Chapter 1: What unique drumming style did Rob Hirst bring to Midnight Oil?
When Midnight Oil were playing gigs in the 1980s, Rob Hurst hit the drums so hard that his drum kit had to be nailed to the floor. Rob's drumming with the Oils was always fast and ferocious. It forms the bedrock of the band sound, lifting the roof off sweaty pubs across Australia and then stadiums all around the world. Rob's brought that energy to other parts of his life too.
A loving but complicated family and a great affinity for the Australian bush. Hi Rob. Hi Sarah. Tell me about the place that you go walking almost every day.
Well, I'm very lucky, actually, because in Sydney, we live down near the harbour. It's a little secret spot. And there's bush pretty much straight outside the door. And so I do this kind of fast walk slash stumble, you know, through the bush. And there are wallabies in there and there are water dragons.
And over the years, because I've been there for a long time, about 30 years, in the same spot, which is, I know, unusual for musicians, you know, where... fairly peripatetic normally, but I'm very happy there. And I've been intrigued by these powerful owls because they're, I don't know if you've seen them up close, Sarah. No, what do they look like? Well, they're enormous.
The adults are kind of brown and white flecked. And I think it's the daughter. It must be the daughter. It looks like a kind of panda in reverse, like a creamy-coloured with black eyes. Sometimes I see all three together.
They're not there all the time, but they roost high up in one of the angophora trees, you know, the apple gums, and they usually have a small creature that they're in the process of eviscerating, usually a brushtail possum or other birds end up there.
So they're big, they're fierce.
Yeah, yeah. I always get the feeling, you know, walking through the bush that I kind of look at them and they look down unblinkingly. But I don't stay too long because I don't want to, I've heard stories from some of the other residents that, you know, they can attack. And if they did attack, I mean, I think they'd tear your spleen out.
You might lose a forearm or something.
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Chapter 2: How does Rob Hirst connect with nature in his daily life?
I've kind of learnt most of the vegetation and... Rather than just sort of wandering aimlessly through and going, you know, there's a bird, there's another bird, I've actually become this, you know, it's horrifying, you know, these midlife men who become twitchers or birders, as they call it in America, you know. So actually now I know when the migratory birds will arrive.
Although climate change has changed that. They're all over the place, you know. And I know where on the walk. The walk only takes about 40 minutes. But I know which part of the bush to expect the wattle birds or the New Holland honey eaters or the migratory birds like the coals. and the Channel Bill Cuckoos come down from New Guinea. I know where they'll be, so don't get me started.
I could really bore you on this, let me tell you.
Have you learnt that just by observation or have you got books or people you've spoken to?
I've got books. Yeah, so I look very carefully at flowers and trees and birds, and then I don't have any gizmos. I'm not, you know, a total Luddite when it comes to technology. I'm sure there's these apps you can get, you know, if you just point your iPhone, you know, or your smartphone towards this thing, it'll come up with what it is.
But I like to go back and then try to find what it is that I've seen and then try to memorise it.
Where did your love of the bush start, Rob?
For the first seven years, Mum and Dad and my two brothers, Stephen and Matthew, lived up on a bush block in a place that was then called Kent Lynn. It's part of Greater Campbelltown now. And those days, we just had this marvellous freedom for the first seven years, particularly myself and my older brother. Dad made a cricket pitch and he made a flying fox that would go screaming between trees.
We ran around the bush making cubby houses and bothering funnel webs and... It was just magnificent. You know, Sarah, that program, the Michael Apted show, you know, Seven Up? And, you know, the theory is show me the man until he's seven, the boy, and I'll show you the man, you know.
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Chapter 3: What childhood experiences shaped Rob's love for the bush?
I use a lot of buzz rolls and paradiddles and things that I learnt up there. So it was useful, at least. Much more than, you know, being in the cadet corps, of course.
And you were also getting into ragtime and jazz.
Yeah, I met this fellow called Michael Stenning, and his obsession was the original Dixieland jazz band, which started about 100 years ago last year, 1917 they started. I hadn't heard that music very much. It's very primitive recordings, of course, back then. It's kind of syncopated music with... The drummer used to use a big marching drum rather than a kick drum, and this was before hi-hats.
There was a kind of a sock cymbal they had, and they had all sorts of things they called traps, which were bells and whistles and woodblocks and little cymbals and, you know... And they had these amazing songs like Tiger Rag and Maple Leaf Rag, and they had...
this song called Livery Stable Blues, which was, I think, the first one that we played together in this new band, which we called the Stanley Street Jazz Band, named after the road that goes down next to Grammar. And we got gigs immediately. I mean, we were really... But that kind of suited the music because it wasn't highly produced music and the recordings were so rough. It kind of worked.
