Each member of SnarskiCircusLindyBand gets a droll mention in Shane O’Mara Wore Mascara, but only one gets to wear a crown. “Our golden queen, her glistening drum kit/Towering above us all,” Rob Snarski croons on one of the few tracks that Lindy Morrison didn’t have a hand in writing.

“I’m not sure ‘embarrassing’ is the word,” the queen responds with a laugh. It’s meant with love, she knows, “but I don’t like to be seen to be pulling focus. Because the one thing people resent,” says the former drummer with the famously dysfunctional Go-Betweens, “is that”.

Today the Australian rock trailblazer and legend is captive in her book-lined Randwick home. “The whole band is in Melbourne apart from me, which upsets me,” she says. “I have to rehearse alone! It’s a lonely life.”

It’s also “a life of ridiculous fun,” to quote one new song, The Dying Conversation. She’s delighted SCLB is “becoming a band” in that indefinable sense: an indivisible entity that transcends its celebrated parts. Graham Lee from the Triffids and Dan Kelly complete the supergroup on What’s Said And What’s Left Unsaid.

One thing the album says loud and clear is that Morrison is, at last, a songwriter. Yes, there was Tina’s Story, the one she wrote with Amanda Brown for Cleopatra Wong, the early ’90s duo they formed in the bitter aftermath of their ousting from the Go-Bes. But as potent as that pop fable sounds today, at 74 she’s more ready.

“I worked at the Bondi Pavilion for 25 years, taking songwriting workshops. I ran intellectually disabled groups. We put on musical theatre, we made records, we did all sorts of stuff together,” she says. “I’ve been all over the country directing community music shows, either the drums or working with local artists to produce a show through songwriting. So I was doing a lot,” she says, pre-emptively bristling lest anyone suggest otherwise.

Fighting for due recognition has long been second nature to the woman who, along with the Moodists’ Clare Moore, Cathy Green from X and others less sung, dared pull the drumming stool from under the blokey Oz rock club of the 1980s.

Her friend, Tracey Thorn from UK duo Everything But The Girl, was so incensed by Robert Forster’s book about the Go-Betweens, Grant [McLennan] & I, that she wrote one of her own. My Rock’n’Roll Friend (Canongate, 2021) is an intimate portrait of Morrison as a frontline feminist and cultural revolutionary with a voice as fearless as her politics.

Looking back, the daughter of a Brisbane doctor and ’50s homemaker mum traces her radical streak to two things: a history teacher at her school, Somerville House, who gave her a book about “what was really happening in Vietnam” in 1968, and the arrival of the contraceptive pill.

“That was shocking to the older generation, even my older sisters,” she says. “It can’t be underestimated how important it was to go on the pill and start having sex. It separated you from everyone [who came before]. You developed a great freedom, like getting your driver’s licence at 16.”

In her early 20s, when her future bandmates were in their mid-teens, Morrison was living in a fabulous Brisbane share-house with Geoffrey Rush and other aspiring actors, broadcasters and artists. Her social work with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service was galvanising in a different way.

“Those two years … were killing me, and the people I was dealing with were having terrible lives. I mean, that radicalised me so much, working and living with indigenous communities … because I experienced the racism they were experiencing through their eyes.”

What she learned was that she could make a difference, “particularly after the first year when I went and worked in the Department of Children’s Services … and I was able to return children to families; take mothers to see their kids in institutions.”

She also carries a more barbed memory, courtesy of First Nations activist Dennis Walker. “He said to me, ‘One day you’ll walk away from here because you can, because you’ve got white skin’. I often think about the sadness and the truth of that statement. That’s what I did. I walked away.”

In England, she dabbled in alternative theatre while working as a nanny. Back in Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Brisbane, art and politics escalated in a series of agitprop theatre groups, but in the late ’70s she declined an offer to join the Pram Factory in favour of a more explosive option.

“I knew it was a life-changing decision, but I decided to stay with the drums because I could see how political they could be. Punk music! There was nothing like it. It was so effective. When [the Sex Pistols’] God Save the Queen came out, it was just like, ‘F--- me, that’s really saying something. I want to be that’.”

Ironically, McLennan and then-boyfriend Forster’s filmic-literary aspirations were far removed from the harder-edged bands she abandoned to join them. But “I always thought it was admirable that you’re part of the alternative,” she says. “I was very ideological about that stuff. And I loved the music.”

Just as importantly, “I really liked the men,” she says. “I mean, OK, they’re all seven years younger than me, but they were different to the men that I knew from my age group. They’d been more affected by feminism. They were more politically aware about what men did unconsciously towards women.”

Too many books have been written about the Go-Betweens’ glorious rise and sad fall to dwell on that story here. The drummer’s own characterisation of the band as “the indie Fleetwood Mac” says enough about the tangled personal and artistic trajectories that led to their implosion.

She’s never read Forster’s book, though people like to quote it to her. At gigs, she’s often presented with Thorn’s to sign. Recently in Brisbane, she played one of the occasional Go-Betweens shows that reunites her with Brown and bassist John Willsteed. Guest singers clamour for the privilege. McLennan died in 2006. Forster opts out.

“We always ask him. This is the fourth time. This time he did actually have an excuse,” Morrison says. “My ongoing disappointment is that he’s never thought about a reunion. I mean, I’ve asked obviously, but he won’t do it.”

She’s characteristically frank about other disappointments. She’d like to be in the ARIA Hall of Fame, but Forster has told her that before he passed, McLennan vetoed that in perpetuity. “And I would like to win an ARIA award before I die – which is unlikely,” she says, given the indie profile of SnarskiCircusLindyBand.

In less glittering ways, she also knows her legacy is sound. For 25 years, she represented artists on the board of the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia. She was the lone social worker for Support Act for almost as long, handing out crisis grants, finding housing or cars for musicians in trouble.

Then there’s the whole drumming thing – “because look how many female instrumentalists there are on stage now! It really makes me shudder when I see all the reunion bands now. I’m always deeply shocked. Wow, there were just no women.”

Back then, “you were always the other. Always. And I’m not sure if the scrutiny on my playing that I’ve had to endure all these years is because I’m a woman, or because I’m a big mouth. I can’t work that out, and it kind of fascinates me.”

What matters now, she says, is playing. She’s proud of new songs like The Dying Conversation and Take A Step – “to me that’s like Paul Weller’s Shout to the Top! or Elton’s I’m Still Standing – and Keepsakes, which is a song to Robert Forster … So yeah, I’m happy about the songs,” she says.

“But I’m really happy about the drums.”

SnarskiCircusLindyBand launch What’s Said And What’s Left Unsaid at Memo in St Kilda on October 25.

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