Last Quokka On Being Punk & Changing The Australian Rhetoric: 'We Want A New Way Of Doing Things'

29 November 2024 | 12:16 pm | Emma Newbury

From neo-Nazi hate, Facebook echo chambers, and their merch being worn by politicians, Fremantle's Last Quokka have put up with a lot over their 9 years, with no plans of stopping.

Last Quokka

Last Quokka (Supplied)

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Starting in Freo’s local watering holes, Last Quokka were never intentionally meant to be a punk band. 

Starting as a “joke” between friends Ray Grenfell (bass), Jose Zaverino (drums), and Kirill Ivoutin (guitar), it elevated into distressed rock chords, punchy drums, and frontman Trent Rojahnt's spoken-word style. 

“My friend Ray had been jamming with this kind of rocky stuff with a few people, and I thought, just for a joke, I’d jump along and just try some vocals, but it kind of worked, and that kind of solidified the band. Before I was in the band, there were violins, and they were quite long post-rock tracks…

“I think my lack of ability to achieve anything more than two notes in my vocal range meant that we kind of had to become a punk band,” Rojahnt told The Music, calling in from his mobile home along Western Australia’s coast.

“And you know, it’s… it's grown to be really… something I'm really quite proud of as a person.”

Around nine years on and with several member changes - half the band went back to their motherland countries while Justin Zanetic (guitar), Dion Mariani (guitar), and Carlotte Rivera (drums) joined the ranks - Last Quokka have gained momentum on a national scale, slowly but surely finding ways to keep the snowball going through their DIY efforts. 

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Do-It-Yourself

“Yeah, I'm in charge of the numbers,” Trent chuckles, “so I've got to like, like, do all the tax stuff and all the. I'm just like, I just have no idea what I'm doing. But it's, you know, so that is it, you know, like someone's gotta do it, right? and there's just five of us and we're busy working, especially given a cost of living crisis at the moment.”

A lot of our hours have filled up with work, so we've kind of just gotta jump in and make things.. make things happen, which is great. And and the band has always been wanting to be as democratic internally and.... I guess just as self-driven as possible. So, we've always kind of self-managed and we've always found our own ways and own ways [sic] around issues. We've often, you know, organised gigs in backyards or places like the (Fremantle) Buffalo Club which are very community and member-driven places and yeah, we've always tried to... To treat community and ourselves with like a really nice DIY ethos, which has helped a lot given I guess given the world we've got now.”

Privilege

The band’s sound continues to get more and more loud and more angry with the current economic crisis rearing its ugly head and chomping on Australians’ savings accounts. Looking back at their first released song from 2019, they admit there’s still the same core issues under the hood. ‘Privilege’ came out as a tongue-in-cheek song narrated from the perspective of a straight white rich male, or the epitome of the world’s luckiest demographic, as Last Quokka sees it. While not based on a direct figure, there’s that archetype in mind that Facebook helped to source:

“Most of the band live in Fremantle and there's a, I guess, a Fremantle community page called Freo Massive. Fremantle is a place that has a very strong working class culture and history, yet is also heavily gentrified with a lot of conservative rich people. So there is this, like, melting pot of different views.”

Telling the story of how Trent and bassist Ray had now been banned from the Facebook page due to purposely engaging debate, the frontman comments on the importance of speaking up and challenging to these perspective-limiting views.

“We just had to see. It wasn't, like, going out looking for a fight, but you get just really, really rich and privileged people complaining about the homeless, for example… and you just have to say something.

It's sad to look at Facebook because I think the the lowest percent of most abhorrent people are the loudest. So sometimes on Facebook, it does sound a lot like… It sounds like the world is in a pretty bad shape, but it sounds a lot worse on Facebook.” 

“It's so... it's such a strange thing that we've become so used to. Like, there's people sleeping rough in most of the populated areas we live in and we kind of walk past blind to it now. But I mean the.... The contrast of like class in in any way you look now it it creates a really… Really strange dystopian dynamic, doesn't it? It's really odd, but yeah, I guess I guess coming back to Freo Massive that was a really good example of that. 

And there was one guy whose name I won't use, who, most of the lyrics come from direct things he said. It was just like on the Internet, like, you know, “I've never been groped at a gig, so I was probably fine”, you know? And like, I just thought this guy was absolutely hilarious, obviously. Like just so… So ignorant and so male. And his world view was so privileged.

Like, “I've never had to. You know, I've never had to leave the venue because I felt unsafe or I've never had to. Like, I've I've had my voice heard by my daddy my whole life” you know? It  was really nice to be able to take the... the strange privilege things… just turn it into a into a track, and that was some of the basis of of the lyrics.”

Saying Things As You See It

This no-holds-barred attitude has drawn both admiration and controversy. From neo-Nazis sharing psychedelic “fan art” of the band’s music, to a local MP wearing their shirt in Parliament, Last Quokka’s activism often sparks unexpected reactions. 

“We did get some strange neo-Nazis. It was the strangest thing ever. We put an EP out in 2016 or 2017, self-titled, our first EP, and this neo-Nazi page on YouTube got all the tracks, played them all at once, and then there was a photo- The video was a photo of the band and it was just changing and there were all these psychedelic patterns. It was the coolest thing ever. And I was like, this is dope! Who's made this fan art for us?