And immediately, I mean, we weren't of an age to drink or drive or anything, but we got invited to all these boozy parties. and things. There was a regular meeting of all these old jazzers with long beards and, you know, serious drinking habits on Berry Island. And we were invited there a few times.
And there was a gig called the Abraham Mott Hall in the Rocks, which was a regular weekend gig, Saturday or Sunday. And once again, we were underage and alcohol was flowing big time. But we managed to play that a few times. And then we got invited to... All sorts of different kind of gigs. We even got invited to Lucas Heights where the nuclear, that was a brand new. What were you doing there?
I don't know. Maybe opening a new reactor or something. Dad was horrified. He said, don't play in the dirt. We opened Dad's shops because by this time Dad and some of his war buddies had done some good investments back in Campbelltown. He'd wanted to be a lawyer but came back from being a serviceman and didn't have any money even for the legal books.
So he sadly drew his attention to starting a little real estate business up there and gradually they made some investments and they bought this row of shops and the Stanley Street Jazz Band opened the shops.
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Chapter 4: How did Rob's family dynamics influence his musical journey?
And, of course, I immediately rang the number back and said, yeah, of course I do. And then it was apparently already Jay knew that I was her father and put the pieces together. It's like, oh, that kind of explains this music, this damn music that's been going around in my head for years.
How did you first make contact with each other? What happened?
First of all, I got online and looked at her amazing career because she'd eventually got a publishing deal with Warner and gone to London and made a couple of Kate Bush kind of sounding albums.
She's got this voice which soars through the octaves, just like her birth mother, that operatic thing, and then came back and then continued on dancing and singing and just getting jobs where she could to survive and then met Marco Shea, who's the youngest of nine people
kids from dolby in queensland and and they um they became boyfriend and girlfriend and eventually married and um but and performed together and performed together still as o'shea and they moved to nashville because mark's first love is country music so um sorry to answer your question we met um i was like it's like one of those films slow motion dad and daughter you know sort of heading towards each other just outside those cafes in bronte when she came out from america
Did you recognise her straight away? Oh, yeah, because I'd already, you know, looked at the film clips and she looks exactly like Lex, my daughter, and Ellis, because I've got two amazing daughters with Leslie. Lex, who's 32, the editor with one of the big publishing houses in Sydney.
and Ella who's an artist who's just finishing in London her fine arts masters so there's music and art and literature sort of in the family so it all made and there's a physical similarity as well so I knew what she looked like and what was that first meeting like I mean it can be so much pressure so much expectation it can end up a bit rocky those interactions how was it for you
It was fantastic. You know, I mean, obviously, I guess we were really nervous. But then after we relaxed a bit, you know, the story was told. We didn't get even halfway through it. You know, you can't tell someone's life story just like that. And so gradually, I actually just wrote to Jay.
I wrote bits of my story with letters just to fill her in so she could get up to speed and then gradually found out hers. You know, Sarah, sometimes you hear terrible stories about these reunions that work out terribly, but in our case it has been, when all's said and done, been joyful.
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Chapter 5: What pivotal moments defined Rob's early musical career?
And he had a lot of the war still in him, like he'd shape up as a boxer to us boys if we annoyed him, and we knew that he'd flatten us.
So did that mean he was harsh with your mum or judgmental about her illness?
No, he suffered in silence because he couldn't come to grips with what he could do. When mum finally lay dying in his arms, my mother over a year drank three different kinds of poisons. She wanted out. And, you know, if the law in this country... If there was some sense for people who were so, had lived a great life but just didn't want to be around, you know, she wouldn't have had to do that.
But as she lay dying with Dad holding her and the ambulance took other priority calls because that generation never wanted to bother anyone, by the way. I just think that broke Dad's heart. He never really recovered. Dad died last year. Do you think he felt that he'd failed your mum somehow? Perhaps, yeah. I think perhaps he just was in such a state of, I can't do anything more.
Every time I go to the beach to have my morning walk, there's a danger that mum will, by the time I get back, she'll be on the floor, you know. You know, at the risk of hurting family members, I still think it's more important for people that have got this terrible condition in their families to talk about it rather than to feel ashamed about mental illness.
So that's why I'm prepared to... and really want to be part of that group of people, including the Black Dog Foundation and all the great people that you can turn to, you know. It's important to demystify this. And because I've got first-hand knowledge of it, you know, I mean, I used to...
have a fair bit as well, particularly in London all those years ago when the oils were doing the 10 to 1 album. I used to have to run madly around Ravenscourt Park in West London to try to get myself straight, thinking, you know, that these panic attacks were actually going to kill me.
But, of course, realising they're not and that so many have them and it can be controlled, you know, either through exercise or walking through the bush or through therapy or through some of the drugs that are available or a combination.
Did you and your mum talk openly about that struggle with mental health?
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