Wind In The Dunes

 

Sometimes it takes a long, long time to get an idea, a story, to work. To distill it out of the ether.

When I was 10 years old, my brother and I found a skull in the sand-dunes near our family farm.

It was wild, wild country back them. Coastal swamps, scrub, dunes, and a long, long lonely beach. A few isolated settler farms.

That place, the Coorong, was a land with a dark history.

As I grew older and became aware of that history I tried to capture it in a novel, which failed. In a screenplay, which failed. But the story, the images, would not go away.

Then I took up song-writing and, suddenly, it all came together.

I wrote the essence of the song in an afternoon…plus 40 years of failing to write it in other forms.

I then spent a few more months polishing it, arranging it, getting my voice to the point where it could deliver the song, working out the accompaniment. Finding how to play it on my old guitar. Then finding a producer to work with who could capture the sound. We got the sound down before Xmas, 2017.

Then I went on a road trip of some 1,000 Km to return to the place where it all happened to capture some video imagery. Pretty rough imagery as I only had my Zoom recorder. But I had the feeling, and I do think that is what counts in the end.

Here it is. Wind In The Dunes.