AUSTRALIAN AM STATION 6WF to Leave the AM band for FM

The transmitting tower for sunny Perth, Australia's ABC radio station 6WF, which is moving from the AM band to the FM band after decades of serving Perth and a large part of SW Western Australia.

If you look closely, you can see the Perth skyline in the far background. The tower is in the Perth suburb of Hamerslsy, in the northern part of the city. 

photo from ABC.net.au

A radio station I used to listen to -- at least when they had a shortwave relay -- is leaving the AM band for FM in late February this year, after 94 years on the AM band.

6WF, Perth, Australia's main ABC Radio outlet, is being moved to FM as the ABC determines that with more and more cars being FM only, taking 6WF off the AM band is the best way to serve listeners. The switchover from AM to FM will occur on February 23rd.

6WF-AM has been on the air in the Perth region for 94 years, as the transmitter installation and tower date from 1934.

For those who don't know it, Perth is a large city of two million people on the Indian Ocean, and it's the capital of Western Australia, Australia's largest state by area. Perth is also known as the 'most isolated capital city in the world', being that it is farther from other metros than nearly every other national or state capital on the planet.

A CITY WITH AN EXTENSIVE MUSICAL HISTORY

Perth is the city where late AC/DC singer Bon Scott lived as a kid, after his family moved there from Kirriemuir in Scotland. He got his musical start there as a singer for the Valentines. The Australian rock band INXS also got their careers kickstarted in Perth (they were in Perth for 10 months, as the 'Vegetables'). The lead guitarist for the Divinyls, Mark McEntee, was from Perth, and the excellent Aussie glam rock band Supernaut were also from Perth.

I used to listen to 6WF back when I got my first good Shortwave radio, my Realistic DX-160, which was a Christmas gift. With that radio I listened to a lot of different stations, including Radio Australia, various Indonesian stations at night, 'tropical band' radio stations out of Venezuela and Columbia, and 6WF.

SHORTWAVE RELAY STATIONS FOR THE OUTBACK

How could I receive 6WF? Well, back in the day the ABC had several Shortwave outlets to serve the Outback and desert regions of the Australian interior, and being that more than half of Western Australia is desert, with a lot of isolated mining towns, other small towns and farming and other 'stations' in the interior, SW was the best way to reach those people. 

Queensland also had a Shortwave relay station, VLW4, which I think I heard once. It was used to beam ABC radio to the Outback from Brisbane. The Western Australian shortwave relay came in better here, I think because they beamed their signal more in my direction.

The 6WF shortwave relay was officially called VLW6, and their frequency was in the 31 Meter Band. One night (early a.m., actually), I heard a DJ on 6WF play a bunch of music by the La De Da's (including their cool song 'The Place'), and another night he played almost half an album by the band called Flowers, which changed their name to Icehouse.

The transmitter cable for 50KW AM station 6WF in Perth.

photo from ABC.net.au

The shortwave relay station always identified as '6WF/6WN'. The relationship between the two ABC stations I never clearly understood, but 6WF was the main one.

During the early 2000's when I discovered online radio I 'tuned in' to 6WF a few times, as by then they'd switched off the Shortwave relay.

Of course, today Australia has no Shortwave presence at all, aside from the Reach Out Australia religious station in Kununurra, in the Kimberley district of NW Australia. They broadcast religious programs to ethnic minorities in Southern and SE Asia. I posted a short article on Reach Out Australia and my hearing them a couple years ago, which you can read here.:

https://interrocknation.blogspot.com/2024/05/dxing-reach-beyond-australia-hearing.html

The ABC, thanks to the Australian government, pulled the plug on Radio Australia about 6 or 7 years ago, in a move that not only saddened SWL's all over the world, but maddened rural people in the Australian Outback who depended on Radio Australia for news and information.

It's another case of governments not caring about serving people in rural areas. The US took a similar move with pulling the plug on VOA, which took America's message to rural people in Africa and Asia.

You can read the ABC.net.au article on 6WF here.:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-15/perth-am-to-fm-switch-goes-ahead/106343336

IN OTHER LIFE....

The weather here has taken a turn for the cold again, after a two week respite. The barometer has fallen below 30 inches of mercury, which usually means a low pressure system, which usually means more rain, which usually means higher temperatures in Winter. But that's clearly not the case.

