Caravana Sun On Sharing A Bond To The Australian Landscape

When you listen to travel anecdotes told by someone like Luke Carra, you're already packing your bags and scrubbing fresh wax on your board in your mind to go road tripping around the country. Driven by extensive trots around remote and rural Australia, Caravana Sun have scattered their love of country over their sun-drenched third LP Guerrilla Club, and it comes with a message. 

"I feel like a lot of people, whenever you talk about anything Indigenous, they almost freeze up, and don't want to talk about it..."

"We wanted to do a video for Open Up which is a song I guess about opening up to Indigenous culture," Carra shares. "We spent three days with local elders, camped out on the land; we had a 4WD and they were teaching us how to spear mullet from mangrove trees, big mud crabs and cooking them on a hot fire and it was just unbelievable what we were doing," he enthuses. "Spending time with Indigenous people, learning their customs and their culture, it's been really inspiring... It's really had a profound effect on all of us. The more we go away, the more we realise how connected we are to the land and the landscape, and we really wanted to paint a picture of what we'd been seeing and what we've been feeling, and that's what this record is all about."

But Carra doesn't want the record to be perceived as overtly political, and "we didn’t want to be like these white guys trying to be black, trying to be about in their community doing stuff that they do, that was a big thing for us," he insists. "We wanted to say 'we're really grateful and we wanna show that there's a lot of joy and a lot of things to be learned out there if you're willing to experience it'... The thing I found was that these guys were so open with us, it was just this openness and they were willing to teach us things and they wanted us, I guess because we were musicians, to share those experiences that we've had with other people."

The son of two migrant parents, who travelled here in the '40s from Malta, Carra believes that everyone needs to join the conversation about inclusiveness. "I think that's exactly right, we need to be creating until and connectedness rather than - I feel like a lot of people, whenever you talk about anything Indigenous, they almost freeze up, and don't want to talk about it, or they've got really strong views," he explains. "I think it's about being more open; we should be because it's such a part of who we are. A lot of that inspiration is that when you're out in those places in the more remote areas, you really feel the landscape, you feel it inside you and I feel like that is what being Aboriginal is, it's a connectedness to the land, and anyone in Australia that feels that connectedness to the ocean or the mountains or what ever it is, I feel that's a bond that we share with Indigenous people."