Bob Brown’s greatest hit

One evening in 1983, Shane Howard and his Goanna Band did a one-night-only gig with other Australian pop-music luminaries to form Gordon Franklin and the Wilderness Ensemble.

The Ensemble released a single of their resulting protest anthem ‘Let The Franklin Flow’.

The B-side of the Ensemble’s single release was a spoken-word offering by The Australian newspaper’s 1982 Australian of the Year — who was then the director (and a founding member) of The Wilderness Society, and who is now Senator Bob Brown in the Australian Parliament.

Bob’s foray into pop greatness consisted in a rambling dissertation on Man-and-Science versus Arcadian Nature. (Bob seemed quite sanguine with then-prime minister Bob Hawke sending space-age F111 military aircraft over the Gordon-Franklin wilderness to spy on the Tasmanian state government’s nature-wrecking activities.)

My short video presented here is an excerpt from Bob’s Save-the-Franklin spiel, illustrated with images ranging from tranquil nature shots to vintage Goanna album artwork.

Bob’s spiel was bracketed with a mournfully untuneful kid belting out the chorus of ‘Let The Franklin Flow’, so in the video I’ve mercifully faded-in the Ensemble’s more melodious finale.

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By the way, tech-savvy nostalgia buffs may find this link of interest.

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Metamorphosis achieved

A one-time heavyweight of the Australian rock scene looks to have achieved his lifelong ambition to throw off the yoke of his glitzy past.

Shane Howard — who in the early ’80s rocketed to success with his Goanna Band — appeared on ABC1’s 7.30 Report on Wednesday night as a “local resident” of regional south-west Victoria, campaigning to save a local historic church from being sold off to developers.

The segment makes no reference to Howard’s Goanna heyday, referring to him merely as the “musician partner” of the lady who leads the grassroots campaign to save Saint Brigid’s, near Killarney; while in the transcript, he appears as “Shane Howard, Local Resident.”

Many viewers may have been too young to recall Howard’s rock-anthem ‘Solid Rock,’ which starkly depicted the dispossession and genocide of Aboriginal Australia by White Australia. Although Howard and his band shouted the ‘G’ word into the mainstream Australian consciousness, perhaps too many will remember ‘Solid Rock’ merely as a roolly great rock song, ma-a-ate!

The pressures of commercial success sat uneasily on Howard. After the release of the second Goanna album, things fell apart until the band’s guiding force suffered a breakdown, finally departing the commercial rock scene to lose himself in the Big Heart of the Country. But he eventually came out the other side to reclaim his life as a family man and carve himself a niche as a respected Australian songsmith.

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