G'Day Mate MkII

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Fans mourn country's voice
The family of Slim Dusty - for decades, a treasured fixture of Australian country music - yesterday accepted the offer of a state funeral as tributes to the singer poured in from the bush, the music industry and politicians.
Dusty, 76, died at his home in Sydney's northern suburbs at 9.10am yesterday. He was surrounded by his wife, Joy McKean, and children, Anne and David.
Heather McKean, his sister-in-law and president of his fan club, said the family was devastated.
"We've lost someone very precious to us in our life and very precious to Australia," she said. "He was an ordinary, everyday Australian who loved his country and his fans."
Dusty was revered by generations of country artists.
Singer John Williamson, president of the Country Music Association, said: "Slim showed me the strength of a simple Aussie ballad. No frills. As pure and as straight to the point as the characters he sang about."
Kasey Chambers, an ARIA award winner, was reportedly too upset to talk to journalists on hearing of his death, but another young star, 34-year-old Troy Cassar-Daley, said Dusty's music was "the reason I wanted to pick up a guitar in the first place".
Cassar-Daley recorded a new version of Dusty's song The Biggest Disappointment with him in 1998.
"I used to get his records for my birthday and I wanted to emulate the thumb-pick method [of playing the guitar] he was known for. His songs are bookmarks in your life," he said.
At The Pub With No Beer, in tiny Taylors Arm on the North Coast, barmaid Vicky Provost spread the word of Dusty's death to regulars.
Ms Provost said the last time Dusty had a beer there was in 1996. He was known to older drinkers, as he had grown up in nearby Kempsey.
"It's a big shock to us," said David Perry, 40, who has been coming to the bar for the past 11 years. "Obviously it's sad news. It's a legend gone."
The endurance of the song - a huge hit for Dusty in 1957 and Australia's first official gold record - has meant Perry and other Taylors Arm drinkers have shared their local with a regular stream of tourist buses.
Dusty had surgery for cancer in 2001 and had a kidney removed. In August, he was re-admitted to hospital in Sydney for treatment, but was looking forward to returning to his home studio to continue recording his latest album.
EMI Australia said Dusty had recorded and released 106 albums, selling more than 6 million records.
Max Ellis, a former vice-president of the Tamworth-based Country Music Association of Australia, had been friends with Dusty since the late '60s. He said the singer had been instrumental in promoting Tamworth as the nation's country music centre.
"His legacy is immense," Mr Ellis said. "Slim started recording Australian music in 1946 and continued until he died. The amazing thing is that his music was always fresh and relevant, and really meant something to many Australians. It's almost as if he was a Don Bradman who just kept on batting and scoring centuries."
Mr Ellis said Dusty's defining characteristic was his enthusiasm. "He revelled in everything he did and regarded himself as the most fortunate person in the world because he made a living doing something he loved."
The Prime Minister, John Howard, was another who paid tribute to Dusty yesterday: "It was the distinctive Australian character that he brought to country music that marked him out, and for almost six decades he's been an institution in this country and won such affection and renown."

Slim, the man with no peer
Slim Dusty, who died yesterday at 76, was Australia's great communicator, and not simply because he had 1000 songs to sing, writes Peter Garrett, ex-Midnight Oil.
Slim Dusty transversed generations. He crossed over musical genres with his distinctive and authentically Australian voice. In pioneering terms, first he made country a musical form that was viable in Australia - it WAS Australian country music - and second, he laid some of the foundations of building and sustaining a career for all who followed, by heading out and playing to people all over the country.
Slim's secret was that he was more than a singer, he was yarning to the audience as well. His was an unaffected Australian voice that brought real intimacy to the performance. That he was talking to you as much as singing to you, I think, makes him a giant among performers in our history so far.
What is absolutely unique about Slim is that he made it happen for himself and his music right from the start. He withstood the ravages of time; he was almost the perpetual fountain of youth, the constant voice of Australian country music. Slim Dusty was an extremely accomplished performer as well as being a strong writer of songs, partly because he was able to always rise to the occasion.
He'd done it in so many dusty showgrounds, raw rodeos, remote towns, cities, clubs, creek beds, on flat-top trucks, in school-of-arts halls. From the Opera House down, is there one place Slim has missed on his Australian odyssey? I remember when Midnight Oil first toured in the desert in the '80s and we thought we were true pioneers. On more than one occasion someone came up to say, "Slim was here five years ago . . . or Slim was here 10 years ago."
