Ship’s Log: The Red Dirt Blues
April 2026
The thing about the desert is it doesn’t care how you feel about it.
You can love it. You can hate it. You can write poems about its emptiness, its ancient silence, its big sky that makes you feel like a speck of dust on God’s workbench. The desert will absorb all of it and ask for more because the desert is not a mirror. It’s a mouth.
I’ve been travelling to that mouth for forty years. First, as a kid with a thumb out on the Stuart Highway, chasing sounds I’d only heard on rare radio transmissions and cassette tapes passed hand to hand. Then, as a man with a guitar and a passport stamped in places most people can’t find on a map. Cambodia. Timor-Leste. The dive bars of Phnom Penh. The old courthouse in Alice Springs, where they tried the men who killed the Warlpiri at Coniston.
Somewhere along the way, I forgot the primal reason I picked up a guitar in the first place.
To make noise. To make the room shake. To feel something that can’t be described, only experienced. To be more specific, that was me, in my bedroom down by the river Derwent, plugging in a cheap electric guitar (now considered the greatest Australian guitar ever made), a cherry red Maton Firebyrd with it’s 3-on-the-tree pick-up settings “bass”, “treble” & “wild dog”. Well, you don’t have to guess the setting I went for as I plugged this old 66 Maton into a homemade amplifier – my uncle’s Hitachi Hi-Fi, it was soon spitting out the kinda bite, snarl and feedback that has been with me ever since. Unfortunately I can’t say the same for the guitar, it was stolen somewhere along the way but that doesn’t mean I ain’t kept it in mind, I’m still set to “wild dog”, and it’s perfectly in place in my kinda blues the Red Dirt Blues.
This is me remembering.
I turn sixty this year. The Year of the Fire Horse. 1966.
The year the Wave Hill Walk-Off began. The year my guitar was built in England. The year the world was already coming apart, same as it is now, same as it always has been.
You’d think a person would slow down at sixty. Take up gardening. Learn to appreciate quiet afternoons. I’ve tried. I’m no good at it. The quiet afternoons remind me of all the noise I haven’t made yet.
So I started a new band. Red Dirt Blues.
You could call it a detour. A sabbatical. A midlife crisis. But that’s not what it feels like. It feels like coming home to a place I’ve never lived. It feels like the howl you make when you’ve spent a lifetime chasing frequencies and suddenly realise the only frequency that matters is the one your own body makes when it refuses to shut up.
The band was not born in a rehearsal room. It emerged from jam sessions then a live gig outside the Old Courthouse in Alice Springs, from a lunchtime concert on the lawn where Warlpiri elder Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves gave us a song – a protest song – that rattled the stone walls.
That song, that opening chord was the beginning.
Ned had come to me with a song about his grandson. About Kumanjayi White. About all the sons and daughters locked in cells. “Jails are full of our children,” he sang. And the room went silent. Not the silence of respect – the silence of a truth too heavy for words. A silence that had been building for generations.
We recorded that song. “Karrinjala Muajarri (Ceasefire).” A protest anthem sung in Warlpiri and English, mixed in Berlin by Professor Kinski, built on a twelve-string strum and a voice that has carried this land for sixty thousand years.
That song is the heart of Red Dirt Blues. Everything else is just the noise around it.
And that noise matters too. Because you can’t deliver a message like that without an amplifier. You can’t howl that kind of truth into a vacuum. You need drums. You need fuzz. You need to turn it up.
The debut EP is called I Gotta Go. Four tracks. Ten inches of sexy black vinyl.
We recorded live to tape in a tin shed outside Alice Springs. No click tracks. No overdubs. Just me and Stuart “Tart” Robertson, who’s been my drummer since we were both young enough to think the world owed us something. Now we know better. The world doesn’t owe you a thing. But you can still take what you need.
The producer was Paul Maybury. He’s a man who understands that polish is overrated. That the hum of an amplifier is part of the music. That the mistakes are often the best parts.
The mastering was done by Jim Diamond in Detroit. The White Stripes. The Dirt Bombs. Andre Williams. He’s got ears like a radar dish and a philosophy that can be boiled down to this: if it sounds good, it is good. Don’t overthink it.
The man with the radio show listened to our rough mixes and said: “The Cramps meet The Monks. Primitive boogie for the end of the world.”
I said: “It’s Slim Dusty with a fuzz box.”
And we take that as a great compliment… it means we’re tuned in to the ‘out there!’.
Each song is a small story. A little movie scene.
“I Gotta Go” is a road-train boogie. Diesel and truckstops. The sound of a man who can’t stay put because staying put feels like dying.
“Devil’s Lost His Marbles” is a rollickin’, white-line-fever swamp-blues boogie. Written after a gig at the Devil’s Marbles Hotel. A place that’s been broken into more times than anyone can count. A place where the staff keep showing up anyway, because someone has to.
