Buried Country: Live in Concert just confirmed to appear at the fabulous Port Fairy Folk Festival next March:

Just come to my attention: Nice to see my 1996 book Stranded included on a list of “The 10 Best Books About Punk Rock” by Sunil Badami for Double-J on the occasion, apparently, of the 40th anniversary of punk. I say ‘apparently’ because the birthday/geneology of punk is itself a culture war I don’t want to get into here. But how nice an acknowledgement is it really? given some of the other 9 books on the list! 

Without wishing to get into too much of another culture war, or parlor game – listomania, I call it – I couldn’t possibly disagree with the inclusion of Please Kill Me or England’s Dreaming, both great great books, and respectively well reprezenting the American and British sides of the story just as Stranded represents Australia's. But the rest? I dunno. I would certainly say, What about Mark P’s The Bible? What about Caroline Coon’s 1988? What about The Boy Looked at Johnny? as silly as it was. Given that my firm conviction is that regardless of punk’s origins, it was dead by 1978 as surely as Sid Vicious died only a few weeks into the following year (just as surely as grunge died along with Kurt Cobain); after that, in a post-punk world, it becomes a non-issue, sort of. On which basis you’d have to include another of my books too, Inner City Sound, which I’m sure its fans who call it ‘the Bible’, or a ‘foundation document’ or ‘sacred text’, would nominate way ahead of Stranded. But it is nice to at least see Stranded as an Australian title (the only one) nestling alongside all those other American and British books, which is an equity not accorded by similar such lists coming out of America and Britain themselves – which was part of the drive behind it, as well as Inner City Sound, in the first place! Off the top of my head I can think of a few other books I’d nominate even before Patti Smith’s Just Kids too: Like Clinton Heylin’s From the Velvets to the Voidoids (despite its dreadful title) and Simon Reynolds’ Rip it Up and Start Again, and – again evening out the imbalance – Andrew Stafford’s Pig City. Ultimately though, perhaps all this does is beg the question yet again, Why didn't the makers of that awful 2015 documentary Stranded just come direct to my quality source, rather than passing-off themselves as something they weren't?

         When I took a turn to say a few words at this session, I said that there was as much in their stories that was familiar to me as unfamiliar. And so I did try to stress that to struggle as a writer is not unique to Cambodia. Some had already learnt the hard way, like Heng Borin, who started out thinking all writers get as rich as J.K. Rowling; and who then, even when he published a hit book in Blood from Hell, lost out big-time to pirates and an unscrupulous publisher (pirated books are certainly all I’ve ever seen in street-markets and bought in Cambodia, the same as CDs and DVDs). If young Cambodian writers have to support themselves, I told them, through day-jobs like writing advertising copy or selling noodles, well, I said, that’s not very different to Western writers like myself who’ve driven cabs, written ad copy or worked as a cook or a cleaner!
           There was, however, a bit of a gulf between these young Cambodians and so many of the barang that otherwise studded the festival. I was one of the few barangs at the session recalled above. But literary festivals are international affairs and certainly it’s a point of frustration for me that once past the fact that Australian literary festivals are mostly all about the sanctioned highbrow-elite capital-L literature, audiences will flock to see the latest sensation of the month from overseas and ignore the unfashionable schlepper from next door (if he’s been lucky enough to be invited in the first place!). Also overlooked a bit too, I think, is the expanding syndrome of the once-exiled refugee Cambodians who are now coming home to roost, or rather to give something back, what with all the more education and experience they’ve gained in the West, mainly the US and Australia. The festival was studded with such types, like Chath Piersath, Kosal Khiev, Teeda Butt Mam and volunteer-helper Poz.
            The festival was officially launched in Phnom Penh with a reception hosted by the British ambassador at his private residence. If I went along expecting G&Ts and cucumber sandwiches, well, that’s precisely what we got and I couldn’t have been happier. I was prevailed upon at a moment’s notice to say a few words (subbing for my pal Shane Maloney, who’d been unable to get on his flight out of Melbourne the day before), and so I did what if I say so myself I do so well – I made it up on my feet. I said that I wanted to talk about rhetoric and reality, in two instances: Firstly, in the instance of Aboriginal Australia – hooking in to the fact that I was there, after all, to present a screening of Buried Country as part of the festival’s ‘Indigenous Voices’ component – and so I said that the word ‘reconciliation’ was a virtual cliché we heard all the time in Australia but which meant little to most Australians, most of whom don’t even know any Aboriginal people. But for me it took on a reality as I got to know so many Aboriginal people, and the sort of lives they led, as a result of a near-lifetime’s work that’s gone into Buried Country. Another, the second, bit of rhetoric we hear a lot about in Australia was that we need to start seeing ourselves as part of the Asia Pacific region rather than as a subject of the British Empire or an ally of the Americans. But again, for me, this didn’t take on much reality until I started actually coming to SEA, and meeting not only ratbag expat Aussies (that got a laugh) or even Khmer themselves but also people from all over the world like were amassed in that room at that time. We can all get caught up in our own little world, I concluded, and I’m just thankful that I’ve been able to find whole other worlds not only outside my own country, like here in Cambodia, but even inside it, in Aboriginal Australia.
            Fortunately, since clashing schedules would prevent catching a performance by Morganics in Kampot, we got to hang out a bit with the Aussie hip-hop legend in PP, and what a pleasure that was, getting to know this great guy who just exudes so much positive energy it’s staggering. When we stumbled across a shop called Hip-Hop we had to get the photo below, even though – or especially because – the place traded only in pirated DVDs.

