Australian country music: some context

Before we consider Dougie Young, it will be useful to briefly contextualise country music as an enduring genre in Australia. Recordings by nascent American hillbilly artists such as Jimmie Rodgers and Vernon Dalhart found a large and enthusiastic audience in Australia from the late 1920s. From the mid 1930s EMI imprint Columbia Gramophone recognised an audience for local artists, and began releasing records by local performer Tex Morton. Morton was immediately extremely popular – matching, and in many cases outselling, other popular recording artists of the era. This popularity initiated a spurt of releases by local artists and following World War II hillbilly music quickly established itself as the rock ’n’ roll of its day – an exciting youth culture that appealed to rural and city audiences alike. Women performers were particularly well represented – with ‘yodelling cowgirls’ such as Shirley Thoms touring and selling records in significant numbers. The scene was well supported by radio programming, and many stations had specialist hillbilly shows, such as 2LM's ‘Radio Ranch’ broadcasting from Lismore in northern NSW. Towards the end of the 1950s, this identity changed somewhat owing to the advent of rock ’n’ roll and television. From the 1960s, consequently, country music relied more on a rural audience, and its lyrical concerns increasingly reflected that. Artists such as Slim Dusty working in this period toured extensively to rural and remote areas. Nevertheless, country music remains one of the most popular musical genres in Australia and Slim Dusty, for instance, remains Australia's highest selling recording artist.Footnote ⁵

Two factors made country music highly appealing to young Australian audiences. Firstly it was exotic: an exciting modern, American culture, delivered via the latest technologies such as the record, the radio and the cinema. Its rise coincided with an era in which young Australians were turning away from Britain and towards the US as a source of culture. Secondly, its lyrical concerns of rural, working-class labour resonated with a sense of Australian identity that had been well established since at least the 1890s.Footnote ⁶ The majority of songs recorded by country artists in the 1940s–1960s dealt with pastoral work and specific skills required, such as horse-riding. A significant minority of songs also dealt with working-class economic struggle, particularly songs about itinerant homelessness – personified by ‘swagmen’ or ‘hobos’. The experience of the Great Depression haunted Australian country music for many years. In short, labour, mobility and freedom were key themes of Australian country music. Two key elements distinguished Australian country music from its American counterpart: its musical minimalism (usually accompaniment was provided by a sole acoustic guitar) and its predominantly sentimental flavour – songs about wandering cowboys and cowgirls pining for their homes and families in sleepy little valleys had a particular popularity in Australia (Martin Reference Martin2015).

For Aboriginal audiences in the 1950s and 1960s, country music was accessible and appealing for a number of reasons. In Australia's eastern states, a large proportion of Aboriginal people lived in and around regional towns, either on ‘missions’ or in their own housing. For these people, of whom Dougie Young was one, country music was the music on the juke box, on the car radio, on the gramophone, and the music most likely to be played by touring artists. It was also a music which was relatively easy to play – usually requiring just an acoustic guitar (or not even that – many Aboriginal people made their own), and an awareness of three or four chords. It was possible to play and sing convincingly without formal musical education – an education that was not available for most Aboriginal people. What some Aboriginal people did have was a Christian education though missionaries: its accompanying hymn singing also mapped onto country music concerns with redemption and salvation. Other conventional lyrical concerns of the genre – rural working-class labour, mobility and social struggle – also resonated with Aboriginal people. Many Aboriginal men and women in this period were itinerant labourers in the pastoral or agricultural industries, having to travel large distances for seasonal and insecure labour (see McGrath Reference McGrath1987). Aboriginal songwriters were to prove particularly adept at using the conventions of country music to voice concerns specific to their community – concerns about a violent and traumatic colonial past, and about ongoing racial, social and economic injustices.

‘Youngie’ Doug

Young was frequently explicitly self-referential in song, even referring to himself in the third person through the moniker ‘Youngie Doug’. He also put some of his biography into his songs. As the first verse of ‘The Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards’ puts it: ‘I was born in the scrub in the Mia Mia, on the banks of the river Barcoo/My parents left me when I was quite young, to paddle my own canoe’. Young may have been playing with truth for the sake of a good rhyme here – and possibly connecting with and parodying other bush poets who wrote about the Barcoo, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson – as other accounts have him born in the town of Mitchell.Footnote ⁷ Mitchell is on the banks of the Manoa river, which almost rhymes with canoe but not quite, although it is not far, as the crow flies, from the Barcoo (Beckett Reference Beckett2014). A contemporary of Young's claimed he was ‘a bloke from Charleville’ a town about half way between the two rivers (Jack Malone et al. 1987). In any case, Young was born Douglas Gary Young in southern Queensland in 1933. His mother was Gunu – an Aboriginal nation that straddles the NSW/Queensland border – and his father was a white stockman (an Australian iteration of the cowboy). His parents raised him fairly devoutly Catholic, and this influence was to emerge in some of his later material such as the song ‘Alf Kelly’ which ends with a section of a hymn. However, as the ‘Crow’ narrates, Young was living a separate life to his parents when ‘quite young’ (Beckett Reference Beckett2014).

