Category: Northern Star Column

Northern Star Column

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mickdaleyo

Back from Canada for three weeks, the Re-Mains are settling into their old habits nicely – we played two shows at our old stomping grounds, Nimbin and Lennox Head pubs, on the weekend. Nimbin was, as ever, a brilliant, bawdy experience. The much-maligned hamlet is, for mine, the most vibrant and important town in the region, a brawling, majestic colony of the furthest reaches of the human condition. Playing there is a unique privilege and its good to see folk I’ve known there for years still responding to the majesty of country rock and roll. At Lennox the Trojan’s had won their final and were carousing steadily – they had no choice but to submit to the sinister powers of the banjo.
Which brings me back to Canada – and another epic tour conducted in Curtis, our doughty V8 Chevy Van, which swallowed 18,000 kilometres as we played 51 shows across that gargantuan nation. Highlights included playing Breakfast TV in Calgary, criss-crossing the Rockies to play such remote venues as the Zoo in Prince George, venue voted most likely to have your ear bitten off in, and supporting the likes of the Joey Only Outlaw Band, the Secretaries, the Bush Pilots and The Beauties, all bands that I consider among the best I’ve ever seen.

Northern Star Column

Dorrigo, 24/9/09

mickdaleyo

I was up in Dorrigo recently with the Lonely Horse Band. That’s the mob with whom I’ve done projects at the opal fields in White Cliffs, and out on the malleee at Nymagee, writing, recording and performing songs about these remote, eroded communities.

Dorrigo used to be at the heart of the forestry wars, back in the 90s when the timber barons could sense the coming of the end, as the country began to wake up to the fact that we need trees to survive. That was in the days before Howard, when the ferals raged through the forests, locking down dozers in bare-faced defiance of antiquated laws, while aggressive Unions firing up disgruntled loggers in the pubs.

Dorrigo’s a different town now, the pubs outnumbered by coffee shops. It produces more mementoes of the past than timber and boasts a terrific museum that graphically portrays a tough and often brutal past for the settlers and the dispossessed, casually referred to as the Wild Blacks. The only really wild action occurs on the footy fields or at the RSL when The Re-Mains are in town, which we will be on October 16, or the Lonely Horse Band returns to the Plateau to play the Dorrigo Bluegrass Festival on Oct 22-24th. It’s a lovely town, if you’re not locked on to a dozer.