I know it’s a hackneyed adage, but for many Australians finding themselves overseas as Covid struck, it took on new meaning. In an unimaginably bold move the Australian government actually heeded the advice of scientists and sensibly sought to value add to our oceanic isolation by grounding international flights.

With Donald Trump most definitely not heeding advice from epidemiologists, Covid death rates in the US were spiralling, and as the portcullis of international isolation came thundering down, one couple had their eye on a hasty exit from the US, and home in Gympie never looked so good.

Gympie-born-and-bred Darren Hanlon and his partner Shelley Short were fleeing the pandemic, a variation on that biblical nativity scene with jumbo jet replacing donkey, for Shelly was in advanced pregnancy. An anxious moment when the prospect of being stranded in Hawaii seemed all too real until, relief, they were taken on board what would be the last Australia-bound flight from Honolulu.

And so it came to pass that young Rocky Hanlon came into the world in the very same hospital in which Darren had made his entry, some forty plus years previously.

Darren’s always been proud of his Gympie roots. At the time when Gympie was enduring that “Helltown “tag (following a scathing Penthouse article by criminologist Paul Wilson, who lost some credibility when he was subsequently found guilty of historic sex offences and spent time behind bars), Darren told an ABC interviewer that he was Gympie’s third favourite son, after Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, and gold discover James Nash of course.

In times pre-Covid, and pre-parenthood, Darren had been in Melbourne writing and recording songs in a church hall, for an album that only saw the light of day this year, but more of that later.

Two years grounded in Gympie but he’s not been idle. He released, to widespread acclaim, the single “We all cope in different ways”; with Double J describing it as “incredibly profound about this year’s health crisis and how it has affected our brains” and Ian McNamara having it on his frequent play list.

With state borders being closed, he embarked last year on a festival of Small Halls tour with Kelly Brouhaha, a tour that took them through a wide sweep of rural Queensland, from Texas in the south to Charters towers in the north, real Slim Dusty country, says Darren, who had featured a couple of years back in a film on the legend and who proudly displays his photo taken with Slim at Hamilton Hall in Gympie all those years back.

But as international flights resumed, Darren and Shelley, and young Rocky, were keen to again cross the Pacific, to spend time with the other grandparents.

And on the eve of that departure, along with fellow ex-St Pat’s teacher Liz Lewis, I was keen to sit down with Darren and better understand his influences and his trajectory.

There’s no shortage of students who take up the guitar, maybe even write their own songs, but, sadly, most succumb to the lure of careers as accountants, lawyers, teachers even. It was in his school days that Darren expressed a dream to “play with Billy Bragg”, again not too uncommon at a time of adolescent hero worship, but his tenacity in pursuing, and pulling off, that dream require some elaboration.

At school Darren related well to both his peers and his teachers and was popular with both. He acknowledges his parents’ interest in music but singles out the influence of a teacher, a teacher from a different school, who lived nearby and who had a large record collection.

“He shared a house with my Manual Arts teacher,” says Darren, “and he had this great record collection and I must’ve driven him crazy, going round there to listen to them, Billy Bragg, the Clash, Sex Pistols, the Smiths. I must’ve been about 16 at the time, but the next year I’d travel to Brisbane and go through the record shops.”

Now, towards the end of his high school years at St Pats, his admiration of Slim Dusty and Kenny Rodgers had been, shall we say, considerably broadened.

If there’s one thing we should have seen in Darren it’d have to be his persistence. At one stage the music teacher with the record collection moved house; Darren tracked him down, Gympie’s not that big a place.

That same persistence finally did get him that gig with Billy Bragg (and a number since), the detail best left for Darren to explain in one of his shows, for it is a great story and he is an excellent storyteller. No, more than that; in reviewing his recently released album, Dylan Marshall, in AU Review, describes him as “one of this country’s most underrated and best storytellers”.

Not only does he tell stories, he is a veritable bloodhound for stories. Sometimes they make it into song, sometimes they stay as stories.

When he was recording an earlier album at his favourite local theatre, the Majestic in Pomona, he unearthed Thea Astley’s novel “A Descant for Gossips”, ostensibly fiction but so close to the bone for folks in Pomona where Astley was a young schoolteacher that she had to leave town. Her character Vinny Lalor is the inspiration for Darren’s song “The Ostracism of Vinny Lalor”.

Now back in the US they’ve been doing a spot of house-sitting, ahead of a short tour through Europe, Norway Sweden, Switzerland and Vienna.

“It’s not a long tour,” he says,” but playing in an old opera theatre in Vienna for a couple of thousand people and supporting the Magnetic Fields, you couldn’t not do it.”

Then it’s back to Australia for an album launch at, yes, the Majestic in Pomona on Friday July 15, before heading back for a tour of England, Glasgow, Dublin, Paris, Germany and Denmark, beginning in August.

Did we foresee any of this life for D Hanlon, former altar boy and, as we knew him, student at St Patrick’s in Gympie those three and bit decades back.

The answer is “no” but then, such is teaching. (Liz had the privilege of catching up with another ex-St Pat’s student a few years back at a reunion. Michael Caton attributes his passion for acting to early years in school productions at the old Olympia Theatre near the fiveways).

Darren’s album “Life Tax” is his sixth, recorded in a church hall in Melbourne in times pre-Covid. It’s already had a great review. Dylan Marshall in AU Review wrote, “Coming almost seven years since his last album, “Where Did You Come From?”, Hanlon’s stories are as vivid and humorous as they’ve always been, and just as touching, reflective and solemn as his best and most well-known works.”

For anyone familiar with Darren and Gympie, his “Lapsed Catholic” is bound to raise a wry smile.

We ended up talking about what it means to “make it” in the world of music, to be “a celebrity”, a “household name”.

And we had to concur that Darren Hanlon has done that, but on his own terms, with a loyal and enthusiastic following, all around the globe. I don’t think any of us, least of all Darren, would have predicted that.

The AU Review of “Life Tax” is at  https://www.theaureview.com/music/album-of-the-week-darren-hanlon-life-tax-2022-lp/

An excellent article by Walter Marsh in The Guardian can be found at https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/mar/03/people-started-walking-out-of-my-gigs-darren-hanlon-on-losing-faith-and-moving-home

Article by Ian Mackay