Great Southern Land 30 Years On: The Definitive Interview

This month marks 30 years since the release of Icehouse's iconic Great Southern Land, one of those quintessential Australian songs that stirs a tear for a homesick traveler and warms the heart of every half-cut Aussie who belts it out in time with any radio, cover band or DJ who broadcasts it. While he can't quite put his finger on why, Iva Davies says that the song has always been popular.

“It surprised me how immediate the reaction was to it, even from within the inner circle from when I first took it to managers and the owners of the very small independent record label we were signed to at the time. They reacted so remarkably to it,” Davies recalls of the first impressions the song receive upon its initial completion.

The song is the standout track from Icehouse's second album Primitive Man, an album Davies has often said was incredibly difficult to write.

“The first album included the very first songs I'd ever written and they had been collected over a period of about three years and they were very well road tested before they were recorded,” Davies says. “But when I had the task of writing the follow-up album it was a sort of standing start and I really had no idea, I, by then, was very unsure of myself in terms of songwriting.

“I came back from the first international tour with a couple of pieces of technology, enough to be able to set up in a bedroom in a house I had just moved into and the very first thing that I did with all that new equipment was the demo of Great Southern Land, which was quite odd really, that it was the beginning of the whole process. I regarded it as just the task at hand to write another set of songs and that was the first of the set that I wrote, so that's why it surprised me when people reacted the way they did.

“Although I knew I was taking on a very big subject and I thought about it very seriously and I knew the risks involved, because I knew that, if I got it wrong, that it would be disastrous, the reaction really surprised me then and has continued to surprise me since.”

The song was released in August of 1982, not quite a year after the release of Men At Work's Business As Usual – which featured the iconic Down Under – and a couple of years prior to GANGgajang's equally Aussie-touting Sounds Of Then, but Davies says he has no real idea as to what might have sparked a relative influx of musical commentary about our country. He does, however, know what kind of tone he hoped this song would carry.

“I can't truly identify exactly why I would have taken on this subject, especially as the first songwriting attempt of that collection of songs. But I do remember at the time there was a Commonwealth Games on and what seemed to me like a lot of jingoism and fanfare and in a way I wanted to write something that would offset the kind of postcard, souvenir model of Australia that seemed to be punted quite ferociously, and get to something that was much more to the core of the place,” he says. “There was kind of a context going on I guess in Australia and the only thing I can identify from the time historically is that Commonwealth Games; but there was a whole lot of stuff that was going on in the news that I guess annoyed me.”

As he reflects he recalls some personal experiences that may have somewhat informed the song's creation.

“I remember very vividly the flight away from Sydney heading to London where we went out over the continent of Australia and the landscape became less and less populated and then we got to the point where I was looking down at what seemed to be vast areas of not much in particular,” he recalls. “I went to sleep and woke up two hours later, and when I looked out I saw the exact same thing I had been watching when I went to sleep. I guess that was a kind of light bulb moment in terms of the recognition of how large an area Australia is and then that brought a whole lot of possibilities into my head; are there areas that no person has ever walked across? How do you survive out here?

“We went on that tour and we were on this mission to conquer the world and it was exciting but it was very hard work. I got incredibly homesick; by the time that tour was over I was well and truly burnt out I guess and desperately wanted to come back. So maybe those things were kind of driving me towards that subject as well?”

Sonically, Great Southern Land feels spacious; the reverb on the simple electronic drum beat, the way each line Davies sings rings out into the ether at its conclusion, the synth sounds that worm around the verses before they explode into two staccato notes that provide a vital part of the song's hook – notes that seem to fizzle away after their initial impact. Davies says space was a vital element of the song that he felt the need to communicate.

“Absolutely,” he affirms. “Interestingly I was actually very nervous about the release of it [and] one of the reasons for that was because it was very long. The suggestion was made – I think it was from within the record company – they wanted to cut off the very long note that starts the song and I absolutely resisted this because for me that one single note was the kind of defining core of the song. It was all about horizon, about that expansive view and to me that was best summed up by just holding one single note as if you were looking at the horizon of the sea or looking across some vast plain. So I absolutely resisted the idea of cutting off that note. So, yes, there were lots of kind of sonic pointers towards that sort of picture, although, as is the case with lots of songs, most of those choices are more instinctive than they are calculated.”

He knew he had to be somewhat unconventional for this song to work the way he knew it could, despite the fact there was great risk of misrepresentation.

“I know in writing the lyrics, I can remember some very clear thought processes I went through, one of which was that the subject was really a minefield in terms of the potential to misrepresent,” he begins. “So, for example, I made a very conscious decision to only have two verses where it was kind of standard to create songs with three verses. I very consciously decided to sort of set up a set of scales as it were so that I could weigh the ancient and modern and black and white elements of the discussion in the lyrics equally. I can remember things like that being very conscious, but other things – choices of sounds and so on – were quite unconscious in a way.”

