Hoppe hoppe Reiter

These eye-opening experiences of live music would spark his appreciation and dedication to performance that he enjoys to this day. Following the COVID-19-induced hiatus of the arts industry over the past two years, The Oils headlined the 2022 return of Byron Bay Bluesfest in April. Asking him what the feeling of returning to the stage was like, he said:

“… I think that people had been confined like lab rats for so long that when they eventually got out into daylight, or sunlight, or gathering with lots of others to celebrate music and being together, the feeling was quite different. We’re ecstatic, as in the crowd gathering at a festival or a spiritual experience even.”

“There’s a myth in the modern era which derives from the cult of the individual and this notion that we’re all just single individuals reaching our own destiny by ascending a ladder or buying shiny goods or locating ourselves in a cool and desirable place. But, of course, that’s just a means of perpetuating an economic system, really. We’re much more communal. We’re still hunters and gatherers; we love to hunt and gather together, and we derive meaning not ultimately from things we end up throwing away but from memories, we collect and stories we tell one another, and the experiences that we share.”

I asked Peter whether this shared musical space lends itself to activism and overcoming collective action problems like climate change. He disagreed, “The two are not really connected particularly because some people do one and some people do the other.

It’s just that in our case, we happened to find a way of sometimes doing them both… We just always have existed as a band of songwriters, musicians, and activists, and that’s the way that we are.”

As a man of many potential titles – musician, activist, politician – I asked whether there have been any new identities or activities he’s found himself inhabiting since leaving Federal Parliament in 2013.

“A rediscovery of the simple joy of expression without anything else to have to think about in the day. That’s been the most important thing for me, being in this fortunate position of being freed up to be back on stage with the other members of the Oils and to completely lose yourself in the sound and in the plain. I’m sort of having a second childhood really at this stage of my life, with lots of love.”

In attendance at Bluesfest was Peter’s former colleague, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, colloquially known as DJ Albo. When asked about the importance of having a music fan in office, Peter said, “It’s very refreshing to have someone who’s connected enough with the culture of the country and is a music fan and celebrates Australian music, isn’t ashamed of it, and doesn’t have a cultural cringe and understands it some extent.”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that my expectation is that the current government should deliver a decent cultural policy and support the music industry. Not for a handout, but for building foundations for people’s careers, particularly young artists’ future.”

Peter and the Oils have always put their money where their mouths are in helping Australians access the arts. In the late ’70s, the band went on strike after a promoter of Sydney Northern Beaches pub The Antler reneged on a promise for reasonable ticket prices at their show. For their upcoming show at the ANU, student tickets are $60 lower than the standard price.

“We’ve always believed that what we’re [Midnight Oil] doing should be heard by as many people as possible, and people shouldn’t be prevented from hearing or seeing Midnight Oil simply because of their income. We’re always mindful of price. We’re price-setters, we always have been, and we never charge the maximum amount of money to, as it were, try and squeeze all the juice out of the lemon.”

“And of course, we know students are not big earners; they’re students, it goes without saying. They’ve probably got HECS debt before they’ve got anything else.”

The Oils’ latest album, Resist, addresses the biggest problem facing students: climate change and the consequences of environmental degradation. The album’s opening track, Rising Seas, begins with:

Every child, put down your toys And come inside to sleep We have to look you in the eye And say, “We sold you cheap.”

Peter acknowledges that Baby Boomers, who have been complacent in good economic times, have “a lot to answer for”. I asked how a person from Generation Z should interpret Resist:

“It’s in the tradition of protest albums which are calls to action. Hopefully, people will hear and feel moved to act. We think that whilst it’s completely bewildering and anger-making that we’re still heating up the planet as though there are no long-term consequences, the fact is that the climate crisis will impact younger people who’ll be around longer than we will. It’s something look on with a great deal of dismay… The upcoming generation has a great deal of hard work to do, and we’ve given them a soundtrack that hopefully makes that hard work a bit more palatable.”

When speaking about the issues he cared about, or the city he called home for so many years, it felt as though Peter might still be a student. A certain youthfulness sprang from the phone in these moments in our conversation. His excitement for The Oils and love for being on stage with his bandmates resembled a musician at the peak of their prowess. Not one in the closing act of a career that has spanned decades. I finished by asking him what it meant for the band to be returning to Ngunnawal and Ngambri land for their penultimate show.

