Joy McKean, Slim Dusty and Wiradjuri Survival Legacies

Slim Dusty and Joy McKean came together through their shared passion for country music and their love of taking their show on the road. Their marriage of more than fifty years is celebrated as the most successful partnership in the history of Australian music. “I’ve been there (and back again)” by Joy McKean is a book about her life with Slim Dusty.
Presented in the style of a “coffee table book”, “I’ve been there” is part storytelling, part photo album, part songbook. It’s a lovely book to leaf through, and the stories of their life on the road together, from 1954 onwards, are interesting and engaging. They travelled all over Australia, and in the book, Joy says of the early days “Our old caravan was short on home comforts but we could make do like plenty of other people, and we were our own bosses….. a fact that pleased Slim even more than it did me. I think it was the big deciding factor in us continuing the touring life. That’s why I agree with a line in one of Slim’s songs where he says, ‘I always say the old days were the best damn days of all.’ He was referring to the hard days before we had motels and cars and bitumen roads; big sound systems and stage bands; planes and tour managers. I enjoyed the easier side of touring in later years, but, like Slim, I think the exciting adventure of being out there among the little towns and the big, being able to talk to people after the show every night, and living all over this land and being part of it, was the best of all.”

“Survival Legacies” by Peter Kabaila is another excellent book. It details stories of survival of Aboriginal people in the urbanised south-eastern part of Australia and presents them in a historical framework drawn from Aboriginal elders, mothers, stockmen, storytellers, politicians, tour guides, law-breakers and law-makers.
“In this book I've tried to tell stories of adaptation and survival in Aboriginal communities of south-eastern Australia,” author Peter Kabaila said. “I was attracted to visiting and recording southeast Australian Aboriginal settlements, particularly in the Wiradjuri and neighbouring regions of New South Wales, rather than seeking out distant communities, because this is where I live. Many of the stories here are highly personal accounts; about discrimination, family, poverty, community and re-settlement. Details of survival are the most important themes in life, and because such families are largely forgotten, these accounts are an important record of Aboriginal life.” This book combines the three Wiradjuri Places field books, which have been long out of print, with additional interviews, maps and discussion. The 600 page book includes an Aboriginal family name index and a place name index, as well as 370 photos and illustrations.

These two books, and many more, are available from Gilgandra Shire Library. The Library is open from Monday to Friday, from 10am to 12.30 and from 1.30pm to 5pm, and on Saturdays from 10am to 12 noon. To see what books the Library has, check out our catalogue at http://nwls.spydus.com. Happy reading!