Clinton Walker

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Australian writer

title: "Clinton Walker" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1957-births", "living-people", "australian-journalists", "australian-music-journalists"] description: "Australian writer" topic_path: "arts" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Walker" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Australian writer ::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Australian_writer_Clinton_Walker.jpg" caption="Walker in 2009}}"] ::

Clinton Walker is an Australian writer, best known for his works on popular music. He wrote the books Highway to Hell (1994; a biography of Bon Scott), Buried Country (2000), History is Made at Night (2012), and others. He has also written on other subjects, in books such as Football Life (1998) and Golden Miles (2005), and has worked as a journalist.

Early life

Born in Bendigo, Victoria, in 1957, Walker dropped out of art school in Brisbane in the late 70s to start a punk fanzine with Andrew McMillan and to write for student newspapers.

Career

In 1978, Walker moved to Melbourne, where he worked on-air for 3RRR, and with Bruce Milne on the fanzine Pulp and wrote for the fledgling Roadrunner magazine.

Moving on to Sydney in 1980, he commenced a career as a freelance journalist, and for many years he wrote for numerous magazines and newspapers, including RAM and Australian Rolling Stone, as well as The Bulletin, The Age, New Woman, Playboy, and Juice.

Books

Walker published his first book, Inner City Sound, in 1981. It documented the emergence of independent Australian punk/post-punk music and quickly fell out of print but was re-released in 2006 in an expanded, updated edition, along with an accompanying CD anthology.

In 1984, after a couple of years in London, Walker returned to Australia and published his second book, The Next Thing.

Walker's third book, Highway to Hell, was a biography of Bon Scott (1994).

Walker then published Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977–1991 (1996) and Football Life (1998). Stranded was republished in 2021 by the Visible Spectrum in a new updated global edition. Des Cowley in his review in Rhythms Magazine said: "Reading Stranded today with a quarter-century’s hindsight, it’s easy to see that Walker mostly got things right. And if he stumbled now and again, it’s still the case he was streaks ahead of the pack." Football Life was similarly a personal history but covered minor-league Australian Rules culture.

Walker's sixth book, Buried Country, a history of Aboriginal country music, was published in 2000, along with an accompanying documentary film and CD soundtrack album. In his review, author Karl Neuenfeldt wrote, "the sheer scope of the book over diverse, distinct and dispersed Aboriginal communities and musicians means some things get more emphasis than others but overall it succeeds as social and musical history." A new updated edition of the book was released in 2015 along with a rebooted version of the CD called Buried Country 1.5, which received further critical praise. A live stageshow adaptation premiered in 2016 and toured for several years in the festival circuit. In 2018, Australian singer-songwriter Darren Hanlon, in conjunction with Mississippi Records in the US, produced a vinyl iteration of the Buried Country compilation that included new tracks.

In 2005, Walker’s seventh book, Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car, was published, expanding on an article he published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002. The Sydney Morning Herald praised the book's design and called Walker "our best chronicler of Australian grassroots culture". It was re-released in 2009 in an expanded and updated edition by Wakefield Press.

In 2012, Walker published History is Made at Night about the Australian live music circuit. In 2013 he published his ninth book, Wizard of Oz: Speed Modernism and the Last Ride of Wizard Smith, about the ill-starred Australian speed ace from the 1920s, Norman 'Wizard' Smith, as well as co-producing the CD Silver Roads, an anthology of Australian country-rock from the 1970s. Deadly Woman Blues, a graphic history of black women in Australian music, was released in 2018 by a division of academic publisher UNSW Press. Each of 99 biographical entries was accompanied by a hand-drawn illustration by Walker. The book immediately garnered a few glowing reviews. There was an angry backlash from four of the artists who expressed their displeasure at being included without being spoken to, and citing factual inaccuracies. This led to social media outrage in which Walker was criticized as a racist, misogynist, colonialist privileged white male. The book was withdrawn from sale, with the publisher promising to pulp any unsold copies and never to reprint it. Walker admitted to mistakes and apologised, saying "I didn't try to obscure what I was doing, I didn't take all the appropriate steps. I've been involved in underclass music forever, and in some ways, this is no different, but in other ways, it is very different".

In 2021, Walker released two books, including a new edition of Stranded and a new work, Suburban Songbook. Suburban Songbook: Writing Hits in post-war/pre-Countdown Australia is a critical history of the early evolution of rock/pop songwriting in Australia.

Walker's twelfth book The Soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever was published in 2023 as part of Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series of short books on albums.

