Dive For Your Memory: A Map Made of Music and Memory

This blog was written by 2024 John Oxley Library Fellow, Dr John WIllsteed as part of his fellowship project, Dive For Your Memory – Queensland music stories.

Looking Back:

The interviews in Dive for Your Memory are the stories that now become some part of the map of the past. This map is constantly changing, as people reminisce on Facebook pages, or write about their lives in Brisbane in the 70s and 80s, or make movies about sharehouses in New Farm or West End. Music is a big part of this memory-making, as songs, like (I’m) Stranded or Streets of Your Town or These Days, light up particular places and times for many locals.

One of the truths about this project, one that I touched on in the Research Reveals, is that this list of Queensland musicians will be incomplete. It’s in the nature of sampling or surveying a scene or subculture or social group – not everyone can be represented.

I am so sorry that I can’t talk with some of my friends and colleagues. Over the last 40 years many have drifted quietly into the great beyond. Michael Hiron, Rod McLeod, Vick Allan, Johnny Gorman, Mark Moffatt, Clare McKenna, Geoff Wilkes, Ronnie Peno, Warren Lamond, Ed Wreckage, Cecily Childs, Grant McLennan, John Rodgers, Michael Whelan, Steve Dillon, Rollo, Andrew Faux, Peter Adams and so many more.

And it’s these losses which have really driven the broader research that I have been doing for the last decade. The awareness that these particular stories won’t be told, and that the big story is not as dense as it could be, is always on my mind. And, of course, my own capacity to do this work is . . . dwindling?

These stories also need to be seen in the context of Queensland’s, and more particularly Brisbane’s, attitude to its own cultural history. Mainstream culture is celebrated to some extent, but counter-culture and sub-cultures are virtually invisible. The tearing down of ‘old buildings’ through the Bjelke-Petersen years by developers, and the government, in the name of progress, posterity’s promise and the glister of profit is a recurring theme when people talk about Brisbane’s cultural heritage.

It was in response to the State Government’s redevelopment efforts, as well as its stifling straight/Christian/conservative attitudes, that “a remarkable oppositional culture manifested in music, theatre and art; media, comedy and satire”. (Willis, 2005) The interviews are with some of the people at the centre of that culture. Well, the musical centre!

In a recent ARC Discovery project application, with Professor Andrew McNamara and a number of UQ academics, we posed these questions:  What does the demolition of a building mean? What is the cultural worth of a public space? How do we evaluate intangible cultural heritage and public memory?

The filmed interviews in Dive for Your Memory touch on these ideas, as the names of disappeared venues and social spaces are often mentioned, from Festival Hall to White Chairs to Cloudland. But there are other notions which echo through the stories, like family, friends, mentors and teachers, successes and failures, with the persistent, bright thread that is music deep in the heart of these lives.

I hope that others will use these interviews to develop new ideas and new stories, so that we can approach the future embracing the knowledge of the past.

Dr John Willsteed
2024 John Oxley Library Fellow

Gaiman, Neil (2006), The Mapmaker from the Introduction to Fragile Things, William Morrow (UK)
Willis, Liz (2005), ‘How Joh inspired a generation,’ Sydney Morning Herald, April 25, 2005.

Read other blogs by Dr John Willsteed.

Watch Dr John Willsteed’s Research Reveals talk below, or explore more talks on the Research Reveals webpage.

The full collection of digital stories from Dr John Willsteed’s Dive For Your Memory project is currently being processed by State Library’s Collection Building and Metadata teams and will be available in our catalogue soon.