… to the Territory where so much music and some of our stars – Warren H. Williams and Leah Flanagan – come from, and so I’m delighted to be able to announce that Buried Country: Live in Concert will be playing opening night at the up-coming 2018 Darwin Festival in August. 

​The show, which is free (!), will be presented at the Darwin Amphitheatre on Thursday, August 9, at 7pm. For more details go here or click through the image above. 

​Possibly a statement is overdue from me regarding the criticisms of Deadly Woman Blues that started cropping up a couple of weeks back. Not until now have I felt equipped to do that though, because I wanted to have some sort of palpable idea or a path to suggest towards making reparation for the misinformation the book has propagated, and apologising for the hurt that this has caused.
            Now a course of action has been decided upon – the book will be withdrawn from sale and pulped, and NewSouth Publishing will post up corrections on its website.
            This post here then is just the start of my own personal processes to amend any online profile of the book that I’m responsible for.
            As public access as something like Spotify is, I’ve just removed the Deadly Woman Blues playlist I’d compiled there, and I have similarly deleted a similar playlist on YouTube. I’m working on amending other outlets like not least of all this website itself.
            To say that I have myself felt distress over these past few weeks would be churlish in the face of that suffered by those women who have been misrepresented by the book. But I am in a state of distress and since I just don’t think I could string a coherent sentence together for any interviews at the minute, I have prepared this statement to go out to media outlets meantime:
 
“I have been devastated to learn that my failure to consult with many of the women in my book Deadly Woman Blues has caused such distress and anguish to them and to their friends and families. The book started life in graphic form and grew into one hundred images across one hundred years. The accompanying text about the women’s lives and work contains factual errors and I take responsibility for these. My publisher is working with these women to correct these mistakes on their website – these will be uploaded next week. I will be personally approaching some of these women, whose music has meant so much to me over decades, to apologise over the coming weeks. I should have followed protocols and consulted and checked and am now reflecting on my processes as a writer so at odds with my hitherto good reputation. Given all this, withdrawing the book from sale is the right decision. I apologise unreservedly to the women for any hurt I have caused.”
 
            NewSouth’s CEO Kathy Bail released a statement the other day announcing the withdrawal of the book, which reads as follows:
 
“NewSouth published Clinton Walker’s Deadly Woman Blues: Black Women and Australian Music in February 2018 and a small number of books have sold since then. We have been made aware that not all the women who appear in the book were consulted about current biographical details and that some entries contain errors of fact. We are deeply sorry for any hurt or distress this has caused the women concerned and apologise to them unreservedly. We will be publishing a list of corrections on the NewSouth Publishing website when confirmed by those parties involved.”
 
            The news is out there now in the media and on the net and so as much as I'd thought, in the interests of balance, I could provide links to the some of the criticism, that’s what all the news is anyway, and it’s not hard to find, so just do a search, there’s plenty of it there.
            At some stage soon, as part of the process at hand, when I have come down a bit and calmed down and can reflect a little more clearly, I will post up a detailed account of myself and of the book.

Real nice first bit of 'print'-media on Deadly Woman Blues from Brisbane's Courier Mail, by Phil Brown:

Today is the official release date of Deadly Woman Blues. It’s only now that I put it that way I realize it’s my first all-new book for five years, since The Wizard of Oz in 2013, which seems like an absolute age ago. The new Buried Country came out in 2015, but as much as its great amount of expansion entailed a great amount of work, it was still built on an existing foundation. And then the latest edition of Highway to Hell came out in 2016. But Deadly Woman Blues – it’s something I’ve been nurturing, on and off, since, well, Buried Country first came out nearly twenty years ago, and so for it to be coming out now, in a form that’s pretty much exactly the way I always envisaged it (credit for which and with great thanks for goes to NewSouth), it’s just such a pleasure, to hold the finished product in my hands, to see it in bookshops, as you can see here, today, at my local Gleeboox at Dulwich Hill:

