Mongrel Wisdom

There is a charge to Don Walker's latest album. The legendary Australian songwriter is now in his 60s, and much of Hully Gully is about the view from over the hill, but Walker will not go gently into that goodnight. For every reflective tune about loving well and being wise, there is a slinky blues rejoinder about playing pool and being a bit wicked. “I would hope that others see me as a fine, upstanding, circumspect conservative man, but I'm not as good at portraying that as I imagined.” Walker laughs, “Maybe there's a little bit of gristle peaking out.”
One of the most interesting tracks on Walker's third solo album is Young Girls, an idle fantasy in which our songwriter picks up a beautiful young hitchhiker and makes a life with her fuelled by whiskey and midnight meals – “all the steak and cigarettes that you can steal”. There is a yearning in the song for the lost folly of youth. “It was kicked off by seeing a girl on a street corner getting drunk in an irresponsible way with a number of irresponsible friends. There was a certain amount of envy on my part for the stage of life that they were at, because I was rushing somewhere to do some stuff,” Walker explains. “At a certain stage of youth, there are less things to do and less things to worry about.”

Escape is a recurring theme on the album and it punctuates Everybody, a song about loathing the world around you and looking for the back door. A version first appeared on Cold Chisel's 2012 album No Plans, but with Walker singing instead of Jimmy Barnes the song is at once more disgusted and more resigned. “It's just a product of being cranky at the world in general, at everything I was seeing in the papers and hearing on the radio,” Walker muses. “I wrote it back in 1998 and I'm probably a little more relaxed about things like that now.” Age has made all the difference. “More and more, the protagonists in all the stories you read are younger than you. There's a certain stage when you realise that all your political leaders were in infant school when you were a teenager. It helps in the process of being less engaged.”

Walker has always been a philosophical songwriter, but as friends around him begin “dropping off the perch”, he finds himself dishing out very specific advice on how to live. On the track Mongrelwise he suggests we stay positive, fall in love and be wary of mongrels. “Being mongrelwise, being streetwise, is not something that you pick up in academia,” he says. “I'm always very wary about advising anybody else – I have enough trouble advising myself – but I guess that's something worth knowing.”