Importantly, Slim played to Aboriginal and European audiences alike throughout his long career and he was quite clear he wanted everyone to come and share in the performance.
In terms of the number of shows he has done, the number of recordings made, the number of times he geared himself up for the whole business of releasing another album, going out on the road again . . . Slim has run the marathon of music 1000 times over.
At the end, Slim Dusty was as good if not better than the day he started. That's the phenomenal thing about it. His career did not go up and down like most of ours go up and down. His career went up, found its rightful place - the Slim Place - in the galaxy of Australian country and stayed there.
There's the country music industry place and there's the Slim Dusty Place.
Any understanding of the Slim phenomenon has to include the remarkable contribution of his wife, Joy McKean, as a business strategist and quasi-manager and also as an outstanding performer and extremely accomplished song writer. She brought a unique set of skills and abilities to the partnership. It made them truly invincible in some respects.
They were going to endure, they were going to survive, they were going to succeed. And what they delivered was going to have great value.
It is worth remembering that Slim Dusty did not come from the wrong side of the tracks. Where Slim came from, there were no tracks at all.

The long and dusty road
He's been touring since 1954, has produced a staggering 100 albums, and has rock stars such as Peter Garrett and Paul Kelly singing his tunes and his praises. But how has Slim Dusty stayed the king of country for so long? Greg Bearup joins him on the road.
In a street of grand old mining buildings, magnificent pubs and quaint corrugated-iron miner's cottages, the Broken Hill Entertainment Centre is a huge, pebblecrete-rendered, 1970s monument to drabness. But the 400 or 500 people milling about excitedly on the steps don't seem to notice. It's as if U2 or Madonna is about to arrive. A ruddy-faced farmer, decked out in his best red-striped shirt, likens it to being at the SCG to watch the Don in action.
Some of the fans have driven hundreds of kilometres to get here and herds of battered Toyotas jostle for space in the street. One man, his horse tethered in a paddock nearby, is complaining of a sore backside after a 30 kilometre canter to the show.
Then there are the seriously dedicated, like the man with an image of Slim Dusty tattooed on his back, or barmaid Jenny Camilleri, who named her chihuahua after the showman. "My dad was a miner, and when he died he had every single one of Slim's records, going back to the old 78s," she says.
Backstage, the legend they've come to see bears a remarkable resemblance to a perfectly ordinary bloke. He's alone in a corner, going through a warm-up session on his guitar, getting up every now and again to pace about or pour himself a cup of tea from a vacuum flask before resuming his plucking.
Slim is a short, slightly built man of 73 who compensates for his height with Cuban heels on his R.M. Williams. The weather-worn face that has seen most of Australia and, in return, is recognised in almost all of it, squints out from under the hat he's rarely seen without. "It's my disguise," he says. "When I take off my hat, no-one recognises me." Like his songs, his speech rolls out in an easy-listenin' drawl. He listens carefully and responds deliberately and, despite his fame, seems almost shy at times. After years on the road, he's used to the adulation but not completely comfortable with the deference it often brings. "I would hate people to think that I was up myself," he says.
When Slim finally comes on stage, backed by his Travelling Country Band, the crowd erupts, then quickly settles, listening to every word. It's in the lyrics of his songs - about outback Australia, horses, stockmen, hard work and heartache - that they see themselves, their friends and the world they inhabit.
Up in the front row, a young boy is standing on his seat, clapping and dancing. After a handful of songs, Slim slips from the stage and his daughter, country singer Anne Kirkpatrick, moves to the microphone. While the men in the audience fall in love with her, Dad catches his breath.
"Did you see that little fella in the front row clappin' and cheerin'?" says Slim.
"Yeah," someone replies, "I met his parents before the show. His name is Luke. He's only four."
"Ah," says Slim with a sly smile. "You get them by four, you've got 'em for life."
It's a joke, but it's also part of a philosophy that has sustained the most enduring and successful show-business career Australia has seen. At the heart of it is a loyalty to his constituency that has never wavered. If fans see Slim Dusty as a superstar, in his own eyes he's an old showman who is nothing without his fans. "You've got to always look after your fans, and in my game that means travelling," says Slim after the show.
