W.B.T.G. Slinger:
So we wanted to speak to you because of the video you posted of King Gizzard performing in 2010 for an assessment in your course at RMIT. Can you elaborate on the context of teaching most of the band at university?

Dr. Barry Hill:
So here's the backstory to me getting back into academia after my PhD. I really went into the music industry sort of gung-ho from the nineties into the early noughties, I was really trying to make it work as a career. My two bands: The Bird, and Amphibian had gotten really close, we were getting ‘Triple J famous’, we had independent record deals, we were doing little tours over to Europe. This is relevant to the King Gizz story because I noticed how much you got appreciated overseas as an Australian artist. When my Amphibian instrumental trio went to Europe for the first time everyone was really interested. At the time we were also really quite popular in Melbourne, but the money we were getting from gigs was next to nothing, and we didn't really get much record company interest. There were a couple of people at Triple J who liked the music, so we're getting a bit of airplay, but we were finding touring in Australia was a struggle. If you could find a way to get overseas, all of a sudden, you’d sell out all your CDs, and you'd get a bit of a following, festivals were paying good money, which would make it possible for you to actually come back with some in your pocket.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
Well, that was the break for King Gizz as well really, they won their grant in 2014 and got to go to the US for the first time. That's really where it all kind of came together for them.

Dr. Barry Hill:
I'm really proud of the fact that they were able to do that. I came away from the music industry because we were losing so much money, my band members were just like: 'we can't deal with this anymore'. It's just too much of a rip-off in the Australian music industry.
So I went back to: ‘well what the hell am I gonna do now?' I've always been interested in popular musical culture in Australia, so I went back to university, specifically to get a PhD scholarship to see if I could make it as an academic.
I managed to get into honors at Monash, had a fantastic time at uni, whereas previously, I didn't really want to go. This was the first time I was studying something I was really interested in and passionate about. I'd been living sort of between the Byron Bay area, Sydney, and Melbourne. I had a few connections up at Southern Cross University through the old bass teacher, Greg Lyon, and he liked what I did. So I got my scholarship to study at Lismore.
Then when I was finishing my PhD, this was 2004, 2005, I was back to: ‘well, what am I going to do after I finish?’ I was down in Melbourne, sitting with some friends and having coffee in East Brunswick. I looked at The Age and here was an ad for a music industry lecturer. This is the first job I’ve seen in the papers that I could apply for, I was perfectly qualified for what they want. So I applied for the job and got it and RMIT moved me down to Melbourne. They were just starting out this music industry course which was being delivered by the business school and the arts school with a focus of getting people ready to become professional musicians.
Because by the nineties, a lot of the traditional ways of being a musician were disappearing, laptops had basically killed the session music industry. RMIT recognized the need for a course that taught music industry artists how to be business people, because I'd had a bit of industry experience I thought ‘that's the course for me’. They must have hit the nail on the head, because in the first year they ran the course, which was the year before I was there, they doubled their student numbers. I was there for the next three years, and numbers doubled every year, from 30-50 students applying to 500 students applying, and the uptake going up to 90 students. It just meant that we'd meet all these people and we'd be talking to them about their plans and what sort of musical ability they had. So the focus of the course was much more about: ‘you have to understand, with music, you are the product as a musician these days’. The music industry was rapidly changing. At the time, the whole downloads thing was destroying the monopolies that the big four record companies had on the CD industry. So there were all these new opportunities, and King Gizzard has really snuck in on this wave of being able to be totally independent and access a market through the internet.
So, Stu, Joey, Eric, and Lucas turned up in 2010, and you could really tell that they had a plan, that there was already a project bubbling in the background.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
Well, each of them had been in quite a few pretty loosely structured bands over the years leading up to that.

