Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

'It's a long straight road and the engine is deep. I can't help thinkin' of a good night's sleep. And the long, long roads of my life are a-callin' me'—that's the start of one of the most famous songs, one of the most iconic songs, in country music, and it was written by Joy McKean. As has been said previously, Joy McKean was born in Singleton. Her mother was a dairy farmer and her father was a school teacher. At a young age she learned to play the steel guitar, the accordion and the piano. Her sister played the ukulele.

This is an incredible songwriter, and what has been mentioned and what we love about Joy McKean, who married Slim Dusty, but I will just focus on Joy, is that she was Australian. There was no doubt about it. Her songs—'Ringer from the Top End', which she wrote the lyrics for; 'Indian Pacific', which she wrote the lyrics for—were Australian. They showed that we didn't have a cultural cringe, that we could be our own people and write about our own circumstances, and we didn't have to try to be Roy Rogers. That's what we liked. Joy McKean and Slim Dusty in their tours around Australia would just hook up the caravan and off they'd go. Probably where they had their biggest following was in Aboriginal communities, Indigenous communities. They really had a big following there. People saw them with lyrics that talked to Australian people, that talked to people in outback areas.

When I was growing up—I grew up, obviously, at Woolbrook and Limbri—I grew up with country music songs. They were part and parcel there. A lot of kids—their dads were truck drivers and they really did culturally identify with a lot of the music. On 'Lights on the Hill', there is a memorial in Gatton in Queensland for truck drivers and bus drivers—we think of the tragic people killed lately, unfortunately, by the alleged actions of a person who wasn't driving well. For the Gatton memorial, they asked if they could incorporate the lyrics, because that song spoke to people on long hauls. That song spoke to their lives.

Joy McKean was no fool. She went to Sydney university; she was no goose. Her first time on radio was when she was 10 years old. It was on 2GB. She went on to have a show on 2KY. It was one of those things that a lot people who liked country music tuned into, to hear the music that spoke to them. There is a statue of Joy McKean with Slim in Tamworth. She won six golden guitars in her own right and Slim won every other one. Here's the thing: on some nights it wasn't so much the Australian country music awards as the Slim Dusty commemoration—but so he should.

A lot of people, because of the style of the music, were attracted to it and were attracted to her song writing skills—even Mental as Anything. People could see the wordcraft of this person was something that they could borrow from and utilise. Later on, in the other direction, to be frank, Midnight Oil wrote lyrics for Slim Dusty in one of their songs. I think both of them—and I say this although Midnight Oil has a strong connection to the other side!—spoke on an Australian narrative, and that's why people like that sort of music.

One of the things I think Joy McKean gave us and that I hope we don't lose is that Australian lexicon, that Australian fingerprint in our music. With country music now, at times—not always—I listen to something and I think, 'You're not Nashville!' That's great, if you want to play Nashville—fine. But I don't hear an Australian song there; I hear a country music song, but I hear basically a Nashville country music song. My cousins live in Nashville, so I've got a pretty good idea of how that show works as well.

As I said, this is commemoration of the work of Joy McKean. Obviously she became Joy Kirkpatrick. Slim Dusty's real name is David Kirkpatrick. David came from Kempsey, and Joy came from Singleton, and obviously they were one of the greatest combinations in country music in Australia's history, without a shadow of a doubt. Fortunately she had a good life. She lived to 93. When she was young she had polio, and she was part of the treatment group—I can't remember the name of that nun—which at the time was pretty dynamic and controversial and others might say revolutionary. But obviously that treatment worked for Joy, and she actually went on to be quite a good swimmer as well.

What we get from this is that there's so much to a person. Sometimes you see one section. And I think where she could have been undersold is that people thought of Joy as 'Slim's wife', but Joy was vastly more than Slim's wife. She was Slim's wife and proud of it, and they had long marriage; I think it was about 50 years. But she was quite dynamic from a very young age and all the way through her life. For people in my area, yes, she had an influence on them. Every time you hear one of those songs—without making a total fool of myself by singing one at the start!—if you sing it, people say, 'Actually, I know that song; I've heard that song; I know that.' That's why I sing the songs. They're part of the narrative. I also identify them as talking to me about the Australian experience. As I've said before, 'Lights on the Hill' came from a trip from Tamworth to Warwick and up the New England Highway. Gosh, I don't know how many times I've done that run. The song is about the idea that you always see—a really simple thing—someone who doesn't dip their lights when they see you coming forward. It's this thing that is probably about Australia more than anywhere else, because of our long hauls. Slim and Joy were pulling a caravan, but obviously the empathy was for those who do long-haul truck driving.

So, I hope Joy is with her maker and back with Slim, penning songs and keeping the people around the fireplace behind the pearly gates well and truly entertained at night. All the best, and God bless Joy.

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