Every Passing Day was a favourite song from Goanna’s ‘Oceania’ album, unfortunately the album is not available to buy today, and I haven’t heard it (the album) since my young formative years, alas if you know the lyrics there’s a hollow achingness inside of me, a sense of loss as I remember back to those days. Sentimentally I catch myself drifting from Goanna, Shane Howard, Solid Rock, White man, White law, White gun and invariably ending up with the ‘Unlucky Australians’ the Indigenous Australians our own people, our mates, our history and culture and their struggle to survive Every Passing Day. Then my sense of loss for some fantastic music of the past compared to a 50,000 years old culture being ‘unavailable’ puts it all into perspective and I believe White Australia and myself included needs to stand up and be counted, it’s time to join together and contribute to the long-term survival of our Indigenous Australians by just doing something, lets put their suffering front and centre of our mind, we can’t just ignore it and hope it goes away as that will be the end result, lets be proactive and talk about the issues, focus on the positives, education and community are key factors, communicate your feelings, you can even ‘scream from the rooftops’, there is so much we all can do as the time slips away. The following is a quote from Shane Howard from a recent article I read (can’t remember which paper, as I didn’t do my research very well on this one. Sorry!!!)
”There’s much greater awareness of indigenous culture,” he said, ”but it seems incredibly frail, possibly hanging on by a fingernail. In my travels of the past three or four years, the sense of anxiety is growing stronger inside me that we are potentially on the edge of losing something incredibly precious – the continuous living cultural memory of 40,000 to 50,000 years.”Part of me wants to scream from the rooftops, ‘Don’t let this disappear before our very eyes.’ My fear is that by the time we appreciate it in our non-indigenous society, it’ll be gone.”
I’ll give you a starting point get the ball rolling, do yourself a favour and check out Shane Howard and his band, Ross Hannaford (Daddy Cool) and Australia’s answer to ‘Bob Marley’ in Bart Willoughby (No Fixed Address) as they make a special appearance at the Caravan Club in Oakleigh on February 23rd 2012, don’t miss out on a night of great Australian music for only $35-(Value) and maybe this will be the start of something big.
Related articles
- NT indigenous elder is Senior Australian (news.smh.com.au)
- Chronological Indigenous Legal History (thinkingbookworm.typepad.com)