As a teenager and young adult, Young worked as a stockman and his work took him across the central west and the erratic river systems that bisect its dry heart. He travelled down the Darling River to Bourke, and it was around this time, when he was a young man, that he began writing songs and singing them to his mates, around the campfire, of an evening. His journey down the Darling eventually brought him to Wilcannia, where he met and married Christina ‘Chrissie’ Johnson in 1955 and together they had 14 children (Buried Country 2018).Footnote ⁸ In 1957 a bad riding accident put him in an Adelaide hospital for several months, thus ending his career as a stockman at the age of 24 (Beckett Reference Beckett2014). He subsequently earned a living as a driver for the local council, but also turned his attentions in a more serious way to writing songs (Rowley Reference Rowley1971, p. 280).

In 1963 he recorded his own compositions on visiting anthropologist Jeremy Beckett's field tape recorder. Beckett had lived in Wilcannia in 1957 to conduct research for his Masters thesis, and had returned for follow-up research and in the hope of recording Young (in this Beckett was directly inspired by the American field recordings of Alan Lomax and his BBC broadcasts – Beckett 2018). Six of the Beckett recordings were released on the folk label Wattle Records in 1965, and in the same year ‘The Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards’ was recorded by one of Australia's best known folk revival singers, Gary Shearston. Shearston had a local top-10 hit in 1965 with the talking blues ‘Sydney Town’, which was packaged with the ‘Crow’ on the EP Australian Broadside. Also in the same year another non-Aboriginal performer, Athol McCoy, a hillbilly singer from Tasmania, released ‘The Crow’ and another Dougie Young song ‘Scobie's Dream’. McCoy first heard Dougie Young when he toured through Wilcannia in 1963. McCoy claimed that the local constable told him about a great local singer whom McCoy should consider booking to open the show. McCoy agreed and Young's performance impressed McCoy enough that he recorded Young singing his compositions backstage, and eventually bought the copyright to both ‘The Crow’ and ‘Scobie's Dream’, a deal which Young regretted and believed he was never adequately paid for (McCoy 1993; Gilbert Reference Gilbert1978). Young's songs appealed to both inner-city ‘folkies’, through the original and Shearston recordings, and to rural and suburban hillbilly fans, through the McCoy version. In 1960s Australia these two scenes were sceptical of each other's styles and supposed politics but in Young they had found something in common. However there were limitations for Young's popularity and reception with these audiences, as we shall see (Martin Reference Martin2015, p. 81–114; Doyle, Reference Doyle and Christian2014).

The various recorded versions of his songs did not bring Young much in the way of material gain, nor a dramatic shift in his career. Towards the end of the 1960s Young and Johnson's children were taken from them, part of the forced removal of Aboriginal children known as the ‘Stolen Generations’. The couple separated, and Young left Wilcannia. Two decades of wandering, bouts of heavy drinking and health issues followed, presumably considerably exacerbated by the trauma of having lost his family. Young lived for a while in Bourke and Balranald (where he recorded one or two more songs) and then eventually with his daughter in Newcastle, on the coast.Footnote ⁹ This was also a period in which Young seemed to interrogate his own Christianity, both in song and in an interview with the Aboriginal writer Kevin Gilbert, where Young claimed Australia was the first garden of Eden (before colonialism) and pointed out the fact that the bible encouraged drinking (Gilbert Reference Gilbert1978). In 1979, Young travelled to Sydney to contradict a widely believed newspaper report that claimed he was dead (Coffey Reference Coffey1979). While in Sydney, Beckett lured him into Trafalgar Recording Studios in inner-city Annandale where he made his only studio recordings. Beckett remembers that Young seemed shy and reluctant to record, and it was only because the engineer happened to have the tape running while they checked the levels that anything was captured (Beckett 2015). After the sound check, Young slipped off the stool and split the breeze. Young really did die in 1991, aged 58. Three years later the National Library of Australia and the Aboriginal Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Islander Studies issued 14 of his songs on CD. While Young never received much critical or commercial recognition in his lifetime, his legacy and significance have grown over time.

Old Wilcannia Town

Wilcannia in the 1950s and 1960s consisted of two communities, white and black, who lived in separate parts of the town. Conditions in Wilcannia constituted apartheid, in everything but name. This was enforced through both legislation and social convention. Aboriginal people lived in the government housing known as the ‘Mission’, or in their own housing on the ‘Mallee’. Beckett, who lived on the Mission for much of 1957, and part of 1963, wrote that:

In the first part of the 1960s, more than a decade after Australia signed the 1948 United Nations declaration of human rights, Aboriginal people still had basic freedoms and rights restricted or banned outright. In many states Aboriginal people could not vote, and they were barred from voting in federal elections until a referendum in 1967 changed the constitution. So-called ‘mixed race’ children were being forcibly taken from their Aboriginal families and placed in institutional or foster care, a policy which combined aggressive paternalism with a genocidal desire to ‘breed out the colour’, resulting in the ‘Stolen Generations’ (Curthoys Reference Curthoys2003, p. 12; Bird Reference Bird1998). Ability to work, marry and travel was restricted, and required permission from the State legislator. It was possible to apply for an exemption from these laws; however, in doing so Aboriginal people had to disassociate themselves from their Aboriginality and answer such questions as ‘what was the “breed” of my parents’, ‘does applicant habitually associate with aboriginals’ and ‘does applicant live in a civilized manner’, and have their homes subjected to humiliating inspections to prove it (Brennan Reference Brennan2013, p. 158). The resulting ‘exemption certificate’ was known in Aboriginal communities as the ‘dog tag’, indicating the esteem with which it was held. Throughout the country, town councils and businesses practised various forms of exclusions and employment inequality was ubiquitous. Country singer Col Hardy remembers growing up in Brewarrina: ‘when the police used to drive down the street all the Aboriginal people had to stand up and when they go past they sit back down again’ (Col Hardy, 1999).