I recently rediscovered my Dad's old barometer -- it's a Stellar brand barometer made in what was then called Western Germany. It seems to be reasonably accurate, despite its age. It's been through a bit over the years. An uncle who was staying with us in the 1980's put it in the trash in a drunken rage, and my former GF shoved it in a box of junk because she didn't know that a) it had been in my family for years, and b) I don't think she really knew what a barometer was.

I'm still not sure if you can forecast the weather by reading the changes in a barometer, but it's still cool to track it.

ON SHORTWAVE, THERE IS NOTHING ON BUT HF STOCK TRADERS

OK, I may be exaggerating here a bit, but not really. High Frequency Stock traders -- a.k.a. 'HFT' stations -- get a lot of criticism from hams and SWL's, but they really aren't taking over the SW spectrum. How can they, especially when the SW spectrum is increasingly nothing but static?

And if you look at the actual number of these HFT stations, there really aren't that many of them. Those stations do put out a pretty solid signal, though, and even when the ionosphere is DOWN, their signals still seem to be UP. At least one of them I've heard recently blasts out a massive signal.

HFT aside, radio here has been a bit dull lately. The Shortwave radio conditions have been absolutely abysmal. Last night I tuned around and there was nothing but static, a couple weak ham radio operators out of Oregon, Nevada and California that I couldn't read through the static, and a digital HFT transmission on 6838 kHz, which was around S3 out of 5, signal-wise. I have no idea where this HFT station is located. Most of the known HFT transmitters are in Illinois, but this signal is too strong for Illinois. I only know it as an HFT (High Frequency Trading) station because signals experts on HFU and elsewhere have said the 6838 Digital hash is HFT. 

One of them said that the HFT Digital signal I'm hearing on 6838 kHz, which slams all my radios with S3-S5 signals (even my little XHDATA D-221 picks that signal up -- just off the whip!), may be located in Ritzville, WA -- a small town in Eastern Washington, about 250 miles east of me, in the middle of desert and wheat country.

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EDIT to ADD: About a week after posting this article, I did some research, and I do not think the Digital hash station I'm hearing on 6838 kHz is in Ritzville, as I've looked at the maps online and the FCC address for the Ritzville experimental station shows nothing but sagebrush, and a few curious looking spots that look like boreholes. No towers, no shadows that would indicate towers -- no powerlines, no access roads, really. 

So I don't know what it is I'm hearing on 6838 kHz. It is, so far, a mystery. It also might not even be HFT.

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This begs the question: if that station is indeed in Ritzville, why is a High Frequency Trading station located in WA state, and slamming the airwaves with a signal that is estimated to be 400 KW PEP? Are they sending trading data to Japan? South Korea? Taiwan?

Who knows.

When the station on 6838 is not transmitting Digital hash, it often just puts out a carrier. There is another carrier, on 6938, that I often hear. I've not yet heard a digital signal on that frequency.

Down below the 40 Meter ham band is a lot of interesting stuff -- pirates, Indonesian chanters, Latin American fishermen, mystery carriers and military signals, Chinese OTHR, and now, apparently, High Frequency Trading stations. Of course, you'll only hear most of this when the ionosphere is UP. When the ionosphere is DOWN, you don't hear anything except the strongest signals.

And most of Shortwave is basically dead right now. And we're supposedly still in a peak solar cycle period. I'm not buying it, of course. I've said before that this Solar cycle sucks, and I think the relatively dead SW conditions back that assertion up.

EUV is down, and eUV is what makes the ionosphere ionized, and according to NASA, the ionosphere is less ionized than it was in 1995 -- eUV ionization has been consequently dropping since then, and who knows when it will come back?

I've got no idea about that.... Solutions to that problem are far above my pay grade. :-)

BACK TO MEDIUM WAVE

Consequently, I'm getting back into my first radio 'love', MW DXing. Now, the ionosphere sucking also affects the AM band, but there still is plenty to hear on the AM band, especially if you have a good radio and a loop antenna. After a night of hearing nothing but static and unreadable signals (and HFT digital hash) on Shortwave, I grabbed my trusty Sangean PR-D4W and tuned the AM band. It was like night and day. 

I didn't hear any super DX, but I listened to KOAC out of Corvallis, Oregon (550 kHz), with a BBC special on the Indian economy, and then heard some music on KSWB, Seaside OR (840 kHz) and some cool classic hits on CKOR Penticton BC (800 kHz). And it was all in high fidelity, as the PR-D4W has the best sound and performance of any MW radio I own.