Deadly Woman Blues is my tenth book, a graphic history of black women in Australian music, the sort of sister-sequel to Buried Country, and I’m even more than usually excited about it because it’s a graphic history, a book I’ve illustrated as well as written, and as such marks my return to the art where I actually started in the first place. I dropped out of art school in Brisbane in the mid-1970s to follow my nose and start writing about music, and it’s really via Deadly Woman Blues that I’ve gotten back to art, and so immensely satisfyingly so that my standard line now is, I hope to end my days painting, picking up where I left off over forty years ago…
 
For more information on the book itself you can check my page on it here, or - and to buy as well - go to NewSouth Books’ page here. That it’s a book about a fairly secret history that will hopefully reveal that history to a broad audience is something else I’m very excited to be doing.
 
The book has gotten out of the blocks with a first nice little notice in Books + Publishing, which is reproduced below.
 
It will be launched with a clutch of events in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne with thanks due, again, to the lovely folks at NewSouth. Those events are:

• On February 21 in Sydney, I’ll be ‘In Conversation’ with the lovely Natalie Ahmat at Gleeboox in Glebe, for bookings go here
• On March 9 in Brisbane, I’ll be ‘In Conversation’ with the lovely Alathea Beetson at the Avid Reader in the West End, for bookings go here
• And on March 19 in Melbourne, though it’s not quite as yet confirmed, I’ll probably be at Readings in St.Kilda, but stay tuned for final details on that one
• And for people in Sydney, tomorrow, February 2, you can tune into ABC Radio Sydney at 11am to hear me chatting on Focus with the lovely Cassie McCullagh; you can stream it live on-line here

Stay tuned for more to come.

Buried Country is about to be born again again, with the imminent release of a vinyl LP through a co-pro between Mississippi Records and Flippin’ Yeah Records, the former an amazing archival specialist coming out of Portland, Oregon, the latter the label run by Australia’s own Gympie Songster, Darren Hanlon. Darren has been a friend of Buried Country for a long time, and this album is really his baby, as he has coursed all over Australia in pursuit of producing it, making more friends and connections, as he is wont to do (pictured above with 'Salty', who he met in the Kimberley). The album will be released very soon, and it brings so much more to the table, featuring tracks never before re-/released and with lavish packaging including more rare photos, original artworks and extensive liner notes. The tracklisting is as follows (and the test-pressing sounds stunning):

SIDE ONE
1/ BLACK ALLAN BARKER Take Me Back
2/ GALARRWUY YUNUPINGU Gurindji Blues
3/ WARUMPI BAND Jailanguru Pakarnu
4/ KANKAWA NIAGARA Yanany Baliba
5/ KOORIERS Sick of Being Treated Like a Low-Down Mangy Dog
 
SIDE TWO
1/ JIMMY LITTLE Give the Coloured Lad a Chance
2/ BROWN BROTHERS Black and White Cat
3/ DOUGIE YOUNG Cut a Rug
4/ MAISIE KELLY My Home in the Valley
5/ COUNTRY OUTCASTS Streets of Old Fitzroy
6/ BOBBY McLEOD The Resurrection 

​I came to know Darren via Buried Country sooner than his own music. But by now I’ve come to love his stuff too. The Gympie Songster showed up at the 2015 launch of the new edition of Buried Country in Sydney, after he’d been on the road in search of the ghost of Dougie Young, and then when I bumped into him again at an event at the Golden Age Cinema where Eric Isaacson of Mississippi Records of Portland, Oregon, gave a talk and showed some films, well, what happened from there, to cut a long story short, was that we all got together to get together the vinyl LP edition of Buried Country to come out as a co-pro through Mississippi and Darren’s own Flippin’ Yeah label… and so basically after giving Darren a few leads, I just had to sit back and watch him scour all over the country in pursuit of doing the major right thing by this project. He is truly a modern-day troubadour, who just gets around in his shonky old van singing for his supper and enjoying whatever adventures come his way. He has gone way beyond the call of duty to ensure that the new Buried Country LP is not just another, further iteration of the BC brand-cum-juggernaut, but a virtual whole new entity in its own right. To be listening lately to the test-pressing (remember them?!) has just taken my breath away all over again. So, with the artwork currently in production – and that will be something special in itself too, which I’ll save for a surprise upon release – we can now only await the album dropping sometime early in the new year.

