Number 6 – Icehouse – Great Southern Land

Why do so many of the greatest Australian songs have a rhythmic pulse to them? There must be something about the soul of this place. A heartbeat of sorts. At least, it must feel so for those who create songs that endeavour to embody everything from the endless coastlines to the endless deserts of our mighty, ancient continent. At the very least, these suppositions seem to embody the choices made by Icehouse when composing their timeless wonder, ‘Great Southern Land’.

If you grew up in the 80’s, you saw and you loved Yahoo Serious’s 1988 film, Young Einstein. For the younger folk reading this, yes, that was the name of the person who wrote, directed and starred in the film. (Ok, he was born Greg Pead.) Young Einstein was his first film, and the only one (of three) that did well at the box office. I’m not sure if time will have been kind to it – I’ve not seen it in decades - but it was an endearingly daffy thing for a 12 year old to watch at the time. It also had one helluva good soundtrack. Paul Kelly, The Stems, Mental As Anything, Big Pig, and of course, Icehouse. The film’s titular character is a bizarrely imagined incarnation of Albert Einstein. In this world, he is a wildly (red) haired Tasmanian who splits a beer atom, thereby inventing the froth we all know and love. (Again, young’uns, we were a simple people.) When ‘Einstein’ leaves the Apple Isle to make his way across the nation, it’s Icehouse’s ‘Great Southern Land’ that accompanies his journey. A better choice at that time can scarcely be imagined.

There’s a timelessness to ‘Great Southern Land’ that belies its distinctly 80s production values. A good deal of this timeless quality can be attributed to two aural components: the soft timbre of lead singer, Iva Davies’ voice and the production treatment that gives it a dreamy, shoegaze quality, and the inclusion of stabs of twanging guitar that evoke the snapping of barbed wire and the wobbling air of extreme heat. The fact the song was recorded in 1982 – well before the dream pop shoegaze sub-genres are agreed to have emerged – reveals that the song isn’t simply terrific but well ahead of its time. Icehouse were a far more interesting and innovative band than history has recognised thus far.

And the song itself is unusually structured, in that it's the verse that are more major in tonality and the bridge and chorus more minor. This gives the song a more ominous, foreboding quality than one might expect, unless one takes the time to examine the lyric.

In it the land is framed as having created those First Australians, who ‘make it work’, meaning that the connection between the land and its people is effectively symbiotic. Europeans are not encompassed by this, however, because time - namely, a ‘million summers’ have not ‘burned them black’. Rather, they still see the land as ‘prisoner island’. And it is they who walk like 'primitive man'; not because they resemble First Nations Peoples, but because they don't. They are primitive in the context of the land. They know nothing.

Though there is some nuanced reading required to see this in the lyric, the sentiments are nevertheless there, which again needs due recognition given the song written in 1982, a full decade before the Reconciliation Movement began to make its way into the broader Australian consciousness. It’s even been translated and sung in the Gamilaraay Language of the Kamilaroi People, which suggests that there is something in the song that resonates with those whose perspective on Country will forever (rightly) overshadow the limited ones available to more recent arrivals.

When I hear this song, when I feel it, I can’t help but feel an increased sense of reverence for the lands on which I live and walk. It makes me feel like a traveller; a guest in the best of ways. And in the context of a million summers, we’re all simply visitors to the blinding, inscrutable totality of our Great Southern Land.