Beds Are Burning -- Midnight Oil

Out where the river broke  The blood wood and the desert oak
Holden wrecks and boiling diesels  Steam in forty five degrees

(**)  The time has come  To say fair's fair  To pay the rent  To pay our share
The time has come  A fact's a fact  It belongs to them  Let's give it back
How can we dance when our earth is turning
How do we sleep while our beds are burning
How can we dance when our earth is turning
How do we sleep while our beds are burning

The time has come  To say fair's fair  To pay the rent, now  To pay our share
Four wheels scare the cockatoos  From Kintore East to Yuendemu
The western desert lives and breathes  In forty five degrees

(**) 


"Beds Are Burning" is a political song about giving native Australian lands back to the Pintupi, who were among the very last people to come in from the desert. These 'last contact' people began moving from the Gibson Desert to settlements and missions in the 1930s. More were forcibly moved during the 1950s and 1960s to the Papunya settlement. In 1981 they left to return to their own country and established the Kintore community which is nestled in the picturesque Kintore Ranges, surrounded by Mulga and Spinifex country.
It is now a thriving little community with a population of about 400.   (wikipedia)


            
                                                                                    The Pintupi Inhabiting 

Painting about Pintupi 

 

Pintupi refers to an Australian Aboriginal group who are part of the Western Desert cultural group and whose homeland is in the area west of Lake MacDonald and Lake Mackay inWestern Australia. These people moved  into the Aboriginal communities of Papunya and Haasts Bluff in the west of the Northern Territory in the 1940s-1980s. The last Pintupi to leave their traditional lifestyle in the desert, in 1984, are a group known as the Pintupi Nine, also sometimes called the "lost tribe".