SAME OLD TUNE Mythologisation and the Music Documentary

As icons of Australian music go, Jimmy Barnes, Peter Garrett and Michael Hutchence – along with the respective bands they fronted, Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and INXS – are about as iconic as you can get. They are among the most recognisable and renowned names in the annals of Australian music history, not to mention the global cultural landscape, and are emblematic of an era of mega-selling chart success for Australian rock around the world. Each, alongside the incredibly successful Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986), also helped give the country something of a singular, defining identity as a land of untamed masculinity.

These artists emerged out of the societal upheaval of the 1970s, in a country that was beginning to reckon with the part it played in the global market, its responsibilities within the region in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the effects of industrialisation on the environment. This was a time when the rights of Indigenous peoples were finally being institutionalised, and when multiculturalism was challenging the very meaning of the term ‘Australian’. The genre – labelled ‘pub rock’ – was a stiff middle finger to the rise of colourful and outrageous disco music and the more slickly polished American style of rock’n’roll. It was – depending on how you perceive it – an enclave for the working class alienated by the changing nation wherein ‘[t]he Woodstock spirit of peace and love and bad brown acid was largely replaced […] by VB, Tooheys and West End’.¹

Despite Barnes and Garrett being vocal advocates for left-leaning politics, they remained beloved within this musical scene that has been critiqued for its ‘localism and hyper-masculine attitude’. And, while Hutchence, the brooding voice of INXS