​Meantime Darren is on the road, as ever, and launching his twelfth annual Christmas show tour. You can read his account of some of his recent adventures on this road here, and get details on the tour dates here, which features special guest the Space Lady direct from San Francisco, and buy tix for the Sydney show here.
 
And so when Darren called and asked if I would deliver the short Christmas address at the Sydney show, I couldn’t have been more flattered. I mean, these are significant shoes I’m being asked to step into, having been previously filled by the likes of Bob Hawke and the late Bob Ellis. I am filled with ambivalence generally about Xmas as it is, but I am willing to take on the challenge and look forward to doing so and I hope to see plenty of revelers there.
 
If nothing else you certainly wouldn’t want to miss this likely once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the incredible Space Lady, check her out here:

​It seems like an age ago that I wrote the piece that is included in Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats, but perhaps the book’s long gestation is best seen an indication of the sheer determination of its editors Andrew Nette and Iain B. McIntyre to get the thing out – which, I’m delighted to now be able to say, after all sorts of hiccups and travails, it finally is!
     Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats was launched in Melbourne at the end of November and hopefully may yet enjoy a launch in Sydney too.
​     And what a fantastic anthology it is! To see a bit of hard data on the book from the publisher, and links on buying, go to PM Press here.

​     For me, I’m chuffed to be rubbing shoulders with writers like the two editors themselves plus, just to name some of my local confreres, Peter Doyle, James Cockington and Matt Gear. I remain grateful to the editors for the opportunity in the first place and that they never doubted my piece called “The Wild Beat,” about Australian pulps in which music is a major or even minor component.

​The whole pulp revival, if I can call it that – which I shouldn’t really, because for me and many others pulps never went away, so it can hardly be called a revival; let’s just call it this on-going half-life – it’s something I think is sometimes just sort of fobbed off a bit, especially by the big-“L’ Literary elite. And that’s why I think this book is so great, because it takes pulp fiction seriously, or at least semi-seriously, which is to say not beyond the point where it gets all po-faced and structuralist and all that, which does nobody any favours. It just tackles the topic head-on. You’ve got to have a sense of humor and a sense of humor courses through this book as does the recognition that true art can come from anywhere and sometimes even accidently, or out of cynicism, and that even accidental art can have a lot to give. The other notable thing I love about this book is that it puts Australian content on a par with the American on a par with the English. So much of my work from the very beginning was done towards achieving this sort of equity (Inner City Sound was about putting Australian punk/new wave next to all the stuff you always heard about from the UK and UK to the exclusion of so much else), and so it’s great to see it finally, naturally happening now.
     Naturally the book is full of gorgeous colour reproductions of all the lurid cover art, which as aficionados know is just as legitimately a part of pulps’ pleasures as their texts, and sometimes moreso. And what’s wrong with that? I’ve seen a lot of worse literary books with even worse covers, and what’s right with that?! The pure object itself is a thing of beauty and now a lost relic of a bygone age.
     Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats is a guide to the pulps of their golden age – the post-war period up to about 1980 – and to my knowledge there is no other volume quite comparable in terms of its big-picture vision and its general suss. If I say so myself.
     To see some of the response to the book, go to the Literary Hub here and Hardboiled Wonderland here.
     And to see a bit more on the book’s two editors – and you could do a lot worse than digging deeper into Nette and McIntyre because they both have rapsheets as long as your arm, and full of fascinating shit – go to Andrew’s site Pulp Curry here, and Iain’s LedaTape page here.

February, 2018...