There's a question at the centre of this album that Midnight Oil never quite answer. They just leave it hanging there, out over the red dust of Western Australia, over the South China Sea, over the war graves of Europe. Who's gonna save me? And the longer you sit with Blue Sky Mining, the more you realise that's exactly the point. Nobody's coming. And somehow, impossibly, that makes it one of the most galvanising records ever made.
I was fourteen when this came out in February 1990. Diesel and Dust had already done its work on me, turned me into a proper Midnight Oil obsessive, the kind of teenager who bought music magazines specifically hoping someone would write about them. But Blue Sky Mining felt different from the moment I got it home and pressed play on the tape player. Heavier somehow. More urgent. Like the band had been carrying something around for a while and finally had to put it down.
What I didn't know back then, because how would I, was just how much there was underneath these songs. I knew the title track was about asbestos mining. From the MTV video I knew Peter Garrett was in some kind of permanent righteous fury. But the full story of what this album was actually built on? That took me years. Decades, honestly. And it's a story worth telling properly.
The Ghost Town in the Dust
To understand Blue Sky Mining properly, you have to understand Wittenoom. And Wittenoom is one of those stories that once you've read it, you can't really unknow it.
Deep in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, hundreds of miles from anywhere, there was a town built entirely around blue asbestos. In the 1940s, a company called Australian Blue Asbestos, a subsidiary of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, CSR, took over the mining leases and started pulling crocidolite out of the gorges. They built houses. They built a hotel, a bakery, a library. Somewhere around 20,000 people passed through Wittenoom between the 1940s and the 1960s. Workers. Wives. Children. European migrants who'd been displaced by the war, offered a new start in Australia and pointed at the desert.
The asbestos dust was everywhere. In the air, in the streets, in people's lungs. Children played in the blue tailings. The airport runway was made of the stuff. And here's the part that makes your blood run cold: CSR knew. Or they should have known. The Western Australian Health Department was raising concerns by the early 1960s. Research was piling up. And when CSR finally closed the mine in 1966, they did it not for safety reasons but because it was no longer profitable.
More than 2,000 of those 20,000 people have since died of asbestos-related diseases. Mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis. The average life expectancy from mesothelioma diagnosis to death is nine months. In Western Australia, proportionate to its population size, it became one of the worst mesothelioma hotspots in the world. By 2007 they had literally removed Wittenoom from the map. Degazetted. A whole town. Gone.
This is what Blue Sky Mining is about. Not abstractly. Specifically. The blue sky of the song is the blue asbestos sky. The mine in the lyrics is that mine. The worker who just wants to put food on the table and wonders who's gonna save him? He's one of those 20,000 people.
The Song That Almost Wasn't the Single
Here's something I love about the making of this album. The song Blue Sky Mine, the title track, the song that would top the Billboard rock charts and become one of the defining Midnight Oil moments, wasn't even initially standing out as a single during production.
It was Peter Garrett who put it up first on the whiteboard when the band were debating the track listing. He saw the potential in it before anyone else did. Which, when you think about it, is very Peter Garrett. The man has always known exactly what a song is capable of doing in the world.
The song's musical roots go back even further. Jim Moginie, the band's guitarist and keyboardist, originally conceived the musical idea when he was fifteen years old. Fifteen. And it went through enormous changes in the studio before becoming what we know. Producer Warne Livesey pushed it toward something with a Motown feel, brought in a Vox organ riff, and then Martin Rotsey came up with that incredible echo guitar part. A new chorus was built around all of that. It was convoluted. It was collaborative. And it absolutely worked.
The whole album was made at Rhinoceros Studios in Sydney over three months, with Livesey at the helm again after Diesel and Dust. There's a story about the trumpet parts on Bedlam Bridge being recorded in a car park because the echo just sat perfectly with the track. They brought a French horn player up from Melbourne. There were strings on Mountains of Burma, a full orchestral arrangement. This was a band spending real time and real care on every detail.
And then there's the moment in King of the Mountain where, at the end, Warne Livesey apparently just told Garrett to ad lib over the top. No lyrics prepared. And Garrett just started singing, and what came out was so good they used one of the first takes. If you haven't gone back to that track recently, do it after you read this. Listen to that closing section. That's a man operating on pure instinct.
An Album About the World as It Was Falling Apart
1989. The year Blue Sky Mining was being recorded. Think about what was happening. The Berlin Wall hadn't come down yet when they started. The Exxon Valdez had just gouged open the Alaskan coastline. The Cold War was still technically running. Tiananmen Square happened. And Midnight Oil were in a Sydney recording studio trying to make sense of all of it.