Dr. Barry Hill:
So that footage that I've posted, I've gone through that archive, and I've actually got all these different performances by Eric and Stu and Joey doing all different things. I've thought, maybe I could release these as well, but I'd have to make sure that they're happy with that.
Eric in particular was obviously a superb drummer. I wanted to play with him, he really sounded like Elvin Jones from John Coltrane's band, he's got that amount of creativity. And yeah, lovely guy. But he was really lazy on assessments and getting prepared. He'd rock up to the performance exam and go, ‘I just put this together yesterday’. So posting that sort of stuff, he might not be very happy with. I'm gonna see if I might contact them first and see if they think it's suitable or if they're happy for it to be put up. As they obviously had a project together, and were sort of like a little bit of a gang.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
So that stood out to you among their whole course? Was there a sort of ‘spark’, do you think?

Dr. Barry Hill:
Yeah, definitely. They stood out in that they seemed to be focused on something, on a music project that was outside of RMIT. A lot of the kids there at the time were sort of looking for something. They'd be trying all sorts of things and got a sense that maybe they were there at university because they didn't quite know what direction they wanted to head in. So they wanted to get a degree behind them just to sort of try and work out where they were going, which is what I did as an undergraduate. I didn't really know what I wanted to do so I just did an Arts degree.
But you got a sense that Stu and Joey in particular, were just like: ‘we're on a mission’, that they really knew what they wanted to do. They didn't actually talk about King Gizzard too much, basically that performance I posted was them introducing the concept to me.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
Are you aware of how long the King Gizzard name, like the band itself, had existed at that stage?

Dr. Barry Hill:
I know that they were to-ing and fro-ing about it, and I know that we also had a bit of a discussion about what the hell is that? You know, in terms of a band name, it sort of goes against all the rules of band names. Because it's really long, it's really difficult to spell. And the only thing that it had really going for it was that you definitely would be able to get the website.com, any URL at all. In a sense, in that way, it's actually a really good band name.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
Yeah, I'm of the opinion that it's worked out brilliantly for them having that name.

Dr. Barry Hill:
It certainly has, yeah. All my current students just refer to them as ‘The Gizz’. Australians will always find a way to shorten anything they think is too long. I found they were interested in being original and they were confident about the original ideas. A lot of students are like: ‘oh, I don't know whether this is right’, ‘I don't know whether this is a good thing’, ‘I don't know whether the industry is gonna like it’, ‘I don't know whether people are going to like it’. You got the sense with King Gizz like: ‘this is what we're doing and we really like it, we think it's fun, so we're gonna do it’.
That's really a much better way to approach your music and your artistic practice. Because if you've got one hundred percent passion in your performances, the audience is going to love it, nearly no matter what it sounds like. Because part of music is the theatrical nature of the live performance, where we sort of voyeuristically like to look at people pursuing their passion on the stage. When there's a group of young guys doing it, when it's non-violent, in a way, it's model behavior. That's something teenage guys get into. Super energetic, super crazy, but obviously, communicating really strongly between the band members.
One of the things I alluded to in my PhD is that with the surge of electronic music coming into the 21st century, as a culture, we're in danger of stopping listening to each other because of the increased interaction with computer screens. Whereas with King Gizzard, that music only works because they listen to each other, it's such a big dynamic range and you've got to be so on to the changes and be happy to go with what's going on, in a sense that they take a very Jazz approach to their music.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
Have you seen them perform live more recently?

Dr. Barry Hill:
Not more recently no. I think I might have seen them play another gig at some little outdoor venue in the city in Melbourne, it could have actually been in RMIT. But I know I haven't seen them since they got massive.
So it would be very strange for me to see, after seeing them just rock up in my dusty old lecture theater where the video was shot. In the class, if everyone turned up there might have been 15 people there.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
I brought a musician friend to see them for the first time in 2019, and his first comment afterwards was that they're still doing it like a high school band. Like it's pretty simple up on stage and very straightforward, there's not much pretense to it. You might find it remarkable how organic they still are, but yeah it's the crowd that's a pretty big deal these days.

