I am very deeply saddened to hear of the death of Rob Hirst.
Midnight Oil has been my favourite band since I was a young teenager, and still remains an endlessly renewable resource of energy and inspiration with every repeat play. Rob’s lyrics, drumming, and vocals are one of the indivisible elements that made Midnight Oil into an Australian cultural and political phenomenon, forming an intrinsic part of the soundtrack to so many lives and campaigns.
Rob’s presence on stage was extraordinary and unforgettable. As wryly noted by a roadie in the film, Midnight Oil, 1984, the drum kit had to be literally nailed down–such was the force with which Rob struck the instruments. There was transcendent power in Rob’s performance–yet never any sense of aggro. What you were witnessing was tonic, not toxic; no aggression but incredible strength and singularity of purpose expressed through action in the moment. The dynamics generated by the members of the band on stage in combination were famously exhilarating, with the huge and whirling frame of Peter Garrett usually the focus of things. Still, it was Rob who provided the literal beat for the band’s enormous heart.
And offstage, Rob was just an absolutely lovely bloke. It is sometimes warned that you should never meet your heroes, but that simply didn’t apply to Rob Hirst.
Along with his bandmates, Rob was a tremendous supporter of the work of Greenpeace. The Oils played gigs and took numerous actions on Greenpeace campaigns, among the many causes and organisations to which the band gave their strength and resources. As Andrew Stafford has noted in his obituary in the Guardian, it was Rob’s particular inspiration that the song ‘Hercules’–part of the epic and historic Species Deceases EP–should be an elegy for the Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, which had been martyred by French secret service agents in Auckland Harbour.
Memorably, on their very final tour, the Oils collaborated with Greenpeace and others in staging a spectacular intervention against Woodside Energy’s climate-wrecking gas expansion plans. Greenpeace is very deeply grateful to Rob for his deep commitment to environmentalism and social justice over so many years.
It feels impossible to even try to select highlights in this raw moment, so here’s just one favourite, ‘Only the Strong’–a song written by Rob in extremis–performed as the opener, live at the Capitol Theatre in Sydney 1982:
Of course, Midnight Oil wasn’t Rob’s only band. He found time for a range of other musically varied acts, including Ghostwriters, Backsliders, The Break, and The Hillmans–the latter whose one-off tribute to Midnight Oil bassist and vocalist Bones Hillman, who died from cancer in 2020, now feels like it has an added layer of sadness and poignancy.
The audio and video recordings of Rob in full flight with the Oils mean that the energy and resolution expressed through the music is eternal; always there for anyone at the edge of themselves, or seeking that necessary inspiration and resolve to take the hardest line.
As Rob said when Midnight Oil received the Gold Medal for Human Rights from the Sydney Peace Foundation in 2020, ‘the fight goes on, daily and weekly in this country’. Rob Hirst may no longer be physically with us, but in these troubled times, his music and spirit could hardly be of greater necessity, or enduring power and salience.
On behalf of all at Greenpeace, our very deepest condolences to Rob’s wife Lesley, daughters Alexandra, Gabriella and Jay, and to the surviving members of Midnight Oil, Pete, Martin and Jim.
RIP Rob Hirst.
