Iva Davies decided to borrow a literary device from beat novelist William S. Burroughs when he sat down to write Icehouse's 1982 record Primitive Man.
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Using the cut-up technique, he had written three-word phrases on little paper shreds which covered the carpet of his Sydney home.
Davies was struck by three words that would become the making of an Australian classic: Great Southern Land.
Unusually, he decided to write two verses instead of three, which was standard for the time.
But he deliberately decided to write these two verses as polar opposites: ancient and modern, black and white.
The first verse speaks to a metropolitan, modern setting – Sydney Harbour or Port Phillip Bay.
But the second is far more indigenous, of pre-European Australia. Davies said white Australia’s fraught history with Aboriginals was forefront in his mind.
“There was no way I was going to attempt to write a song called Great Southern Land about Australia without including that very important chapter,” he told The Border Mail.
Decades later when converting the song into a symphony, an orchestral musician’s response surprised Davies.
“I remember clearly him coming back to me in the next meeting and saying I had no idea how dark that song is," he said.
"And nobody ever really heard those lines in the end of verse two:
“They’re going to betray you – they’re going to forget you – are you going to let them take you over that way?
“I’m not going to explain what all that’s about but you can probably work out a lot of it for yourself.”
From the opening note to the beat of the LinnDrum, it’s clear the song’s haunting lyrics mean more than just an anthem to play before cricket games – it’s homage to the First Nations peoples, who mastered this unforgiving country over 60,000 years.