Around the prettified precincts of Sydney Harbour where dejected felons once hobbled in shame and shackles, the tourist emporia are open for business. Genuine Kangaroo Scrotums ("A Unique Souvenir") are dangling in plastic sachets. yours to treasure - an attractive purse, perhaps, or an amusing key pouch - for something in the region of 6.50.

Away from the waterfront in a smart Sydney restaurant a gangling bald bloke, who's become an Australian cultural export in his own right, is expounding upon the same trivialisation of his country's heritage that those unlucky marsupials have had profound reason to ponder.

"Crocodile Dundee, Edna Everage, I can do without all of them to he brutally frank." says Peter Garrett, singer with Midnight Oil. "Barry Humphries's perception of Australia is completely a figment of his own imagination. It makes for very good entertainment but it should never be construed as what goes on here in this country. I remember when your Channel 4 started they had a big pop show and one of the features was a barbecue, and who was at the barbie but Edna Everage, doing the whole thing.

"Now, even the kind of barbie my parents had wasn't as gauche and tasteless as that, hut every one was lapping it up. I mean, I wasn't born with sausages coming out of my nose. I do know who Chaucer is."

With the worldwide success of Midnight Oil's sixth album Diesel And Dust, and of its spin-off single Beds Are Burning (which deals, most untypically for a chartbound sound, with the matter of Aboriginal land rights), this band that Australians invariably term "the Oils" has found itself increasingly cast in the role of ambassadors for the southern continent.

If the old "Ocker" stereotyping remains an issue - and the country's own comedians, global publishing magnates and beer company ad campaigns do more to keep it alive than anybody else - then the Oils have at least done their bit to combat it, presenting an image of tireless campaigners for truth, justice and right. Nor are they apologetic about their origins: they're known to perform abroad with a stuffed dingo and kangaroo on stage, while their record sleeves are apt to proclaim "All Australian composition/All Australian performance" (even when the music's made in a London studio).

Britain, in fact, was about the last territory on earth to pick up on Diesel And Dust, an Australian hit as far back as 1987, and big in America soon after. Defiantly parochial in some ways, the Oils are underwhelmed by their belated UK breakthrough, and even cynical. "We were actually of the view that if we had a hit in the United Kingdom then we would have done something terribly wrong in the making of our music. Because when we'd lived in Pom, we were so disgusted by what used to get in the charts, and because England had constantly ignored us and treated us like we were third-class colonial cousins with Barry MacKenzie haircuts.

"The media was pretty fair to us, it's just that no one liked the music, or got particularly excited by it. Midnight Oil is a distinctly sitting inside the bedrock of what we do kind of band, as opposed to bouncing around on the waves of it. We never have been a band of a certain time with a certain look that's in and hip hop and happening We're much more stolid and tree-like than that. We just sit and do.

The Oils "sit and do" on their own terms, to an almost unnerving extent. Although signed to CBS, their independence is legendary in Australia. "It's all right," smiles Garrett, "you can call us bloody-minded, we don't mind. We've been called worst things."

Raised in Sydney and trained as a lawyer, Garrett first lent Midnight Oil his six-foot-five frame (in those days crowned with flowing blond hair) in response to an ad placed by the group's musical nucleus of drummer Rob Hirst and guitarist/keyboard player Jim Moginie. Also on hand were guitarist Martin Rotsey and manager Gary Morris (a fairly hard-nosed negotiator who's commonly accepted as a Midnight Oil member in his own right); new bass player Bones Hillman replaced Peter Gifford in '87.

Garrett joined up, by his own description, as "a vaguely interested student drop-out ex-truck driving lawyer surfie bum" who'd done a bit of roadying for another band. Their early music was raw, red-blooded rock, though a touch too musicianly to be considered new wave. Later years, and higher recording budgets, have seen their albums grow in subtlety and variety. Diesel And Dust, to be sure, is a sleeker beast, softened with acoustic guitars. To this day, though, as Garrett accepts, you'd be hard pressed to find an Oil song that so much as mentions a girl in its lyrics

The band's uncompromising way of doing business - a mix of social idealism and bugger-you obstinacy - finds its origins in their early experiences, in the late '70s, playing the coastal pub circuit of Australia's Southeast. And in "getting ripped off".

Garrett sets the scene: "This is a band that could only find one pub in Sydney to play at. These hotels are places where a lot of beer is served. They're four or five times bigger than an English pub, with one or two big rooms, often with tiles on the door, a small stage up at one end and a couple of ceiling fans going round.

"No one wanted to record us and no one was interested in our songs, because we weren't of the time then, which was disco moving into punk; we were neither The Eagles nor The Sex pistols. So we started setting up and running our own shows in one hotel in Sydney, a surfers' bar which had an asbestos ceiling about eight feet above the floor and a fibreglass air vent which used to be opened up at night to let the steam out. You had about a thousand surfers with their T-shirts off and wrapped around their heads, sweat falling off them, and this band playing as loud and as fast as it could, to get enough money through the door to keep us in food and petrol until the next week.

