Beds Are Burning

In 1986 Midnight Oil left the city stages behind and toured the Outback, playing to remote Aboriginal communities and seeing for themselves how serious the problems of health and living conditions were. Out of that trip, Peter Garrett, Jim Moginie and Rob Hirst wrote "Beds Are Burning", a song about how Aboriginal people had been pushed off their land, built around a pre-chorus that simply says the land belongs to them and should be given back. The band were determined not to sound like they could be from anywhere. Hirst later explained that land rights are an issue in many countries, but Midnight Oil wanted specific place names and details in their songs, so this one mentions the Kintore Ranges, the town of Yuendumu, Holden cars and old Australian political slogans. It opened their 1987 album Diesel and Dust and, against all expectation, went to number one in New Zealand, South Africa and Canada and into the American top 20. Garrett himself wondered who would have thought an Aboriginal land rights song would travel that far. At the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics the band played it without the permission of the IOC, because of its political message. In 2009 sixty musicians and public figures, Kofi Annan and Desmond Tutu among them, reworked it as a climate change appeal, and in 2022 a Northern Territory band released a version in Arrernte and English. APRA's panel has ranked it the third best Australian song of all time, and its demand has never stopped being relevant.