<p><span>- "<em>The past isn't dead</em>", once wrote <strong>William Faulkner</strong>; "<em>in fact it's not even past</em>". This is the reason we put in effort to remember the stories from times gone by - because understanding the world we live in partly means understanding the past events that got us here.</span></p>
<p><span>Few bands are as committed to the historian ideal as folk punks The Dead Maggies. The band formed with the mission statement of "songs about Tasmanian murders and suicides". And though their island home is a small place, their third album <em>More Than Just Ghosts</em> shows the well of gory history hasn't run dry yet.</span></p>
<p><span>Musically, the album is a folk punk hoedown - an overflowing mix of acoustic instruments played at punk rock speed with gang shout-along vocals. Lyrically, they mostly cover the Dead Maggies traditional terrain, with plenty of wild convict and bushranger stories. The chronology takes a sharp jump forward though in the song <em>Port Arthur</em>. It's still set in a famous convict location, but this track remembers the massacre from 1996, when <strong>Martin Bryant</strong> killed thirty-five people and injured twenty-three more.</span></p>
<p><span>It's interesting the way the mood changes with this jump through time. <em>Port Arthur</em> is a slow ballad on an album of mostly punk thrashes and its tone is serious where the band have traditionally approached even the most grim subjects with a morbid humour. On the next track in fact, <em>The Diary Of Michael Howe,</em> the band depict eponymous bushranger shooting his aboriginal lover during his attempt to evade police. Howe is the first person narrator and somewhat the hero of a light-hearted and fun song.</span></p>
<p><span>There's something about the living memory of Martin Bryant's murders that makes that seem out of the question. As singer <strong>Gareth Davies</strong> notes in the lyrics "<em>some of my friends went to school with him</em>". So instead we get a serious anti-firearms message, saying "<em>we'll never know why he raised that gun, but if it hadn't been there he couldn't have done</em>." Bryant's act was horrific and avoidable, but history is full of terrible acts that fit that description. Is it just a failure of empathy that means we relate differently to the Port Arthur tragedy?</span></p>
<p><span>It's from this song that the album title <em>More Than Just Ghosts</em> is derived, echoing Faulkner's famous quote. The Port Arthur massacre didn't appear in a vacuum - there were historical events that influenced the finger on the trigger that day. Nor did the story end with Bryant's imprisonment. The event led to mass changes to gun laws in Australia, an example that is cited often in the US as history tragically repeats itself again and again.</span></p>
<p><span>The past is not dead then, which is why a project like The Dead Maggies is so interesting. Folk music can treat the past as a preserved relic to be observed like a museum exhibit. The music industry often uses it like a tomb full of treasures to be plundered, seeing the sounds and aesthetics of the past as products to be marketed. The Dead Maggies though, treat history as living stories, retold in an attempt to change the future. In their hands the aspirations and oppressions of our ancestors are more than just ghosts.</span></p>
<p><span>- Andy Paine.</span></p>
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