Drinking was illegal for Aboriginal people in every state except Victoria until 1963, as was setting foot inside a pub. Consequently, Wilcannia pubs conducted ‘sly grog’ transactions at their back doors or in their back alleys. Operating in a black market, publicans were able to inflate their prices. Police would routinely arrest Aboriginal people for drinking (although rarely the sly grog sellers themselves) and as Young sings in ‘Wilcannia Song’, the punishment was 10 pounds or 20 days (Young 1979). ‘In those days,’ said Bill Riley, a contemporary of Young's and a fine country singer himself:

As Riley's recollection shows, leisure activities for Aboriginal people mostly took place outside of pubs, clubs and restaurants, away from the town. Aboriginal people of Wilcannia – and in communities up and down the Darling – held ‘claypan dances’ in the soft, flat floodplains that were set back from the river. These were parties that went into the early hours, using giant bonfires for light. Musical entertainment in the first part of the twentieth century was often jigs, reels, schottisches and polkas played on a push-button accordion, but sometimes it came from 78 rpm records played on a wind-up gramophone that had been enterprisingly hauled down to the claypan. From the 1940s, the acoustic guitar began to take over as the instrument of choice. The guitar was passed around the fire and people took it in turns to play hillbilly songs, sentimental favourites, ‘bush ballads’ and 1950s rock ’n’ roll. Sometimes someone would perform a solo step or tap dance. Police would often break up the claypan dances and parties, sometimes driving their cars right into the gathering, headlights blazing, and would lock up whoever they caught (Allan and Chris Sloane interviewed by Rob Willis, 2006; Wilga Williams interviewed by Clinton Walker 1999).

Within the general climate of segregation, however, contact between people and cultures did occur in isolation. For instance, Wilcannia's Greek milk bar, as it was popularly known, was a café run by a Greek-Australian couple (as were many country town cafes in twentieth-century Australia – the employment opportunities for migrants from southern Europe also being restricted, (see Alexakis and Janieszewski, Reference Alexakis and Janiszewski2016)). The Greek milk bar served black and white customers alike, and one of its big draw cards was a juke box loaded with hillbilly music. The other place in which it seems that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people could interact with some degree of equality was at hillbilly shows, the predominant musical form in 1950s and 1960s rural Australia. The stars of Australian country music – Slim Dusty, Chad Morgan, Buddy Williams, Athol McCoy and Aboriginal entertainers like Col Hardy – would tour through Wilcannia on a fairly regular basis in the decades following World War Two. At these shows Aboriginal people were often offered the same seats as anyone else. At Condobolin in central NSW, for instance, Slim Dusty came through every year playing at the church hall, and here ‘Kooris always got the front seats’ (Sloane 2006). This was not the case at cinemas, where Aboriginal people were given the choice of sitting on milk crates down the front, or high up in the balconies, or at venues and restaurants in towns such as Walgett that had ‘upstairs for white people and downstairs for Aboriginal people’ (Hardy, 1999).Footnote ¹⁰ These differences were partly to do with the requests of the performers, and also because country music shows were often held in venues that did not have the complication of liquor licences, such as church halls.

The songs

Dougie Young's songs were written and performed in a remote rural community with a lively musical scene, oppressive racial segregation and ever-present police harassment. Young's songs sprang out of this environment, and provide a vivid description of it. Musically, Young worked in a straightforward hillbilly style. He played the classic country strum: thumb on the bass notes, second-beat emphasis, dum-chucka dum-chucka dum-chucka.Footnote ¹¹ He was inspired by American artists like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, and Australian singers like Slim Dusty, whose records could be heard on the milk bar juke box, or on the radio in the council car. Unlike many of these singers, though, Young deployed a clipped vocal style, often almost spoken word. He usually sang fast and conversationally – ‘patter style’, as some have called it (Breen Reference Breen1989, p. 41) – but he had a flexible voice, and could sing in a more mellifluous style if the occasion and a slower tempo called for it.

Young's lyrics were almost exclusively about everyday life for his community and himself in and around Wilcannia: claypan dances, droving work, drinking sprees, imprisonment, seasonal grape picking, chicken thieving and romantic dalliances. The characters in his songs bore the name of real people in the Wilcannia community, their names often subject to Young's signature reversal, i.e. Bert Hunter became ‘Hunter’ Bert. Many of these songs were humorous social-realist descriptions of life without a polemical edge. In ‘Cut A Rug’, Young celebrates letting off steam with his mates: ‘Way up in ‘Bre they call it “on the spree”, in Bourke it's the Jitterbug/But Wilcannia's got the best name of all, yes we call it Cuttin’ A Rug’.Footnote ¹² In ‘Got No Time for Dancin’, also known as the ‘Wilcannia Song’, Young wryly describes the situation that awaits those arrested after just such rug-cutting: a 10 pound fine or ‘twenty days hard labour’. Gaol is described vividly: ‘No sweets, no sugar in your tea, no smokes to ease your mind/You're sleeping on an old straw mat, concrete for your bed/You feel your belly pinching you, you wish that you were dead.’ Yet, even in the face of this, Young is still prepared to defy the law in pursuit of a good time:

Beckett has observed that drinking for Aboriginal men in Wilcannia, and a cavalier attitude to consequences, functioned as a form of political defiance and assertion of masculinity (Beckett Reference Beckett2004). Young's songs are an acknowledgement and celebration of this form of defiance.

