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Blacken Festival , 2017
First published in The Wire magazine, Issue 401, July 2017
Drive 1,500 kilometers south of Alice Springs and you’ll reach Adelaide. Sixteen hours north is Darwin. These are the closest big towns. Alice (as it is known) is red dirt country – traditional home to the Arrernte people and four hours from Australia’s most famous rock, Uluru. A return flight to Alice from Sydney or Melbourne costs about $700. It’s no casual weekend away but ...
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Reflections on a weekend in exile
Kate Hennessy, self-published, July 2017
“This song is about underground communities and how they tear themselves apart.” Fifteen minutes after Shogun of Royal Headache said this onstage, I began to experience an offstage version. Only there was no catharsis; no song. In the gig washout, a message popped up on my phone. It was from the admin of a Facebook group I’ve been part of pretty much since inception. “We’ve ...
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Music You Missed: Jan, Feb, March – 2017
First published in The Guardian, April 2017
Last weekend in Melbourne, and the week before in Brisbane, A Rock & Roll Writers Festival returned for a second year to put songwriters, music critics and novelists on stage to discuss their craft. Speakers included Adalita, Bunna Lawrie, Tim Rogers, Jess Ribeiro and Jenny Valentish. I took part in a panel with three other music critics. The festival claims to “celebrate the creative relationship ...
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Empire of the Sun on the ad that changed their lives

On YouTube, views of the Honda Civic advertisement first televised in January are ticking towards 200,000. “Song iz awesome,” reads one comment. “Hey what is that song called and who is it by I like that song,” reads another. A commercially placed song, known as a “sync”, is an increasingly legitimate way for musicians to make a buck in an industry where sources of cold ...
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Paradise Daily Records Turns Two: Interview
The full version of an interview first published in The Quietus, December 2016
While fossicking in a recycled garbage shop in late 2014, Sydney’s Jaz Brooking found a cassette duplicator. Brooking played in five or six bands and had a bit of money saved from trading second-hand goods. It was a logical next step to start dubbing tapes of her and her friends’ bands and thus, Paradise Daily Records was born. The label has racked up nearly 40 ...
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The Drover’s Wife review – plot twist leaves Australian classic spinning on its axis
First published in the Guardian, September 2016
A selection of short stories by Henry Lawson was published in 1959 called Fifteen Stories. Australian author Colin Roderick wrote in the introduction: “[Henry Lawson] never attempted to draw people he did not know … it was the world of the drover, the prospector, the miner, the rouseabout, the shearer, the railway worker, the swagman and the sundowner, the cocky, the timbergetter, the underpaid apprentice, ...
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Penis whistles and performance art: Dark Mofo
First published in The Lifted Brow, August 2016
On the bus, the duet from Dirty Dancing, ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’, is playing too loud for the tinny speakers. Pink balloons hang from the ceiling and tassles fringe the aisles. The windows are papered over so we can’t see out. It’s cheap, nasty and there’s nowhere to hide. “Can I sit here?” I ask a guy with a spot beside him. ...
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Dark Mofo, 2016
First published in The Wire magazine, August 2016
A mirror hangs from a tree reflecting the clean Tasmanian sky. I’m in the exercise yard of New Norfolk Hospital For The Insane, taking a break from what’s inside. The asylum – originally built for sick convicts – sprawls over both sides of the River Derwent in this small town 40 minutes from Hobart. Many locals worked here; others were family of inmates. The asylum ...
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Kill Climate Deniers: the play that infiltrated Parliament House
First published in Guardian Australia, September 2016
At midday on 31 August, a silent and subversive music event happened inside Parliament House. Milling among the gaggles of children on school excursion were about 15 unacquainted visitors distinguished by one thing: all wore earphones and walked the same route through the building’s public zones. I was one of them. That morning, as instructed by the artists, I downloaded an album from Bandcamp called ...
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Music You Missed: April, May, June 2016
First published in The Guardian, July 2016
Time’s the revelator,” country musician Gillian Welch sings in her song of the same name. I assume she meant things such as love and grief, but it applies to music more than anything. Only time can reveal which records will bloom, then shrivel and fall from the vine – and which will make a late great run towards eternity. ...