"And we had this attitude of, Stuff it, we won't work through the agencies, or through the management companies, or through this eight-legged octopus called the industry, we'll do it ourselves. And we were very lucky that we've got pubs dotted up and down the coast for people to go out and hear bands. They're rough kinds of rooms, they're not sophisticated venues, there's no lights or cushy chairs and you just go out and play.

"And sometimes the stage would collapse when we played because we gave it so much punishment. Quite often we'd blow up the power, quite often the police would come, occasionally people would want to punch one another, but after a while we sorted that out. We went into these places and played a very intense music 200 times a year for years.

"By the time we'd been shown the seventh door of the seventh record company and told to go back and try something else and not bother to try and write songs, and had our first pay docked by some unscrupulous promoter and been rejected by countless venues we'd decided the only thing we could do was do it ourselves. And in doing it ourselves we were going to establish a relationship with the audience that was going to keep us alive which had an element of mutual respect as opposed to mutual exploitation.

"When we started playing we had very young, vigorous crowds and when bouncers were overly heavy we would intervene. Sometimes the price of beer would mysteriously go up when Midnight Oil was playing; people were trying to cash in on us. So we started blacklisting venues.

"We broke down an agency system here which was somewhat similar to the Mafia: if you weren't with the boys, you didn't get the work and if you tried to work without the boys you ended up in the bottom of the harbour.

"We weren't getting played on radio. This thing was so underground that even underground papers weren't writing about it, because it wasn't hip; it wasn't happening in the cities, it was happening in the beach suburbs, and the surfies are the uncoolest of the uncool.

"There are no hidden corners in what we're doing, we state quite openly what we want to see happen. We won't be exploited and we want to have control over what we do - it seems to me that people need to have that control in their lives. There's no great mystery in it, it's just that the music industry has traditionally exploited its labour. Like John Lee Hooker: a bottle of whisky and no royalties for 20 years.

"People believe in subversion by delivering art that they think is subversive. But we have a different view about that. We think that it takes place in the way that you deal with people and what the results of that are. There was never anything gained from The Clash blasting CBS into the outer limits by calling them all sorts of names. There comes a stage if you're a band that has political ideas where you realise that you have to make a pact with the institutions of commerce. So I don't want us to come on as the holier-than-thou revolutionaries from the southern shores because we're not. We're going about it in a different way and we have been for 10 years.

"We blacklisted the number one pop show here. It was conventional wisdom that you couldn't become known without going on the Aussie equivalent of Top Of The Pops, Countdown. The record company weren't just horrified, they were mortified. As far as they were concerned that was it, forget it. It doesn't seem like any big deal, but at the time people were practically ready to jump out of windows."

And, having gone about it in their own sweet and slightly awkward way, was the eventual success all the sweeter?

"Only, and I stress only, because it shows it can be done. You see, success was never one of the reasons we were doing it in the first place. We never had the success fixation that drives most people. We had a control fixation, and we had an integrity fixation, and we had an issue fixation, but success was a completely ephemeral by-product of the whole exercise."

Another unlikely by-product, on the face of it, was that a rock band, playing to raging surfies in weekend beer-halls, should emerge as figureheads for a whole range of radical causes: US bases and disarmament, uranium mining and the environment, youth unemployment and Aboriginal rights were lust a few of the issues that the Oils have campaigned on, whether in their lyrics or through playing benefits (they've even founded a Midnight Oil Trust to lend more organised support.

"I think that's just one of the quirky things about Midnight Oil, that it's always given itself over to writing about things which aren't escapist. It's always preferred to try and make its music out of reality than out of fantasy. We had a conservative government in the country at the time, and they were doing things that we didn't agree with and I started to talk shout them on stage and one thing led to another."

What about the audiences in those early days? Were they necessarily up for a spot of Saturday night consciousness raising?

"I think our audience is the same as any audience in the world. There are those that care, those that can be tweaked a little bit, that don't like what's going on and would maybe like to consider alternatives. For others that's not part of what they think about and that's what our audience is like too.

"And although we were playing. and still do, to large audiences, many of whom on the surface don't seem to give a toss for it or maybe even hold attitudes which are completely different from ours, there's always been a sufficient number of people who respond to make us know that what we were doing is touching a chord.

"So I agree that it's weird but we haven't been talking about these things in terms of serious political analysis or consciousness. We don't use words like 'hegemony,' we're talking about why is the beach full of toxic waste? Why can't you go surfing tomorrow? How come the area where you used to go fishing with your mum and dad has been turned into a tourist resort, and you're not allowed to go in there any more? These are political issues.

"And this is only a small part of what was a very full, difficult-to-ignore performance of songs on the stage. I get into too much strife from the band when I start carrying on. I suddenly hear this '1-2-3-4' behind me and we're off again!"

