Peter Garrett calls it the “hallelujah moment” of Australian music, those heady days of the 1970s when the music crackling out of our transistor radios came with that sweet, familiar sound of the Australian drawl.
Before bands such as Skyhooks, AC/DC, Sherbet, Cold Chisel, The Angels and Garrett’s own Midnight Oil found their way out of the pubs and onto vinyl, the airwaves were filled with US or British pop/rock singers – or Australians trying to sound like them.
Like so many bands of the time, The Oils emerged from the smoke-filled pubs of Australia, at a time when a middy would set you back about 30 cents and, Garrett recalls, “there was a consciousness raising thing that went on” in the Australian psyche.
Opposition to the Vietnam War and the progressive politics of the Whitlam era “saw this idea that we don’t define ourselves as being an outpost of an empire, but we define ourselves by the sort of things that we can see amongst one another that says, ‘We’re Australian’.
“Australian bands had one or two choices,” Garrett tells Leigh Sales in a special interview with Australian Story. “They had to either find their own voice or essentially mimic what was going on elsewhere because prior to that, that’s pretty much all we did.”
For The Oils, home base was the Royal Antler Hotel at Narrabeen, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, a hard-rocking venue that also hosted the likes of INXS, the Radiators, Mi-Sex, the Party Boys and Rose Tattoo.
