Clinton Walker is an Australian writer, best known for his works on popular music. He is known for his books Highway to Hell (1994; a biography of Bon Scott), Buried Country (2000; also a film and soundtrack album), History is Made at Night (2012), and others. He has also written on other subjects, in books such as Football Life (1998) and Golden Miles (2005), and has worked extensively as a journalist and in television.
Born in Bendigo, Victoria, in 1957, Walker dropped out of art school in Brisbane in the late 70s to start a punk fanzine with Andrew McMillan and to write for student newspapers. [1]
In 1978 he moved to Melbourne, where he worked on-air for 3RRR, and with Bruce Milne on the fanzine Pulp, and wrote for the fledgling Roadrunner magazine.
Moving on to Sydney in 1980, he commenced a career as a freelance journalist. Over the next 15 years he wrote for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including longstanding associations with both RAM and Australian Rolling Stone ; he also wrote extensively for Stiletto, The Bulletin , The Age , New Woman, Playboy , Inside Sport , the Edge and Juice. [1]
He published his first book, Inner City Sound, in 1981. It documented the emergence of independent Australian punk/post-punk music, and itself became an icon of the movement. After the book fell out of print in the mid-80s, bootleg photocopies of it began to crop up for sale in Melbourne record stores. Eventually, in 2005, Verse Chorus Press in the US re-released a revised and expanded edition, at the same time as a CD anthology with the same title. [1]
In 1984, after a couple of years in London, England, Walker returned to Australia and published his second book (The Next Thing), and got a job cleaning toilets at Pancakes on the Rocks.[ citation needed ]
Walker's third book, Highway to Hell, a biography of Bon Scott (1994), was widely acclaimed and a best seller in Australia; it has continuously remained in print ever since, making it probably the most enduring Australian music book ever, ahead of even Billy Thorpe’s Sex & Thugs & Rock’n’Roll. Subsequently, it was published in the US, and translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Bulgarian, and Finnish.
Walker then published Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977-1991 (1996) and Football Life (1998). Stranded was initially somewhat contentious for its non-mainstream view, but it was better understood when the Invisible Spectrum published a new updated edition in 2021. As reviewer Des Cowley said: “Reading Stranded today with a quarter-century’s hindsight, it’s easy to see that Walker mostly got things right. And if he stumbled now and again, it’s still the case he was streaks ahead of the pack.” Football Life was a sort of companion piece to Stranded, another personal history but this time of minor-league Australian Rules culture.
His sixth book, Buried Country , a history of Aboriginal country music, was published in 2000 and spawned a documentary film and soundtrack CD with the same title. "Like many of Walker’s projects", Martin Jones wrote in Rhythms, "Buried Country was at least a decade ahead of its time". At a time when Aboriginal music still wasn’t established or accepted as a fixture on the broader Australian music scene, Walker had long been one of its few media champions, and Buried Country was hailed as a pioneering and monumental work of music historiography, and still stands as the closest thing Australia's ever produced to the efforts of a Harry Smith or Peter Guralnick. [2] [3] [4] A new updated edition of the book was released in 2015 along with a rebooted version of the CD called Buried Country 1.5, and as a result of their even greater success than the first time around, [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] a touring live stageshow adaptation premiered in 2016 and played the festival circuit for a few years. [10] [11] [12] In 2018, Australian singer-songwriter Darren Hanlon, in conjunction with Mississippi Records in the US, produced a vinyl iteration of the Buried Country compilation that included even more new rare tracks. [13]
In 2005, his seventh book, Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car, was published. Three years before that in 2002, Walker had written a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald ‘Spectrum’ section celebrating the enduring cult appeal of unique Australian cars like the Holden Monaro and Valiant Charger, [14] and it was encouragement enough for fledgling publisher Coloumb Communications to sign him up for the book on whose research the article was based. [15] When Coloumb went bust before the artwork was completed, Walker’s contract was novated over to Lothian, and when Lothian released it, it was praised for its innovation, irreverent humour and beautiful design. [16] When Lothian went bust, the book was picked up by yet another publisher, Wakefield Press, and re-released in 2009 in an expanded and updated edition.[ citation needed ]
In 2012, Walker published History is Made at Night, a polemic on the endangered Australian live music circuit. [17] [18] In 2013 he published his ninth book, The Wizard of Oz, about the ill-starred Australian speed ace from the 1920s, Norman 'Wizard' Smith, as well as co-producing the CD Silver Roads, an anthology of Australian country-rock from the 1970s.
After the debacle of Deadly Woman Blues in 2018, [19] Walker returned to the publishing scene in 2021 with two books. Early in the year a new edition of his 1996 title Stranded was published, and then later in the year with the all-new Suburban Songbook. [20] [21] [22] Suburban Songbook: Writing Hits in post-war/pre-Countdown Australia is a critical history of the early evolution of rock/pop songwriting in Australia, [23] and was well-reviewed. [24] As the i94Bar said: “If Walker had only ever written Inner City Sound or Highway to Hell, his reputation as the grand old historian of Australian music would have been assured. The Suburban Songbook bookends the lot and is at least as essential.”