You can feel that in Mountains of Burma. My favourite song off the album. Rob Hirst wrote the lyric, and it's this extraordinary patchwork of the world's unresolved grievances. References to Solidarity in Poland, to the women's movement, to Northern Ireland, to the military junta in Burma. It's a song that looks out across the globe and asks whether the struggles of previous generations meant anything at all, whether anything was learned, whether anything changed.
And Forgotten Years is doing something related but different. Rob Hirst wrote those lyrics too, drawing directly on his own family's experience of war. His grandfather fought in the First World War. His father in the Second. His wife's grandfather was buried in the Verdun cemetery, which is where they filmed the video, stark and black and white among all those crosses. The song is about what those generations gave so that subsequent generations wouldn't have to. It's about the weight of that. The gratitude and the sadness and the slight bitterness of it.
Peter Garrett described it as crediting those who served, remembering that at times war was folly, as in Vietnam, and at times it was survival, as in World War II. That's a real distinction. The Oils were never simplistic about this stuff. That's what made them so much more than a protest band.
What We Didn't Know Then
This is the bit I keep coming back to. When I bought Blue Sky Mining in 1990, I had no way of knowing most of what I've just told you. The Wittenoom story was not widely known outside Australia. The specifics of the CSR case, the legal battles, the scale of the deaths, all of that was buried. You couldn't look it up. There was no looking anything up. You had the sleeve, you had the lyrics, you had maybe a music press interview if you were lucky enough to catch the right issue of Q.
So what we had instead was the feeling. And that was enough, because these songs are built in a way that even if you don't know the specific story, you absolutely feel the injustice. You feel the anger and the grief and the love for people who'd been let down. That's the craft of it. That's why Blue Sky Mining still works, still sounds urgent, thirty-five years after it came out.
But now we can know. Now you can spend an afternoon reading about Wittenoom and come out the other side genuinely shaken. You can read about the first court victory for the victims in 1988, just two years before the album came out. About the judge who ruled that CSR acted with 'continuing, conscious and contumelious disregard' for its workers' safety. About the settlement in 1989 and 1990, right when the Oils were finishing this record and releasing it.
This wasn't ancient history to them. This was live. This was happening.
The Protest Outside the Exxon Building
In the middle of the Blue Sky Mining tour, Midnight Oil pulled a flatbed truck up outside the Exxon headquarters in New York City and played a surprise set in the street. A protest against the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Some Exxon executives actually came out and started dancing before they presumably realised what was happening.
I love this so much. Because it captures everything about what made Midnight Oil different. They weren't just making albums with political themes and then going home. They were in it. Constantly finding ways to put the message in front of people who'd rather not think about it. The Exxon executives dancing is almost a perfect metaphor for how power responds to inconvenient truths until it can't ignore them anymore.
This was the band at their peak, globally. Blue Sky Mining went to number one in Australia, top five in Sweden, Switzerland and Norway, top twenty in the States. They were playing Radio City Music Hall. And instead of just enjoying the victory lap, they were on a truck outside Exxon. That's who these people were.
Antarctica and the Strange, Perfect Ending
The album ends with Antarctica, and it's a strange choice that becomes more right the more you think about it. After everything that's come before, all the fury and the grief and the specific named injustices, the album closes in pure isolation. Cold. Remote. The one place on earth not yet fully claimed or destroyed.
It's like the album is saying: here is what we have left if we're not careful. Here is what the world looks like stripped of everything. And somehow it's beautiful. And somehow that's more frightening than anything else on the record.
There's also a bonus track that appeared on the first 1,000 or so Australian vinyl copies of the record, a B-side called You May Not Be Released. If you've never heard it, find it. It feels like a secret the album was keeping.
Go Back and Listen
Blue Sky Mining won Album of the Year at the ARIA Awards in 1991. It deserved it. But awards aren't really the point with Midnight Oil.
The point is that every single song on this album is carrying real weight. Real people, real catastrophes, real corporate decisions that killed real human beings. And Midnight Oil found a way to make all of that into something you can sing along with in the car, something that sounds enormous and alive, something with hooks that get into your head and refuse to leave.
The question Who's gonna save me? is still out there, unanswered. And the fact that it's still being asked, that the issues this album raised are still live issues, a world still extracting and exploiting and then walking away from the consequences, should make us all feel something.
Put it on again tonight. Properly this time, headphones in, lights down. Start from the beginning and let it run.
See if you hear it differently now.
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Further Reading
The following articles and sources were consulted in researching this piece:
