​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a 180º on that opinion, though that doesn’t mean his outrageous win of the Pascall Prize for critical writing has been rescinded!).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?