“It is, without exaggeration, a bit of an epochal moment in our small world, if you like. Because we started playing Canberra… To close the circle off by doing the last big open-air show at the ANU is going to be very special for me.”

Hoppe hoppe Reiter, wenn er fällt, dann schreit er. Fällt er in den Graben, fressen ihn die Raben. Fällt er in den Sumpf, macht der Reiter plumps!

As a child, I would capture my Omi and Opi to have them repeat this nursery rhyme for hours. It had a simple gimmick: I would sit on their laps and on the last line they would pretend to drop me. I loved it so much that I forced my mum and dad to learn it, so I wouldn’t have to face a long drive just to hear it. But today, when I regale my friends of this childhood memory, I have to Google its lyrics to avoid the embarrassment of repeating nonsense.

My grandparents left Germany and Austria as teenagers. They were both forced to learn English when they attended Australian high schools, found jobs and were tricked into thinking Vegemite was chocolate spread. In many ways, they were privileged immigrants. Their skin colour meant that their European accents were a limited remnant of cultural otherness in a society still dismantling the White Australia Policy. But still, they worried. Worried that speaking German around the house would mark their children as different. When their eldest daughter showed up to preschool without understanding her peers, they worried that she might never learn. So they started speaking English. While my mum can somewhat understand a conversation in German today, it’s not a sure thing.

In one generation a family’s native language was left behind.

As a child, I was fascinated by the language my grandparents occasionally broke into. It was reserved for special circumstances: details they didn’t want me to hear, lyrics from my Oma’s choir music, an Easter service at a German Lutheran church. As I grew older, it became the key to unlocking my mum’s family history. And while my family continued to do things that were ‘German’- like Christmas Eve celebrations and an endless supply of cucumber salad at every meal - my connection to that culture began to feel a lot less authoritative in the absence of any real proof.

So I tried to learn.

I tried to learn when I was in Year 6, using a much more rudimentary form of Duolingo and failed because I had the attention span of a 12 year old. I tried when I was in Year 9, practicing vocabulary each night until the German words became too difficult to remember for a brain that was trained on the sounds of Romance languages.

I tried last year, in lockdown, at an age where I finally understood Duolingo and Anki and conjugation and the dative case and subordinate clauses. I lasted three months. Then, when Canberra opened up and ‘more important’ things started happening, I gave up again. For years, I have told myself I would start classes, get a teacher, do it properly if I couldn’t be trusted to do it myself. I haven’t even been able to bring myself to do that.

There are convenient excuses. Language learning isn’t easy, even for languages that bear some resemblance to your native tongue. Despite the value I placed on learning German as the key to a sudden, new, cultural connection with my grandparents, it has always been a sentimental goal. I think, after 60 years of practically solely conversing in English, it is their most comfortable language, a second language turned into an adopted mother tongue.

Yet, perhaps my reluctance is underscored by a fear of the ultimate failure: a potential inability to learn the language that should have been imparted onto me at birth. Am I so culturally removed that I will never be able to master a voiceless palatal fricative? What if I am so un-German that the ders and the dies and the dens never come out fluently? What can I do but give up my claim to culture when my tongue fumbles around the syllables of compound verbs?

Sometimes things seem so important that they feel better left as an intention. If you never try, you can never fail. If you never fail, you can always think about how you could try. If you never try, that door of possibility never fully closes. It might feel like it did if your accent was so strong that your grandparents struggled to understand you.

When there is no real physical connection to your heritage (how do you be half German, besides walking around in half an Oktoberfest costume everyday?) this becomes a consequential fear. We often judge the strength of our cultural connections by our ability to speak their languages. If I was dropped in Berlin tomorrow, I’m sure I’d survive from the meticulous English fluency every German person seems to have cultivated since preschool. It feels frivolous then, to continue childhood traditions under the guise of being German, when you can neither claim the capacity to discuss the weather nor will anyone assume a German identity if not for you giving the dreaded ‘white person ethnicity percentages’ spiel.

One day, I may get over my fear. Until then, as my grandparents get older, I will continue to feel a mild sense of loss whenever German crosses my mind. I will experience the same sense of guilt whenever I put off another opportunity to learn in favour of something more immediately pressing. And each time I am reminded of that childhood nursery rhyme, I will consign myself to looking up its lyrics, I will practise a mediocre rendition of its words and I will butcher their pronunciation again and again.