibility of people who had read postmodern theory, found it largely correct, and responded with the appropriate emotion: sardonic hilarity. Their targets were precisely the right ones: the Australian celebrity machine, the sporting monoculture, the reflexive anti-intellectualism that punished anyone who appeared to be trying too hard.
Beneath the comedy was consistent political content. TISM were anti-Hawke, anti-Keating, contemptuous of the Labor Party's capitulation to economic rationalism, and equally contemptuous of the Coalition's alternative. Their political position — if it can be systematised — was something like: a plague on all your houses, delivered with the precision of people who had spent considerable time understanding exactly whose houses deserved the plague and why.
Great Truckin' Songs of the Renaissance (1988): the debut, rougher than what followed but already exhibiting the essential TISM qualities. Machiavelli and the Four Seasons (1995): the peak achievement — satirical ambition matched by musical intelligence. www.tism.wanker.com (1998): the internet age arrives and TISM are ready for it, having been the internet's sensibility before the internet existed. Their deliberate obscurity — the refusal to clarify, to be understood, to make it easy — was the Situationist lesson applied to the emerging attention economy a decade before the attention economy was named.
Chrissy Amphlett and the female body as contested territory — desire, danger, and the schoolgirl uniform as radical act
Chrissy Amphlett walked onto pub stages wearing a school uniform and performed songs about sexual desire with a directness that made audiences profoundly uncomfortable, which was exactly the point. The discomfort was not accidental — it was the work. In a culture that managed female sexuality through a series of acceptable containers (the good wife, the bikini girl, the cheerful pop singer), Amphlett refused every container available and demanded that her audience deal with the result.
Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970) — written by an Australian woman who had left Australia, published to international impact the year before Amphlett began performing — argued that women had been conditioned to suppress and distort their sexuality, to make themselves acceptable to male desire by removing from their own desire anything that threatened male authority. The female eunuch of the title is not without sexuality; she is without the full ownership of it.
Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity — that gender is not a fixed identity but a set of repeated performances that constitute the appearance of identity — provides a more precise frame than Greer's for what Amphlett was doing, though Butler's Gender Trouble was published in 1990, a decade into Amphlett's career. Amphlett performed femininity while simultaneously exposing the performance: the schoolgirl uniform was not naive but citational, a reference to a particular construction of female innocence and availability that she occupied and perverted simultaneously. She was playing the role and dismantling it at the same time.
In the early days of the Divinyls' pub circuit career, a Sydney hotel manager took Chrissy Amphlett aside before a show and told her, with what he apparently considered helpful directness, that women couldn't front rock bands — that audiences wouldn't accept it, that the whole thing would go better if she let the guitarist introduce the songs and she just sang. He was not being malicious. He was reporting what he understood to be a structural fact about Australian pub culture.
Amphlett thanked him and went on stage and did exactly what she always did: wore the school uniform, moved through the audience, got into the faces of people in the front row, made the room feel like something was about to happen that might not be entirely under control. The manager watched from the back. After the set he told her it was the best show he'd booked in two years and asked if she could come back the following month. She said yes, at twice the fee. He agreed without negotiating. She later said this was the moment she understood that the music industry's stated rules and its actual rules were two entirely different things, and that the actual rules were more interesting.
It is impossible to discuss Amphlett without acknowledging Mark McEntee, whose guitar work provided the sonic environment her performance inhabited. McEntee's playing — influenced by the harder end of American rock, by AC/DC's rhythmic brutality, by the kind of guitar that announces its presence physically — gave Amphlett's vocals something to push against. The Divinyls worked because the music was as aggressive as the performance: there was nowhere comfortable to rest.
The Australian pub circuit in the early 1980s was a specifically hostile environment for what Amphlett was attempting. The pub audience was overwhelmingly male, frequently drunk, accustomed to music as background to social activity rather than as demanding confrontation. Female performers were expected to either fit the cheerful-entertainer mould or to be sufficiently sexualised in an approved manner. Amphlett was sexualised in a manner that was not approved — actively, aggressively, on her own terms rather than the audience's — and the pub circuit responded with exactly the mixture of fascination and hostility that she was courting.
"I Touch Myself" (1990) is a strange object in the Divinyls catalogue: their most commercially successful record, their most internationally known song, and simultaneously their most radical gesture. A song explicitly about female sexual self-pleasure, performed by a woman who had spent a decade establishing her right to occupy desire's active rather than passive position — and it went to number one in Australia and reached the top ten internationally.