Dr. Barry Hill:
Yeah, I've watched a lot of YouTube videos of them performing and sort of just tracked their career, because it's been so great to see them. I feel really sort of vindicated because of what I talked about in my lectures about the music industry at the RMIT program. The notion that as an Australian act, it's so important to get overseas quickly, and really push your stuff to an overseas market, because we're a premium, we're exotic. We present as authentically different to all the musicians that they see overseas. I tell my students, imagine a lot of bands from Iceland come to play at your local pub, everyone's gonna go just from that fact. Because it's like: ‘Iceland? What the hell do they do there?’ We're so far away, a lot of people will never make it to Australia in their lifetime. When Australian bands come over, it's like: ‘oh these people actually do stuff that's different’. They think we have kooky animals here, that we have this amazing lifestyle, and this amazingly rich community in terms not only money, but also, we're starting to put together really interesting music.
Music as a sort of a contemporary white-Australian culture is starting to get ‘a sound’ [indigenous music culture dates back tens of thousands of years, while it is suggested that music truly representative of contemporary colonial Australian culture didn't arise until around fifty years ago]. If you think about the Melbourne Shuffle, it was a dance style that came out of Melbourne. A lot of cutting edge electronic music is based around technology which was developed in Australia. The Fairlight was the first sampler in the late seventies, early eighties, and sampling changed the world.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
Like with The Avalanches.

Dr. Barry Hill:
Hm, The Avalanches, you know. The Bird and Amphibian, sort of came up in the early to late nineties, early noughties. That was the transition period between the old style music industry and the new style. So it means back then there was no YouTube, you didn’t really video much, videos back then involved bulky cameras and tape.
I find it interesting that historical periods might not be documented very well. Generally in music, like from 1995 to 2005, we're not going to get much of a record of that time, because there was hardly any vinyl, CDs were declining. There's downloads, but mp3s can be complicated with rights management.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
That's an issue that I've had trying to track the early history of King Gizzard members as well. Some of that stuff only existed on MySpace and is now just lost.
I was born early in that era, so I noticed in your PhD you mentioned the Resin Dogs, which is a band that I only know of because they were one of the more popular live acts to tour regularly in our region; I’m sure they now have some stuff published digitally, but I bet it's not being streamed very much.

Dr. Barry Hill:
You did have the Global Carnival where you were [Gumbaynggir country], that was a really iconic festival. The after party was always a cracker as well.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
I was a bit young for the after party, but yeah, the Global Carnival was very much a defining aspect of my childhood.

Dr. Barry Hill:
Oh, well you probably would have seen me play, because I used to play in a variety of groups there in the nineties, like as a hired drum and bass player. I was with a lot of multicultural groups playing African music, South American music, and hybrid Indian music.
That era was really instrumental for me, I was very much a Sydney based musician then — and just trying to circle this back to King Gizzard — back then, Sydney and Melbourne bands didn't really get to know each other that much. It's just a little bit too far when you're starting out.
I remember going to Melbourne for the first time in the early 90s and getting blown away by the strength of the music scene. While it was happening, we had just been through a progression of shutdowns of live music venues being replaced by pokies [slot machines]. Melbourne just seemed to be really vibrant with amazing music, but not many people getting paid very well. Little cafes and pubs that could get liquor licenses that they wouldn’t be able to in New South Wales. It's like a different country.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
It's funny how little has changed. You had the Sydney lockout laws through the 2010s — which were implemented not long after I moved there — and then I was seeing friends trying to make it in the Melbourne music scene, the difference is just incredible.

Dr. Barry Hill:
There is a deep-set culture in Sydney, it's sort of like Los Angeles while Melbourne is a bit more like New York. In terms of: shit weather, pollution, and traffic. While I was working at RMIT, trying to drive down Punt Road on a Saturday, with the AFL on you can forget it. Music culture is going to propagate more, because people are just stuck in houses on cold days. Whereas in Sydney you can just go to the beach. There's much more of a bodied, beautiful culture in Sydney, and Melbourne is more about: ‘we're funky, passionate artists’.
I think that local network is another important thing that King Gizzard has. They have people who are happy to do kooky videos for them, do amazing artwork for them, have managed their record label for them, and organized tours for them. So they've managed to cultivate this network. And I think, you know, from my memory of Stu and Joey, and Eric, and Lucas, they were all really, really nice guys.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
Yeah, definitely. Every fan that meets them says that too.

