“This country is part of my soul,” John Williamson tells Apple Music. “I wasn't brought up in the city, I was brought up as a little kid collecting bird's eggs and catching fish in the river, and I was already in love with the bush as a kid.” The Australian country music artist has been making music for five decades, singing about his country—what he loves about it, what angers him about it and why it means so much to him. His rise to fame felt slow after winning the talent show New Faces with his first major single, “Old Man Emu”. “There were 16 years of doing clubs and pubs, really on the strength of one hit,” he says. “It wasn't until the mid-'80s that I collected enough songs, after going through the centre of Australia, to bring out the Mallee Boy album [in 1986]. It put me in the ARIA charts—not just the country charts. The following album Warragul was the same. By then I realised I was a reasonable songwriter—I'd been regarded as a bit of novelty, up to that point. But I stuck at it.” Below, Williamson talks more about some of the highlights from his lengthy career. "Rip Rip Woodchip” “Folk singers would make statements about things. Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, they were the kind of people that would write kind of protest songs about how the world's going. So I was never backward in coming forward if I had an opinion about something and putting it in a song. At the time, they were knocking down old forests and turning it into wood pulp, and that just seemed wrong to me. It's the old forests that are most important because they've got the habitat, the old oak trees, et cetera, that all just get pushed down and put into a heap. I'm a romantic as far as the bush is concerned. Seeing a huge, magnificent, thousand-year-old tree taken down just seems like sacrilege. ‘Rip Rip Woodchip’ apparently had quite an influence on people, generally. It made them think about it a bit. If it's not controversial, it's not doing its job.” “Old Man Emu” “We moved from the Mallee up to northwest New South Wales, and we moved onto some big property. At one stage we had 14,000 acres. So I was surrounded, for the first time, by emus and kangaroos. You didn't see too many in the Mallee, because that was all reasonably thick scrub, and you saw a hell of a lot of bird life, but you never saw kangaroos or emus. And I guess I purposely tried to come up with a novelty song. I was pretty aware, back then, that probably the only Australian material that really got much prominence on the hit parade were novelty songs. They were funny songs that virtually send ourselves up—‘Pub With No Beer’, ‘Shaddap You Face’, ‘The Redback on the Toilet Seat’, all that sort of stuff. It was like we didn't take ourselves seriously. And singing with a full-on Aussie accent—I never aimed my music at the overseas market, that didn't bother me.” “Raining on the Rock” “I went on a songwriting trip. I had a big F100 ute that was converted into a big station wagon, and I had one roadie. We had one little sound system and my foot stage box, which I'd developed in the pubs. I decided to do a 14,000 km trip through the centre and see what I could find. I didn't actually see it raining on the rock [Uluru], but I imagined what it would be like, you know? It's very exciting, if you've never been to the rock, when you first come up to it, it just blows you away. It sort of comes up from the horizon. It's unbelievable how it just appears all of a sudden. There was nothing else around it, it's all flat. I was very inspired by the rock, so I basically just described the bush as I was getting there. I imagined how the colours would change when it's raining. I'm thankful that when it has rained on it, the song fits it. It's magnificent whether it rains on it or not, anyway. That was the first version I recorded on my own, I don't know which one you listened to. But then I re-recorded it with Warren Williams, an elder out in Hermannsburg, west of Alice. He inspired me to change a couple of words—like 'Uluru is power', I'd said 'Uluru has power'. For them it's a very powerful, spiritual centre. It's not only the rock, it's all around it. The story's all around it. That's actually more interesting in the long run, to walk around it. If I was the education minister or something, I would demand that every school offer excursions for kids to go out there and walk around the rock. I think they would get a different perception of what this country is.” “Keeper of the Stones” “I have no god, but I do have a connection with the spirit of an ancient country that is like that. There's something about nature that that's what keeps me going. I just absolutely adore the nature of it. The first line is ‘If you take me from the land, you leave me with no soul, I am like a tree/Everything I am is rooted in the soil, or I am just a stick to burn.’ That's how I feel. Then I describe meeting Warren, and the song covered how I feel, as well as how he feels about it. If I was told to get out of Australia, and go and live in America or something, I think I'd die in about two years. I imagine it must be like that for Indigenous people. It would've been in the old days, when they were moved out of their land to a mission or something, it would have been horrible. The whole landscape is like a city to them; there's always things they identify that are landmarks. The landscape feels civilised to them, because everything has meaning.” “True Blue” “Sometimes I think people think it's the only song I've written. I was asked to write a song called ‘True Blue’ by John Singleton. He'd sold the advertising company that he made a fortune out of, but he wasn't allowed to start up another company, knowing how good he was at it, for three years. So he decided to put a TV show together called True Blue Aussies where he went around the country interviewing people like Buddy Williams, who predated Slim Dusty. He just said, ‘I want a song called “True Blue”.’ So I had to sit down and that's why the whole song is a question. You know, ‘What is it? Is it me and you? Is it mum and dad? Is it a cockatoo, what is it?’ So I'm actually saying what I think ‘True Blue’ means, and of course it's about anybody that loves this country like I do. I'm very annoyed with any white supremacist using it to describe white Australians, it really annoys me.” “Cootamundra Wattle” “There’s two sides to it. When I was a kid my mum was always into wildflowers. In the Mallee, about six miles out of Quambatook, there was an area on the corner of one of the bends of the road on the way to another town, and it always had these boronias and wattles that just seemed prolific in that spot. My mother ended up making the council take care of it, and preserve it, so they wouldn't put any road through it. And I was a bird lover as a kid, used to collect eggs and all that. During my first marriage, with my kids and everything, we had a Cootamundra wattle in the backyard, and it always reminded me of that time with my mother, and the Cootamundra wattle. It’s a beautiful wattle, the pastel blue leaves, and a burst of flowers. She was going through the camphor box one day and getting all teary—she always thought that the time with the kids, before they went to school, was the best part of her life. She was just very sad about that that time has gone.” “Home Among the Gumtrees” “Well, I didn't write that, the bloke who wrote it was Bob Brown—not the politician. He also wrote another great song that I recorded called ‘Santa Bring me a Dinosaur’. He was good at that really sort of basic, almost corny stuff, but it was very simple, and people latched on to it pretty quickly. In a way I was a bit annoyed that people relate me to ‘Home Among the Gumtrees’, because I didn't write it—in fact I never thought it was all that well-written. But it was very commercial. I was requested to sing it at Steve Irwin's memorial service, as well as ‘True Blue’. So I've come to respect it a lot more, but I don't put it in the show. I've got 500 songs of my own, why sing somebody else’s?” “Pigs on the River” “It was meant to hurt those people who were taking water from the river illegally. There's no denying it. If I went anywhere near those people they'd probably shoot me, but it's tragic—the water that's been allowed to be taken out of the Darling Basin. They gave too many licenses away, and now they're trading the licenses to overseas companies and all sorts of things. It’s ridiculous. That's the lifeblood of Queensland and New South Wales and South Australia. I think they realised they issued too many licenses, but the [people] at the top of the river seem to think, ‘Well, the water goes past us first, we should have it.’ So they've been a bit greedy up there. But the ones that did it illegally, that really topped it off for me.”