they said it was a country album but don't believe that nonsense, what you have here is pure australiana, it is explicit in the lyrics (bar a couple of lines) and implicit in the music. what a great album, a whole collections of songs that in some way are part of a larger whole although not in sequence. i can't fathom the order but that's neither here nor there. it's lovely, very different from steve's other band or collaborations.

for a long time i seeked out the spirit of australia, i found it in christopher koch's book, highways to a war, i found it in a few pop songs, 'great southern land' being the obvious but it's a hard thing to capture, such an ancient vast continent that means so many things to many people, such a new culture still wrestling with itself with an ancient one laying behind everything but there is this conflict or clash where the frontier meets us, it's a strange interline of time clashing and steve kinda captures it in this as does the winged heels. ironically christopher koch's son is a winged heel and he does a marvellous job on guitars. this is kinda symbolic for me, as it brings together elements of australian culture in a new way and as usual steve's lyrics embody something clearly reflecting an environment of small town outback lands where people veer off on tangents and the landscape looks brutal and beautiful. and the strange environment creates strange characters. 

i was wondering about the english people who have travelled from their early years and now lived in australia for a long time, it must shape them in ways living in england wouldn't. i arrived here in 1988, i was 24 years old. but i had been living away from england for at least 6 years before travelling around making my base in new york, montreal, mexico city, parts of europe especially west berlin which was and then i ended up here in sydney. so my englishness had been corrupted by alien cultures and environments, i had lost that connection to one single geographic location and found myself building one here in sydney, meeting australians, being influenced by australian landscapes, culture and people and i adapted to it in ways i could never adapt to europa. at that time it was frontier land, and anything was possible. it was inhabited by people who seemed eccentric and rebellious, they were characters, and there was that immense other character the landscape that shaped and contoured everything. i began to match the land with the people and see how the conditions drew out something from the characters i met, and in time i think i may have become one of them. 

so as i listen to this piece of music i feel the strange people i once knew return, their outback adventures, their rage against nature, the beauty of a sunrise, the horror of remote town arrests, the wait for rain, the beer and the drunkenness, 'walk a mile in my fucking shoes' doesn't get more australian. 

musically we are in rich territory but not as we know it jim, this is far removed from the church but very very good, equal but different, very different. it would be hard to choose fave songs as they all seem excellent, i love the whole project. 'there's an island sea, where whales are swimming around.' 

there's no explicit aborigionality here but i can feel it, behind the scenes in percussion and timbre, it's strong and strange and seeps through the cracks. 'i ve seen gold nuggets bigger than your fists, the beer and blood, silver ingots disappear in the mist, you should cross it off your wish list.' 

yes steve captures something in these tunes, he's done something quite remarkable, a concept album with no real concept, other than he wrote this to go with a film project and then went on a bus journey with a bunch of art people to strange places attempting to get a movie done and dusted. the movie disappeared into the either, it was never made but these songs tell many stories and in many ways are much better than a movie, you can close your eyes and see the films yourself.