Young also wrote songs that more explicitly addressed the double standards of colonial society, making a strong claim for equal rights. In ‘They Say it's a Crime’, in response to those who say it's a crime to drink ‘beer and wine’, Young replies, ‘I don't care who knows, I work for my dough, and I'll spend it as I please’, just as white bush workers have been allowed, even celebrated, for doing.Footnote ¹³ Young's signature song ‘The Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards’ is a forthright demand for equality and expression of black pride:

In 1964 there was a long parliamentary debate on equal pay for Aboriginal people working in the cattle industry, and in this context Young's song makes a strong political statement for equal pay for equal work (Curthoys Reference Curthoys2003, p. 15). Later in the song Young critiques the West's history of military conflict and invasion through linking the 1788 British invasion of Australia with the contemporary threat of nuclear war in a wonderful leap of imagination.

Perhaps his most radical song ‘I Don't Want Your Money’ rejects 1950s ideals of assimilation and bourgeois respectability in favour of Indigenous forms of economic self-sufficiency. Rather than grind himself down with city life, commuting and overwork, Young chooses an alternative life: ‘I don't want your money, you can take it all away/With my spear and boomerang I get three meals a day … [and] with a stone I grind nardoo’. This song is one of the rare occasions were Young explicitly mentions traditional Aboriginal practices, and as such is also interesting evidence of the ways in which culture was maintained in Wilcannia during this period.

Young also parodied popular songs of the day as a way of underlining the absurd and humiliating situation his people found themselves in. In perhaps his most ingenious song ‘Old Wilcannia Town’, Young ghosts the melody of Slim Dusty's smash hit song ‘The Pub With No Beer’.Footnote ¹⁵ Rather than the pub having no beer, however, in Young's version he imagines a future Wilcannia where Aboriginal people have stopped drinking. Consequently, the police, the publicans and the ‘whitefella runners’ supplying the alcohol are all out of a job. Traditional social roles are reversed: police are penniless, and publicans are ‘walking the track’. Aboriginal people, newly flush with cash, are ‘getting ‘round in flash suits, driving big Customlines’, while the ‘local lock-up is empty’ and the ‘big pub's filled with cobwebs’. Rather than claypan dances, entertainment comes from ‘one Youngie Doug and his rock ’n’ roll band’. In this song, Young manages to be simultaneously bitterly satirical, nostalgic for a way of life already disappearing, and imagine a post-colonial emancipatory future for his people – one where rock stardom is not out of the question.

Although avoiding the straight-ahead polemic address of much ‘political’ music, especially 1960s folk music, Young's music was clearly political in its attitudes to work, race and injustice, providing directions for and evidence of everyday resistance.Footnote ¹⁶ Young's songs were also political because they were social-realist: they clearly expressed what life was like for an Aboriginal man in rural Australia. This was an eloquent black voice – an ‘I’ – that was seldom heard on record at the time. Many scholars have commented on the ways in which narration of Aboriginal life stories and experience allow previously silenced voices to be heard: ‘Identity narratives’ in Aboriginal popular music engender a ‘fresh perspective on the world in order to change it’ (Neunfeldt & Oien Reference Neuenfeldt and Oien2000, p. 30). This has been a theme written about by scholars of Aboriginal literature, wherein ‘autobiographical writing’ is political because it calls attention to ‘a new subjectivity and perspective on the world’ and represents ‘an empowerment’ (Lever Reference Lever2000, p. 114; also Brennan Reference Brennan2013, p. 159). This position is not without its critics. For instance Stephen Muecke regards this position as simplistic because Aboriginal life writers are using European forms to tell their stories (Muecke Reference Muecke1988; Brennan Reference Brennan2013, p. 163). However, as Hugh Webb has observed, Aboriginal writers appropriate and transform the ‘language codes’ of the colonisers, effectively turning them back on their sources. Or, as Michel de Certau has noted, non-metropolitan cultures take so-called ‘dominant cultures’ and make them ‘function in another register’ (Webb Reference Webb2005; De Certeau Reference De Certeau1988, p. 32). The songs of Dougie Young provide a preeminent example of this transformation.

There is clearly a tension here that is not easily resolved. On the one hand, Aboriginal country music can be seen as representative of cultural dispossession and the inability of a Western audience to hear anything not expressed in familiar ways. On the other hand, Aboriginal country music represents a way in which cultural expression may still take place following colonialism. It has been a way of re-building identity, wherein the language of the coloniser is used to critique the very nature of colonisation. While some Aboriginal country-folk-rock performers, especially those from northern and central Australia, sang in Aboriginal languages, those in the Eastern states like Young tended to sing in English. Looking at Young and those using a similar musical language, it would be difficult to argue there was a distinctly ‘Indigenous’ country music style. However, this is precisely the point. Part of the power and significance of songwriters like Young was that they used recognised colonial cultural forms to tell new stories as that was the culture that was available to them. They fashioned something new and striking from familiar materials. And certainly, there was no sense in which Young did not own his music.

