The Meaning Of Midnight Oil : An Analysis Of 'Midnight Oil'

I watched the video and studied the lyrics of Beds Are Burning by Midnight Oil (1983) and I observed that this is a protest song in support of giving the native Australian people their lands back, because some time ago they were forcibly moved from them. The lyrics tell us that it is about time to amend for the mistakes that former governments made. Furthermore, I quite love this song as a piece of music because its rhythm and tempo increase and this makes that you can get its mood, calling you to action, to reveal against abuses and build a better world in which to live. Moreover, in relation to the images, I encounter them useful in order to understand the message they want to share and the display of aboriginal dance clips make it easier.

This poem relates to Aboriginal Australian as it was written by the hand and views of one, and was written for the Aboriginals. The text itself is very emotive and powerful and I personally was unable to resist the emotions it reverberates however I cannot say whether it would be the same for anyone who could read it.

Beds Are Burning, is an Australian rock anthem with a powerful message regarding Aboriginal land rights. Originally written and performed by Midnight Oil in 1987, from their album Diesel and Dust, the song’s target audience was every Australian with a conscience and to educate, protest, openly discuss and raise awareness about the removal of the Australian Aboriginal people from their rightful home in the desert. Beds Are Burning, has stood the test of time and made its impact on the conscientious global music scene, with its message being applicable to and resonating with displaced people worldwide, this anthem has retained its relevance and popularity to this day.

The poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, draws the realistic image of the confronting realities of alienation and displacement of Indigenous Australians. It is because of such experiences that has empowered Noonuccal to express and advocate learning from experiences by positioning the audience to view the horrors that occurred, creating a platform for her poetry. Through the emphasis of identity, it allows the audience to deeply connect with the past, determining and illustrating a profound link between the ancient past and contemporary present. Oodgeroo’s deep connectivity with art and poetry highlights the importance of learning from experiences, for not only the Aboriginal culture but, for all cultures, and that colonisation does not destroy self-identity. Through the poems The Past and China…Woman, it has allowed the individual to promote change, encouraging the survival of cultures through learning from past experiences

In addition to the imagery employed by the poem, Night Racing also utilises the conventions of metaphor and simile to construct the unique perspective of a black Aboriginal being “invaded” by white colonists, working to create a sense of identification with the Aboriginals of the time, which has now carried forward into the modern day context in which this poem was constructed. The manufacture of the car as a “junkyard dingo” and the manifestation of the Earth as having a “dying heartbeat” are two metaphors that are most predominantly important in the construction of the reading that the poem represents an attack on the invasion of Australia. The “reverse colonisation” speaks directly back to a

Australian landscapes have long been used to place fear and anxiety in the Anglo-Australian’s psyche. This anxiety and the requirement for Indigenous peoples to negotiate white ideals is reflected in current Australian literature and cinematic identities. This essay will discuss the critical arguments of what makes the chosen texts Australian literature. This discussion will be restricted to the critiques of the film Lantana directed by Ray Lawrence and the novel Biten’ Back written by Vivienne Cleven. The will firstly look at the use of landscape as a crime scene and how this links to the anxieties caused by the doctrine of terra nullius and the perceived threats from an introduced species. It will then look at the Australian fear of a different ‘other’ followed then by a discussion around masculinity and the need for Indigenous people to negotiate white ideals. The essay will argue that Australian literature and film reflect a nation that still has anxieties about the true sovereignty of the land and assert that Indigenous people have a requirement to fit in with white ideals.

In the first part of the poem the writer shows the difficulty he is having with taking a human life. In the second stanza he says “Making night work for us the starlight scope bringing men into killing range. This dark tone helps to emphasize the struggle the author is feeling as a soldier in war. Also he shows his emotions directly. In stanza 3 he says “The river under Vi Bridge takes the heart away”. This quote shows the feeling that the author gets

This theme is brought through the song by showing multiple literary devices. Such as “I'm the one at sail, I’m the master of my sea”. This metaphor shows the realization and empowerment that oneself can give in a depressing situation. This simile “Falling like ashes to the ground, Hoping my feelings they would drown” compares his feeling of sadness and depression to ashes, and wanting them to drown and vanish, from his life. This line, “All the hate that you’ve heard has turned your spirit to a dove” explains how all of the hate that he has experienced and gone through has turned his feelings around, and decided to look on the bright side of things. Personally I think this is a great

