‘Beds are Burning’: Midnight Oil’s Social-Justice Classic

By Oliver Tearle

Few phrases have aged more quickly or more badly in the last decade or so than ‘social justice’, but back in 1987, before it was co-opted by shouty people with cartoon avatars on social media, those two words still meant something. And ‘Beds Are Burning’, by the Australian band Midnight Oil, is a social-justice song that means something, too.

This is a song with a message to impart, and one of the reasons the message has endured is that Peter Garrett and his band understood that, when it comes to writing political music, the music must come first.

This song, famously, is about giving back a part of Australia to Aboriginal peoples who have lived on that land for millennia. When Midnight Oil toured through the Outback in 1986, they played to remote Aboriginal communities and observed the poor living conditions up close. The land ‘belongs’ to the Aboriginal peoples who had been displaced, and Australia should ‘give it back’ to them.

This is a peculiarly Australian song, about Australian issues, that has nevertheless travelled all over the world, and travelled well. Although the song’s lyrics refer to very specific locales in the band’s homeland such as Kintore, Yuendemu, and the Western Desert, the song’s punchy chorus – not just ‘catchy’ but rather so infectious you’d be advised to take a course of antibiotics after listening to it – ensured that it went on to be a global hit.

Another factor probably helped the song to become internationally known and loved. The image of beds ‘burning’ suggested the other issue (I won’t say ‘burning’ issue: oh, too late) which the song engages with: climate change and environmental causes.

The reference to forty-five-degree temperatures gives a nod to this, but the lyrics’ repeated allusions to ‘renting’ land that we must, or should, give back also chime with the rallying cry of environmentalists: that we don’t own the land but merely rent it, caretaking it for our children until the time comes to pass it on to them (and their children).

Of course, there’s also a pleasing summoning of the phrase ‘you’ve made your bed, now you lie in it’; and who wants to lie in a bed that’s on fire? Even in autumn I get hot enough if I don’t have the bloody window open at night, and I live in bloody England, for goodness’ sake.

So if we have made our beds by despoiling Mother Earth, now (the song seems to say) we must lie in them; but there’s also a note of hope in the chorus’s use of questions (inviting a response) and the ‘time has come’ urgency which suggests there is still time to act on these injustices. Which is more than you can say for the climate millenarians who are periodically wheeled out by audience-and-ambulance-chasing media organisations as soon as the temperature passes twenty-five degrees every April.

The video, fittingly enough, features the band recreating their tour that inspired the song, along with footage of them singing it among the very communities it speaks up for (although with its clear blue skies and radiant sunshine, it does have the unintended effect of making the Outback look like a rather pleasant place to go for a two-week holiday).

So ‘Beds Are Burning’ is that rare thing: an optimistic pessimist’s song, urging us to do the right thing. But its upbeat and catchy chorus saves it from the charge of moral posturing or hectoring the audience. Audiences have taken the song to their hearts, even if not every listener has necessarily taken its message to heart.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has named it one of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. And you can’t argue with that, because a fact’s a fact.