In 1984 Garrett's own career took a remarkable detour when he was asked to stand for election to Australia's national Senate, as one of New South Wales's five representatives, riding on the Nuclear Disarmament Party ticket. Politics, he claims, hadn't been an ambition of his and still isn't, but the call came from a caucus of radical and church groups looking around for a public figure in the wake of the ruling Labour Party's apparent backsliding on the issues of uranium mining and foreign bases. The aim, he says, was not to get elected, but just to get the matters debated - and yet he nearly won. "We scared 'em to death, which was good fun."

And so Garrett found himself in TV discussions with "proper" political figures, earning him the Geldof-like role of an alternative yet credible public spokesman which has made him one of Australia's most-recognised media faces. Nobody in Britain, with the lightweight exception of Screaming Lord Sutch, has made the trip from pop stardom into the official electoral system. So was he taken seriously?

"Not at first. Not until the first debate. I was a camera draw, hut we had good candidates throughout Australia. I defy a politician to rationally defend a policy that says the best way to preserve ourselves is to set about building things which exterminate us. I don't have any problem talking about it on TV. You don't have to be particularly clever, you just have to he honest.

"Luckily, with a little bit of lawyer's training, and growing up in a home where discussion was relished, I was not intimidated by somebody who tries to put me down or use long words. As a result of that exercise I saw the politicians often saying things they didn't really mean, and the people watching at home saw this gangly bald-headed bloke berating politicians, and politicians answering back when their hearts weren't really in it. Very interesting television theatre."

When the votes were counted he came "so close that in order to prevent me taking my seat the two major parties decided to exchange preferences with themselves for the first time in Australian political history just to make sure I didn't get in."

Since '84 he's returned to putting Midnight Oil at the forefront of his activities, though not exclusively (he's published a book of polemics, Political Blues, and turns up regularly at rallies), and through the Diesel And Dust album he's emerged as a leading light in white Australia's reassessment of its relationship with the country's longer-standing inhabitants the Aborigines.

In '86 the band were invited by tribal groups to tour the townships of the outback, a world away from Australia's normal gigging circuit. In tandem with the part-Aboriginal Warumpi Band, the Oils set off on tile Blackfella/Whitefella Tour", trek around desert regions "which we planned with the precision, of a National Geographic African safari with four-wheel drives and two-way radios and first-aid kits and snakebite stuff and emergency supplies of water. And we went into very remote areas where you can look into the dimension of the heavens, the nights are so clear, where Aboriginal people have lived for 40,000 years in flint-like, hard, desperate red terrain which has a great beauty that you don't notice at first because you're still getting used to the distances and the heat. And out of that experience, we went into the studio to make Diesel And Dust."

A number of the album's songs - Beds Are Burning, Dead Heart, Gunbarrel Highway and others - reflect directly this growing notion of Australia as a land with a mystic, timeless interior in uneasy co-existence with the neurotically modern culture of its city-and-suburban coasts.

"There's a point where you can be abstract about things, or you can he heavy handed, or you can be direct, and the idea was to be direct. We weren't trying to colour it, or make pretty poetry around it. Wherever in the world there are indigenous people they must be allowed to live, so that we can understand how the world is meant to be lived in. The Aboriginals are the longest continuing culture of human beings there has ever been. They make the so-called civilisations look like Sunday afternoon baccanalia of building and destruction that came and went in the blink of an eye. This mob have been out there for eternity, and in that period of time they've developed a way of looking at the world which is far more benign than ours.

"This land is their mother, and they don't believe they can own it and use it for profit. And because of that they don't have hairdryers and videos, but they have something much deeper, although it's pretty difficult to express in Q Magazine without romanticising it, and it's difficult to express when you're a whitey that's just been in and come out for a time. Plus they live in great poverty out there, and the material poverty isn't completely compensated for by the spiritual richness because kids are still dying."

Currently Midnight Oil are recording their next album. If it turns out to lack the commercial bite of Diesel And Dust then the band will doubtless settle back to being local heroes, overlooked or looked down upon by the outside world. It's unlikely to happen, but it seems that they'd he genuinely unconcerned if it did.

The rest of the band have cultivated a public profile that's as low as Garrett's is high, but he maintains that they're an internal democracy: "Although I do the yakking and I'm the front person, within the room it's very much: singer, go behind your microphone and sing. Which is fine by me. You leave your ego at the door when you go to a Midnight Oil session, otherwise it'll just be in shreds.

"The greatest barrier to bands becoming successful is that they constantly break up, it's not because they haven't got any talent. And we're certainly no more talented that anyone else. We've just worked out a way of hanging together and being satisfied with what we do.

How did his own role as gob-in-chief evolve?

"Just a natural loudmouth I think, couldn't be restrained! We've just fallen into a thing where everybody has their own areas. It's a bit strange, I used to, enjoy going overseas and being totally anonymous. But, you know, you make your bed. And you've got to roll over in it."

From Q Magazine, by Paul Du Noyer

(Note: this article has not been approved for reproduction.)