Good Or Shit: Melbourne's Troubadours

'Dan, I can' go back there. I can't. Everything is too far away.'

It's what the boyfriend of the main protagonist says on, like, the second page of Christos Tsiolkas's new book Barracuda. They're in Glasgow. What everything is too far away or, what is too far away from everything? Australia.

The universe has struck again. Cruising along, loving life, friends, boyfriend, job, London, the adventure that is not being at home in Australia. Gearing up to use my Croatian passport to be able to stay in the UK, as soon as I hit twelve months in my job, which I'm about six weeks away from, and the company goes under. Boom. Just like that. A spanner comes hurtling through the air and it clocks in me in the head, giving me a blinding headache.

What the hell do I do from here? I don't want to go back. Everything else, such as the entire rest of the world, will be too far away.

But, there have been all these signs.

The first one was a couple of weeks ago. I was listening to the radio and I heard this voice. This voice I know so well. The Australian voice. I'm catching snippets of what she's singing about, references that sound familiar to me, and when she mentions a time she had too much pseudoephedrine and couldn't sleep, I found myself standing there cracking up with laughter. She could be me; she could be lots of people I know.

Courtney Barnett – I love her. Not just the casual conversational style of her lyrics, but the folk rock sound that accompanies it. There is something about it that makes me homesick. Not sick for the humidity of Sydney, but for the dry heat and chilly winters of south east NSW/north east Victoria. There are a handful of artists who do this to me, who fit into a genre that I like to call Kelly country (that's a double entendre).

Like most Aussie kids (at least, this is what I tell myself) I had an obsession with Ned Kelly (and sharks, didn't we all?). I read endless books about him, recited facts with expert pride to anyone who would listen. One of my fondest memories is of being taken to Glenrowan so that I could stand in the Glenrowan Inn while troopers shot at us and the building went up in flames (it's a sound and light show). I think I've been to the old Melbourne Gaol four times and don't ask me how many times I watched that film with Mick Jagger in it.

In primary school, I made my friends play the Kelly Gang. I was always Ned's sister Kate. Being an accurate nine-year-old historian, every game had to end with me drunk and drowning in a river. 

Jordie Lane, Jen Cloher, Liz Stringer, Van Walker, Graveyard Train. All very different, all perfectly suited for gigs in a wool shed. Undoubtedly there are more, but these are the ones that came to mind as I listened to Courtney Barnett. If they don't originally come from Melbourne, they end up there. Melbourne's troubadours.

I've spent the past few weeks in some cases familiarising and in others re-familiarising myself with their music. I asked a Melbournian whether they thought the city put out more of these musicians than anywhere else in the country and he agreed there are a lot; but that there are also a lot from around the Byron Bay area. The difference, he suggested, is in the subcultures that surround them – the hippy and the hipster.

I am theorising that this sound is a direct descendent of the Irish convict culture. Influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by their ballads, by their lyrical tale-weaving, by their lamentations and romanticising of the world around them. Love and landscapes, weather and weariness, longing, leaving, learning, returning.

I imagine that a Northcote Social Club of 1880 would have been a house in a paddock where a severe looking Irish woman sold you bootlegged booze and everyone got drunk and stamped their feet or sat back and sipped slowly while someone sang a slow ballad about better times and longing for home.

Of course there are other influences in there, most notably country American ones. And hey, maybe it's just me, but when I'm listening to this kind of music I immediately smell bottlebrush, billabongs, brumbies, bushrangers and Banjo Patterson. I taste long necks and long blacks and long sweltering nights sitting on a vernadah. Fuck I miss heat and verandahs!

So my second sign came after listening to Jen Cloher and Kieran Ryan's duet Call If You Need Me. It was like ghosts were calling me. I had this uncontrollable urge to go wandering through a foggy paddock at dusk, hoping to get a glimpse of my outlaw lover, just so I could be sure the troopers hadn't got to him yet.

I Googled 'foggy paddock' looking for an image to show my London girlfriends what I was going on about. Scrolling through, I found myself drawn to this particular photograph. Like my subconscious was saying, Yes, that's the one, that's the paddock I want to be in. I clicked to enlarge it and – UNIVERSE – it was a bloody photo of Wodonga.   

There have been other signs. I pulled “follow the yellow brick road” out of a hat full of random Life Options. I mean, really? Follow the yellow brick road, to see the Wizard of OZ and GO HOME.

And then Tsiolkas. My literary hero. I would follow him into battle ... and, if I ever saw him in one, around a supermarket.

'It's too far away, Dan, I cannot go back.'

'And, mate, I can't stay here.'

NO, DAN, NO. IT'S TOO FAR AWAY. YOU'LL GET STUCK THERE AND YOU'LL NEVER LEAVE AGAIN. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO THERE? KICK A REFUGEE? BATHE IN COAL? TAKE A SHIT IN THE GREAT BARRIER REEF? I'M NOT READY. UNIVERSE? UNIVERSE! I'M NOT READY!