You don't even really need an external loop with the PR-D4W, but a loop like the AN-200 will add a db or so, which helps with the weaker stations.

DSP SSB Radios -- they work really well

I'm working on an article about 3 DSP/SSB radios I bought last year -- the Tecsun PL-330, XHDATA D808 and Raddy RF760. My PL-330 has gotten heavy use over the past year, but I've noticed that it does overload, especially on the CB band, and when there is strong, pulse-type RFI. 

A 150 ohm resister clipped between the wire antenna and the Tecsun's whip antenna seems to have cured most of that. I'm hoping the issue (bleedover, blocking, AGC over-reacting to changes in signals, unexpected whistles here and there) is just overloading. We'll see.

I'm also working on an article about a music scene that rose and sort of fell -- the Norway pop music scene, which seemed to really put out a lot of great music ni 2014. That article will come along in 3-4 weeks.

I'll close this article with a great track by the NZ/Oz band The La De Da's, who -- when they made this track -- were headed by guitarist Kevin Borich, who then went on to have a lengthy solo career in Australia.

This is the track I heard on 6WF one warm summer night. "The Place".:

And this track by FLOWERS, the band that became ICEHOUSE, was played a few years later on, some time before 6WF's Shortwave relay went off the air. The song is 'Skin".:

This track, one of my favorites by ICEHOUSE, was not played on 6WF, but it's one of Icehouse's better tracks, from 1984, 'Sidewalk". It's got a kickass bass line and guitar chords, and really cool use of the Fairlight Computer.:

Until next time, stay warm, friends (for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere). 

Peace.

C.C., Feb. 19th, 2026.

ADDENDUM, February 25th, 2026:

As I added -- in blue -- in this article, I am not sure the Digital hash station I'm hearing on 6838 kHz is High Frequency Trading, and I'm certain it's NOT in Ritzville, WA, because I looked at the online maps -- both Google and Bing maps -- and see nothing but a flat plot of land with sagebrush at the location where the FCC license address says the Ritzville experimental station is. So I do not know what I'm hearing. But it's digital, and it's noisy, and it runs at various hours during the day, for hours at a time. The typical transmission is around 20-30 seconds of digital hash, with the beginning of it having quick 'pulses', and the ending of it having even quicker 'pulses', and there are one second stops, roughly, between the transmissions.

There are no CW / Morse Code ID's whatsoever -- something that apparently is required by the FCC for HFT stations. So this station may not be HFT at all, because in over an hour of listening to this digital racket on my DX-440 this evening, I have not heard one Morse Code ID.

So where, and what, is this station? Who does it transmit to? Japan? Asia? The Pacific in general, if it happens to be military? Who knows?

Another Small-town, AM Station Bites The Dust: KNPT 1310, Newport, Oregon is going Off the Air; and some Australian Crawl

When I was a young teen, my Father and Mother discovered the idea of camping. Dad had just gotten a new Chevrolet truck, with a canopy over the back, and when Mom looked inside the canopy, she said "You know -- we could go camping in this!"

Dad thought it was a cool idea. So they got a camping stove, a large, metal cooler for ice (that could double as a seat), a large, plastic, square water container (it held maybe 5 gallons of water), and three sleeping bags. 

The next Summer vacation my parents took -- probably late in July or early August of that year -- we went camping. We took too much stuff, but we did OK, and had fun. Naturally, I always took my radio. We went to the Oregon Coast, an area my father always was interested in. He was a rockhound, and was always interested in going to places where you could find agates.

And Dad had read, or heard, that there were several places along the Pacific Coast, and Oregon Coast, where you could find agates. Japanese, glass fishing floats were another item he wanted to find. But agates were the thing.

We went to Fort Stevens, on the ocean near Astoria, Oregon (no agates); Agate Beach near Port Angeles on Washington's Olympic Peninsula (no agates there, either); and "Agate Beach" just off the Yaquina Bay estuary in Newport, Oregon (no agates there, either).

Although Dad did find a small, glass fishing float lodged near a piece of driftwood at Fort Stevens, and found a lot of interesting rocks, he found no agates. Unknown to Dad, the Cedar River, which runs maybe three blocks from our house here in Renton, has agates. :-) I have found maybe 20-30 of them of varying quality. I only discovered that my local river was an agate, jasper, and petrified wood location just 5-6 years ago.

