Bob Cambell is a veteran of the Australian folk music scene, a singer, musician, poet, teacher and story teller who has performs in many parts of the world and throughout Australia. He has recorded numerous CDs, both solo and with his band, Home Rule, and has toured and performed extensively, playing his particular style of distinctively Australian music.

The subtitle, "An Activist Folksinger's Memoir," is accurate - fair dinkum, as Australians say, for the autobiography of Campbell, a member of the Maitland Bush Band, Ironbark Home Rule - and, for a span, the Australian Communist Party. 

Though there are cameo appearances by the young Bee Gees, the Dubliners and the Chieftains, and some reminiscences of trashing pubs (and one unfortunate record turntable) whilst intoxicated, emphasis is less on tour gossip than politics. Which, fortunately, in Campbell's telling, is also raucous and gossipy. 

He was born in 1942 in the roughneck town of Maitland, where drinking and fighting (and composing lyric poetry about same) were routine. After brushes with delinquency and an early marriage, Campbell labored in brickworks, road construction, and other dangerous, dirty industries which enlightened him (along with the literature of John Steinbeck) to trade-unions, Marxism and the capitalist exploitation condoned by the monolithic, conservative Catholic Church. 

Music came to Campbell on the side, and, as Australia's Cold-War government lent men to the USA in Vietnam, he and his comrades took up the guitar, mouth-organ (Campbell built a chrome frame for it in imitation of Bob Dylan at his own steelworks) and fiddle, playing folk tunes and protest anthems in Ned Kelly territory. 

Meanwhile he ascended in Australia's steelworker unions and various activist movements (peace, Aboriginal rights, anti-Apartheid, ecology etc.). He quotes here from dossiers compiled on him by Aussie intelligence snoops - who, he acidly notes, missed completely a time in the 1970s when Campbell and his mates prepped for possible national insurrection. 

While some Australian communists mindlessly hewed to Moscow, Campbell writes, the USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia, split with China and chronic human-rights violations splintered their sympathizers, and he himself broke away. 


He remains committed to progressive causes, but says that today his role model is Gandhi, not Lenin, and he has even tolerated old ideological foes playing at folk-festivals he has overseen. Liberal amounts of Campbell's ballads and poems appear throughout the manuscript. 

www.fiddlerbob.com.au