Sven Simulacrum
(Australia)

CONCEPT

Voice When Pisi asked me to remix a revolutionary song from the “place I am from”, what immediately came to mind was “You’re the voice,” recorded by John Farnham and the lead single from his album
Whispering Jack (1986). It’s a song that I remember from my childhood watching music television while growing up in the suburbs of Sydney. I never liked it, even though it received a major push from Australia’s commercial media outlets. “You’re the Voice” is often described as Australia’s “unofficial national anthem”, but I find it unbearable, especially its supposedly rousing chorus. Some years later, “You’re the Voice” rang out during protests organised by the then burgeoning alter-globalisation movement in the early 2000’s, notably the massive three day long S-11 blockade of the World Economic Forum held at Crown Casino Melbourne, 11 September 2000. 

S-11’s organisers ran an online poll that selected “You’re the voice” as the anthem for the protest. Farnham’s management was furious and demanded that his image and a link to download the song be removed from the S-11 website. As one protestor James Plested recalls, while the choice was partly ironic, the song’s lyrics spoke to the optimism of the movement: 

This time, we know we all can stand together,

With the power to be powerful,

Believing we can make it better. Among the mobile sounds systems playing hip hop and techno, “You’re the voice” had a different tone, I suppose one could call it “cringe”. I also recall a breakcore remix circulating around that time. 

Now some 25 years on, I began researching “You’re the voice” in relation to Three Sound’s theme of “political disappointment” and was intrigued to learn that Farnham had approved the use of his recording in a recent campaign in Australia. In October 2023 the settler-colonial state held a national referendum to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander “Voice” to Parliament and recognise Indigenous Australians in its constitution. Farnham agreed to have his song used for the “Yes” campaign and in a widely circulated statement the then 74-year-old entertainer declared: “This song changed my life. I can only hope that now it might help, in some small way, to change the lives of our First Nations Peoples for the better.”

The song was used for a series of promotional videos made by the The Uluru Dialogue, for its “History Is Calling” campaign, urging voters to “stand on the right side of history”.  This organisation is dedicated to advancing the Uluru Statement from the Heart that arose after years of consultation and dialogues with indigenous communities, culminating in the National Constitutional Convention, Uluru, 2017. As the largest consensus of First Nations people, the Statement urges for the establishment of a “Makarrata Commission” to supervise a process of agreement-making and truth-telling between settler governments and sovereign First Nations. Makarrata is a Yolŋu word adopted to describe a process of conflict resolution, peacemaking and justice.

Farnham’s “gifting” of the song to the Yes campaign was also met with detractors, and his Facebook fan page was forced to close and delete comments on this issue. The then opposition leader, Peter Dutton who opposed the constitutional change also evoked the song’s chorus, “You’re the voice, try and understand it”, in an interview with Sky News, commenting: “I honestly don’t think most Australians understand it. And they want to be informed.”

After eleven months of fierce campaigning, this initiative to establish a constitutionally recognised “Indigenous Voice” was rejected by an overwhelming majority of voters on 14 October 2023.

Songs

“You’re the Voice” is not a song I feel any affinity with, and nor did I as brown kid trying to fit into hegemonic white Australian society, albeit as assimilationist policies gave way to multiculturalism. Actually, I really dislike the power rock ballad genre, although it is common among democratic movements of the 1980s to early 2000s era (eg Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong) and is probably good for karaoke. So, my approach to this remix was to not be faithful to the song. Indeed, I thought the most revolutionary thing to do was to transform it into a track that I liked, or at least enjoyed making. I began by editing out snippets of Farnham’s recording that I found amusing: the opening tap-tap rhythm, the fretboard runs that ornament the bassline and Farnham singing in falsetto. I avoided the chorus, although I did consider the distinctive bagpipes in the middle eight.

My first rule was to only use sounds in Farnham’s 1986 single—no imported pounding kicks or crystalline hats. I collected other versions of the “You’re the Voice”  that I thought I might sample, including a version recorded by Chris Thompson, one of the song’s authors, alongside another recorded by the band Heart, but I could not bear to listen to them.

Recalling this era, however, led me to consider another iconic song from that time and that might be considered a counter national anthem. Yothu Yindi’s “Treaty” (1991) invokes the issue that it seems most Australians refuse to consider, which is of a Treaty/Makarrata—or treaties—with it’s First Nations’ people. Yothu Yindi were a mixed Yolŋu and Balanda (white settlers) band based in the north of the continent and “Treaty” is sung in both the Gumatj language of the Yolŋu people and English. It has a rock pop structure, propelled by a djatpangarri dance rhythm. It recalls a visit made by the then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, to the region during the Barunga Festival in 1988, the bicentenary year of the founding of the British colony. Here he was presented with a large bark painting and statement of political objectives known as the Barunga Statement, one of several bark petitions issued to Australian political leaders since 1963. On receiving it, Hawke promised that his government would conclude a treaty by 1990. Three years later, with no moves towards a treaty and the Yothu Yindi wrote the song to keep the issue alive, in collaboration with respected singer-songwriter Paul Kelly and the band Midnight Oil. It was released the same year Hawke lost office following a leadership challenge within the Australian Labor Party. 