It's ironic that Dad wanted to find agates so bad, and we journeyed to various places in the Pacific Northwest to find them, and yet they were just within 3 blocks (or a mile, if you go to the part of the river where they're more easily found) of the house. 

But, we spent a lot of time on the Oregon Coast. Nearly every summer vacation camping trip included the Oregon Coast. We camped at places like Fort Stevens State Park, Yaquina Bay State Park, Beachside State Park, Beverly Beach State Park, and Harris Beach State Park. We camped along the entire Oregon Coast, enjoying the mild weather; the rocky headlands; sandy beaches; sand dunes; the moor-like fields and misty bogs of Curry County; and the warm ocean water near Brookings, Oregon, at Harris Beach -- just next to the California border.

My dad loved Oregon.

And, invariably, whenever we went to the Oregon Coast, we went through, or stayed near, Newport, Oregon.

Newport is one of the larger cities on the Oregon Coast, and it's about halfway down. It's not far from the larger, inland cities of Salem, Albany, and Corvallis using US Highway 20 -- those cities being maybe a distance of 50-70 miles away, on the other side of the Coast Range. Newport has maybe 10,000 people. Lincoln City, a long, sprawling town maybe 15 miles north, has about 9,000 people and is a popular tourist attraction. Only the Oregon Coast cities Astoria and Coos Bay are larger in population. Newport has got a fishing port, a NOAA marine facility, and it's a popular tourist center, as many Oregonians pass through it to get to other parts of the Coast.

There are also many nice beaches in the Newport area, too.

And, up until recently, Newport has had a radio station, KNPT 1310. I remember tuning in KNPT when we'd drive down the coast. I don't remember if they played Top 40 or not, but there weren't a ton of AM radio stations on the coast at the time, and fewer FM stations. The inland stations from Corvallis and Salem didn't have great coverage over coastal areas at the time, either. FM was just kicking in at rural, non-metropolitan areas at the time, and most small towns and cities in the PNW still didn't have FM stations. They could just afford to support an AM station. And KNPT was one of these.

I haven't been to the Oregon Coast in over 20 years, but I have heard stations from the Oregon Coast while DXing the AM band, though. KDUN 1030, Reedsport, used to come in with strong signals, playing oldies, back in 2011-2014 or so. They went off the air, and then were bought by radio personality Delilah Rene maybe 2 years ago, and they're back on the air again. KAST Astoria, 1370, used to come in very well. The popular resort town Seaside's KSWB 840 was always audible at night in 2012, with their Classic Hits and oldies. KCUP Toledo, Oregon, on 1230, comes in now and then with classic hits, and maybe some talk and sports. 

Most of the stations from the Oregon Coast I used to hear 11 years ago are strangely difficult to hear or log today -- I think it's because MW conditions have been so mediocre since the last solar cycle flattened out in late 2016. There's no other reason for a station like KSWB, which was a nightly regular, and hasn't cut its power, to disappear completely for several years.

But KNPT Newport was always audible on 1310, with talk and some local programming, even during the Solar Minimum. They ran Jim Bohannon's show (later Rich Valdes), and other talk shows at night. I often would hear KNPT early in the morning, and hear the local announcers give the Lincoln County news and the weather reports. It would be 28 degrees F here in Seattle overnight and the KNPT weather report said it would be 50F or 60F in Newport that day. It was like a reminder of how things were when we'd travel there when I was a kid.

And KNPT seemed to have enough local advertisements that it looked like the revenue would be adequate for keeping the lights on, including spots for stores in Newport and nearby resort town Lincoln City. That's a combined, Lincoln County trading area of maybe 20,000-30,000 people. They seemed to have enough money to have a popular Seattle area voiceover guy (Joe Michaels) do their IDs and liners.

But the revenue being adequate was apparently not the case. Just as in the case of ESPN Yakima 1460, KRLC 1350 Lewiston, and KMED/KYVL Medford 1440, the recent downturn in advertising revenues -- especially for traditional media like radio, TV, and newspapers -- has socked it to yet another small town radio station. Even some big city AMs are gone. KZIZ 1560 in the Tacoma area of the Seattle-Tacoma metro went off the air last year. They were playing Punjabi programming. There was a rumor they were going to install an FM translator. That never happened. The pandemic, plus the travails of keeping an AM station on the air, did them in.