The Apology Day Breakfast, and, Heart’s Core Lament are two powerful indigenous poems which use poetic techniques and devices to portray theme, times, places and identities. These poems both address the stolen generation and the impact that white colonisation has had on the Australian indigenous community. However, Natalie Harkin’s, Heart’s Core Lament has more impact through using graphic imagery to connect the poem to historical

The Dreaming is communicated through songs, stories and rituals, in which is explains how the “creator ancestors shaped the land and brought it to life” (Gammage, 2011, p. 1419). All of life, from religion, geography, life and more, are explained and connected to the Aboriginal people’s spirituality, land and family through this form of communication. The Dreamtime “shapes the Aboriginal people’s view of the universe and themselves” (Wierzbicka & Goddard, 2015, p. 43). The passing on of the Dreaming stories from one generation to the next was a “most important aspect of education” (Edwards, 1998, p. 83) and is seen as the fundamental reality. Edwards stated that through ritual, humans are able to “enter into a direct relationship with

Throughout Australian history, Aboriginal people have been displaced and mistreated through the course of time, through the separation from their from kinship groups, land and the stolen generation. This has resulted in the connection to their dreaming lost, misconnection and loss of their sacred sites and traditional food from their land. As a consequence of the stolen generation, many aboriginal children were deprived of their parents, families, spirituality, language from their land and their cultural identity. All of these aspects contribute to the continuing effect of dispossession on Aboriginal spiritualities.

The title of this poem tells about the people trying to escape a degraded place to struggle no matter what. Also no matter hard they try it’s not going to change anything or it won’t matter because either way there is still going to be a war or battle that would never end. The symbolic passages from the story was “lands turned black and bare”, this means how their lands were abandoned by the attack of the enemies and people being left with no homes. The theme of the poem was even though people would have these arguments that end up to a war and tragic. The mood of the poem left the people devastated, women crying, and heartbroken people without joy or careless. A symbolic image from the poem was, “Where upon clamor of tongues.” Which you can

The Indigenous Australian imagination perceives the way of the world and all that exists as not the result of a singular force or mind, but, rather, the result of powerful totemic ancestral beings who once roamed the land. This ontological tradition, known as “The Dreaming”, serves as an infinite link between past and present, people and place, and both the natural and spiritual world. “The Dreaming,” then, asserts that all of humanity and nature in its entirety is alive and connected. In his ethnographic account titled, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, Fred Myers examines the importance of The Dreaming to Pintupi society and its centrality in the constitution of their lived world. Descriptions of what happened in The Dreaming underlie Pintupi social relationships and constructions of “country.” It is through this mythological construct that the Pintupi Aboriginal people mediate their relationships with the land and negotiate aspects of personhood and identity.

Wright further conveys the poignancy of the Aborigines’ disappearance in the third stanza. Structurally, the third and first stanzas parallel each other; both list aspects of indigenous Australian culture that no longer exist. In the first stanza, Wright highlights the loss of the “song” and the “dance”. Similarly, in the third stanza, she notes the absence of the “hunter” and the “spear”. Wright describes the “spear” as “splintered underground”, giving the reader an image of a weapon broken, smothered in the dirt, lying unseen. Thus, the poet stresses the extinction of the Aboriginal tribal traditions. Wright also notes, through her metaphor of the “painted bodies/a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot” that rituals such as corroboree are no longer practiced. Her use of the words “dream”, “sleeping”, and “forgot” emphasizes that these ancient rituals, so much a part of Aboriginal culture, have ceased to live on today. Wright then states that “the nomad feet are still”. Here, the word “nomad” refers to the itinerant lifestyle of the Aborigines, “still” now, since the Aboriginal way of life no longer has any value in Australian society.

How would you feel if you had the thoughts of your own funeral playing out in your head? The caesura used in line three and line seven is another great example of one of the rhythm patterns in this poem. End rhyme is a rhythm patterns used in this poem in stanzas two, three, and four at the end of the first and third lines. One example is from line six and eight where it says, “ A service, like a drum- / My mind was going numb” (807). I think the reason for this end rhyme is showing the service playing out in her head like and drum, but at the same time her body is beginning to become numb from the thoughts. I think the author uses the end rhyme on in the middle lines for the comparison of the way