But clearly, like the rest of the videos that were made and were engaged with were like you know, like full on Neo Nazis, but it was a really, like, a cool art project. I thought it was quite creative. So we had that.” Trent says, speaking of an online group who tried to use the unexpectedly creative format to spew hate on the five-piece. 

Another incident involved WA MP Josh Wilson wearing a Last Quokka shirt into parliament for Aus Music T-Shirt Day in 2023.

“There was a photo of him in Parliament recently wearing a Last Quokka shirt and he had like, Tanya Plibersek on one arm and some other f**kwit on the other arm.”

“And, you know, like for example, Tanya Plibersek - the person in the photo standing next to the person with the Last Quokka shirt on - was responsible for approving the Burup Peninsula project over here, which ended up with my partner and I being raided and arrested last year because we were involved in the protests against it, and then just to see like to see Josh Wilson standing there in the Last Quokka shirt in Parliament next to this horrible human... It was quite shocking. So we called that out publicly and asked to put some pressure on Josh to stop towing the party line and actually speak out against the party, which I understand is quite hard.”

Silently reflecting on the last few years of turmoil, Rohajn shrugs and adds, “We do cop some attention for saying things as we see it, I guess.”

OTC & NGOs

Much of Last Quokka’s fire stems from their firsthand experiences with inequality. Trent, who spent years working in underfunded NGO sectors, channels this frustration into the band’s music and, most recently, single OTC. Even the song’s acronym OTC, or On The Couch, is a look into the class burnout of the little guys feeling hopeless with their progress. This can especially be felt by young people entering an ever-competitive job market post-covid and intra-cozzy-livs. 

“A lot inspired it. My history was (inspiring it), I guess, like I spent most of my 20s working really, really hard at NGO sectors trying to create change from within the system….And I was doing a lot of overtime and working through my lunch break without getting any extra money, and I was expected to do that for the love. And we were grossly underfunded, like and, you know like grossly underfunded. And I was trying to manage drug and alcohol programmes and a clinical team, and we couldn't do the work because we didn’t have enough money and it it was extremely stressful, and,. at the same time there was a lot of rhetoric. I think, Gina Rinehart had said something at the time about, like, “if you want money, you gotta work hard for it”, and here's me, like, working extremely long hours. I'm, like, working my absolute *** off, making ends meet. And I was like, this is nonsense. Like she's jetting around in a private jetting around from function to function. “

The band also use the new single to encourage us to look into the stigma of those on welfare, and the stigma of class vs productivity. 

“There is this rhetoric about, you know, “the bloody doll bludgers”. My experience of working with, I guess a lot more people with like working-class backgrounds is like these people often know how to work really, really hard and. And do work hard, whilst  the general rhetoric is that the poor are lazy. The rich... the rich are the lazy people, extremely lazy people, and they're just getting some money in and they're all good.”

While their specific brand of punk has a pessimistic undertone, Trent highlights that it’s more about questioning the quality of life you’re getting, because why settle for the default?

“I do like to think about the future a lot. Because…if you're trying to create change in the present, you lose drive and motivation. You don't imagine the better future, you know? The better future is a carrot dangling, right?”

Upcoming Quokka Antics

While wrapping up 2024, LQ already have projects on the way for the new year. As they prepare for their sixth album, the five-piece continue to explore what it means to be part of a democratic Australia. The upcoming LP ‘Take The Fight To The Bastards’ is coming out in Feb 2025, with Trent detailing what can be expected. 

“The last album (Red Dirt) was very much an ode to country, you know, and thematically it was about the beautiful parts of what the community of Australia builds together. And so. transitioning out onto this new album, it's, It's thematically probably more a class album, you know it's about pointing out the hypocrisies in dominant Australian narratives such as like “the poor are lazy” or whatever. But so it was kind of like thematically about “We're sick of this. F**k you. We want a new way of doing things.” 

I think like that theme is driven a lot by faster music. So we've probably got a lot faster, a little bit louder, a lot bigger. And that kind of just packs that kind of punch of like “we're pissed off and we're not going to stop yelling about it”.

Quokk Fest

To help nurture the arrival of their upcoming sixth album, the band are holding their own self-titled music festival Quokk Fest this Friday 29th November. In a similar vein to that of King Gizzard and The Lizzard Wizard and Gizzfest, Last Quokka will be headlining their own pub fest, bringing along local bands Mood Punch, Project Bexx, Mariana, Symmetrical Dogs, and Desert Sex for the ride. 
“Yeah, it's a diverse lineup. A loud lineup, a really, really fine line up.” Trent says of the event.  

“It's just community. It’s community and fun. We always try and put on gigs that aren't just sitting in some established chain venue with a prim stage and like 4 bands that just play one after the other and then you go home. We try and create fun and a different vibe, and hopefully that's what the punters can experience at Quokk Fest.“

OTC is out now on all streaming platforms, meanwhile tickets for tonight’s Quokk Fest are available here. For those on the East Coast, LQ will also be playing Moving Different Festival on 1st December, with tickets available here.  

This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body

Creative Australia