KMIA 1210 in Auburn, maybe 15 miles South of me, went off the air temporarily mid-pandemic, until a Spanish language religious organization took them over. KKPZ 1330 Portland, a religious station, pulled the plug during the pandemic. The religious teaching programs have been tightening their belts -- because their donors are tightening theirs. A lot of the religious programs are going online, and leaving radio behind.

It's tough to run a radio station that isn't a highly rated, FM music station in a major metro, and it's been a bit worse, even for them, post-pandemic. I've even heard some odd and bizarre ads on some highly rated, local FMers recently -- the kind of commercials that some radio fans make fun of, spots that they think only belong on late night AM radio. It's obvious that even some FM stations are going for whatever they can get, revenue wise. However, for small town media, largely dependent on small town businesses (who may be hard up for revenues themselves), it's apparent that the local advertising business model is in trouble.

And now KNPT is a victim of the changed economy for local radio, post-pandemic.

Recently it was announced that on January 1st, 2024, KNPT would be off the air, permanently. They announced that they are having financial issues, and no one wants to buy the station and take over operations. The announcement indicated that a couple other stations in the company's cluster of local stations would also possibly not survive.

When I listened to them over a couple nights in late December, an announcement said that KNPT's advertising revenue had dropped by over 50% since the end of the Pandemic, and with interest rates going up as they have been, they couldn't maintain financing to stay in business.

My trusty Penncrest (Penney's brand) radio, which I always took with me when we'd go camping when I was a kid. Later in life I'd take a Superadio when going camping. The Penncrest, amazingly, still works well.

'LIVE AND LOCAL', AND LOCAL RADIO IN GENERAL, IS IN DANGER

It's sad to see these smaller media outlets like KNPT disappearing, but it's a sign of the times. AM radio isn't as popular today as it was even 10 years ago. Local radio in general is losing out to national syndication, social media like Twitter (X), Instagram and Facebook, and national and worldwide internet entertainment.

Just like online news media, social media, and online classified ads killed local newspapers, the present online-based revenue and media model is killing other local media -- and it's decimating small town radio stations like KNPT. Big city radio isn't too far behind, actually. The internet is not going to stop with small town radio.

FM is having similar issues, for that matter, and TV's existence also is staring at the cliff. Younger people don't listen to "radio", nor do they watch "TV", much less read a "newspaper" (whether paper or online). Everything is internet videos, streams, and podcasts -- whatever you can get on your phone -- with very little of it locally based.

And the advertising revenue just isn't making it. The big advertising agencies, naturally, couldn't give a shit less about AM, or even FM in many cases. They definitely don't give a shit about small town media. In fact, there are huge swaths of demographics that the big advertising agencies, that are vital to radio, avoid: and those avoided demos are both age-based, location-based (i.e. rural), economically-based (i.e. poor), and ethnic-based. It's one reason that there are segments of the US population that have no radio stations that cater to them, unless it's an AM station, or maybe a public radio station -- and even those may be seeing some financial problems.

The big ad agencies have their favorite demographics, demos that their beloved research tells them is an easy sell, and that's all they want to reach.

The rest of the people can go take a hike.

However, it's not just their fault that radio, and local media, is in decline. The consolidation of retail and the movement of retail from the brick and mortar store to online has also taken its toll on radio stations. When I was a kid, you'd hear more spots on popular radio stations from local stores. Nowadays, many of those local stores are out of business, replaced by huge, national box store chains that don't often, if ever, advertise on local radio -- or, they've been replaced by online retail, which never advertises on radio.

It's like the perfect storm for small town stations like KNPT.

My Realistic DX-390, which for years I used to troll the SW broadcast and ham bands for all sorts of signals. I never used it for AM and FM, however. It's a great FM receiver, with good performance on FM. But it does surprisingly well on the MW/AM band -- you just need an external loop to bring in the distant signals -- at least in my location. 

The morning I posted this article I heard KNPT alone on the channel (1310), with readable signals. The station does get out. Sadly, it's not enough to keep them on the air anymore.

IT'S ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF RADIO'S PROBLEM IN GENERAL;

AND EVEN STREAMING CAN'T SEEM TO SAVE IT

It's odd. Just a few weeks ago I wrote an article about three PNW stations shutting down -- ESPN Yakima 1460, Medford's KMED/KYVL 1440, and Lewiston's KRLC 1350. But this particular station shutdown actually hurts.

