Mel From Melbourne - Music & Words

Recorded live in the lounge-room ‘studio’ of the Koroi family home, Vuci Road, Nausori, Fiji by Dr Robert Wolfgramm – former Lecturer at Monash University, Editor of the Fiji Daily Post newspaper and Editor of the New Fijian Translation of the Holy Bible. In the early 1990s, this sheltered white boy from Beaumaris undertook studies through the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University, Frankston. In my second year I met and was taught by the amazing Fijian Sociologist Dr Robert Wolfgramm. From him I learned fundamentals in the Sociology of Indigenous and Ethnic Relations, the Sociology of Religions and the Sociology of Popular Music. Robert changed the course of my life. We became close friends, he invited me to stay for a couple of months with him in his ancestral village of Qamea in group of small, remote islands north of Taveuni. As our friendship progressed I served as Best Man at his wedding to Lupe Koroi and when we returned to Australia, Robert sugges...

Watching an ABC (Australia) 'One + One' interview with Ai Weiwei, I had a directional thought: that if he can have risked his life on a daily basis under a brutally repressive Chinese Communist regime to present to the world a forum for truth telling, then I, in my relative comfort & liberty have a responsibility to tell the truth from this 'miggle miggle' class Aussie bloke's angles, which are more manifold than our current ideologies might like to admit. Some will argue that we've heard it all before, but I'm not so sure -- else I wouldn't be doing this. The truth is always difficult to tell, regardless of one's social positioning. Some may say that I am a victor in History and you could see it that way. But I am also a fragment of the human whole, and so while suffering exists I am implicated. I am not here to cry for me, but to cry for all 'Argentina' . I consider my role in all of this, and my position in the world allows me to shed...