Tag Buried Country
When it was first published 15 years ago, Buried Country: The story of Aboriginal country music represented a major addition to the chronicles of Australian music. Now it has been revised and updated. Its author Clinton Walker is one of Australia’s most admired chroniclers of its popular culture, with groundbreaking books on the country’s musical and social history. They include Highway to Hell: The Life and Death of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott; Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music, 1977-1992; and Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car. Though Buried Country is a warm tribute to unheralded voices, as with any study that addresses Aboriginal culture in the twentieth century, there is a thread of deep sadness running through this tome. Walker tells some confronting, disturbing tales, including that of Herb Laughton, who was stolen when he was two years old and spent much of his early life trying to find his mother, leaving him with emotional scars that led to him to attempting suicide in the eighties. His music endured. Alcoholism, violence, mental illness and incarceration are all themes in the lives of Dougie Young, Vic Simms, Bobby McLeod and Roger Knox. The best of the genre’s songs, too, are infected with tragedy, none more moving than Bob Randall’s ‘Brown Skin Baby’ with its haunting wail and elegiac lyrics for the stolen generation.