STEVE TOWSON – The Shock&Awe Zine Interview – Part 1
Joe: So Gayndah is where?
Steve: North Queensland.
Joe: Is it like a port area?
Steve: No. it’s more like a river-port. It would have been a river-port at one stage. Like, there’s a river that goes there and people could board the trains from there. But even in North Queensland you got Japanese, people from Chinese background that are 6th generation Australians. And quite often the traditional music… A lot of the traditional songs which people called as the Australian traditional songs are maybe, 4 or 5 generations old. I found on the internet one day, video footages which have been done in the late 1800s of a Chinese orchestra in Melbourne. So there have been this Chinese element in Australia which hasn’t been discussed in popular culture; as well as the Japanese “pearlers” or pearl divers in North Australia, in Broome, Drawin, North Queensland. So we have so many ethnicities which is why… I could release a whole album right now but I wanna hold off to do a lot of different recordings and compile it all. Maybe it’s gonna be a 3-CD kinda thing.
Joe: So it’s basically gonna be a compilation of traditional Australia music that’s made up with songs from all these different ethnicities.
Steve: Yeah. There’s some stuff like, an Afghan song I’ve got, Macedonian…
Joe: So that Afghan song is gonna be sung in Afghan language?
Steve: No. I recorded it off a guy who learnt it from an Afghan camel driver. Like ages and ages ago, probably now 70 years ago so there’s all of this instrumentation. I think it’s interesting that there have been Afghans in Australia for well over 100 years. Like they were plying a lot of inland explorations and trade-routes from the east coast right to the center of Australia because of camel-driving and taking trades with them. I think all of that kind of history is really important. It could give the Australians a good understanding of the diversity of the history of the country ’cause it’s really big. But then also, like, ’cause my neighbours, like a lot of people that I know, like my stepmom, for an example, is Korean-Australian. My Uncle, Indian-Australian. There’s this huge diversity of ethnicity while I think a lot of people overseas easily got sold the Romper Stomper kind of story. Like some of my best mates since I was a kid were Vietnamese-Australians. So that doesn’t really fit in to the whole Romper Stomper kind of.. that glamour of cultural violence. That there’s one culture, there’s another…
Joe: Probably the ones who identify with that Romper Stomper thing don’t relate to whether you’re Australian or not, they’re just judging you by the colour of your skin.
Steve: Yeah. Quite often violence is just really exciting in movies ’cause you can watch it and you know it’s actually part of the danger, so it’s a very voyeuristic thing whereas no-one really depict everyday life because it’s not that exciting, not very dramatic…
Joe: What about this thing I heard from some friends who were in Melbourne recently… they had a good time, of course, cause there’s a lot of great music and good friends there too, but at certain points at night in Melbourne they were harrassed racially on the streets, things like shouts of “go back to your country”, “you chinks” and some of that bullshit.
Steve: I think Melbourne maybe recently had an increase volume of racist attacks, but I really don’t know because I rarely go out to Melbourne. I’ve been in Malaysia more than I’ve been in Melbourne.
Joe: I love Melbourne though. It’s a good place…
Steve: Yeah. I think it’s got this reputation as being a real cultural, like the cultural capital but in (the sense of) an European cultural Australian capital rather than a, like..
Joe: What about the rock’n’roll kinda culture there…
Steve: I don’t know.. the community can be kinda very segmented, and very fashionable, which… There’s some really good bands in Melbourne, but I find Melbourne a sad city like a lot of people migrate there to “break the industry” and musicians..
Joe: It’s like going to Hollywood…
Steve: Yeah, and musicians and artists find themselves working in a crap job to live a dream of being a musician and artist and they can end up quitting music or whatever… I don’t particular think the city is any better or worse than anywhere else in Australia, as a place to live. But I don’t really know what the racist stuff is like in Melbourne. I heard stories of people who got mugged for their laptops, like on trains, are mostly Indians. But then I know myself I would not use a laptop on a train, even being white because there’s a lot desperate people out there.. you know, some people can be just dickheads…
Joe: Maybe we should rob this guy here… (pointing at Matt who were busy surfing on his MacBook)
Steve: yeah, he’s with his laptop, we could just beat him up… (we both laughed at Matt) But y’know like, I would never use a laptop (on a train) because to me it’s a valuable tool that I can’t afford getting stolen so I would not take that risk. But then it’s also easy to blow it out of proportion, and we don’t really know whether they are racist attacks or non-racist attacks. It needs to be analyzed first, like any other social issue. Like analytically going like, “was this dude being rude to someone else, or whether these guys just purely attacking because of colour”. Where I live that’s a very rare occurence. Sydney and Melbourne I think… maybe there’s also a greater Australian resources in those cities now, like they’re getting bigger and bigger, and more people are migrating there from within the country as well as externally, so a lot of people wanna go to Melbourne which can add to internal pressures. I don’t know… I generally stay clear of the place.