Works

Bibliography

  • Inner City Sound (Wild & Woolley, 1981; revised and expanded edition, Verse Chorus Press, 2005)
  • The Next Thing (Kangaroo Press, 1984)
  • Highway to Hell: The Life and Times of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott (Pan Macmillan, 1994; revised edition, Verse Chorus Press, 2001)
  • Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977-1991 (Pan Macmillan, 1996/Visible Spectrum, 2021)
  • Football Life (PanMacmillan, 1998)
  • Buried Country (Pluto Press, 2000; revised and expanded edition Verse Chorus Press, 2015)
  • Golden Miles (Lothian, 2005; expanded edition, Wakefield Press, 2009)
  • History is Made at Night (Currency House, 2012)
  • Wizard of Oz: Speed Modernism and the Last Ride of Wizard Smith (Wakefield Press, 2013)
  • Deadly Woman Blues (New South, 2018/Withdrawn)
  • Suburban Songbook (Goldentone, 2021)
  • Soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever (Bloomsbury/33.3)

Discography (as producer)

  • Buried Country (Larrikin-Festival, 2000/Warner Music, 2015)
  • Long Way to the Top (ABC, 2001)
  • Studio 22 (ABC, 2002)
  • Inner City Soundtrack (Laughing Outlaw, 2005)
  • Silver Roads (Warner Music, 2013)

Videography (as writer)

  • Notes from Home (ABC, 1987)
  • Sing it in the Music (ABC, 1989)
  • Studio 22 (ABC series, also as co-presenter, 1999–2003)
  • Buried Country (Film Australia, 2000)
  • Long Way to the Top (ABC, 2001)
  • Love is in the Air (ABC, 2003)
  • Rare Grooves (ABC series, also as presenter, 2003)

References

References

  1. AustLit. (22 March 2024). "Clinton Walker (20 works by) (a.k.a. Cee Walker)". [[AustLit: The Resource for Australian Literature]].
  2. Walker, Clinton. "Narrative biography".
  3. Robertson, Donald. (27 September 2019). "'One More Boring Night in Adelaide'—Roadrunner 1978". [[Roadrunner (Australian music magazine).
  4. (1982). "Inner city sound".
  5. (April 2012). "Writing Oz pop: An insider’s account of Australian popular culture making and historiography: An interview with Clinton J Walker". [[Thesis Eleven]].
  6. "The Next Thing / edited by Clinton Walker ; photographs by Francine McDougall".
  7. (March 15, 2001). "Highway to Hell (Book Review)".
  8. Cowley, Des. (July–August 2021). "Stranded: Australian Independent Music, 1976–1992".
  9. (January 2008). "'Each time I'm reminded of it, I feel as though I need therapy': Australian Football, tragedies and the question of catharsis". [[University of Melbourne]].
  10. (August 19, 2000). "Black and blues; Book review". [[Sydney Morning Herald]].
  11. (September 2001). "Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music". [[Australian Public Intellectual Network]].
  12. (10 April 2015). "Buried Country celebrates indigenous music's wayward dreamers". [[The Australian]].
  13. (2 April 2015). "Clinton Walker: Buried Country: The story of Aboriginal country music.".
  14. Crawford, Anwen. (1 May 2015). "'Buried Country' by Clinton Walker".
  15. (13 November 2015). "Undiscovered heart of our own country".
  16. Byron, Tim. (8 December 2015). "No longer a buried country: the blossoming of Indigenous music".
  17. Earp, Joseph. (12 October 2016). "Buried Country". [[Beat (magazine).
  18. Dwyer, Michael. (11 October 2016). "Melbourne Festival 2016: Buried Country concert unearths canon of Aboriginal music". [[The Sydney Morning Herald]].
  19. Watts, Richard. (11 August 2018). "Review: Buried Country, the Beginning of Nature & Baker Boy, Darwin Festival". ArtsHub.
  20. Latimore, Jack. (5 December 2018). "Even on the streets of Melbourne, country music was the soundtrack to my soul".
  21. (8 October 2005). "Revheads and rock'n'roll rebellion; Review". [[Sydney Morning Herald]].
  22. Walker, Clinton. (16 November 2002). "Highway '72 revisited". [[The Sydney Morning Herald]].
  23. Clare, John. (4 September 2005). "A high-revving romp through time". [[The Sydney Morning Herald]].
  24. Currency House Plus. (7 August 2012). "Clinton Walker 'History Is Made At Night'".
  25. "History is Made at Night: Live Music in Australia / Clinton Walker".
  26. (May–June 2013). "AG's Bookshelf".
  27. Cashmere, Paul. (6 July 2013). "Warner Music Compiles Rare Australian Recordings for Boogie Silver Roads".
  28. "Clinton Walker".
  29. Capp, Fiona. (2018-02-16). "Deadly Woman Blues review: Clinton Walker on Australia's black women singers".
  30. Hocking, Rachael. (6 March 2018). "Book on black women musicians dumped after explosive claims author didn't interview artists".
  31. (2018-03-06). "Deadly Woman Blues book to be pulped following backlash over 'distressing' errors".
  32. (7 March 2018). "What writers and publishers must learn from the Deadly Woman Blues fiasco".
  33. UNSW Press. (6 March 2018). "Deadly Woman Blues".
  34. (3 February 2021). "Clinton Walker's Stranded Gets Reboot". [[Rhythms Magazine]].
  35. (29 August 2021). "Stranded: Australian Independent Music 1976–1992, Revised & Expanded Edition: Clinton Walker". Loudmouth.
  36. Coffin, Ed. (30 November 2021). "The Naked City: The Hits and Misses of Oz Music". City Hub.
  37. (4 October 2024). "33 1/3 Author Q&A: Clinton Walker on the Soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever".

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