Dr. Barry Hill:
So if you're a nice person with creative ideas, and you support and listen to other people, and work interactively, you create a network really quickly, and that network becomes a community which then supports your art. So they did two things which I talked about in the program: get overseas, and create a good network and support it and cultivate it. They were probably going to do it anyway, but they definitely followed the model that we were suggesting people follow at RMIT. Interestingly enough, one of the members of The Smith Street Band was also attending RMIT at that time, as well as Lucy Wilson who became a little bit ‘indie famous’ in Melbourne. So The Smith Street Band crew were hanging around RMIT, then Lucy Wilson was hanging around RMIT, the King Gizzard guys were hanging around RMIT. It was a couple of years where there were these really driven artists who were studying there, and we sort of made a really nice vibe in the course.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
About needing to get out of the country early, do you think it is a blessing or curse? A lot of Australian musicians talk about how difficult the industry here is. You’ve established it brings a potential advantage, but I wonder if you think it's more difficult here than other international markets?

Dr. Barry Hill:
Look, I think it's sort of a two-edged sword, it's definitely different. Definitely very, very difficult to make money. That's in the Australian market itself, unless you're really supported by Triple J. To get access to Triple J these days you need to pay a publicist to promote your act to their programmers, which as a process in general is unfair because it's so expensive. So in a sense, Triple J really control the development of independent artists in Australia, and that's not a very good situation.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
I've been a lifelong Triple J listener. With King Gizz, my sense is that they've had some of that support, it is how I discovered the band. But I've always had this feeling that Triple J doesn't really know what to do with them either. Most years they'll put one song in good rotation, which is more than most bands could hope for, but it never seems like the ‘right’ song and they typically don’t perform well in the Hottest 100. I guess King Gizz don't really fit the model of the release cycle and the touring cycle, with their prolificacy and diversity; it always seemed to be kind of a funny relationship with Triple J.

Dr. Barry Hill:
Look, I could go into a big rant about what I think about Triple J. But just basically, they are part of an older music industry model where they have a relationship with the major labels, which is a problem because Triple J has centralized programming now. When I was listening to it as a student back in the 80s and early 90s, each DJ got to program their own show, so it wasn't a monopoly. There were maybe eight or nine DJs all programming different stuff, drawing on all different networks of music in Australia.
Now, it's one person making those decisions, someone who's a middle-aged white man. So they have strong relationships with record companies, who recognize that getting a new artist on the station is a stepping stone to get them commercially famous. That happens because of the way copyright payments and APRA payments work in Australia. So as a record label, because there's only a few big radio stations, Triple J is one way you can promote your artists out there, get APRA royalties for your act, and get some money for the investment that you've made in them. For independent artists, you really need to come through the Triple J Unearthed program and then get someone in Triple J to really support you, otherwise you have to pay a publicist 'ten-thousand' a month to keep pushing your stuff to the head honchos.
With King Gizzard, because they're independent, because their music sometimes is not radio friendly, the whole identity of the band doesn't fit well into one genre, so that doesn't fit into a particular show they want to promote.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
The fans are actually pushing to get The Dripping Tap into the Hottest 100 next week.

Dr. Barry Hill:
Even the Hottest 100, that's become this hilarious, sort of way of ‘let's see how we can stack the voting’.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
I'm personally a bit of a purist when it comes to the Hottest 100, you know, I manually write-in my votes and all that, but this trend does make it a little more difficult to engage with over time I feel.

Dr. Barry Hill:
To get back to what your question was about the music industry, it's hard financially, but one thing that's better about it than overseas markets is that when you're starting out, it's not so cut-throat. I've known people who've gone to the states, to Nashville to try and make it in that scene. There's so many people living in their cars, still paying rent to a friend's house so they've got access to a shower and a kitchen. Just struggling, and struggling, and struggling to get that first step into the music industry in America as American artists. Same in Europe or England, there's just so many bands, you're competing with so many things.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
So there's a bit more space down here.

