Midnight Oil’s final tour is not a victory lap. It’s more akin to a gathering. Forty-four years since releasing their debut album the Oils are armed with a new one, Resist, and they are in typically powerful, passionate form.

Climate change, collective action and procrastination are common threads in the new record released on Friday and drummer and songwriter Rob Hirst can hardly wait to pump new tracks into the group’s last Australian tour.

Midnight Oil (from left) Martin Rotsey, Adam Ventoura, Jim Moginie, Peter Garrett and Rob Hirst.Credit:Remi Chauvin

“We want these gigs to be ferocious,” Hirst said. “We never wanted to be one of those bands that were trotting out radio hits from years ago, we wanted to inject new material into the set, so they stand proudly next to songs that are better known.”

Five years since the band got back together for the Great Circle world tour, singer, songwriter and former federal politician Peter Garrett said the decision to “pull up stumps” on national and international touring sits comfortably with the group.

“This is it, really … not in terms of making music, but in Midnight Oil’s career, it’s a big moment,” Garrett said. “We tend to mean what we say.

“It’s difficult to put into words, but touring has been such a big part of our lives and something we’ve always shared. Sometimes you come out with a record, or you’re in the midst of something else that’s going on and there’s things flying in every direction, but it always tends to take shape and form when we get on stage and start playing the songs.

The band is playing really well, we’re kind of at the top of our game …

“The thought we won’t be doing that, whilst very much a decision we’re all pretty comfortable with, it’s bittersweet. There’s been a few emotional moments, when you start to think it through because it’s been such a long innings.”

Recent shows on the Resist tour in Launceston and Hobart were capped at just over 1000 people, but when the tour hits the mainland next week, arena and large outdoor audiences can expect a potent mix of songs stretching back to late ’70s classic Cold Cold Change to chart-topping singles and thunderous new track Nobody’s Child.

Hirst said the band had been waiting two years to release Resist and to “honour Bonesy Hillman, our late bass player” with this final tour. Hillman, who joined the band in 1987, died in 2020 at his home in Wisconsin, aged 62. He performed on Resist and the Oils’ 2020 release, The Makarrata Project.

“We were determined to do at least a handful of shows around the album, so we’d fulfilled the moral contract with ourselves, but particularly with Bones,” Hirst said.

“And we’re determined to do justice to the album … it has a lot of big rock songs on it that need to be played with a kind of fury and anger, and we’re not going to be able to do that forever. We might play single shows down the track, but touring isn’t something we’d relish in future … we want each show to be as savage as the ones that people remember when they first saw the band play in the late ’70s and early ’80s.”

Guitarist, keyboard player and songwriter Jim Moginie said “we’re all feeling the loss of Bones” and it was “really tricky to work out” playing the band’s music without him, given Hillman also played a key role as a backing vocalist on many songs.

“Adam Ventoura [on bass] is working out really well, he’s absolutely the right man for the job in my view,” Moginie said. “And we’ve got Leah Flanagan and Liz Stringer, who are just wonderfully talented, singing with us and that’s been great.“It’s not like we could ever find a Bones clone, that’s not even possible because he had such a unique presence and voice and style, but we’re going into another world, an exploratory phase of creativity and mixing things up.”

Moginie said the decision to play a final tour on the back of Resist comes after the surprise of Midnight Oil getting back together for the Great Circle tour.

“A lot has happened in that time … I didn’t think any of it would happen a few years before that,” he said, adding, “… you don’t want to hang around like a bad smell.

“The band is playing really well, we’re kind of at the top of our game, and maybe that’s the time to pull up stumps. We want to go out with a bang.”

Along with strong memories of performing at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and playing on the blockade at Jabiluka mine two years earlier, Garrett looks back fondly on “the grungiest, nastiest little heavy metal club in Boston or Philadelphia” where the band’s opening onslaught was US Forces. “There’s plenty of memories,” the 68-year-old said.

“I certainly remember us playing up in Arnhem Land on the stillest of nights, and when we finished playing the Warumpi Band went on and it was one of the first times I’d heard My Island Home. I was laying in the grass, looking up at the stars, thinking ‘well, I hope this song gets heard by a lot of people, and I hope ours do too’ because at that time we were making connections with remote communities … learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures in a way we never could have, had we not been in those places.”

Hirst expects the band to be “pretty wrecked” by the close of the Resist tour. “Hopefully not as wrecked as we were after the 2017 tour … but I reckon we’ll think, job done,” he said.

Resist is out now.

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