DARWIN BOOK LAUNCH: The Silver River

Jim Moginie in-conversation with Matt Garrick

Join us for a night of stories and song with founding member of Midnight Oil, Jim Moginie, to celebrate the release of The Silver River: a memoir of family – lost, made and found.

A moving and inspiring memoir of families lost and rediscovered, by a founding member of legendary band Midnight Oil.

For fifty years, songwriter, guitarist and keyboard player Jim Moginie was a driving force behind the startling rise and global success of one of Australia’s most iconic rock bands, Midnight Oil. Through the ups and downs of writing and releasing generation-defining songs, touring relentlessly, and enduring the intense scrutiny drawn by the band’s uncompromising lyrics and environmental activism, the members of Midnight Oil developed a feeling of ‘five against the world’, the firm friends forming a de facto family.

For Jim Moginie, the band was a calling and a refuge, and a distraction from a growing feeling that something was missing from his life. Raised by a loving family, he’d learned as a child that his biological mother had given him up for adoption. Gradually, alongside the Oils’ unfolding saga of stardom and controversy, Jim began a quest to find his birth family, these twin paths leading him from suburban Sydney through the nascent Australian punk scene and the uncharted musical territory of the Western deserts to the stadiums of Europe and America, the meandering roads and verdant hills of rural Ireland, countless musical collaborations, and poignant reunions with band members and long-lost relatives.

Threaded with vivid recollections of childhood and travel, behind-the-scenes stories of band life, and fascinating insights into the creative processes that produced some of this country’s most beloved songs, The Silver River is at once a lyrical coming-of-age story, a heart-warming family chronicle, and a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Australian music.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jim Moginie was raised in Sydney’s northern suburbs and attended high school by the banks of Sydney Harbour, where he befriended future Midnight Oil drummer Rob Hirst. Together with another friend, Andrew James, they formed the band Farm, before recruiting singer Peter Garrett and guitarist Martin Rotsey and changing their name to Midnight Oil. Jim is best known as a songwriter, guitarist and keyboard player for the Oils, but his career has also spanned dozens of less well known creative adventures, from playing traditional Irish music with Shameless Seamus & the Tullamore Dews and creating soundscapes for eight guitars under the banner of Jim Moginie’s Electric Guitar Orchestra, to playing with punk-edged cerebral rock band the Family Dog and surf instrumentalists The Break. Jim has also collaborated with prominent artists such as Silverchair, Sarah Blasko, the Warumpi Band, the Living End, Kasey Chambers, Neil Finn and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

ABOUT THE CHAIR:

Matt Garrick is an award-winning journalist and author at ABC Darwin. He has written extensively about politics, Indigenous affairs and music. His first book, Writing in the Sand, an authorised biography of NT band Yothu Yindi, was published by ABC Books in 2021.