Dr. Barry Hill:
Yeah, it's similar to living in regions like we do as opposed to Living in New York, you've got space to go out to beautiful waterholes, establish your creative practice and establish a network of people. The great thing about the music industry now, is that if you are driven, if you have a really good project together, and you've got a few people on board that have the time to develop it, you can develop your international networks completely outside of the record companies and radio stations.
The social media thing is a real help that we didn't have in the nineties, to actually connect with people overseas who might like your music and that might be able to put on a gig for you. I'd love to get Stu and everyone up to my current course to tell my kids how they did it, what the breakthrough moments were. But I reckon the first couple of tours to America must have been in the back of a bus.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
Oh, absolutely they were. That $50,000 AUD grant [the Carlton Dry Global Music Grant won at the Australian Independent Record Labels Association awards for Float Along — Fill Your Lungs] got them to the US where they really cut their teeth with a real tour like you can’t do here, and made all sorts of connections. Then they were still able to rent a cheap cabin in upstate New York for a month and buy a bunch of equipment off Craigslist, and traveled down to Brooklyn every weekend to do a residency in the 3am slot at Baby’s All Right. I think half of them would go in the van and the rest had to rotate each week for who would take the bus. That cabin is where I’m In Your Mind Fuzz started coming together, and they had just enough left over to buy some studio time at Daptone Records for that as well.
So that was their first big leap, in terms of being able to produce their first truly realised studio album, and to tour that much at the same time. They’d hooked up with John Dwyer from Thee Oh Sees, and so that album was their first international publication on his independent label, Castle Face Records.

Dr. Barry Hill:
That, to me, sounds perfect. Sounds like the way to do it in the big time. The good thing about touring in America is you've got a city of a million people, a couple of hours down the road, everywhere. So base yourself over there, make yourself different to every other band.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
And then you can just put in the work.

Dr. Barry Hill:
They've done it really well. I know musicians from all different walks of life, like in the classical music scene as well. Australian classical musicians are playing in half the orchestras around Europe, and they’re the key musicians. My friend, Joseph Tawadros the oud player, went directly over to New York and recorded with really great musicians, and he's now got multiple ARIAs for World Music albums and doing stuff all over the world, because he developed an international network. I've got my friend Paul Corley, who I met here and is an amazing audio engineer, he went over to Iceland and is now working with Björk and those sorts of people. To me, the thing about being an Australian artist is to recognize that the way to monetize your practice is to get overseas as quickly as possible.
The limited success that I had with Amphibian, we sold more albums in Japan than we ever had here. It was the same sort of thing. We established a relationship with an independent international record label and then from there, you can expand out. Whereas trying to establish a relationship with an indie label here, there's just too many people involved to pay the bills. If you've spent the time developing your practice in Australia, you can't afford to pay a publicist, you can't afford to pay a tour manager, can't afford to pay a band manager or a sound engineer. You just gotta go with whatever and do it yourself, which means it's a much slower process, much more frustrating and much more taxing on your band’s practice.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
I'm always on the lookout for the post King Gizz generation, and there's one band I've kind of had my eye on that I discovered on Rage, Liminal. I wanted to mention them because they're from Lismore [where Dr. Hill currently teaches].

Dr. Barry Hill:
Ah, I know Liminal very well, its interesting, there’s a current little bubbling scene in Lismore, and they’re all King Gizz fanatics. They're all taking on different aspects of King Gizz. Another band is called PUFF.
Alako Myles who is behind Liminal, he's doing a lot of things, like he plays drums too. As his independent project last year, he produced eight episodes of a video program called Anemoia. It's sort of like a Recovery or Rage type project he put together himself. So he’d do all the shooting of the content, then do a live gig to a three camera shoot in our auditorium, and set up a little sort of TV studio style interview space in front of a live audience, and posted online every Saturday. Another type of these people who are just really driven.

