Midnight Oil has always been about social justice, the earth's beauty and hope through action | David Ritter

The band, who will receive a human rights award this week, were formative in the political activation of so many people of my generationOn a road trip back from somewhere mid-2016 the talk turned to personal origin stories, as is wont when the miles are long. There were four of us in the car, all in leadership positions in Australian campaigning organisations. Turned out that our family, work and activism backgrounds were heterogeneous, but there was something in common. For each traveller in that fast-moving sedan, the music of Midnight Oil had been a formative part of our political activation.I found myself drifting off, thinking of road trips 30 years earlier. There were other great bands and sounds, of course, but the Oils were singular. At times we seemed to listen to Midnight Oil almost on loop, played on cassettes that wore out in beaten up old cars. The question wasn't what band, but would we start with Red Sails or Blue Sky? The music was like something elemental, intrinsic to the temper of the time for that generational cohort to which I belonged, emerging in the greedy, scary last decade of the cold war, and the wasted locust years of the 90s. Continue reading...