The question of whether this represents a genuine rupture in popular culture's management of female sexuality or simply the mainstreaming of a sanitised version of Amphlett's earlier radicalism is genuinely open. Pop music has a long history of absorbing subversive content by making it comfortable. But something about "I Touch Myself" resists full absorption: the song's directness, even in its commercial form, retains an insistence that male discomfort is not the relevant standard against which female desire should be measured.
The post-industrial sublime, the collective body, and music as shared physical event — Mark Seymour's brass-driven cathedral
Hunters & Collectors are the Australian alternative band most committed to music as a shared physical experience — as something that happens to a crowd rather than to individual listeners, that requires bodies in proximity and volume at sufficient levels to make the chest cavity resonate. Their early records — produced by a sprawling, loosely defined collective including brass players, percussionists, and found-sound enthusiasts — were genuinely experimental. Their later records are anthems. The transition is interesting: it shows what happens when experimental energy finds its appropriate social form.
Hunters & Collectors formed in Melbourne in 1981, the year in which the Whitlam dismissal was still a recent wound, the Fraser government was in its last term, and Australian manufacturing was beginning the long decline that would restructure the working class whose energy the band's music seemed designed to metabolise. The brass instrumentation — not jazz, not ska, but something more industrial, more collectively rhythmic — sounded like a factory floor that had taught itself to play.
Jacques Rancière's concept of the "distribution of the sensible" — the way in which aesthetic forms participate in the organisation of what is visible, sayable, and thinkable within a political community — helps illuminate what Hunters & Collectors were doing. A crowd of working-class Australians singing "Holy Grail" or "Throw Your Arms Around Me" in unison is not merely entertainment; it is a distribution of the sensible that makes particular kinds of collectivity visible. The band didn't preach politics. They created the social conditions for a particular kind of solidarity to be experienced as pleasure.
Mark Seymour wrote "Throw Your Arms Around Me" in approximately fifteen minutes on a Tuesday afternoon in 1984. The melody and the words arrived simultaneously and completely, with almost no revision required. His immediate reaction was that it was too simple — that a band known for post-industrial brass arrangements and collective physical energy could not release a quiet, vulnerable ballad that asked to be held. He played it to the band and said he wasn't sure it belonged on the record.
The rest of the band disagreed. It was recorded and placed at the end of side one of Human Frailty, where it sits like a sudden clearing in dense bush — the noise stopping, the single voice remaining. In the decades since its release it has been covered by well over a hundred artists, has become a staple of Australian sporting farewells and memorial services, and has been voted the greatest Australian love song in multiple polls. Seymour has played it at almost every show since 1984. He has said the song still surprises him — that he does not entirely understand where it came from, and has stopped trying to find out.
The early Hunters & Collectors records — the self-titled debut (1982), The Fireman's Curse (1983) — are products of Melbourne's post-punk experimental community, which intersected with the art school world, the performance art scene, and the nascent electronic music underground. The band were drawing on American funk, African polyrhythm, European industrial music, and Australian pub rock simultaneously, producing something that was none of these and recognisably local.
Mark Seymour wrote "Throw Your Arms Around Me" in 1984, midway through a career defined by collective energy and physical force. The song is none of those things: it is a ballad of almost painful intimacy, asking for the simplest possible human comfort — to be held — with a directness that makes listening to it a slightly embarrassing experience, the way being present at a genuine emotional disclosure is always slightly embarrassing.
The song became one of the most-covered in Australian music history precisely because of this directness. It cannot be ironised. You cannot sing it at a distance. The music demands the emotional proximity it describes. In the context of Australian male emotional culture — which has historically required considerable indirection when approaching genuine feeling — this directness was its own kind of radicalism.
What the alternative scene did to Australian self-understanding — and what it failed to do, and why both matter
By 1993 something had shifted. Not healed — shifted. The Australian alternative scene had accumulated, over roughly fifteen years, a body of work that was no longer simply defensible against the charge of being local and therefore lesser. The Saints had demonstrably preceded British punk. Nick Cave was more critically celebrated in Europe than most European artists. The Go-Betweens were beloved by musicians of the calibre of R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, who recognised the songwriting quality immediately. Dead Can Dance were genuinely international in a way that required no qualification.
In 1992, when The Go-Betweens had been broken up for three years and Grant McLennan and Robert Forster were both pursuing solo careers with modest results, several of the band's albums were out of print in Australia. You could not buy Before Hollywood or Spring Hill Fair in a Melbourne record shop. At the same time, in London, Paris, and Berlin, second-hand copies of those same records were selling in specialist shops for prices that reflected collector enthusiasm. French music critics were writing retrospectives. British journalists were naming the band in lists of the great underappreciated acts of the decade.
