If you are reading this from overseas, forgive me if the musical reference in the headline goes over your head. The line is from Khe Sanh, the song that has enjoyed a mythical status in Australia for almost 50 years.
It was written by Cold Chisel’s Don Walker, who grew up in rural Queensland. He imbued the lyrics in his compositions with a sympathetic understanding of the challenges and disappointments of being a working-class Australian. Walker played the keyboard, so his tunes are mostly devoid of the clanging guitars that Australians usually prefer in their sing-along ballads, and instead have a country-western style that matches his penchant for poetic storytelling.
The lyrics of Khe Sanh describe, in the first person, the disillusionment of a Vietnam veteran as he tries to “find a place to settle down where my mixed up life could mend”, but the options he finds back in Australia no longer appeal to him.
The song would have been a gentle, contemplative story about a restless nomad if not for Jimmy Barnes’s energised and growling vocals. Barnes, born in Glasgow and raised in a working-class suburb in Adelaide, was the main reason Cold Chisel, whose style was closer to blues and country than rock and roll, became a phenomenon on the beer-sloshed pub circuit back when barn-size pubs were the only pathway to success in Australian music.
In his dotage, though, Barnes has morphed from vodka-swilling rocker into the type of grumpy old man who takes umbrage at ordinary Australians appropriating Khe Sanh without his permission.
When some people played it at a Reform Australia protest against Islamic immigration in Brisbane in 2015, Barnes responded like Anthony Fauci defending “the science”:
“It has come to my attention that certain groups of people have been using my voice, my songs as their anthems at rallies. None of these people represent me and I do not support them. I only want to say the Australia I belong to and love is a tolerant Australia. A place that is open and giving. It is a place that embraces all sorts of different people, in fact it is made stronger by the diversity of its people.”
Somewhere along the way, Barnes also lost his sense of irony. One of the key lines in Khe Sanh is at the end of the third verse:
About the long forgotten dockside guarantees
And there were no V-day heroes in 1973
How we sailed into Sydney Harbour, I saw an old friend, but I couldn’t kiss her
And she was lined, and I was home to the lucky land.
Lucky? As far as Khe Sanh’s protagonist is concerned, Australians were deluded about their luck. The lyric is an obtuse reference to Donald Horne’s book The Lucky Country (1964), a treatise that also argued Australia’s enormous prosperity in the postwar years was both unearned and fragile. You could say the same now about the “strength” of our “diversity”, but Barnes has become too woke to see the irony in that.
The song’s appeal, which continues even now among Australians who were born 20 years after it was released in 1978, is a bit perplexing. It’s a swipe at the type of people whose “hearts were held in fast suburban chains”, which is most of us. It does, however, espouse the tendency that all young Australians feel to “travel round the world from year to year” and encapsulates the instinctive contempt and distrust all self-respecting young Aussies have for authority.
Its true meaning can vary, which — again, if you’re reading this from the United States — would make it roughly the Australian equivalent of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in The USA, another slightly ambiguous song about a Vietnam vet which was release six years later. Coincidentally, Springsteen too has sadly evolved into a tiresome old leftist bore.
However you interpret Khe Sanh, though, it’s plausible that Anthony Albanese, who has always been a huge Chisel fan, took the song more literally than most during his idealistic youth. You can picture him on the beer-sodden dance floor of some Sydney pub in the 1980s, gyrating in his effeminate way while hoping the pissed working-class blokes around him don’t notice the weedy, chinless pissant in their midst. And when he joins the whole pub screaming, “The last plane out of Sydney’s almost gone”, he has, through the fog of half a dozen UDL vodka mixers, an epiphany. “The last plane out of Sydney! What a great idea! I wanna be on that plane!”