And travel he has. He and his wife, Joy McKean, have toured every year, without fail, since 1954. "Before television even," Slim says. "We would head off with a caravan for 10 months of the year. An advance man would travel ahead on a motorbike and book the halls and put up the posters. We'd be back for Christmas and I'd record two albums before we set off again."
It has made him probably the most famous man in this country. More Australians own an album by Slim Dusty than by any other Australian artist. In 57 years of recording, he has sold almost six million records in Australia, a couple of million more than his nearest rival. He has just produced his 100th album (a world record) with EMI, the firm known as "the company that Slim built".
He was the first Australian artist to be awarded a gold record, and the first to have an international hit (The Pub With No Beer, in 1957, which sold 250,000 copies in Britain alone). He has won more Golden Guitars at the Country Music Awards of Australia in Tamworth than any other artist and, in 1987, when the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) set up its Hall of Fame, he was the first to be inducted, along with AC/DC and Dame Joan Sutherland. He has been around for so long that he has two gongs now, a Member of the Order of the British Empire and a more recent, and fitting, Order of Australia. In 1981, as the space shuttle Columbia passed over Australia, a version of Slim's Waltzing Matilda was beamed to earth, making him the first artist to be broadcast from space.
Within the country music scene in Australia, Slim is king, but he has transcended the genre. Singer/songwriter Paul Kelly is a friend and fan. Don Walker, from Cold Chisel, is now one of Slim's songwriters. In 1998 a tribute album, Not So Dusty, was released, with artists such as Ed Kuepper, the Screaming Jets, Mental as Anything, Paul Kelly and John Williamson paying homage with their renditions of Slim's hits. Midnight Oil belted out a version of The Pub With No Beer.
"Slim and Joy are two of the most remarkable figures in Australian music," says the Oils' frontman, Peter Garrett. "I really don't think their place is properly appreciated by city Australians and the mainstream media." He says they have a bond with their audience that other artists can only envy. "And to top it off, they are two wonderful people. I enjoy their company immensely."
Through it all, Garrett says, Slim has stayed true to himself and maintained his liberal views on issues such as uranium mining and Aboriginal reconciliation, views often at odds with much of his audience.
The Nulla Nulla Valley, in the hills behind Kempsey on the NSW North Coast, looks like the setting for one of those dairy commercials where contented Jersey cows graze lazily on lush, rolling hills. But in 1927, the year David Gordon Kirkpatrick was born, it was a very different place. Poor Irish immigrants such as his father, Noisy Dan Kirkpatrick, set about clearing their meagre blocks only to have the Depression strike a few years later.
"I lived in the shadow of an elder brother who died of meningitis, which left me the youngest with three older sisters," Slim says of his childhood. "My mother was terrified of losing me, her only son, and wouldn't let me out of her sight. She became paranoid with fright if I got a cold, let alone cut myself."
He was painfully shy and hated every day of his schooling, from age seven until 12. Somewhere along the line, he discovered he could sing and, with music, his fears disappeared: "I was never shy and I never stammered when I was singing," he remembers. When his fiddle-playing father bought a wireless, that was it. Young Gordon became obsessed with the hillbilly stars of the day, men with stage names like Tex or Rocky or Smoky.
He also had a young mate who called himself Shorty Ranger. "Gordon" had to go. He tossed around a few names before settling on Slim Dusty. He was 11, and the new name allowed him to take on another persona. "I didn't want to be Gordon Kirkpatrick," he writes in his 1996 memoirs. He recalls writing the name Slim Dusty across a photo of himself, as if to will the new personality into being.
Throughout his teen years, Slim Dusty busked with Shorty Ranger at country shows and rodeos. They knocked on the doors of radio stations, occasionally getting airtime. In 1942, Slim's father took him to Sydney, to Regal Zonophone, where he recorded his first album (self-funded) and distributed it to country radio stations. Even in those early days, Slim had a fan club and would dutifully reply to all his letters. By 1946, he'd managed to snare a record deal for six albums.
He moved to Sydney and wound up working with a young country singer, Joy McKean, who had established herself as a yodeller with regular radio spots on 2KY. When they met, Slim thought she was "a bit stuck-up". Joy thought he was a lair with "tickets on himself". They worked together on a gig and fell in love. They've been together ever since, in one of Australia's most successful show-business relationships. Slim may be the frontman, but make no mistake, Joy is the boss. She has also written some of his bestselling songs.