Wider musical context

Scholarship around country music in the USA has tended to emphasise either its apolitical nature or its associations with conservatism and populism. With some notable exceptions –such as Johnny Cash's exploration of the mistreatment of Native Americans in ‘Bitter Tears’ – virtually no popular country songs dealt with racial or ethnic equality or civil rights in the 1960s (Van Sickel Reference Van Sickel2005). Don Cusic is unequivocal in his assessment that US country music was aligned with conservative politics. In particular, it stood with segregation, ‘family’ values, the Vietnam War and against the burgeoning counterculture movement. Cusic only counts two significantly popular country songs in the period that dealt with race (Cusic Reference Cusic, Wolfe and Akenson2002; also Rodnitzky Reference Rodnitzky1999). US country music did have black artists – most notably Charlie Pride but also earlier artists like Wynonie Harris who sang hillbilly songs – but they were marketed to a black audience via the ‘race’ charts. There were also Native American artists and audiences. Overall, however, country music in America was not the vehicle for radical political protest in the same way as soul and funk were (Pecknold Reference Pecknold2013; Guralnick Reference Guralnick2002, p. 226).

Australia's situation was somewhat different. Despite the claims made by some scholars that non-Aboriginal country music has ignored an Aboriginal presence, there were some notable exceptions, even before the flowering of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Slim Dusty was a white artist who had been recording songs about colonial massacres and issues around Aboriginal pastoral labour since the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁷ While Dusty may have been an exception, he was also exceptionally popular, both with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences, and he showed how country music could deal with fraught political issues in a deceptively straightforward way. As for black performers, the first Aboriginal performer to record popular music commercially was Jimmy Little. In 1963, Little became arguably the most famous Aboriginal person in Australia when his gospel-tinged pop single ‘Royal Telephone’ became a top five single. Prior to this, in 1959, Little released the country-infused ‘Give the Coloured Lad A Chance’. The song, written by Little's father, relates the experience of looking for work as an Aboriginal man, promising a future employer would benefit if only they'd ‘give this coloured boy a chance’ (Little Reference Little1959). Young took Little's gentle appeal for equality and hardened it. The ‘tall, dark and lean’ figure who can ‘mix it with the best’ in Young's ‘The Crow’ demands equality, as opposed to Little's ‘coloured boy’ who seeks ‘a chance’. The latter seems to be working within the confines of assimilation, while the former seeks to showcase his difference as a source of power. In this way, Young's music indicated the confrontational stance that Aboriginal country-infused music would take in the 1970s, with artists such as Vic Simms and Bobby Macleod. It also anticipates the post-assimilationist direction that Aboriginal protest movements would take in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The erection of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972, its associated claims of Aboriginal sovereignty and calls for a treaty between the Australian government and Aboriginal people were fuelled by a sense of self-determination that had much in common with Young's statements (Foley et al. Reference Foley, Schaap and Howell2014).

Young's reception outside Aboriginal communities was limited. He rarely, if ever, performed outside western NSW. His EP release on Wattle Records was bought and listened to by a relatively small cohort of dedicated progressive white urban ‘folkies’. The version of his song by Gary Shearston became fairly well known to an urban folk audience, and the Athol McCoy version was certainly played on regional hillbilly radio and was moderately well known. For wider, whiter, audiences Young was a cultish and exotic curio – an Aboriginal man singing songs of the bush. While Young's music was appealing to both folkies and hillbilly fans, his use of country music styles was also a limitation. Politically progressive urban white audiences in Australia in the 1960s were not listening to country music. In many cases they were hostile towards it for its presumed musical baseness and the conservative social stance of its lyrics and its artists. Such audiences tended to be more sympathetic towards ‘folk’ music, and indeed many young urban Australians of the early to mid 1960s were active participants in the ‘folk revival’. Consequently, Young found an audience in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne through being identified as a ‘folk’ artist, rather than a ‘country’ artist. He was released by a folk label (Wattle) and covered by a Dylanesque folk artist. Young himself listened to and was influenced by country music and his rural Aboriginal and white audience identified him as such.

This conflation of folk music with radical politics was typical of the way in which the Australian civil rights movement of the 1960s took many of its political and cultural cues from America, but blended these with local concerns and content. The civil rights movement in Australia had begun as a local student protest against American policies of segregation and racist violence towards African-Americans, before quickly morphing into an awareness of homegrown injustices. University of Sydney students organised a ‘freedom ride’ to the ‘deep north’ of NSW in 1965 to protest against the virtual apartheid of many country towns. These were directly inspired by the bus rides from north to south in America in 1961 (Curthoys Reference Curthoys2003, pp. 1–30; Maynard Reference Maynard2005). A 1963 edition of ABC television's 4 Corners used Peter, Paul and Mary's version of Bob Dylan's ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ cut to footage of civil rights protests (Curthoys Reference Curthoys2003, p. 4). In 1964 a rally in Sydney's Hyde Park to raise awareness of Aboriginal Rights saw ‘several hundred students’ assemble for ‘folk singing and speeches’ (Tharunka, 17 July 1964, p. 5). Gary Shearston sang a number of ‘freedom songs from America’ as well as songs written by Aboriginal poet Kath Walker (later known as Oodgeroo), including a version of her poem ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’ (Curthoys Reference Curthoys2003, p. 24). One of the most enduring songs to emerge from the Aboriginal civil rights movement was 1971's ‘Gurindji Blues’ about a strike by Aboriginal stockmen and the subsequent battle for land rights. ‘Gurindji Blues’, sung by Galarrwuy Yunupingu in an Aboriginal creole, in Yolungu style, was written by a white country-folk songwriter, Ted Egan. It is a strident expression of Aboriginal workers’ rights and land rights.Footnote ¹⁸