In 1982 to 1983, he lived in London, England, where he worked at the Record & Tape Exchange and served as a stringer for Bruce Milne's pioneering cassette-zine Fast Forward .[ citation needed ]
Walker has also worked at ABC Television on the two documentary series, Long Way to the Top and Love is in the Air, as well as co-hosting, with Annette Shun Wah, the live music program Studio 22 and hosting the short-lived Fly-TV show for record collectors, Rare Grooves. He has contributed to many literary anthologies, from the 1995 best-seller Men-Love-Sex to the 2012 collection of journal Meanjin's 'greatest hits'; he has also produced and/or annotated a long list of CD anthologies, [25] and appeared in many other rockumentaries. [26]
Going into the 2000s, Walker started a decade-long stint in the academy, despite not having formal qualifications. He taught creative writing in the Media department at Macquarie University in Sydney, and served as an Honorary Research Fellow for the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, in which capacity he wrote numerous papers published in journals and delivered at conferences in Australia and abroad. [27]
Walker has also worked as a cook, graphic artist, a DJ and a bookseller, has had his artwork exhibited in Sydney and Phnom Penh, and he was a member of the country-grunge band the Killer Sheep, who in 1987 released the single "Wild Down Home" on Au-Go-Go Records. [28]
Deadly Woman Blues, a history of black women in Australian music, was released in 2018 by a division of academic publisher UNSW Press, Each of 99 biographical entries was accompanied by a hand-drawn illustration by Walker. The book immediately garnered a few glowing reviews. [29] [30] [31]
There was an angry backlash from four of the artists who expressed their displeasure at being included without being spoken to, and citing factual inaccuracies. [32] [33] [34] [19] This led to social media outrage in which Walker was shamed as a racist, misogynist, colonialist privileged white male. The book was withdrawn from sale, with the publisher promising to pulp any unsold copies and never to reprint it. [35]
Walker admitted to mistakes and apologised for them, [35] but he nevertheless suffered personal trauma and grave damage to his reputation. "I didn't try to obscure what I was doing, I didn't take all the appropriate steps. I've been involved in underclass music forever, and in some ways, this is no different, but in other ways, it is very different". [33]
A reviewer of Golden Miles: Sex, Speed And The Australian Muscle Car in The Sydney Morning Herald has called him "our best chronicler of Australian grass-roots culture". [36]
The Saints were an Australian rock band, originating in Brisbane, Queensland in 1973. The band was founded by Chris Bailey, Ivor Hay (drummer), and Ed Kuepper (guitarist-songwriter). They were initially labeled a punk band because, like American punk rock band the Ramones, the Saints were employing the fast tempos, raucous vocals and "buzzsaw" guitar that characterised early punk rock – although this only reflects a portion of their overall sound. With their debut single "(I'm) Stranded" in September 1976, they became the first punk band outside the US to release a record, ahead of better-known acts the Damned, the Sex Pistols and the Clash. They are considered one of the first and most influential groups of the genre, particularly within Australia.
The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) is a daily compact newspaper published in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and owned by Nine. Founded in 1831 as the Sydney Herald, the Herald is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia and claims to be the most widely-read masthead in the country. The newspaper is published in compact print form from Monday to Saturday as The Sydney Morning Herald and on Sunday as its sister newspaper, The Sun-Herald and digitally as an online site and app, seven days a week. It is considered a newspaper of record for Australia. The print edition of The Sydney Morning Herald is available for purchase from many retail outlets throughout the Sydney metropolitan area, most parts of regional New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and South East Queensland.
Indigenous music of Australia comprises the music of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, intersecting with their cultural and ceremonial observances, through the millennia of their individual and collective histories to the present day. The traditional forms include many aspects of performance and musical instrumentation that are unique to particular regions or Aboriginal Australian groups; and some elements of musical tradition are common or widespread through much of the Australian continent, and even beyond. The music of the Torres Strait Islanders is related to that of adjacent parts of New Guinea. Music is a vital part of Indigenous Australians' cultural maintenance.
Casey Donovan is an Australian singer, songwriter, actress, theatre actress and author, best known for winning the second season of the singing competition show Australian Idol in 2004. She won the competition at age 16, becoming the series' youngest winner. In 2017, Donovan won the third series of I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here. Donovan also hosted the NITV music show Fusion with Casey Donovan.
Edward Joseph Egan is an Australian folk musician and a former public servant who served as Administrator of the Northern Territory from 2003 to 2007.
The Deadly Awards, commonly known simply as The Deadlys, was an annual celebration of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander achievement in music, sport, entertainment and community. The event was held from 1995 to 2013.
Ruby Charlotte Margaret Hunter, also known as Aunty Ruby, was an Aboriginal Australian singer, songwriter and guitarist, and the life and musical partner of Archie Roach.
Alexander McPhee Miller is an Australian novelist. Miller is twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He won the overall award for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for The Ancestor Game in 1993. He is twice winner of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Conditions of Faith in 2001 and for Lovesong in 2011. In recognition of his impressive body of work and in particular for his novel Autumn Laing he was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012.
Bruce Elder is an Australian journalist, writer and commentator.
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Donald Hugh Walker is an Australian musician and songwriter who wrote many of the hits for Australian pub rock band Cold Chisel. Walker is considered to be one of Australia's best songwriters. In 2012 he was inducted into the Australian Songwriter's Hall of Fame.
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Auriel Andrew was an award-winning Arrernte country musician from the Northern Territory of Australia.
Buried Country is the name of a documentary film, book, and soundtrack album released in 2000, and a stage show which toured from 2016 to 2018. A prosopography created by Clinton Walker, it tells the story of Australian country music in the Aboriginal community by focussing on the genre's most important stars.
Bobby McLeod was an Aboriginal activist, poet, healer, musician and Yuin elder. He was from Wreck Bay Village, Jervis Bay Territory. He was involved in the fight for Aboriginal rights in Australia and travelled the world speaking about cultural lore, health and healing.
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Music magazines have been published in Australia since the 1950s. They peaked in popularity during the 1970s and '80s, but currently, there are still several national titles, including local editions of Rolling Stone and the classical music-focused Limelight, among others.
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