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Bad Luck/King of Palm Island

Bad Luck

Inspired by Patrick White’s 1970 novel The Vivisector, Bad Luck finds The Holy Sea at their visceral best. Abrasive guitar and pounding pianos are offset by sweeping cello stabs in a bitter lament on love and the landscape. Rich in poetic allusions – from White, T.S. Eliot, Max Harris and Sameul Coleridge – Bad Luck is a song firmly rooted in the Australian tradition. Relationships take on the familiar grandeur of the rolling South Australian countryside, while at other times the landscape becomes an oppresive place filled with longing and dread.

King of Palm Island

King of Palm Island tells the story of the 2004 death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee. Inspired by Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man, it takes the perspective of police sergeant Chris Hurley as he attempts to justify the actions that lead to Doomadgee’s death. Hurley begs with the listener to give him ‘a little love’ for the difficult task of policing a remote community, but soon realises that the community owes him absolutely nothing. King of Palm Island is a mediation on the base inequality of race relations in Australia, whilst using Hurley to show that this is an inequality for which we are all implicitly responsible.