And so it has come to pass. Four decades later, Albanese has made Australia the kind of place you can’t wait to leave. Rampant inflation, creeping authoritarianism, censorship, hordes of violent immigrants, unprecedented corruption, the world’s highest taxes, unaffordable housing, schools churning out brainwashed robots, harridan women dominating politics and business, fuel shortages (with the prospect of food shortages to follow), prime farmland being forced to accommodate useless gay solar panels and giant ugly windmills… it’s all infinitely worse than the Australia that the vet in Khe Sanh found depressingly uninspiring.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics doesn’t record the net worth of the people fleeing Albanese’s dystopia, and wouldn’t share the figures even if it did, but my anecdotal reading is that the smart money in Australia at the moment is all on one-way flights out of the joint.
One of the charms of Khe Sanh is that it’s not political. You get the feeling the vet never knew why he had been sent to Vietnam, nor cared. He just did what he was told, and got screwed over anyway. The government is doing the same to us now. The Vietnam War was meant to stop communism’s march south, which it did. But communism is being introduced anyway, by stealth.
It started in 1972 when Gough Whitlam convinced Australians that only a bigger, more innovative and ambitious government could solve the country’s problems. This fallacy should have culminated when the nominally conservative government under Scott Morrison printed hundreds of billions of dollars to pay the nation’s workforce to stay at home during the fake Covid pandemic in 2020.
Instead, Albo has spent the four years since winning government in 2022 trying to prove he’s even more Mao than Morrison, assuming responsibility for building millions of houses, endlessly boasting about “free” healthcare and ensuring the education system teaches only approved leftist ideologies. I’d like to think Australians are getting sick of all this big government bullshit, and are finally starting to wish these intrusive, authoritarian politicians and bureaucrats would just leave them alone.
A key element of the Labor Party’s agenda is to develop Australia’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. Ever since Whitlam beat Nixon to scoring a private meeting with Mao in the early 1970s, Labor apparatchiks have beaten a path to Beijing to pay homage to their political idols. Albo is no exception, spending an indulgent four days in China in 2023 to repair the relationship after the CCP covered up the Covid virus. “With communication comes understanding,” was his cryptic way of explaining the trip.
Sure it does, Albo. The CCP this week declared it would not be sending jet fuel to Australia for the foreseeable, what with all the trouble in the Middle East and all. Australia, a vast and sparsely populated island continent, relies on air travel more than most. But China, which provides about a third of our jet fuel and is our biggest single supplier, doesn’t understand that.
So we are now closer to the mythical “last plane out of Sydney” than we have ever been in the 48 years since Walker wrote that evocative line. And should that plane ever leave Sydney, even metaphorically, you can guarantee that Albanese will be aboard, sipping champagne in first class and wistfully thinking, like Walker’s Vietnam vet, that Australia really wasn’t the country for him after all.
The feeling’s mutual, Albo.
The last plane out of Sydney’s almost gone
And in seven flying hours, I’ll be landing in Hong Kong
And there ain’t nothing like the kisses
From a jaded Chinese princess
I’m gonna hit some Hong Kong mattress all night long.
There’s a rumour in journalist circles that Albo once found that kind of comfort closer to home, without having to endure the seven flying hours first. Whatever. It’s hardly an aberration in Australian politics. And if it’s true it couldn’t possibly reduce him in my estimation anyway. He’s a transactional politician, which detaches him emotionally from his decisions and allows him to rationalise the carnage he’s caused. It’s never his fault anyway. He might reassure those who care that his intentions were always good, but I don’t even believe that any more.
And it’s really got me worried
I’m going nowhere and I’m in a hurry
This is where Walker’s vet goes from charismatic drifter to self-destructive itinerant, and loses me. It’s just a throwaway rhyme for the final chorus, so I guess it was never meant to embellish the song’s powerful effect anyway.
But this line now acquires a meaning all its own. Few lyrics in Australian music could describe our Prime Minister more accurately. The odious class warrior has always been a worrier, and in an obnoxious rush to go nowhere. How he became Prime Minister of such a wonderful country as Australia is a mystery that not even Walker could explain.
Should Albo ever get on that last plane out of Sydney, it will be the first decent thing he ever did for Australia.
