Aussie Rock - Who is Your favorite Band

Aussie Rock - Who is Your favorite Band

  • Cold Chisel

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs

    Votes: 1 16.7%
  • The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band

    Votes: 1 16.7%
  • Midnight Oil

    Votes: 2 33.3%
  • Daddy Cool

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • INXS

    Votes: 1 16.7%
  • The Easybeats

    Votes: 1 16.7%
  • Men at Work

    Votes: 2 33.3%
  • AC/DC

    Votes: 1 16.7%
  • Skyhooks

    Votes: 2 33.3%
  • Other - please list

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    6
Depends on the species of Kangaroo they range from small like Rock Walabies to the Red Kangaroo (Macropus rufus) is the largest of all the present species of marsupials (they are not mammals) in Asutralia and live in Central Australia (the desert regions). Reds are the big ones and can grow typically up to 5.2 ft (1.6m) and weigh about 190 lb (85kg). The largest confirmed one having been around 2.1 m (6.9 ft) tall and weighed 91 kg (200 lb).[SUP][/SUP]
Big enough to take on the fattest politician!!!!;)
 

John Watt

Member
Thinking about Aussie rock, and how many acts I thought were L.A. based,
who's up there on the charts now?
Have any big bands featured aboriginals?
What Australian woods are used for building professional instruments?
Who are the biggest electric and acoustic guitar makers?
Hurry, hurry, oh please hurry, and link us up.
All this, from a former friend of Pete Traynor when he was a music store employee.
 
Responses in red below- good questions!

Thinking about Aussie rock, and how many acts I thought were L.A. based,
who's up there on the charts now?
Have any big bands featured aboriginals? Yothu Yindi would be the biggest but there are many here, although not internationally know eg Coloured Stone
What Australian woods are used for building professional instruments? refer to their web sites below - quite a few aussie woods in fact
Who are the biggest electric and acoustic guitar makers? Maton and Cole Clarke
Hurry, hurry, oh please hurry, and link us up. Trying
All this, from a former friend of Pete Traynor when he was a music store employee.
Cool

http://www.yothuyindi.com/

http://www.maton.com.au/

http://www.coleclarkguitars.com/index.asp
 
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John Watt

Member
All right! My delving into Australia continues!
Jeff Martin as a feature guitarist for Maton? He's local for me, and got kinda Arabic with his band, The Tea Party.
Lots of interesting things to hear and see with these links. Thanks!
But that's not all. What you typed before got me looking when I picked some movies this weekend.

"Animal Kingdom", a very grim crime drame filmed in Australia, and I don't know what city.
Guy Pearce, someone I thought was English, was a detective with a Paul Hogan accent, if I'm right.

You put the name Hugo Weaving into my head, so when I saw four stars, "A great film,
Weaving gives the performance of a lifetime", I picked it right away, supposed to be a road movie.
"Last Ride"
I don't see Hugo as giving the bravura performance as advertised, a laid back, fatherly thing,
considering the other extravagant roles he played and his villainous American roles.
His accent is much more florid, and I'm not sure where he was in Australia.

They were running from the law, stealing cars and sleeping in the bush, swimming in ponds and rivers.
That's the first time I've seen an Australian not get chased by crocs, snakes or other exotic animals,
even if they showed a lot of nature. Oh, except for the movie Australia, when it was the Japanese.
They came to what looked like a huge lake and he didn't stop, driving the car into it.
But they kept going, looking like they were on top of the water, splashing a little.
Then they got out and walked around, splashing a little.
I thought it might be a salt flat like in Utah, but the shore was reddish-brown soil.
He also was calling aboriginals "blacks". I never heard that before, from an Australian.
These might be the first two Australian movies where I never heard a digereedoo or saw a boomerang.

Big sky country, that's for sure.

I'm adding after getting back from Facebook,
where some friends in the business are wondering where Jeff's twelve-string came from.
This is one of their more ordinary songs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agg6LgjBtzM.
 
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Cool glad you liked.

Guy Pearce is aussie- think he started out as a TV actor here, and as you may have discovered know there are australian movies other then Crockadile Dundee type.

Have not seen the movies you refer to but we do have many salt lakes here in Oz the biggest being Lake Eyre- site of Donald Campbell's world speed record attempt in the 1960's (currently under water- happens once every 20 years or so) and Lake Gairdner- Australian version of Bonnieville for another. See links below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Campbell


http://www.dlra.org.au/lgairdner.htm
 

John Watt

Member
I remember watching Donald Campbell's record attempt with our family, the first live television death.

Crocodile Dundee really hit a nerve with me, identifying with the bushman in the city.
I've always seen Australian movies as being original and concerned about people, not flash and trash or slash and gash.

A good friend of mine in the 70's, meeting him by selling my car, came from Adelaide, Alex Christoff.
He was an Olympic speed track oval rider, and two weeks before the Olympics his appendix burst, pulling him out.
He had some incredible teak furniture, cabinet doors made from strips that curved into the side,
being hard to see the lines from the cuts, very impressive.
He was working for the GM frame assembly plant in Thorold as a hydraulic repairman, working on towmotors and cranes.
He did so well GM offered to set him up as an independant sub-contractor, building a shop off-site.
He'd hire me for a Saturday, going into the plant, usually spray-washing machinery.
His bike didn't have gears, but he could take off like a rocket and do circles backwards, no hands.
He's the only person I've ever used a band I had to play for a private party.
 
See the good people come from Adelaide just like me. Won't mention Snowtown thou.................