The pattern is not unique to the Go-Betweens — it describes the entire Australian alternative scene's relationship to its domestic audience. The music that the country produced and failed to adequately receive became, in the hands of international listeners, evidence of a cultural vitality that Australia itself had not quite believed in. The cringe operated in both directions: not only did Australians undervalue their own music, they then had to receive the news of its value from abroad, which confirmed the original anxiety rather than resolving it. Forster, who has written about this with more clarity than anyone, says the only response is to keep making the work regardless. The work, eventually, makes its own case.
Forster's diagnosis was accurate. The cringe doesn't die; it evolves. In its original form, it denied that local production could be as good as imported product. In its evolved form, it granted quality while maintaining the reservation: the "for Australians" clause. The work was good within its frame of reference, but the frame of reference itself was still positioned as subsidiary to an imagined metropolitan standard.
Mark Fisher's concept of hauntology — borrowed from Derrida, applied to contemporary culture — describes the condition of a present haunted by futures that were possible but did not arrive. The lost futures of British post-punk: the moment when it seemed that something genuinely different was coming, before Thatcherism and the culture industry reasserted their logic and the revolution became a style.
The Australian alternative scene had its own lost futures. The Go-Betweens should have been as commercially successful as R.E.M.; the intelligence of the songwriting was equivalent, the timing was comparable, the international critical response was enthusiastic. Something in the infrastructure — the distance, the cultural cringe operating on radio programmers, the specific way Australian record companies negotiated between local and international markets — prevented the arrival of the audience the music deserved. These lost futures haunt the present: you can hear them in the care with which the work is now being reissued, documented, reassessed. The music is making the argument for its own significance that it couldn't make at the time.
The scene demonstrated, definitively and against considerable institutional resistance, that Australia was capable of producing popular music of genuine international quality and philosophical seriousness. This sounds modest stated plainly; it was not modest in context. The cultural cringe had operated by denying this possibility at the level of reflex — before the evidence could be considered. The evidence accumulated until the reflex could no longer suppress it.
Specific achievements: The Saints established that Australian punk was not derivative but parallel and, in some respects, prior. The Birthday Party established that the most confrontational band in the world could come from Caulfield Grammar School. The Go-Betweens established that the most literate songwriting of the 1980s was not happening exclusively in New York or London. Dead Can Dance established that an entirely self-invented sonic world could be constructed from Melbourne and find audiences on every continent. TISM established that Australian satirical intelligence could operate at a theoretical level that mainstream culture usually reserved for gravity rather than comedy.
The scene did not resolve the cringe. It did not establish the conditions for a self-sustaining alternative music infrastructure that could reproduce itself without exceptional individuals. It did not, in most cases, achieve the commercial success that would have provided economic security for its participants. David McComb died at thirty-six. Grant McLennan died of a heart attack in 2006, at forty-eight. Chrissy Amphlett died at fifty-three. The scene was hard on its participants in ways that economic marginalisation and geographic isolation make inevitable.
Nick Cave's trajectory since the Birthday Party is the most instructive case study in what the reversal of the cringe actually looks like. By the 2000s, Cave was receiving honorary doctorates, curating film festivals, being covered by orchestras, and writing novels of considerable merit. He had become, in the most complete sense available, a major international cultural figure — one whose Australianness was part of his identity but not the defining qualifier. This is cringe reversal: when the "for an Australian" clause is simply dropped because it has become irrelevant. Whether this represents the work's victory or its absorption into the very metropolitan cultural machinery it originally refused is, as always, genuinely open.
The long paddock is a droving route — a stock road, used historically to move cattle and sheep between grazing areas during drought, when the paddocks were bare. It is a liminal space: neither the property you've left nor the destination, but the between, the movement itself, the animals strung out along the road's length heading somewhere that may or may not be better.
The Australian alternative scene was a long paddock. It was the between — between the pub rock monoculture that preceded it and the internationally integrated music economy that followed it, between the cultural cringe and whatever has replaced it. The bands in this series were not the destination. They were the movement. And like all genuine movement, what they achieved was not an arrival but a change in the conditions of possibility. After them, it became possible to make serious music in Australia and not assume, as a structural given, that seriousness required first going somewhere else.
That is not nothing. In the context of two centuries of the colonial gaze and its internalisations, it is, in fact, a great deal.
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