All my students were flabbergasted when they heard that I taught Stu, Eric, Lucas, and Joey, and they started to doubt it, so posting that video gave me a lot of credit.
The marketing manager of my faculty has a son who is really into King Gizzard, I was having a meeting with him about general boring university stuff, and I just mentioned about the YouTube clip and this interview, and he suddenly ran off and then came back on the Zoom with the new album in front of the camera. I really like how they're becoming this sort of more underground phenomenon, they're sort of bypassing the traditional Triple J route to fame and fortune.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
So you’ve obviously loosely followed their professional career, but I don't really have a sense of how much of a fan of their music you are. Are you at the level where you’ve heard all their albums, or do you have a favorite?

Dr. Barry Hill:
I haven't heard all their albums yet, but I absolutely love their music, like even that gig I posted online. I was there behind the camera with Bobby Flynn, the Australian Idol finalist. He’s an indie lover, not your classic Australian Idol crooner type, we just looked at each other after they went off stage and went: ‘wow that was fantastic!’.
I love Frank Zappa. I'm sort of an old alternative punk rocker, my early music that I was making was all about that. I’m into a lot of crazy alternative rock bands, like Camper Van Beethoven or The Modern Lovers.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
The thing that shocked me about your video from 2010 was Joey in particular, almost doing that kind of psychobilly thing that Nick Cave was doing in the early 80s.

Dr. Barry Hill:
He would turn up to lectures looking like that.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
It is wonderful to know that.

Dr. Barry Hill:
I thought he was gonna go solo, he was playing with all different people in the course. It was like Joey is with this person, Joey is with Eric doing a duo…

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
He does have a solo side project, and is just promoting new material for it now. Bullant, it's a sort of an abstract techno-IDM-type thing.

Dr. Barry Hill:
Part of the course was the computer sound production unit, I've got all these assessments on my hard drive still that Joey’s put in of electronic stuff. Eric's electronic stuff was awesome as well. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me he's doing electronic solo stuff.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
You know, King Gizz are obviously very environmentally conscious; and as a worker in the renewable energy industry, I also wanted to ask you about one of your more recent research projects, the Sunflower.

So it's a portable lithium battery bank with solar charging and AC power supply to use in place of a diesel generator for a live music event. I was curious if it has features that specifically facilitate audio visual Production?

Dr. Barry Hill:
Yes, it is specified for audio visual production. We actually built the precursor to the Sunflower, the Germinate Project, at RMIT. We did a power audit on every single piece of gear you need to run a sound system with the research question: ‘how much power do you need to run a medium sized festival venue?’, enough for maybe one or two thousand people. So we got the amount we'd need for the backline for a small LED lighting array, for the front of house, foldback, and all the gear. This gave us a battery and inverter capacity that would be able to provide the power for a festival stage for a weekend. Then we added a solar panel array that was big enough to supplement the average power consumption of the stage through the day.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
It's kind of mind blowing that all those specs have lined up, actually. That's very ambitious of you, well done.

Dr. Barry Hill:
Well, they only just do. Back then, no one knew about lithium batteries, Tesla was just like a crazy sports car that didn't handle very well. We got these cells from the Chinese air force, so we had to build the battery packs ourselves and get a company from Western Australia to make the battery management system.
It's been a great project for me, because it's taken me away from music a little bit, but I did start from the concept that this is an area of our society that we can replace diesel generators in.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
It's impressive that you have a lithium bank that has lasted this long, you must have been among the first people to specify a bank with that high a capacity for practical use. So it sounds like you have been able to eliminate the need for a diesel generator at an outdoor festival?

Dr. Barry Hill:
We've demonstrated proof of concept. At the moment, there's no way that the Sunflower could run the mainstage at Splendour In The Grass [one of Australia's biggest annual music festivals, it is heavily sponsored by Triple J]. But the thing is, you would only need a certain number, or you just need to up the numbers, so you can make that happen. At the moment, to get enough power out of something that has the footprint of a diesel generator, it's only just able to happen.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
I read it's been used at fifty or so events?

