For Australian bands to be showcasing in this venue now means Australian rock is once again a serious player on the LA music landscape.

All great rock bands have a little dirt in their faces.

That is as un-Australian as you can get. That has to be a serious criminal offence with serious criminal consequences,

Where else would you do this? If you do this in a serious venue, it would sound smarmy, produced and self-conscious. The best way to get out of (trouble) and get a few laughs is to have a late-night comic helping you through.

When I returned home soon afterwards, it was with a newly awakened sense of what Australian literature was good for: helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance.

We invited about ten dirt jumpers from the States and Canada and there were five rock bands playing on the main stage. You could watch the concert, the dirt jumps and the cross country from one spot. The announcer was always talking about everything, talking about the current standing in the race or explaining the tricks, introducing the bands.