Country-style songs that dealt with Aboriginal issues, on the other hand, tended to keep their politics fairly understated. They tended to eschew the polemical style of folk, or the impassioned energy of rock, choosing instead to tell stories about people in a musically understated manner, rather than make general or overly dramatic statements. ‘The Crow’ was the closest Young came to a polemic, which is probably why it was the song covered by Shearston, but it was an exception; most of the time Young's politics lay beneath the surface of the song.

The other aspect of Young's writing that made him not a straightforward fit with the folk movement was his sense of humour. Indeed his humour set him apart from most other country music as well. Top-selling country songs in America in the 1960s often expressed ‘generalised nostalgia’ for lost childhood days (Van Sickel Reference Van Sickel2005). If anything, the fashion for sentimentality was even more pronounced in Australia. From the earliest recordings in the 1930s, until the present day, country songs have often been sweet, wistful and sentimental evocations of family, home and nation. For instance, despite his rough and tumble image, the subject matter of Australia's first hillbilly star Tex Morton's most popular songs was dying or dead parents left behind in sweet little old valleys (Martin Reference Martin2015, pp. 47–80). Also the music itself – drawn out phrasing, excessive use of portamento, spoken word and chords that stayed within major or minor keys (unlike the shifting pentatonic nature of blues and jazz) – enabled a pronounced sentimental flavour. In America, early country music was strongly flavoured with blues styles and ‘blue’ notes, while country music in Australia was ‘whiter’ in the way it eschewed these musical styles (Smith Reference Smith1994, p. 305). Victorian-era sentimentality, expressed in popular culture forms such as music hall ballads and parlour songs lasted well into the twentieth century in Australia (see Bellanta Reference Bellanta2012; Bellanta & Martin, Reference Bellanta and Martin2012). Grafted onto the idea of robust mateship, ‘sentimental masculinity’ has been a dominant mode of country music in Australia, from Tex Morton to Lee Kernagahn (Martin Reference Martin2015, pp. 11–46 and 157). Aboriginal country music too has often employed a sentimental mode, although it is often reimagined as spiritual attachment to land and country. In ‘Streets of Old Fitzroy’ by the Country Outcasts the classic ‘longing-for-home’ trope was recast, desiring instead to be ‘back in the Dreamtime, where there's always peace and quiet’.Footnote ¹⁹

Young, on the other hand, rejected sentimentality. In fact, he parodied it. Lyrics of songs like ‘Old Wilcannia Town’ and ‘They Say It's A Crime’ show a tendency to laugh at injustice, rather than bemoan it. His clipped staccato singing style, as opposed to long legato phrases, helped to deliver the parodies with offhand nonchalance. Young's deployment of bitter humour and dark satire was significant for two reasons. Firstly, with the exception of Chad Morgan, the humorous, often bawdy, hillbilly singer who shares many similarities with Young, very few country songwriters were working in this mode at the time.Footnote ²⁰ Secondly, because it shows the complex way in which Aboriginal people could react to injustice and oppression, including the use of humour. Young's work shows that often the reaction was to laugh at the absurd double standards, rather than bemoan them, and that satire could be an empowering weapon against injustices.

Just as Young's message anticipated the activism of later decades, the ironic anti-authoritarian sense of humour of his songs also resonated with the radical comedy of the National Black Theatre and their Basically Black sketch comedy show broadcast on ABC television in the early 1970s (Foley et al. Reference Foley, Schaap and Howell2014; Miller Reference Miller1985) and has continued into the twenty-first century with television shows such as Black Comedy. Some scholars have commented on the prevalence of satirical humour in Aboriginal communities as a mode of empowerment and emotional survival. Indeed, the famous Australian laconic sense of humour may have its roots in Aboriginal modes (Holt Reference Holt2009). Other oppressed populations have also combined humour with music to protest against colonial power structures – the African-American ‘cakewalk’ dance for instance emerged from a satirical impression of white plantation owners before entering popular culture (Levine Reference Levine2007). More recently, African-American comedians such as Richard Pryor and David Chappelle have famously used humour to critique race-relations. Young's use of humour sprang from and empowered his community, just as it did for many other artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Young's legacies

While Dougie Young's music never achieved mass recognition among white Australia, among Aboriginal people, particularly in the Eastern states, he left a significant legacy. From the 1960s on, Young's songs struck a chord with Aboriginal people living in similar circumstances, some of whom were burgeoning musicians themselves. For this audience, the McCoy and Shearston versions, or the Wattle Records release, or even Young's own recordings, were largely immaterial. Many rural Aboriginal people did not hear his music through a record player or radio, but rather from other people. They heard it played by someone, who had picked it up through the hum and rattle of a guitar round a campfire, and passed it on. These songs travelled up and down the Darling River, from Mildura to the Queensland border, and further, changing and adapting as they went. At Tilpa, 150 kilometres from Wilcannia, people were still playing his songs in the 1980s: ‘A lot of these blokes around here sing his songs. The young ones’ (Knight 1986). Young's songs were also well known at Cherbourg mission in southern Queensland, some 1200 kilometres from Wilcannia, where Patchy Doctor played a version of ‘Scobie's Dream’ at a dreamily slow tempo (Jack Malone et al. 1987).

