Gary Shearston’s Dingo

Description

When Gary Shearston released his worldwide hit version of “I Get A Kick Out Of You” in 1974, he had already been recording for over a decade, and years of creative adventure lay ahead. His most commercially successful album, Dingo, provides a lens through which to study his role in establishing and developing a purposefully Australian variant on ’70s pop and rock music with its poetic evocations of Australian landscapes, topographies, character and cultural identity, mixed with connections to Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and 1970s London. These blend with the Bush Ballad tradition, native Australian music and rhythms, the ’60s folk and protest song boom, of which he was a key figure and prime mover. All these elements combine on this album to provide a fresh and enduring evocation of what Australian music was, is and could be, and provides a link back to traditional forms and a signpost forward to acts such as The Go Betweens and Nick Cave. Drawing on the author’s correspondence with Gary Shearston from 2008-2013, this book contains previously unpublished primary material from the artist himself. Peter Mills digs into the “Australian-ness” of Shearston’s music, and how such a term came to defined.