The lyrics are ambiguous to a certain degree, Davies admitting that this is due to him realising he could not realistically do his chosen subject justice in an all encompassing pop song.

“I decided very early that if I was going to take on the subject, there was no way I was going to summarise Australia in four minutes, there was just no way, so I had to dream up another way to approach it,” he says. The way that I ended up approaching it was in a not dissimilar method to what I'd used in some songs before, akin to a literary style called cut up; which is basically not finishing sentences, just putting out three word phrases.

“So I made a selection of things that weren't self-contained, that weren't necessarily linear, but that I thought would paint pictures but also had multiple meanings. The intent of it always was that people would project their own interpretations of what those particular lines are. One of the reasons I've never talked about what I thought a particular phrase meant was that I didn't want to project my triggers onto it, I wanted other people to get their own meaning from what those lines were. Some of them are more loaded than others, but that's the way it was designed. I've never had a fear of people getting it wrong, because there is no wrong.”

It's a technique Davies favours and one he believes gives the song a point of difference to certain other songwriters.

“To me I've always felt as if I was at the opposite end of the scale to Midnight Oil,” he says. “I always viewed them as putting a very strong opinion forward, quite black and white; 'this is where we are positioned, this is what we believe and we're going to tell you about it very strongly'. So when you write a line like “The US Forces give the nod/It's a setback for your country”, you make your politics very clear in one line.

“I, on the other hand, took the approach that I don't believe my opinion is actually that important, in fact my opinion is just one opinion and it's a personal one and I wouldn't to pump that opinion, what I would prefer to do is ask some questions and have people try and answer them from their point of view. I guess that was my approach to Great Southern Land, to not necessarily solve any problems or put forward any particular view or presume to know the solution or whatever, but to highlight some things which needed answers.”

After three recording sessions, two producers, at least four mixing sessions and a trip from Balmain to Hollywood, Icehouse's Iva Davies ended up nailing the version of Great Southern Land that we know and love in just two hours.

“It was a very fraught process,” Davies recalls of putting the song onto tape. “The technology I had that enabled me to be able to write a set of songs on my own was one of the very first domestic eight-tracks. So I was actually able to make a very sophisticated demo of the original song.

“We got a co-producer over from America – he was a British producer – he came out to Australia with his engineer and we went into a studio in Sydney and I simply repeated the whole demo process as it were. I'd already made these sophisticated eight-track recordings of the songs and I had a lot of things pre-programmed, all the drum patterns and the sounds of the synthesizers, I simply played all the parts again.

“That was all pretty straightforward, in fact the entire album was recorded in 11 days, it was very fast. But when we went to America, this co-producer revealed his master plan and that was to replace all the LinnDrum parts that I'd built the songs on with himself playing drums. He was a very, very good drummer; he was Giorgio Moroder's drummer and played on a lot of those Donna Summer disco hits and so on. I was pretty resistant to this, I didn't like the idea at all, but he soldiered on and basically turned Great Southern Land into a Billy Idol rock track [laughs].

“We duly mixed the thing and gave it to the American record company and it was sent back to us with the message 'Well, we don't know what's changed, but we don't like it'.”

Davies had to take the song into his own hands to eventually get a version everyone could be happy with.

“We mixed the thing three times and it kept coming back to us every time; in the end I was so frustrated with this whole process that I went to my manager and I said 'I want to have a go at doing this myself',” he recounts. “We went and found a fairly obscure engineer in a very run down studio in Hollywood and I made the whole recording again just the way I'd done the demo; that process took two hours from beginning to end. I wasn't precious about it, we mixed it in an hour – that engineer had had nothing to do with the project up until that point – we sent that off to the record company and they said 'Yes, that's it. We love it,' and that's the version that's on the album. It was quite a crisis point in the making of the album.”

You could hazard a guess at how many time Icehouse have performed Great Southern Land, but you'd almost certainly be wrong.

“It's got a special place for us in a funny sort of way that people probably don't realise; it's not so much the content of the song or even where it sits in terms of its value to an audience, but for years and years and years and years and years we've always used it as our defining soundcheck song. I guess it's so simple in its construction that if everything sounds right and balanced and so on, then the whole show will be right. We've used it faithfully for soundcheck for 30 years, there's just something funny about the way that all the elements sit together – it's the best song that we have to get everything straight.

“I've always been very particular about sound check; a lot of bands get very lazy, especially when they're touring at a high level and touring a lot, they'll skip soundchecks and will just show up and do a show. I'm not sure whether I should admire them or the opposite, because I think you'd have to have a lot of confidence to do that. Over the years I could count the number of shows we've done without a soundcheck on two hands; that's out of tens of thousands of shows. So yes, we have played it a lot.”

Live at Sound Relief, Sydney in 2009