Some of these burgeoning young singer-songwriters in rural NSW and Queensland would go on to reach audiences and success that Young could only dream of, or sing about. For instance, Roger Knox grew up on Toomelah mission near the Queensland/NSW border in the 1960s. To him and his contemporaries, Dougie Young was a legend: an Aboriginal man who had ‘beautiful words’. As Knox puts it, this was a revelation as it had been indoctrinated into him and his people that ‘we weren't supposed to have those nice words’ (Buried Country (film) 1999). Knox learnt how to put together a guitar from fencing wire and metal drums. He also learnt how to play Dougie Young songs.

In the 1970s, Knox gravitated towards Tamworth – established as Australia's ‘capital of country music’ – and started to get his music going in a serious way. Rural NSW, even after the legislative reforms of the late 1960s, was still a deeply racist place. Aboriginal country artists were still side-lined in general, and in particular in Tamworth during the festival.Footnote ²¹ Despite this, by the end of the 1980s, Roger Knox and his band Euraba were one of the biggest acts on the Tamworth scene. In 1990 Euraba were nominated for two Golden Guitar Awards (the Australian equivalent of Nashville's Country Music Association awards) a feat unheard of for an Aboriginal artist at the time. Knox went onto become one of the biggest stars of Aboriginal country music. When he recorded his critically acclaimed survey of Aboriginal country music in 2012 he included two Dougie Young songs in the set: ‘Cut A Rug’ and ‘Scobie's Dream’ (Knox 2013). Today, Knox plays shows for his community as well as concerts at major international arts festivals, playing and talking about Young's music in these venues.

The influence that Young had on Knox was explicit. For other artists there is a connection to other country singers, if not Young himself, yet it is important to trace where the wiggly line from the claypan leads. Archie Roach was another performer who followed in the footsteps of Young and other pioneering Aboriginal country artists. Roach himself was a member of the Stolen Generations, and after being taken from his family grew up in foster care. At one of his foster family's houses he listened to a lot of African-American soul and blues. After he left home, he lived on the streets of the inner-city suburb of Fitzroy, the focal point for Melbourne's Aboriginal population. It was here that he began to be exposed to Aboriginal country music and was taken under the wing of country performers and songwriters Harry and Wilga Williams. Roach remembers that:

For Roach, country music was linked to his Aboriginality and personal empowerment. It is notable that the phrase that Roach uses in this story, ‘back to my people’, is also a line from his best-known song ‘Took The Children Away’. Roach broke through to mainstream success in the early 1990s with the album Charcoal Lane, and in particular its lead single ‘Took The Children Away’ which told the story of the Stolen Generations from personal experience. The considered slow-burn of the song, the organ backing, the plaintive sonority of Roach's voice and the plainspeaking poetry of the lyrics made the song extremely affecting: ‘Took the children away, plucked from the mother's breast, said it was for the best, took them away’. It was not country exactly, but it drew from the some of the same gospel sources as country music and employed a similar narrative directness. Charcoal Lane won two ARIAs in 1991 and established Roach as one of Australia's most enduring and treasured performers.

This was not the first time the story of the Stolen Generations had been told in song. Northern Territory country singer Bob Randall's ‘Brown Skin Baby’ was one of the first times it was dealt with in popular culture, finding a wider audience through its inclusion in an ABC documentary in the 1970s and in the 1986 Bruce Beresford film Fringe Dwellers, However, Roach's song coincided with the growing awareness of this aspect of Australian history among non-Aboriginal people. Following ‘Took the Children Away’, several other events in the 1990s focussed public attention on the issue of the Stolen Generations, notably, the ‘Bringing Them Home’ report commissioned by the Keating Labor Government and published in 1997, and the 1996 Doris Pilkington book and subsequent Philip Noyce feature film Rabbit Proof Fence, which raised the issue with an international audience. The resulting public conversation showed a widely felt sense of unease and national guilt about the wrongs of the past held by many non-Indigenous Australians. Many Australians, white and black, felt that the Government of the day should issue a formal apology to members of the Stolen Generation, if not actual economic reparations. In the year 2000, a crowd of 250,000 people marched over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to mark ‘Sorry Day’, calling on Conservative Prime Minister John Howard to apologise. It was not until 2008, with new Labor leader Kevin Rudd recently installed as Prime Minister, that the Government issued ‘The Apology’. It had been more than 10 years since the ‘Bringing Them Home Report’ was published, and 17 years since ‘Took the Children Away’.