In 1956, the couple formed a partnership with Frankie Foster, a showman. "They were wonderful times," Slim writes in his memoirs, Another Day, Another Town. "There were all sorts of rides, ghost houses, variety shows, rock'n'roll music shows, girlie shows with dancers and strippers, boxing tents, magical illusion shows - you name it, the showground had it." And the biggest of all was the Slim Dusty Show, especially after The Pub With No Beer was released and Slim became a household name here and abroad. He was free of money worries for the first time in his life.
"This is just about where I came undone," he says of his first taste of success, describing how he took his eye off what was really important - Joy and his children. "I was young and famous and successful, and had a good-looking blonde on my arm when I went out on the town," recalls the 1996 memoir, written jointly by Joy and Slim.
And there were temptations. Amid the folksy tales about the rough and tumble of life on the road, the memoir deals with "a fling" Slim had with a blonde dancer in the show when Joy was away, having just given birth to their second child, David. Interestingly, there is no reference to this hiccup in Slim's earlier memoir, Walk a Country Mile, published in 1976 and written without Joy. "It's Joy's way of clipping Slim behind the ear," says an acquaintance. "Don't ever underestimate how tough she is. She's a good woman, but hard as nails."
To understand Slim's success, another friend told me, you need to understand Joy. She is the rock in Slim's life, guiding him, rousing on him, allowing him to concentrate on his music, working with him creatively. Slim Dusty does not really know why he is so popular, but in searching for the reason, he often mentions Joy.
In showman's talk, the word "mug" means an outsider, someone not suited to the travelling life. "An old showman told me I'd never do any good if I married a mug, and Joy's certainly no mug," he says. After all these years, you can still catch them holding hands when they're walking together alone, until someone spots them and Slim gets slightly embarrassed.
It's the morning after the Broken Hill show, not yet seven o'clock, and Slim has just returned from his morning walk - he still keeps dairyman's hours. It's the first time I have seen him without his hat and, yes, he has hair. "On my walk, I see all those old bastards coming out to get their papers and their milk," he says, chatting outside his motel room. "And then they go back inside and sit on their arses all day. That's not for me."
As the inland sun begins to bite, Slim and his entourage prepare to get on the road. It's like a big family, and many of the Travelling Country Band have been with him for more than a decade. There's also a manager, four roadies, Joy's sister, Heather McKean, and then there's Errol Smart and his wife, Margaret - a semi-retired couple who are members of the Slim Dusty Fan Club. They help sell the merchandise at shows and cook the barbecues on days off.
Despite all the years of touring, Slim still attacks each day with a child's enthusiasm and can't stand being late. "Mother," he says to his wife after the car is packed. "Mother, are you ready to go?" Joy, immaculately dressed and groomed, is just putting on the finishing touches. Now in her seventies, she's an elegant woman with shining eyes. She walks with a heavy limp, the result of childhood polio. As Slim waits in the car, she wanders around the motel car park looking for the best spot to send final e-mails from her palm computer via her mobile phone, before they travel out of range. She has always looked after the business side while Slim concentrated on the music.
We drive off into the desert, heading for South Australia, with Slim at the wheel. Outside, lightly undulating desert plains are laid out before us. The rains have come and flowers are in bloom. It's green where it should be red. The landscape changes subtly from grassland to gnarled shrubs and stunted trees, and back again. The sky meets the flat horizon in all directions. "Just look at that," says Slim. "I just love looking at this country. I never get sick of it. The coast is pretty, but this country draws you into it."
The family has become so used to the road that they just can't stop. "Every year, Mum and Dad will say they are going to slow down and take a break, and we just laugh at them," Anne Kirkpatrick says. Millionaires now, Joy and Slim own a large house on a substantial block on Sydney's North Shore, but they are hardly ever there. Their friends are scattered right across the continent. In Broken Hill the day before, they'd visited a retired stockman, Joe Daley, who has been writing songs for Slim since the '60s. His house is like a shrine to Slim, every wall plastered with press clippings and photos of the artist. He and Slim had sat yarning for hours on Daley's veranda.
"The outback just grows on you the more time you spend in it," Slim says, now seated in the back after Kirkpatrick ducked under his guard at a roadhouse coffee stop and took the wheel. "Good to travel through, but I couldn't live out here."