               Finally, the music. Certainly one of the festival highlights for me was seeing the Bunong Cultural Troup from Bou’Sra, or the Village People as I hope I was not too irreverent in re-dubbing them. This quartet of two men and two woman performed what I was assured is traditional Cambodian mountain music and are apparently one of the last remaining exponents of same, featuring the amazing 91-year old tribal elder Lok Ta. It’s uncanny the the way I could hear in it other mountain musics, like that from the Appalachians, thanks especially to the one-stringed bowed instrument the tro, which can sound like a fiddle; yet at other times, especially in the vocal numbers, it sounded delta-bluesy, and at other times almost Middle Eastern. It was mesmerising, and a privilege to have witnessed before such a thing might be gone forever. One of the more militant members of our mob muttered to me under his breath, It’s not enough we steal their land, we have make them sing like performing seals too! But if it’s a cop-out to say I don’t know anything about that situation, certainly I’d resist any royal ‘we’ at the best of times anyway. The couple of things I do know are: the band-members seemed to be having a ball, with the women especially away from their own performances dancing like fools to much of the other music at the festival; and I know that like everyone else who saw them, I was blown away. One sight made a real impression on me – at one of the their performances, there were two little boys plopped down in front of the stage, they looked like brothers, European, about 4 and maybe 7, and they were both watching the band transfixed, with their mouths open, and I thought, that’s great, because even if for me as a would-be musicologist this stuff still came across as somewhat exotic, for these two little boys it was already becoming normalised. And that’s got to be good.  

Buried Country’s reach continues to expand, and further overseas too. Country Down Under is a BBC Radio 4 documentary that was directly inspired by it. Writer/producer Rachel Claire Hopkin, a US-based British musicologist, happened to hear the interview that Denise Hylands did with me on her 3RRR radio show Twang (that you can hear here), and got in touch. I gave her all sorts of assistance and when she came out to Australia in June she conducted an interview with me along with such luminaries as Roger Knox, Kev Carmody, L.J. Hill and Auriel Andrew and also, I was delighted to note, other such fine artists such as Glenn Skuthorpe and Sue Ray, which at least added a new dimension beyond what BC already covers thoroughly. Yet though I am listed in the program description as an interview subject I was cut from the final result, on the BBC’s insistence apparently, in what I can only interpret as an act of reverse discrimination, that wanted the show free of whitefellas. Still, I can’t complain too much because it’s small beer compared to the outright discrimination many of the featured artists have always had to endure, and the show is a good albeit brief glimpse at Aboriginal country music that gets the message out there that bit moreso… Click through the below panel to hear a podcast as long as it stays up there…