Dr. Barry Hill:
It's way over that, now, we’re probably up to hundreds of events. I'm sort of drawing on the notion that during history, it's the creative arts sector which has actually been a really big part of the innovation of the technology that we use in our daily lives.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
That's why I wanted to ask about it. It would be easy to present my job as implementing renewable energy sources to save the environment; but we’re still entirely driven by capitalism, we exist to make a profit for homeowners and industry investors, and that includes myself. We are in the relatively rare position of using renewables to supply people with power who live off the grid and otherwise couldn’t get access, but that is only a fraction of the business.
So I thought it was quite awesome just to see a project like this that's creative and just niche enough to justify its existence outside of capitalism.

Dr. Barry Hill:
The technology of lithium batteries is controversial, it has its problems. There's all different ways you can environmentally audit the sustainable energy process. If you go from end to end, in terms of extracting the chemicals to build the solar cells, to generate the power, then they'll last a certain lifetime and then degrade, and you have to recycle them. They're still saying that over their entire lifetime, a solar panel, battery based system will be more energy efficient than any sort of fossil fuel based system. Because the amount of inputs that you need to keep a fossil fuel based system running: the oil, the sparkplugs, the replacement parts, is the killer, that’s all taking resources and creating pollution for the environment.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
I think it's certainly projects like the Sunflower that are going to be the practical proof.

Dr. Barry Hill:
As someone who's in the electrical scene, do you know the derivation of the word electrician?

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
I don't actually, I am a technician, rather than an electrician.

Dr. Barry Hill:
It comes from ‘magician’.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
Ha! Of course it does.

Dr. Barry Hill:
The very first people that incorporated electricity into their work practice were artists; doing magic tricks with static electricity for rich people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To me, that's a really great anecdotal story that shows the value of art-space education in our society.
It was the people who have innovated things that have often been kooky sort of people like Steve Jobs and company, who were just getting stoned in their garage in California and trying kooky ways of circuit bending computers and they came up with a mouse. There were two kooky people in Sydney who came up with the Fairlight computer, the first touchscreen computer, which was also a digital sampler. You know, the Wright brothers were kooky cycle engineers.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
Nikola Tesla.

Dr. Barry Hill:
Nikola Tesla, yeah, similar sort of driven artist, probably on some sort of spectrum. But you need these creative people to push the boundaries, business people never push boundaries, as you say, capitalism will always just go for the profit margin.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
I think that circles back nicely to King Gizz, who as environmentalists themselves, they encompass that in their music, and they donate to charities.

Dr. Barry Hill:
They sponsor a football team! It's fantastic that they’re sponsoring an AFLW team, that can't get more Melbourne.

W.B.T.G. Slinger:
With all that in mind, there's going to be a lot of international readers. I wondered if you could provide insight to the environmentalism of a millennial rock band from rural Victoria — where does it come from, or what does environmentalism mean to them?

Dr. Barry Hill:
I would say: we’re both from New South Wales, it's quite a beautiful state, it's very mountainous, the cities are quite beautiful. The thing that struck me about moving south to Melbourne, is that you've got the plains, it's just flat lands, it gets really hot in summer, and freezing cold in winter, it's degraded, they’ve cleared lots of trees. There's lots of people living in these really harsh environments.
I got a sense when I was in Melbourne, that there's much more forward progressive thinking going on in that town than there is in Sydney or in other towns in Australia. Melbourne could be compared to an American city like Chicago or Seattle, it's not a great environment to live in, and that might actually give you more of an inspiration or a more of an impetus to actually incorporate sustainability or environmentalism into your practice. Because you look outside and you think: ‘the environment's pretty fucked, I have to do something about that’.
I think Melbourne is a city that is really pushing the boundaries of Australian culture more so than any other city. Maybe Darwin and Alice Springs are ahead in pushing the indigenous rights aspects, just as a bigger more empowered indigenous population in those cities. But Melbourne is really pushing: ‘this is what Australia is about, or what Australia could be about’.
It's a very progressive, very innovative city, like with Seattle in America, Apple's there, there are aircraft companies there, and Grunge came from there. So basically, I think Melbourne's really like a culturally innovative place, and also environmentally conscious, much more politically aware, and much more progressive than other communities in Australia.