Here's a funny thing: Slim Dusty is a Trekkie. "Oh, I just love it," he says enthusiastically. "Nothing better than finishing a show and coming back to the motel to find Star Trek is on. It just takes you away. When I went to America, they took me to Paramount Studios and let me sit in Captain Kirk's chair. I picked up one of those authentic phaser guns. It's got an adaptation for long range, and when you take that off it's ideal at the shorter distances." When he's at home, his alarm clock announces it is time to rise in English, and in Klingon.
Then again, perhaps it's not so surprising. In many ways, the man defies his own stereotype. On his latest album, he sings a song with Kasey Chambers, the lyrics of which are anti-uranium mining and pro-conservation. He is a supporter of Aboriginal reconciliation and was a sponsor of Sorry Day. In the '50s and '60s, when Aboriginal politics weren't in vogue, he would take his show to Aboriginal settlements in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland. He also had Aboriginal performers working in his shows.
John Elliott, a country music journalist who often travels with the show, recalls an incident three years ago when Slim was making a trucking album. "He decided to go across the Nullarbor on a road train to get himself in the mood before recording, which is a very Slim thing to do," Elliott says. At Eucla, just over the West Australian border, the trucks stopped for the night and anyone within radio distance came to the pub to have a beer with Slim. Towards the end of the night, the throng, including Slim, had had more than a few when a woman started haranguing him about his liberal views on Aborigines. "He tried to explain patiently what had happened to Aborigines, that many of his friends were Aboriginal and that, besides, they were some of his best customers," Elliott says. "She wouldn't leave him alone, and in the end he just said, 'Piss off - I don't even know why I am talking to you.'"
The other thing he is passionate about is halting the decline of rural Australia. For half a century, Slim and Joy have witnessed the slow withering of country towns. Just before lunch, we arrive at Peterborough, on the outer edge of South Australia's wheat belt. It is an unusually pretty place, retaining its early 1900s buildings and grand pubs in the main street, and cottages of hand-hewn stone. When Slim and Joy first played here, it was a thriving town of 4,000. Five hundred people were employed on the railways. Now, not one railway job remains and the population has been halved. "This," says Slim, "just breaks your bloody heart. The politicians have abandoned this place and these people. There has got to be something they can do to rejuvenate these towns."
But it is not only the politicians who've abandoned these places: artists and performers have also forgotten them. Peterborough's town hall, an impressive 1920s building put up in the glory days of rail, houses an ornate theatre. The grand balcony would once have separated the rail managers and graziers from the hoi polloi. Ruth Whittle, Peterborough's mayor, says few major performers see the inside of the building now. "Rolf Harris was the last national act to play here," she says, "and that was eight years ago, maybe longer."
Now Slim is in town and, come dusk, Main Street begins to fill with vehicles. The pubs are packed with families fitting in a counter tea before the show - huge rump steaks with a separate plate for vegetables for $7.
Slim has played at the Sydney Opera House, before a television audience of billions during the Olympics, to crowds of tens of thousands, but this makes him happiest of all, playing to 300-odd people in a town hall.
"This is just great," he says before disappearing to the change rooms beneath the stage. "This hall is just great. Bloody good acoustics, too."
Catching a quick cigarette out a side door before the show are Lance Kynock and his mates. Kynock is a powder monkey in the Roxby Downs uranium mine, and he and his colleagues have driven 400 kilometres for the show. "It cost me a lot of dough to be here tonight," Kynock says with a grin. "I had to blow two shifts, and I'll be in the shit when I get home - but, hey, it is worth it. The man's a superstar. Slim is God." Kynock has 98 of Slim's 100 records. He lifts his shirt to reveal a tattoo on his right shoulder, depicting one of Slim's album covers celebrating 50 years of recording. Why does he adore Slim? Kynock struggles with his words, swears once or twice while he deliberates, and settles on, "Because he sings about us. He cares about us. What other superstar would come and play in the f...ing Peterborough Town Hall?"
During a break, I tell Joy and Slim of the man with the album tattoo. Says Joy, "There is one man who has his entire back tattooed with Slim's portrait." Pity the poor wife, I say, having to wake up next to that each morning. Joy curls over with laughter. Slim walks off in mock indignation.
