“Lighthouse bay / Humpback whales / Breach in the distance,” goes ‘An Introduction’, the opening track from Last Quokka’s fifth album Red Dirt. With their raucous, uncompromising style, it’s easy to reduce the Western Australia punks to the scathing side of their work, be it calling out Aussie Nazis on their self-titled debut to their delicious skewering of culture warrior hissy fits with 2020 single ‘Privilege’. But alongside this excoriation has always existed another thread. A celebration of Australia’s landscape and the flora and fauna which calls it home, not to mention the good people who exist there in spite of everything. Even ‘An Introduction’, more or less at prologue at under ninety seconds, finds the time to reference karri forest, screaming Ngoolark, the webs of golden orb-weavers and the white sands of Cape Le Grande, albeit delivered with a crushing fury.
This duality between beauty and rage is central to Red Dirt. It simultaneously illuminates the contradictions inherent within any colonial country and lifts Last Quokka above the countless other punks and post-punks sneering at the contemporary situation. Because however understandable anger and frustration might be, such forces are dead ends without the clarity brought by reminders of the original motivations. It’s easy, that is, to get a taste for fighting. To fight as an end in itself. But those who remember what they are fighting for are the people fighting to win.
The mood is typified by ‘Broome’, a celebratory list of what makes Kimberley special, from the bustling caravan park and luminescent waves to the secret fishing spots and saltwater crocodiles. Though one which never loses sight of the place’s history and the colonial crimes which shaped it into its current form. “This is an ode to the mangroves / Baking in the Kimberley sun,” lead Trent Rojahn sings. “A salty paradise on stolen land.” Contrast this with the pessimism of ‘Disconnected’, a fatalistic view of the internet age in which each individual is stranded within an echo chamber and powerless to enact change, and the thesis of Red Dirt becomes apparent. Without connection there is no hope, be it within communities or in the relationship between humanity and nature itself.
These braided threads of love and anger run right through the album. The former is captured as fondness for both the past and the present, the small joy of simple acts like kicking a footie in the dirt, or, as in ‘Piggy’, an encounter with a terrifying/cute pig out in the bush. Whereas the latter is delivered with in a cuttingly clear-eyed manner on tracks like ‘Eat the Rich’ and ‘Gina / Rupert’, or processed through a playful, wistful prism as with ‘My Girl’. A song which channels the Macaulay Culkin flick of the same name to create the funniest, most menacing tribute to a nineties movie you’re likely to find.
He can’t see without his glasses
He can’t see without his specs
Macaulay Culkin
Get the adrenalin
Those bees they sting
‘Gael Place’ ramps up the nostalgia, a song of playing cricket in street as the smell of your mother’s cooking mingles with that of the damp earth. But Last Quokka push beyond the surfaces to locate something deeper in the fabric of the land, respecting the cultures which far predate such memories. “The red dirt courses through my veins and prompts me to melt back into this land,” as Rojahn sings on ‘Cue’. “I want to dissolve into the particles that formed my body, the particles that formed my mind / oh sacred stardust, Daddy’s home / I want this country to soak me up.”
Within this context, ‘Gina / Rupert’ plays like a challenge to the titular ghouls (that’s mining magnate and climate change denier Gina Rinehart and enabler Rupert Murdoch) to come outside to see exactly what they are destroying. “Have you ever seen the Western Woodlands at first light? / Or observed the sun rising from a great mountainous height?” Rojahn asks on ‘Bibbulman’, “Watched the morning mist over the Pingarup Plains?” The sense of a force which has preceded them, and will likewise outlast them so long as the capitalist death drive can be averted. And moreover a force from which we can learn in our efforts to avoid such a fate. “There is wisdom in this ancient land,” as Rojahn concludes. “Both discreet and obvious.”
Red Dirt is out now and available from the Last Quokka Bandcamp page, and limited edition cassettes have been released by Noise Merchant Records.
Front cover artwork by Jacob Boylan