Almost 3,000km is a long way to travel for a gig. But for the band affectionately known by its fans as Blacca Dacca, traversing great distances is becoming a habit.
Desert Stars, led by frontman Jay Minning, is Australia’s most remote rock band. This weekend they will travel from their community of Tjuntjuntjara in the Western Australia desert to the closest major town of Kalgoorlie, almost 600km away. There they will catch a plane to Perth and then on to Canberra and Sydney for a series of three concerts.
The venues for two of these concert are not pubs, clubs or stadiums. The cinema chain Dendy is hosting two of the Desert Stars performances – because in addition to playing live, the documentary about their first ever tour is making its New South Wales and ACT debut. (The third concert is happening at the National Gallery of Australia, to help open Vincent Namatjira’s major retrospective.)
Gravel Road follows the band as they embark on their first tour: a 3,723km bus trip crossing the Gibson and Sandy deserts to play in Laverton, Warburton, Uluru, Yuendumu, Balgo, Halls Creek, Fitzroy Crossing and Broome, to promote Desert Stars’ second studio album, Mungangka Ngaranyi (It’s On Tonight).
The tour encounters what to any other band would be unsurmountable roadblocks by the time the group reaches Warburton, on day three. The option of shortcutting it straight through to Broome is discussed, but as one member remarks: “That’s a long way to go for one gig.”
“The biggest antagonist in this film is the landscape,” says Tristan Pemberton, who co-directed Gravel Road with the Tjuntjuntjara community.
“The tour didn’t quite work out the way we planned, but that’s the reality of trying to travel through remote Australia. where there aren’t any sealed roads, and you don’t have much support for things like vehicles breaking down or getting spare parts.
“But I think the essence of what the band intended to set out to do is still captured: the idea of getting out and telling their stories outside their remote community.”
Most of the Desert Stars’ songs are performed in their second language, English, because “in a way, there’s not enough words in Pitjantjatjara … I sing in English, better understanding [for audiences] and more words,” says frontman Minning, also a songwriter.
“For a black man, I’m living in two worlds here – and I got to get the story across to the other side.”
Minning has plenty of stories to tell. Doing time in jail, he says, “I got time to do all this, write all my stories about my land, my people”.
The land of the Spinifex people spans desert terrain across the Western Australia and South Australian borders, and belonged to them for thousands of generations until the British began nuclear testing at nearby Maralinga in the 1950s.
In what was a first European contact experience for many Spinifex hunters and gatherers, they were uprooted and trucked to the Australian Aboriginal Evangelical Mission in Cundeelee, 160km east of Kalgoorlie.
They were not permitted to return to their traditional lands until the late 1980s.
Minning’s song Running is about what happened at Maralinga.
“That still lingers in people’s heads, generation after generation,” he says “It’s got stories about it, so I write a song about running; to me its a tribute to survivors.”
The band’s drummer, Ashley Franks, recalls his father’s tale of “a big serpent coming up … but it was the bomb and he was running for days to warn his family, to warn his people that a big danger was coming”.
The serpent story handed down by the Spinifex people actually came from white officials in the Menzies government. They told the nearby communities the noises of the nuclear blasts were the sound of wanampi, hostile rainbow serpents, to discourage them from getting too close to the testing sites.
The film Gravel Road has itself been on the road for almost two years, although until now has never been screened in NSW.
It won the best documentary feature award at the Poppy Jasper film festival in California and best road/tour movie at the Sound on Screen Music film festival in South Africa. Gravel Road made its Australian premiere at Cinefest Oz in WA’s Margaret River in late 2022.
Gravel Road will screen at Dendy Canberra at 6.30pm on Friday 1 March and Dendy Newtown at 6pm on Sunday 3 March, with both screenings followed by a Q&A and live performance by Desert Stars. On Saturday 2 March, the band is performing at the opening of the Vincent Namatjira exhibition at Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia
