​What follows below I relate because I think it’s a useful cautionary tale, about the internet, intellectual property and how, when it comes to a legacy – and I seem to have spend a lot of time trying to protect mine – the thing is, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

See here a few bits of artwork...

… ​one (top left) the cover of a lavish new book just published in Australia, Product 45, another (top right) a dummy version of the originally-proposed cover for that book, and two others (below) the cover and a page from my own 1981 book Inner City Sound: What follows is the story of how they all fit together; I think it’s important to take this opportunity to try and clarify those relationships…

Some number of years ago now, I stumbled across a website called innercitysound.com.au. What it was, and still is, is what used to be called a tape-swapping service, where fans trade rare recordings of music, in this case by mostly independent/underground Australian acts from the late 70s/early 80s, as in the scene documented by Inner City Sound. Of course I was at once both flattered and affronted that someone would have the cheek to simply appropriate my title like that. I don’t ‘own’ that story as some people seem to think I think I do – nobody ‘owns’ stories – but I do own that branding/presentation of it. And so I got in touch with the convenor of the site, who turned out to be a fellow from Sydney called Murray Bennett, and I said, Look, okay, I might not mind you using the ICS name, because the site is a useful extension of the work the book started, but you have to add some sort of disclaimer, or acknowledgement, and links to the book – and that, to MB’s credit, he did. And so, okay…

Then more recently, I stumbled across Bennett’s Inner City Sound Facebook page. I was a bit more annoyed this time because, well, since we’d already been around the block once, I thought he’d at least have the courtesy to ask me first, second time around. But he didn’t, and so, since these very sort of copyright or passing-off issues are virtually impossible to police in the virtual world of the internet, all I could do was again appeal to his decency and make the same request as before – put up a disclaimer, and links etc – and again, thankfully, that he did. I have to say though, I was less impressed by this variation on the theme, because what it largely seems to be about is old farts indulging in nostalgia, and that’s not my thing and certainly was never ICS’s thing – it’s meant to be a telling history; I mean, if, say, the Screaming Tribesmen are getting back together to play some gigs, I couldn’t be less interested, you know, and I don’t think it’s got anything to do with ICS and its real legacy – but again, what can you do?

​THEN Murray Bennett approached me with the idea, already well-developed, that has ultimately just come to fruition in the release of the lavish, limited-edition book Product 45. It was upon seeing the dummy cover as reproduced that I really had to spit the dummy, and protest, Whoa Nellie! This was now cutting way too close to the bone, and in this much more permanent format of an actual book, I felt I had to rein it in. But because I could also see the value of something like this being out there as a sort of, daresay, ‘remix’ of Inner City Sound, I wanted to try and come to an agreement that I thought could be beneficial to both ICS and MB. It’s like sampling, I told him – you can do it, if you get approval. And I’d be willing to give that approval, given the further approval of original ICS cover artist Phil Brophy, if MB met certain conditions. So, to cut an even longer story short, I invested a fair amount of time and energy haggling and taking many steps forwards and backwards – until one day MB did an unexpected 180º and informed me he’d decided to change his whole approach, thus no longer needed my approval or input. And so all my months of effort were wasted! MB offered me some money for my trouble, but I told him, it’s not about money. MB in turn went direct to Phil Brophy for new cover artwork, and I certainly don’t begrudge my old friend Phil the gig, just as I don’t begrudge so many other old comrades-in-arms taking a fee for waxing nostalgic in this forum that still amounts, either way, to something of a homage to Inner City Sound, whether it actually pays that due credit at any point or not. I don't doubt it's a useful addition to the literature, I just don't care to find out .