Roach's song was an important part of this growing awareness. Robbie Thorpe, an Aboriginal broadcaster, interviewing Roach on Melbourne's 3CR in 2009 stated that ‘your music really forced the government's hand’ to make a national inquiry into the Stolen Generation. ‘You turned a nation’. ‘Your song “took the children away” … played a big part in drawing people's attention to the stolen generation … the truth was undeniable’ (Archie Roach interviewed by Robbie Thorpe 2009). Other Aboriginal issues were, if not propelled, then certainly popularised, through song. The Aboriginal protests that accompanied the bicentenary of British settlement in 1988, the growing campaign for land rights, culminating in the Mabo decision by the High Court in 1991 and Prime Minster Paul Keating's public acknowledgement of past injustices in the 1991 Redfern speech were accompanied by popular songs. For instance Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly's song ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ about the journey to land rights which, as Carmody himself said, transformed a ‘negative concept of the past’ into a ‘positive concept of the future’ (quoted in Barney and Mackinlay Reference Barney and Mackinlay2010). Yothu Yindi's song ‘Treaty’ inserted the topic of Aboriginal sovereignty into the centre of Australian discourse (Davies Reference Davies1993, p. 254). Non-Aboriginal artists such as Midnight Oil also reflected the historical moment with a plea to awaken national consciousness of colonial injustices with ‘Beds Are Burning’ from the 1987 number one album Diesel and Dust.

Many scholars have written about the connections between music and social change. Some have debated the extent to which music can actually create social change in historical contexts such as the Velvet Revolution in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, or the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.Footnote ²² Others have preferred to see music as part of the public sphere where issues are thrashed out, if not actual policy enacted. As Habermas would have it, music occupies the ‘wild part’ of the public sphere, before being laundered into the ‘serious part’ where ‘actual political decisions are made’ (Naerland, quoting Habermas, Reference Naerland2014, pp. 475–6). Music – especially popular song forms – have the potential of providing not just historical evidence of a hidden story, but also a way to empathise with its survivors (see Naerland Reference Naerland2014, p. 447). Music also can communicate ‘disturbing truths’ if they draw on and respond to ideas already glimmering in the imagination of popular thought (Frith Reference Frith1983, p. 62). More specifically, Chris Lawe Davies has argued that Aboriginal rock and reggae bands from the late 1970s and early 1980s, like No Fixed Address, Us Mob and Warumpi Band, opened up ‘discursive space’ for new bands such as Yothu Yindi and accompanying political dialogue to emerge (Davies Reference Davies1993, p. 254). While agreeing with these statements, it is not the intention of this article to theorise too deeply as to what degree popular music created or reflected social change. Rather, what we want to draw attention to is the hitherto under-recognised role that Aboriginal country music from the mid twentieth century played in this broader discussion about social change in the late twentieth century. While Young did not live to see the changes in Australian music and society, he was an important influence on this.

A note on contemporaries

Dougie Young was an exceptionally good songwriter, and serves as an excellent example of the power and usefulness of country and folk-style songwriting to express identity politics in the mid twentieth century. However, it is also worth noting that Young was not the only one writing about life for Aboriginal people in rural Australia in the post-war period. Although becoming better known as a filmmaker, activist and social worker, Essie Coffey from Brewarrina in northwest NSW led her country-flavoured band Black Images in the 1970s and 1980s and produced songs such as ‘Bush Queen’ and ‘She Moves with the Wind’. From nearby Moree, Eric Craigie documented the joys and hardships of life on Aboriginal mission stations in songs like ‘Murri's Plea’ and ‘Middle Camp’.Footnote ²³ Further south, Babs Vincent, from Murrin Bridge Station, who worked as a shearer for much of his life, also penned some vivid lyrics about race relations in small-town Australia. For example, the ‘Black and Gold’ tells the story of an integrated rugby league team who are able to play on the field together yet have to avoid ‘the bandy-legged sarge’ when it comes to having a drink after the game (Babs Vincent 1986). On the NSW coast, Mary Duroux – songwriter and poet from Slim Dusty's hometown of Kempsey – was not a performer herself but her songs ‘Halfcaste Outcaste’ and ‘Heartaches COD’ were performed by artists such as Harry and Wilga Williams. Also from near Kempsey, Clivie Kelly grew up trading country licks with a young Dusty at Nulla Creek, and left behind a perennial song ‘My Home in the Valley’. Keith ‘Patchy’ Doctor, as well as interpreting Dougie Young songs like ‘Scobie's Dream’, also wrote his own accounts of life on Cherbourg mission in southern Queensland (Jack Malone et al. 1987). Growing up in Carnarvon mission in Western Australia, before moving onto busking on the streets of Perth, Vi Chitty sung about places and characters from her life in a folk-country style. Her song ‘Awakening’ from 1979 remains a landmark recording (Breen Reference Breen1989, p. 64).

Furthermore, there were other artists who attempted to meld their country/blues roots with a burgeoning interest in folk music in cities in Australia in the 1960s. For instance, ‘Black’ Allan Barker hailed from northern Western Australia but moved to Sydney at a fairly young age where he performed as a country-folk singer, lived in an inner-city bohemian demi-monde, mixed with various countercultural luminaries including Bob Dylan and eventually went on to found the local branch of Greenpeace. His one album, Fire Burnin, released in 1983, was a fierce denouncement of colonialism and a strong expression of empowerment. In short, Dougie Young had some contemporaries and was part of a strong tradition of country/folk/blues songwriting in Aboriginal communities. However, the wit and vividness of his songs, the relatively early dates of his compositions and his legacy make him fairly exceptional.