If a station like KNPT, which is the main station in a city of 10,000, and which is the center of a trading area that maybe covers 50 miles of tourist beaches and other attractions -- and has an FM translator that covers all three cities in the trading area -- can't survive, what does that say for radio in general? 

There were also online streams available for KNPT, on TuneIn and Streema, and maybe a couple other sites. 

This stream for KNPT worked, at least in late December.

KNPT AM 1310 - KNPT - AM 1310 - Newport, OR - Listen Online (streema.com)

I couldn't get this particular stream to work, when I tried it in late December.

KNPT Listen Live - 1310 kHz AM, Newport, United States | Online Radio Box

Here is TuneIn's page for KNPT. In late December, when I checked it out, it showed the logo, and said "This Station Is No Longer Available."

KNPT, 1310 AM, Newport, OR | Free Internet Radio | TuneIn

The FM translator, located about 10-15 miles north of town, which covers basically the same area KNPT-AM covers, couldn't save KNPT. Obviously, FM translators aren't always AM station lifesavers.

And it looks like even the streaming didn't save KNPT. What does that say about streaming saving radio?

And then there are the memories. Dad always wanted to find agates. I remember he and Mom would slowly pore through the gravelly parts of the beach near the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse, searching for agates, and never finding anything but small, colored rocks, and maybe some sea-burnished quartz pebbles. They had fun doing it, though, and the Oregon Coast was always a great place to be. We'd have campfires at night at the state parks, and the weather was good enough to enjoy them without getting rained on. We'd also wade in the ocean, and sometimes collect seashells and driftwood.

I'd always have my radio on at night, seeing what was to be heard.

But years hence it seems that even a touristy area like Newport can't keep a local, news and talk radio station alive. KNPT had an FM translator in nearby Depoe Bay, Oregon -- just up the road a bit on Highway 101. But even that FM translator wasn't enough to keep them -- and a couple other stations in the cluster -- afloat.

For what it's worth, as I post this on December 30th, KNPT is still on the air. Just this morning, they were in on 1310 with a readable signal, even as late as 10 a.m., on my Realistic DX-390 and loop, fading in and out with nice, clear audio.

Small town radio is slowly going the way of the Dodo, folks. Get 'em while you can.

So long, KNPT. You gave the town of Newport and surrounding areas of Lincoln County 75 good years of news, information, weather, and entertainment. 1310 won't be any better off without you, and it definitely won't sound the same.

AUSTRALIAN CRAWL

I shall close this article with a high note, of sorts: a music vid. And what better music to raise one's spirits than some good Australian rock? After all, the best rock music in the world came from Australia.

The band here is Australian Crawl. They were a popular band in Oz in the very late 1970s and the 1980s. They apparently started out in the surf pubs of southern Melbourne, and then went national after developing a rabid following in their home metro. Their US compilation album, Semantics, which I got at a used record store in 1989 or so, was excellent -- and it had this song. The US Semantics was a compilation of maybe one or two Oz LPs' top tracks (most from their Oz LP Sons Of Beaches -- but re-recorded, I think) and all the tracks from their Oz Semantics EP, from which this track, The Night, was taken.

The kind of music Australian Crawl played was a curious mixture of reggae rhythms (like this track), surf rock, and Australian hard rock and pop-rock. The three guitarists all played Fender guitars -- adding to the surf-rock like feel. But this was way cooler than surf rock. It is definite Oz rock music -- i.e., kickass.

Singer James Reyne was a great singer. I never could understand his words, of course. I just thought it was because he was singing in a strong Aussie accent, and I'm an American. As a fan of Oz music, I can understand a certain amount of Oz accent, but sometimes when it's thick it throws me off. But it wasn't just me, not in this case. Most of the fans on YouTube who are Australian say they can't understand what James Reyne is singing, either.

Here is a track off Sons Of Beaches, their biggest selling LP in Australia. The song is Letter From Zimbabwe, with a catchy guitar riff, naturally played on three different Fenders. It's about an Oz friend of the singer's who went to Zimbabwe just after Rhodesia folded and the country was about to gain international acceptance. It might have something to do with the war there. Not sure -- after all, I can't understand half of what James Reyne is singing. :-)

Enjoy, and to all of my readers, Happy New Year's.

Peace.

C.C., December 30th, 2024.