“Where Ya Goin’, Simos?” is our kind of desert twang. It’s jangling surf-noir. A travelogue for a friend who disappeared into the outback and never came back.
“Stone Age Baby” is a dumb-and-happy rocker. A celebration of the primitive. A Freddy Flintstone and Barney Rubble two-fingered salute to the robots.
The idea for that song came from Grant Granites, our Warlpiri slide guitarist who drives three hundred kilometres on desert roads just to get to band practice. We were sitting around at the tables outside Alice Springs’s The Diplomat Motel, and the local news came on – some politician talking about a dumb arsed progress initiative. Grant laughed. Not a bitter laugh. A real one.
“Send me back to the Stone Age,” he said. “Yeah. I was happy there.”
That’s the whole song right there….and hey, now Mad King Donald’s saying the same kinda stuff… starting wars, threatening to bomb Iran back to the stone age… Heck, if Donald’s view of paradise is today’s civilisation? Well, you can send me back to the Stone Age too… I know I’ll be much happier there than in this new age of the idiot.
WE’RE A FAMILY BAND!
I’ve spent my life working with musicians who live way beyond the comfort zone of the inner city music industry. Getting to know and share the musical life journey with Warlpiri friends like Grant Japanangka Granites. Donovan Rice. Kumanjayi Japanangka Brown. Ned. and Joseph Baarda on Sax. These are my friends from the desert lands. I’ve been listening and learning from their work, old cassette recordings, bush band gigs. We’ve toured and travelled together, cashed pay cheques at banks that looked at us like we were bank robbers. We’ve laughed and argued and played until our fingers bled. Outback Boogie!
Red Dirt Blues is a jam session for all of us. Black and white together. Not compartmentalised by racism and stigma. Just musicians making noise.
That’s my job. My the phone calls, to book it, cook it up and set it loose.
The EP is just the first transmission.
There’s a book coming – The Red Dirt Blues, a novella that started as field notes and turned into something else. A record of the road. The lost cassettes of the Western Desert. The ghost of my great-uncle Dennis, who rode five hundred miles on horseback to manage a cattle station and never spoke a word about what he saw. The silence he left behind – and the music that grew in that silence.
There’s a film – SMOKELAND. Shot on vintage Super-8. Hand-processed at Nano Lab in Castlemaine. A desert noir thriller set in the Wimmera, with a stolen Sidney Nolan painting and a Bollywood wedding and a pink lake that swallows bad men. It’s a movie you can listen to. An album you can watch.
The book and the film and the record are all the same thing, really. Different skins on the same animal. Different ways of saying: We were here. We listened. We tried to sing it back.
The launch shows are this weekend. Friday at The Catfish in Fitzroy. Saturday at George Lane in St Kilda. Two nights, two sides of the river, two chances to make noise before I pack the guitar and head back to the desert.
I don’t know what happens after that. I never do. That’s the point.
But right now, if you’re in Melbourne, come make some noise. Bring your boots. Bring your ears. Bring whatever hope you’ve got left.
We’ve got a 10-inch record. Sexy black vinyl. Limited edition.
It’s a time to get hollering. To yelp and howl primitive style. Blues, boogie, rock’n’roll, a big psychedelic trip – whatever you want to call it. It’s raw. It’s real. It’s human.
A marking and scratching on the face of time. An echo chamber. Endless space echoes.
Plenty of reverb and twang.
This is the Ship’s Log of The Cambodian Space Project. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just making a detour into the red dirt.
The Space Project will return with a special touring show planned for 2027. It’s all about space travel and it is a tribute to the music and stories of Kak Channthy as an exciting evolution of our “Cosmic Cambodia” musical theatre work.
Tuning in to the OUT THERE
But right now, it’s back to my garage roots circa 1966 and the sounds of howling dingos.
Because the world is on fire. Because the machines are learning to think. Because the old certainties are crumbling. And because, when everything else falls away, what’s left is the simplest thing: a guitar, an amplifier, a voice, and the primal urge to make a sound that says I am here. I am alive. I will not go quietly.
That’s the red dirt blues. That’s primitive boogie. That’s the only thing I know how to do.
See you on the other side.
– Julien
RED DIRT BLUES – “I GOTTA GO” EP Launch
Fri May 1 – The Catfish, Fitzroy VIC (w/ Monsteria, The Flash Bastard Experience)
Tickets: https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/0c5b4de9-1eb1-4d69-9cd3-13dee1171411
Sat May 2 – George Lane, St Kilda VIC
Tickets: https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing/1565768
Welcome to the newest member of the retro guitar family – a classic Teisco, yep! It’s a beautiful thing, with less than 500 of these babies ever made. Come and hear it live with The Red Dirt Blues.