He was, is and always will be the driving force behind Goanna, the indie folk-rock band whose seminal 1982 hit Solid Rock was championing Aboriginal land rights well before Midnight Oil’s Beds Are Burning (1987), Yothu Yindi’s Treaty (1991) and Paul Kelly’s From Little Things Big Things Grow (1993).Goanna won fans, plaudits and awards for its debut album Spirit of Place. The studio album Oceania (1984) followed in quick succession, but it would be more than a decade before a third studio offering, 1998’s Spirit Returns. And since then? Virtually nothing.Speaking from his home about 15km from where he was born and raised on the western side of Warrnambool, Shane says simply that Goanna never formally disbanded, just stopped doing gigs for a while.“We burnt the midnight oil, we burnt ourselves out going pretty fast and furious from Geelong to Melbourne to the world,” he says. “It’s very hard to survive that stuff when it’s that fast. We anticipated we might get a bit of airplay for Solid Rock.“We weren’t quite ready for such stratospheric success, but once it happens you’ve just got to run.“We went out boldly unto the world and we got beaten up by the world. You run head first into the music industry and it’s a world of commerce and business. And all that youthful optimism and naive idealism comes crashing up against that.“That song, when it went out across the country and across the world, it was everywhere and the album was everywhere. And that kind of success is like a wild horse you’ve got to ride. “At the same time as we were being feted by the commercial music industry, I’m also out sleeping on Aboriginal people’s floors in their homes, hearing about dispossession, colonisation, stolen children, the broken lives, the broken families, the broken hearts, to the point where I could no longer be proud of the country I lived in.”No wonder he has mixed feelings about the band’s greatest hit. Yet it nearly didn’t happen.Shane acknowledges that Solid Rock is a “heavy” song; how many other Top 40 hits have lyrics that include the word “genocide”? Goanna’s record company didn’t want it released as the first single. In the end, the head of the record company intervened.And even though he didn’t think it would get a lot of airplay, Shane was convinced Solid Rock needed to be their first single. Looking back now he says the song “sort of defined us in a way.“I think he understood, he said to me ‘Artists are poets. They write it, paint it, sing it. Twenty years later it’s legislation’,” Shane says.“And he was pretty right. The Eddie Mabo decision came within a decade.”The Mabo case was a significant legal case in Australia that recognised the land rights of the traditional owners of the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait and overturned the myth that at the time of colonisation Australia was “terra nullius”, or land belonging to no one.Shane doesn’t know how a young bloke from southwest Victoria could become so passionate about Aboriginal land rights and come to write Solid Rock. It’s been something he has been attempting to unlock as he writes his memoir.He grew up with the Lake Condah and Framlingham missions close by and Aboriginal people “around everywhere”. But he says that back then he also was puzzled by how white Australia fitted into the story.Influenced by songs including Cherokee Nation by Paul Revere and the Raiders (1968), Ted Egan’s Poor Bugger Me (1969) and the poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, aka Kath Walker, Shane penned a song called Corroboree when he was still a teenager.He had seen things like Aboriginal activist Gary Foley “crash onto our television screens” and the beginning of the tent embassy in Canberra. Later, as student president at Deakin University, he knew there was lots of politics around Aboriginal self-determination and land rights, even though they were not considered mainstream issues of the day.Hitchhiking along the east coast with his guitar in the 1970s, Shane jammed in parks and met Aborigines “because I was out on the street and they were too”. He eventually found himself at Uluru, looking to see if the Indigenous culture was still intact, whether the languages were still spoken and the dances performed.Invited to a corroboree, Shane witnessed first hand that the connection was very much alive and remembers watching transfixed as the sun set and a full moon rose over the back of Uluru“It was a transformative experience and I realised there was a really deep cosmology at work. And I woke up then, I knew then that I was on a different kind of journey, to really find the heart of the country,” he recalls. “As my old brother (Aboriginal actor, dancer and musician) Bobby Jabanungga said to me at the time, ‘Brother you went out to that country and that spirit then followed you around’.”After 10 days there he was back in Alice Springs being confronted by the rampant abuse, racism and alcoholism. That experience gave rise to the third verse of Solid Rock and the anger of the song with the “realisation we’d stolen someone’s country”.Shane says he couldn’t have known at the time that he’d still be talking about the song 40 years later, yet it could be argued that the issues Goanna shone the spotlight on such as Aboriginal land rights and the environment are even more important today.He says he loves Solid Rock and looking back now he can see it in context for what it is. But at the same time it’s only one of some 300 songs Shane has penned in his career and he won’t show favouritism. “I didn’t think it would change anything, I just felt it was something I felt strongly about and wanted to sing about,” he says.“Solid Rock, I thought, was a song that some people would respond to and other people would completely dismiss. But I felt it was a very powerful and important song, I felt its gravitas I guess. I wouldn’t have written it otherwise.“We went to great efforts to make it well, to write it well and to record it well. But it’s got an energy about it and you can never half sing that song – you have to fully give your spirit to it when you perform it.”And Goanna has certainly been doing plenty of that of late. The band is one of the support acts on Midnight Oil’s farewell tour, stopping at Mount Duneed for A Day On The Green this month. And this week the band announced it was heading back on the road for a 20-date national tour.Shane says the band is excited to be backing Midnight Oil and praises the band’s generosity for calling Goanna “fellow trailblazers from the 80s”. The tour reminds Shane of 1983, with Goanna and the Oils onstage at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl for the antinuclear war Stop The Drop concert with the likes of INXS and Redgum.Goanna warmed up for Mount Duneed with an appearance in Deans Marsh as Shane Howard & the Gordon Franklin Wilderness Ensemble, a nod to the band’s roots. And the band has stuck to those roots in rehearsal, which has taken place at the Door Gallery Cafe in Fyansford’s Paper Mill arts precinct and the Potato Shed in Drysdale.Solid Rock has also been given a makeover for its 40th anniversary, with a new verse referencing Eddie Mabo and the “terra nullius lie” and the chorus translated into Pitjantjatjara. And while the prospect of Goanna going back on the road to headline its own tour is a little terrifying to Shane, there’s also tremendous upside for him and other long-time members like younger sister Marcia Howard, Rose Bygrave and guitar maestro Graham Davidge because they survived all that craziness. “There’s a hunger to do it this time and there’s a great love, as older people, for what we did back then,” Shane says.“We’re able to look back without ego and go ‘Let’s pay homage to that record and what was done with lovely youth optimism that looks at the world boldly’. And also really to say thank you to over half a million people who bought that album and gave us a career.“There were times in the demise of Goanna in the 1980s that were so low, so broken, so lost and so deep down in a whirlpool, that the success of Goanna felt like a poisoned chalice. I know it was the same for Rose and Marcia and the others in Goanna“But I was lucky. I fell through the safety net of white Australia and black Australia caught me. I found a people who had lost so much more and they welcomed me in and shared the ancient and generous soul of this country with me. I’m forever grateful. “All these years later, we’re older and wiser and there’s deep healing in the songs and the music and the mended relationships. Now we have the ability to give voice to those who don’t have the microphone.“Most of the scars have healed. Of course it’s worth it. This is life.”Goanna’s 2022 national tour starts on June 22 in Cairns. Bookings at thegoannaband.comcam.ward@news.com.auStay Informed Geelong Advertiser
Powered by WPeMatico
