Even after 40 years, Redgum’s songs still tell us about our times
Corrugated Highway
The Redgum Years Live
John Schumann and the Vagabond Crew
Drive fast. Drive slow. It’s a corrugated highway. Me and my mates Scott and Graham are going camping in the bush. We have left the comforting feel of the asphalt road to the dirt, dust and ruts of the bush track.
Our bones and the car start to rattle in unison. Drive fast. Drive slow. Which one? We go for fast, after all, we’re young. The rattling smooths out to more like a rat-a-tat-tat, but the car starts gliding round corners. It isn’t built for this, and neither are we. We slow, just a bit. All the while we are watching out for critters unknowingly risking their lives by crossing to the other side of the track or trying to outrun us. We make it to where we are going. White-knuckled, grateful and laughing.
Looking back now, it seems like we were stepping in and out of a Redgum song.
Redgum songs are like that: good memories, old friends. The concerts, the music, the words. They travel with you. Some speak to you; some are part of you.
More than 40 years ago, Redgum recorded a live album Caught in the Act. It was 1983. It was the year of their leaving. And now, half a lifetime down the road, there is this, Corrugated Highway: The Redgum Years Live by John Schumann and the Vagabond Crew. Schumann and the Crew were performing sold-out shows through 2025, and this album – with updated lyrics in parts to echo recent world events – came from a point of wanting to preserve the past and reshape it through a new musical lens.
As Schumann writes in the liner notes: “It was 1983, Mick (Michael Atkinson), Hughie (Hugh McDonald), Verity (Verity Truman) and I had just about as much as we could take of roadwork. We decided to call it quits but we agreed to record a live album. Caught in the Act was our swansong. From the very outset at Flinders University we felt compelled to tell Australian stories in Australian accents and set them in Australian places. We wanted to leave something behind to document what we’d achieved in 10 years ... Then I wrote I Was Only 19 and we included it on Caught in the Act. The rest, they say, is history.
“I listened to Caught in the Act the other day. In retrospect it caught the spirit of the times. Redgum was quite a bit more than three chords and activist passion – despite some of our detractors dismissing us as such. Redgum’s repertoire was a reflection – sometimes far too clear – of a country wrestling with itself. Corrugated Highway is a pretty fair map of the Redgum years. This album is not just a setlist – rather it’s a patchwork of the roads we travelled together and the people and events we ruminated over silently in our minds on long drives through towns glazed hard by the blistering Australian heat.”
Schumann says he sees Corrugated Highway, a double album, as the bookend to Caught in the Act. Four decades have washed through the songs, and it shows in the treatment to some of them. Bob Dylan is notorious in radically changing his songs so much, that in concert you don’t know at the start what you’re about to listen to. This is not the case here, but it is as if not a polish but a different slant of the light has been applied to a few for them to be seen anew.
Says Schumann: “There is a gentle maturity about this one in the playing and the arrangements, but there’s still a frisson.”
This is none more so than in songs Stewie, Killing Floor, The Last Frontier, Where You Going to Run To? and The Long Run. The rugged, ragged beauty of the pieces is brought out either through a different tempo, a different emphasis of instrumentation or a jazzlike bass solo! Or sometimes it’s just Schumann’s voice. It’s always carried the distinctive Australian timbre, but the timbre has aged. The grain has deepened.
Given the nature of some of the pieces in having their foundations in describing and giving insights into Australian society, they could be seen merely as timepieces. But it’s to the credit of the band and Schumann, through the odd tweak in a lyric, and the playing that they are not. The music now has moved beyond the years. Timeless in tempo.
The collection ends with two non-Redgum songs. The penultimate one is Fishing Net in the Rain. It details a subject closer to Schumann’s heart: the mental wellbeing of veterans. It’s deeply moving.
As Schumann said at the time of its release this year: “It’s an attempt to bolt a human story to the Royal Commission into Veteran Suicide. While it’s based on the story of Petty Officer David Finney, it’s about all those ADF members who have taken their own lives after serving Australia. We all need to confront these stories if anything is going to change. And we need to decide if the words ‘Lest We Forget’ are just something we say on Anzac Day or whether they are a sacred promise that we, as a country, keep in perpetuity regardless of cost and the passage of time.”
The final song is a beautiful version of Australia’s alternative anthem, Waltzing Matilda. If you’re looking for this country, you can hear it here. The voices, and the arrangement carry the colours of the days past, days future and all who live here. And maybe that’s Redgum’s legacy. Each story they told is a part of us.
If you are a current or former ADF member, or a relative, and need counselling or support, you can contact the Defence All-Hours Support Line on 1800 628 036 or Open Arms on 1800 011 046.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
Warwick McFadyen is a desk editor at The Age.