When Midnight Oil took to the stage on Sunday night at Melbourne's Rod Laver Arena, it closed a chapter of live music history and not just for the band of brothers, but also for my own family too.
I was 12 years old when Mum and Dad took our whole family to see Midnight Oil.
It was 1990, the band's Blue Sky Mining tour, and for $28.50 we all headed along to the National Tennis Centre to see them play their hits.
The Oils had already been regulars on the record player at home for years. The vinyl cover of Red Sails in the Sunset was burned into my brain.
As a six-year-old, that image of the Sydney Opera House in the middle of a nuclear attack was a visceral and ominous signifier of a fear I didn't understand.
Mum and Dad would take the whole family to anti-nuclear protests in the city and, even though the message wasn't quite clear to me, the medium was: Use your voice.
As I grew up, the Oils records kept coming. Diesel and Dust was full of hooks, and stories of Indigenous Australia I had not heard before.
Blue Sky Mining invited me into a world that was foreign to me in suburban Melbourne. I was a pre-teen learning about asbestos-related illness and the horrors of war.
On that night in November 1990, as we clasped our tickets and filed into the Tennis Centre, I saw it all come alive in the best way to experience the Oils: on stage.
It lit a fire in me, a love of live music, that never went out.
Frontman Peter Garrett's insect limbs and wild abandon is what I remember the most.
"Why is he dancing like that?" I asked my Dad, who just laughed.
I recall the stage being bathed in orange lights and Rob Hirst playing a steel water tank twice the size of his drum kit.
On Sunday night, the tank is back on stage, although a miniature version this time.
"Was the tank three times bigger when we were here 32 years ago?" I ask my Mum.
"Yep," she replies confidently, and even though I'm still unsure whether it's a trick of age and time or the truth, I nod happily.
The audience spans the generations. Another family sits behind us.
"I brought them here when they were your age," my Mum tells the two young boys, as she points to me and my big brother.
I watch as their brains struggle to compute that we were ever kids like them.
Throughout the show I'll see their parents sing much-loved lyrics to them, and their own faces light up in the shared experience.
Midnight Oil are at the Rod Laver Arena, as it's now known, for the final time.
They've been honest about doing future gigs for fundraisers, but this will be their last tour.
With it, the band launches a new album, Resist, their first in 20 years, which manages to capture and hold the ferocity of where they began 50 years ago.
They open with the album's title track, and it's fitting that the images projected behind them are of resistance from across the world, from yesterday and today.
There is a heartfelt plea to listen to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
At one point an audience member throws a T-shirt on stage showing support for the people of Ukraine, and Peter Garrett pulls it on immediately.
The new songs sit alongside the old in a kind of stark parallel, as songs of Rising Seas in 2022 mirror the environmental activism their music has championed from day dot.
It's a seated show, and you can feel the rows shudder when the old stuff is played.
I turn to see my parents sing along, word perfect, to the classics, and look out to the crowd to see fans jump out of their seats to dance with abandon.
They flail their arms like Garrett: The power of performance.
In the time since their last tour, Midnight Oil have lost their longtime bass player, Bones Hillman, to cancer.
The show is dedicated to him, but it's not the only moment the Oils stop to remember a friend.
A day earlier, the world learned of the shocking death of Foo Fighters' drummer, Taylor Hawkins, and as Midnight Oil launch into Power and the Passion, drummer Rob Hirst stands to deliver a eulogy to his fallen friend, before obliterating his kit in one of the greatest drum solos in history.
When the lights fall after the final song, black and white images of Hillman, Hawkins, late Mushroom Records founder Michael Gudinski, and cricketer Shane Warne appear on the giant video screens.
With the celebration of this final musical communion comes the reminder of loss, and of a tough few years in music.
It's been 32 years since we rolled up to the Tennis Centre with excitement in our bellies. To see the band that played on our old record player at home, to have my parents gift us with what they knew already: Music is meant to be experienced loud and live.
In that time, we have lost loved ones ourselves. But we still have each other, and we will always have the Oils.
Midnight Oil's final tour continues.