​Buried Country featured on ABC-TV’s 7.30 last night, in a short but sweet report from that fine young gentleman Conor Duffy, which you can see/read here… or below…

Apart from the fact that Melbourne is Australia’s unequivocal music capital and with that something of a hipper city, and so would naturally all the more enthusiastically embrace me and my work – I've just returned from my fourth trip to Melbourne this year, on which I was again kept busy doing more Buried Country business and generally getting feted for it – I still can’t figure out why I seem to go down better everywhere except my hometown of Sydney, where I feel like a classic persona non grata. The emblematic symptom of that is the way the Sydney Morning Herald has always seemed to equivocate – when Buried Country first came out in 2000 the only negative notice it got anywhere in the world was in my hometown journal of record, the SMH, from Bruce Elder, who concluded it was “a strange hodgepodge of styles and traditions masquerading as a coherent statement” (Elder has subsequently, of course, done a 180º on that opinion, though that doesn’t mean his outrageous win of the Pascall Prize for critical writing has been rescinded!). But now finally, thankfully, the SMH has caught up with Buried Country, and through the agency of a new and at least somewhat switched-on music critic Tim Byron, has been awarded a five-star review, which you can read here, or via the above image… 

In 2014, when I was preparing Buried Country to be born again as it has been in 2015, a few people said to me, ‘Maybe Australia will be a bit more ready for it now’, fifteen years after it was first released. Well, as much as I had to hope they were right, I couldn’t have anticipated just how right: The response has been little short of overwhelming, with notices and enquiries coming in from overseas, like this great review in Louder than War here, and with the BBC working on a radio story, and with cold-clock fan-mail coming in from random local indie popsters, and with more major local coverage forthcoming from ABC-TV’s 7.30 – see pic here of me with 7.30 reporter Conor Duffy and the lovely Leah Flanagan after shooting a bit of stuff in my back shed…

​All this is giving me a huge boost in confidence, such that, after Marty Jones said in Rhythms, “Like many of Walker’s projects, Buried Country was at least a decade ahead of its time,” I’m now prepared to come out and say it, to anyone who would wish to keep up the resistance I’ve had to put up with for years (including getting up Buried Country itself), Look, see, why don’t we all just save a lot of time and aggravation and get on board with my next thing as of, like, NOW – instead of waiting ten years! That’s how and why that terrible recent documentary Stranded (scroll down to see) was able to come along in the first place – because I hadn’t been able to get up a film of the same name on the same subject more than a decade back. Get with the strength now and do it first and get it right!
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Perhaps one thing I never thought I’d be doing though is talking to a room full of barristers, pillars of the establishment and millionaire philanthropists – but that’s precisely what I did in Melbourne on December 11, at the city chambers of law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler, where I presented a screening of the Buried Country documentary, accompanied by a short live performance by Frank Yamma and David Bridie, as part of the ABL’s pro bono involvement in RAP (Reconcilliation Action Program). 
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​And I have to feel honored to have done so, because when I consider the great work ABL is doing with Aboriginal people in Victoria especially – like helping the Yorta Yorta mob with their recent land claim – I think, well, without this sort of silky support in the halls of power, the road would be SO much rockier. I was great to see Frank and David have a sing, Frank who contributes a track to the new Buried Country 1.5 CD – “She Cried” – which is one of the most moving, saddest songs I’ve ever heard. 
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​The Australian Book Review has just published its annual end-of-the-year Best of the Year list, and even though the ABR failed to offer any coverage of Buried Country – despite the fact that it is this country’s long-standing self-styled trade journal of record (which has actually never, across four decades, ever reviewed a single one of my nine books! I can only presume because I'm way too two-fistedly lowbrow for its 'self-conscious knowledge class' sensibilities) – Nicolas Rothwell, god bless him, has nominated Buried Country and Buried Country alone as his uncontested Book of the Year, with the following words that just leave me a bit jibbering:

It is a sign of these murky times for books and the written word that my book of the year is a work of loving enthusiasm and selfless devotion, rather than a knowing, self-conscious product by some member of the knowledge class. Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music, by Clinton Walker (Verse Chorus Press) is a re-edition of a masterwork first published fifteen years ago, but expanded and reconceived so thoroughly as to be something new: an account of vernacular Aboriginal creativity in mid-century Australia, the influences it soaked up and the impact it made – a back channel history worth more than a thousand academic sociologies. Roger Knox, Bobby McLeod, Vic Simms: these are the heroes of its pages: 'Where the crow flies backwards' is its central song, an anthem that defines both an era and a state of mind. What more can a book do than bring you back the past and make it real – especially a past you never knew?