Mad Max yes its time they made another in the series
 

John Watt

Member
Mel Gibson has had one of the strangest movie careers,
full of huge, innovative movies with the uh, widest range of themes and styles.
Showing the C.I.A. as heroin trading operatives in Viet Nam was his finest Hollywood moment.
I'd be willing to be stuck with him in a beaver lodge, even if he was barking more than chewing the bark.

My Australian movie odyssey, er, walkabout, continues, taking out "The Man from Snowy Mountain" yesterday.
I had doubts, seeing Kirk Douglas as the star, and advertised as panoramic scenery,
usually critics code for a lousy plot, but this movie did it all for me.
I didn't know there were mountains like that, or wild horses, er, brombies.
It featured, for this North American long-time western watcher, what was the biggest theme for early movies,
the best horse stunt riding I've ever seen, not special effects, just incredible horse action.
No kangaroos, spear-throwing, or aboriginals at all. It could have been made in Vancouver.
And I'll say one thing, as long as there's an aboriginal who can sleep standing on one leg,
I don't want to try wallaby stew.

By the way, when I was watching "Animal Kingdom", it showed a few moments of television,
and I can't remember the song now, either Little River Band or Air Supply,
but the guitarist was playing left-handed with the bass strings on the bottom like me.
 
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John Watt

Member
Mad Max 4: Offshore

Mel Gibson is sitting in the penthouse suite of a large Hollywood skyscraper overlooking L.A.,
with his agent telling him his career and reputation is in tatters, unbookable, unwanted, even here right now, uninvited.
Mel takes this rejection hard, gnawing on the furniture and his arm hair, ranting like Lethal Weapon numbers 1 to 5,
and just as his bluster and bombast reaches an Australian female prime minister's length, seeming to shake the office,
it's the long-awaited earthquake, and as the city slips into the ocean, almost catching up to him on the highway,
Mel is seen getting away in a private military contractor's armoured truck, with chrome side exhausts and camoflage graphics,
carrying the only remaining Hollywood movies from all the major studios, making him the most wanted man in the world.
Even then, he's considering his next movie, thinking of calling it "Sell You Lloyd", him being Lloyd, the star,
selling off the only Hollywood movie collection, carrying Iron Man 4, The Fast and Furious 6, Mean Streets 2,
Gone With the Wind (Tornado version), The Wizard of Oz remake featuring Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney,
but more than that, all the Oscar backstage and dressing room action taken with secret cameras,
featuring cameos by almost every major Hollywood personality, New York and west coast stars.
Mel is shown struggling with his identity, not knowing for sure if he's Australian or just another Californicator.
Invasive snake-head fish fly out of the water at him, as he pauses to drink at Hoover Dam, now cracked and leaking,
with security running around saying "Two tried to cross, but only one got out".
He trades what Botox he has for peyote, and spends three days underground in a Payute ceremonial pit,
watching his own reruns, more than just a flashback scene for the audience,
alternating between what women want, sensitivity, and what men need, guns, drugs and violence.
Just when a deleted scene from The Beaver is showing,
where Mel is trying to make an elk hop like a roo and it gets too silly, trying to get marsupial wit'it,
Kylie Minogue's Lear jet lands, looking for a peyote pit stop, and she takes him away, flying over the ruins and remains.
As the credits roll, Midnight Oil is shown huddled around a campfire in the Texas desert, looking lost, smelling it, but not finding.
 
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John Watt

Member
Have you ever been to Snowy Mountain?
I said it could have been filmed in Vancouver,
but Vancouver doesn't have trees that look like skin, not bark.

I should have given my script more thought, coming up with better ideas later.
It inspired a couple of lines for my new song,
"When everything is irriadiated,
and the haters really hate it".

Cheech and Chong: We'd ride our bicyles to DeCew Falls for a campfire,
on top of the escarpment near St. Catharines, now Brock University,
for a Friday or Saturday night trip as high school students,
and then the owner of the Canadiana drive-in would let us in for free,
as long as we sat along the back fence, turning on the speaker closest to us.
They always had a Cheech and Chong for an all-nighter, or Alice's Restaurant.

Not Armageddon, as predicted in the Holy Bible, a nuclear conflagration that causes the end of our known world,
yes, they knew nuclear back then, after suffering the first detonations over 4,500 years ago,
but The Worst of Times, what we are living in now. I'll leave it at this, except to say:
if you know your spiritual and physical environment, you can find peace within yourself within it.
And if All Peace Is Upon You, the love and creativity of this life becomes alive,
and those ancient symbols painted on rocks become more than just artwork.
Even "the echoes of glaciers from long ago" become something to sing about, with some enchanting guitar production.

The Canadiana was torn down, and that property, along with the abandoned quarry behind it,
became a logical, if poorly engineered, garbage dump for St. Catharines.
Yeah, all those old style garbage trucks climbing up the long, steep escarpment road,
the only road in the peninsula I won't cruise down on my bike.
A big windstorm blew most of the the garbage out of this open pit,
covering the twenty foot tall Lundy's fence enclosing it,
and the surrounding countryside with paper and plastic bags.
It took years to get this cleaned up, even if in the forests you still find it.
 
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Snowy Mountains yes I've been there a couple of times- I'm in Christchurch at present and yesterday was back toward Mt Hutt which I would guess would be even more like Vancouver or even the Rockies. Yes I can remember watch Cheech and Chong at the drive in - in Oz too was always a drivein favourite - Alice restaurant is good movie but never saw it on the big screen here.
 
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