The original version of “Treaty” received limited airplay when released in June, but soon after it was remixed as a club track by the production crew Filthy Lucre and entered into the Australian charts where it stayed for several months. “Treaty” was also received well internationally, eventually peaking at No. 6 in the US Billboard charts. I sampled both versions with some hesitation and much respect, thinking that it would be appropriate to set up a sonic dialectic between First Nations and settler anthems. Notably, the song’s lyrics “Treaty ma’” (Treaty now), are the only discernible sung words that remain in my mash-up, surfacing periodically in the mix. 

“Treaty” remains relevant today. Following the national vote rejecting the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, Nooky the host of the all-Indigenous music show Blak Out on Australian national radio broadcaster Triple J played the song on repeat for the program’s entire one hour block, Sunday 15 October 2023. He recalls:

October 14 was a moment in history where a dark cloud will forever cast a shadow. I feel like I let down my elders. I feel like I let down the future generations. Last night was the most overt, unconcealed manifestation of racism I have ever experienced in my whole life. Yesterday they said our pain and our suffering continues. The disadvantage and the inequality continues. But so does our love, our happiness, our strength and our pride.

A third element comes from “Arunthava Aadhiputhra” (2024), by young Sri Lankan artists Abhi and Dinoj M, albeit warped and screwed into a different form. I collaborated with them for the digital music production program “Dham Dham Riddim”, at DreamSpace Academy, Batticaloa 2024. While I don’t understand Abhi’s lyrics delivered in Tamil, according to the Bandcamp release it is: “A powerful call for leadership… [that] stands as an anthem for change and hope.”

I met Dinoj M. in 2022, when he was beginning to produce music. Over this time I’ve mashed up, sampled and remixed his productions as a way of engaging with his music and deepening my affiliation with the community in Batticaloa. More broadly, I have been attempting to connect with family and friends in Sri Lanka following the end of the civil war and genocide of Tamil people in 2009.

“Voice” also includes a sample from “Nusa Fantasma” (2025) a song released by Filastine and Nova during the production of this mash-up, March 2025. The couple who pilot Arka Kinari, a sailing ship and ecological cultural platform currently in Indonesia, are old friends and this is the first music they have released in several years. As announced on Bandcamp, Nova’s lyrics are “a call to resist the rising tides of intolerance and polarization, to embrace an equitable and equatorial futurism”. Her thoughts resonate with my interests for this mix, although admittedly I only sampled a segment of hand drumming. But drums talk, no?

Listen

I built my mash-up around a piano loop sampled from “You’re the voice”. When I loaded it into Ableton’s Simpler it played out with a long decay, and I liked the way the claves in the sample would phase. I juxtaposed this with “rave stabs” also made with a sample from Farnham’s anthem, before integrating samples from “Treaty” and the other tracks into my patterns. When I first sequenced it out, I was surprised that it clocked at around seven minutes. Usually my first sequence will be under three minutes. As I continued to work on my mix and research the “Voice Referendum” I began to think about including sound bites from campaigners and spokespeople. I was hesitant at first, as I believed this would shift my track into something overtly propagandistic. Then, I came upon a recording of Professor Megan Davis, a much lauded human rights lawyer, legal expert, author and a Cobble Cobble woman of the Barunggam Nation, reading out the Uluru Statement from the Heart and I decided to simply drop it into the mix. Again, I was surprised to find that it fit neatly into my sequence! And so I continued, adding the voices of Linda Burney of the Wiradjuri people and Indigenous Affairs Minister for the Australian Labor Party who spearheaded the referendum, Warren Mundine, a Bundjalung man, businessman and politician who became a spokesperson for the No campaign and finally Lidia Thorpe of the Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung peoples, a fiery independent politician who resigned as a member of the Greens party during the campaign, and who is a spokesperson for the Blak Sovereign Movement. While these figures take different positions about the efficacy of the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament, none of them oppose treaties with First Nations.

Samples

“Professor Megan Davis, member of the Referendum Council, reads out the Uluru Statement from the Heart for the first time in history on the floor of the First Nations Constitutional Convention.” (2017)

https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/view-the-statement/

“Linda Burney addresses Voice to Parliament failure” (2023)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeDN_QwkCzk

Warren Mundine sampled from a press conference when the results of the referendum were confirmed in “The brutal truth of the referendum result was that Yes campaign couldn’t cut through to a hesitant electorate”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-15/referendum-result-yes-campaign-political-inferno/102977030

Lidia Thorpe sampled from “IN FULL: Lidia Thorpe quits the Greens over Voice to Parliament disagreement | SBS News”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi0QA5V12lM

Lyric

ENGLISH

Treaty yeah treaty now treaty yeah treaty now

You’re the voice, try and understand it

Make a noise and make it clear

Oh-wo-wo-wo, oh-wo-wo-wo

We’re not gonna sit in silence

We’re not gonna live with fear

Oh-wo-wo-wo, oh-wo-wo-wo