I can’t really thrash the drums any more: Midnight Oil’s Rob Hirst

Rob Hirst’s drum kit has hit the road without him this time. “As we speak,” the power behind Midnight Oil reports with a satisfied if slightly wistful air, “it’s trundling down the Hume Highway on its way to the Music Vault in Melbourne.”

Last month, the battered black Ludwig kit that propelled the Oils’ countless circuits around the planet from 1979 until 2022 sold for $90,000 at auction. With the fundraising clout of “rusted-on fans” known as the Powderworkers, that result was $80,000 above reserve.

“The love just kept pouring in,” Powderworker Matthew Yau says. And then it poured back out again: half the proceeds are earmarked for the musicians’ charity Support Act, the other half for the Fix ’Em Up Truck campaign to keep First Nations bands on the road in the Northern Territory.

“I can’t really thrash the drums any more,” Hirst says simply. In 2023, six months after the last ever Oils gig at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion, he was diagnosed with stage 3 pancreatic cancer. Today he’s “hanging in there,” he reports in his upbeat way. “I’m looking at the bush and the jacarandas are all out. It’s a lovely time of year.”

Midnight Oil in the early 1990s.Credit: John Vella, Columbia

To this forever fan’s ear, his pinched breath is palpable on the phone from Sydney. His voice is more plaintive, too, on A Hundred Years or More, his new EP with old schoolfriend turned Oils guitarist Jim Moginie and drummer Hamish Stuart. Hirst plays acoustic guitar. His songs are drenched in psychedelic sunshine and melody.

“I realise it’s quite an existentialist bunch of songs, with titles like Are We There Yet? and A Hundred Years or More,” he says with a laugh. “I suppose I’ve been thinking about lifespan and longevity – legacy, even. And, of course, that comes out in the songs.”

The opening track, First Do No Harm, is a kind of prayer for the future, calling on every living soul to take the same life-affirming responsibility in all things as doctors invoke with the Hippocratic Oath. “I’ve obviously been spending too long in hospitals,” he jokes.

He considers the rest of his time well occupied “as long as I can get angry and irritated by what’s going on in the world but still try to put it in a form where there’s hope for the future. It’s been a bleak time, here and internationally, but if you dwell on that, you forget the beauty of the everyday.

“Now that I’ve started counting back in life rather than counting forward, the days are even more precious.”

It’s family and friends, naturally, that feel most precious as the days grow less certain. When both come together in a recording studio – his daughters Lexi and Gabriella both sing on the new EP – the results are nothing short of “joyful”.

Rob Hirst (centre) with bandmates Jim Moginie (left) and Hamish Stuart.Credit: Robert Hambling

“All the girls can sing,” Hirst says. He made an album with his eldest, Nashville-based Jay O’Shea, in 2022. “Lexi’s a publisher; Ella’s an artist in Berlin… I was strumming A Hundred Years or More at home with a half-finished lyric and Ella started singing… there was an honesty there, and freshness. It suits the mood perfectly.”

Hirst’s renown as one of our most formidable drummers often overlooks his legacy as a writer. The majority of the Oils’ 13-album catalogue bears his credit as well as his strident vocals, driven always by the warrior conviction that gave the band its uncompromising edge.

“We didn’t know it at the time,” he says, reflecting on Sydney’s northern beaches in the 1970s, “but we came up at a time when people were tribally loyal to these new bands, and there were a gazillion gigs to play… They were the halcyon days, a time never to be repeated, and we were so fortunate.

“All that road work stood us in good stead…. By the time we went overseas, we were a pretty cooking live band.” The fact that he and singer Peter Garrett had both studied law was not a bad asset in the den of thieves known as the music business, he adds drily.

But the band’s determination to be agents of real political change means he’s equally blunt about disappointments. The failure of the push for an Indigenous voice to parliament in 2023 was “a shocker” he still can’t fathom.

Hirst on stage with Midnight Oil in 2022.Credit: Paul Rovere

In 2020, Midnight Oil had broken a long silence with The Makarrata Project, an ambitious collaborative album designed to educate and influence popular opinion in favour of First Nations recognition.

“Playing with Coloured Stone, having Bunna Lawrie, Dan Sultan, Joel Davison involved… those collaborations lifted everything. Makarrata was my favourite thing we ever did,” Hirst says, far more proud than bitter.

“I’m happy we were among those bands – U2, Billy Bragg, all the First Nations musicians here and overseas – putting the case for justice.” And again, he defers to comrades – Shane Howard, Alan Pigram, Neil Murray – as fellow explorers of the western desert, “finding a whole different Australia. How lucky we were to see that, and to put it into song.”

Hunger After Power, the last song on the A Hundred Years or More EP, is in many ways its most pointed: a naked plea for democracy under pressure. “Ooh, how can it be?” the singer wants to know as the scales of justice appear to melt down. “Every saint in heaven, say a prayer for me.”

“We could so easily write the darkest stuff, ’cause it’s all around us every day. But I think people want hope,” Hirst says. “On that last track, I think Jim provides that with that incredible guitar solo. He said to me, ‘This Pink Floyd song you’ve written, Rob…’ and I said, ‘Yeah, you know what to do’.”

To Powderworkers and their rusted-on ilk, the reference back to the epic final track on the first Midnight Oil album of ’78, Moginie’s Nothing Lost — Nothing Gained, is about as poignant as rock music gets. “I said, ‘Jim, just express everything through that amazing guitar of yours’,” Hirst says. “And he did.”

He admits that surrendering his own instrument to the vault of history has brought “a combination of relief and wistfulness… That black one was like a close friend. The things that kit’s seen: overturned in trucks, thrown off risers, drenched in water and Gatorade… but it always came up again.”

Asked whether he believes in anything beyond his own battle-scarred body, he answers with due contemplation. “Yes, I do,” he says hesitantly, though an early insight into the hypocrisy of organised religion sent him “through the pagan door” at 13. “I haven’t been in a church since except for weddings and funerals…

“I do believe there’s something,” he muses, no doubt gazing past the jacaranda blossoms into the Australian bush he adores, “but I would bring it back to Earth again. I believe that all the clues are out there in the bush, waiting for us. And we must protect it, for our own sakes and for the Earth.”

Loading

It would be an apt parting message from a man whose life has been devoted to beauty and resistance. Today though, there’s still no end the music inside him.

“Honestly? A Hundred Years or More would be a nice bookend,” he says. “But I think there might be a few ideas floating around. Even though I’m not really drumming — just brushes and percussion — the songs still sound good.

“Sadly, I think this is a lifetime curse,” he says with a laugh. “I still wake in the night with lyrics and melodies. Musical insomnia. If you’re a songwriter, blessed or cursed, it’s always there. Maybe there’s a couple more songs. You never say never.”

A Hundred Years or More by Rob Hirst, Jim Moginie, Hamish Stuart (Eleven: A Music Company) is out Friday, November 14.

In need of some good news? The Greater Good newsletter delivers stories to your inbox to brighten your outlook. Sign up here.