Back on stage, Slim is on a high and the band is in good form, loving the closeness to the audience. This is an old-time variety show. Slim plays a few songs, Joy and Heather McKean come on to do some yodelling, Anne sings her ballads and band member Peter Denahy, a fiddler and guitarist, tells jokes that are older than the town hall and sings corny songs about blowflies in the car. The finale has Slim singing The Lights on the Hill, a simple but touching song written by Joy, about a truck driver who never made it home.
After the show, the merchandising crew does a roaring trade, selling T-shirts, caps and albums while the band packs up and a few hopefuls hang about the stage door, hoping to meet the great man. Slim doesn't do the meet and greet after shows as often as he used to - he needs his sleep.
There's an Aboriginal couple waiting near the door, in their hands cowboy hats to be signed, but too shy to ask. They are Gilbert and Linda Coulthart. Gilbert is a National Parks ranger in the Gammon Ranges, and they have driven 530 kilometres to be here. Unlike the miners, they are driving home after the show, for Gilbert to be at work tomorrow. No blown shifts for Gilbert, "no bloody way". They both grew up listening to Slim. He sings about the country they live in. "He's the best singer in the world," says Linda.
As we leave, I tell Joy and Slim about the ranger and his wife, who will have made a 1,000 kilometre round-trip to see his show. Then we spot them walking down Main Street, towards their vehicle.
"Pull over, Anne," says Slim. He gets out of the car, "G'day. How you fellas going?" Linda is verging on tears; she can hardly speak. Gilbert tells Slim a bit about their life and thanks him for the show. They talk in the easy manner of old friends. Slim gets back in the car, has a little smile to himself. It is quiet for half a minute before he says, "Just given half a chance, they all do well." We smile, all the way back to the motel - it's been another good show.

Slim Dusty dies
Legendary country music entertainer Slim Dusty has died aged 76.
Dusty passed away at his home at 9.46am (AEST) today after a protracted battle with cancer, EMI marketing manager Chris O'Hearne said.
Prime Minister John Howard said Slim Dusty was a one-off and a great Australian icon.
He said the legacy of the singer was a very distinctive Australian brand of country music.
"He really created that himself," Mr Howard told journalists.
"We'll always remember that special style, epitomised really by A pub with no beer, the first Australian song to acquire gold record status.
"But it was the distinctive Australian character that he brought to country music that marked him out and for almost six decades he's been an institution in this country and won such affection and renown.
He was a one-off, says Howard
"He was a one-off, a great bloke in the proper sense of that expression and a great Australian figure and icon."
Mr Howard said he extended his sympathy, on behalf of all Australians, to his widow Joy and children Anne and David.
'Like the loss of a father for rising stars'
Dusty's death was like the loss of a father for rising music stars, music historian Glenn A Baker said.
He said Dusty was "intrinsically and unapologetically Australian" and despite his age and ailing health it seemed impossible that he had passed away.
"He was still making albums that won awards, he was still making albums that were selling large numbers of copies, he was still a very active and competitive country music performer," Mr Baker said.
He said he would be greatly missed by every Australian, particularly Indigenous communities who relished Dusty's dedication to taking his music to some of the most remote parts of the country.
Dusty also had a profound effect on most of Australia's younger country music stars, many of whom would feel like they've lost a father today.
"So many of the other rising stars of Australian music, they all considered it the most enormous honour to be given the opportunity to record a duet with him or perform on stage with him.
"In some ways it's going to be like the loss of a father ... there were always the moments that reflected that."
One of those was when the now-queen of country music, Kasey Chambers, arrived at her first ARIA awards where she won her first award.
"She arrived at the ARIA awards and walked up the red carpet arm-in-arm with Slim Dusty, it was just wonderful."
I wanted to be like Slim, says Harvey
Fellow country music singer Adam Harvey said when he first began singing he had wanted to be Slim Dusty.
"I was a young kid getting around I remember with my moleskin jeans and my Akubra on, trying to be like Slim - I think every kid at one stage or another that sings country music has looked up to Slim and wanted to follow in the path that Slim's taken," he told ABC Radio.
Wrote his first song at the age of 10
Born David Gordon Kirkpatrick in 1927 in Kempsey, on the NSW mid-north coast, he wrote his first song The Way the Cowboy Dies at the age of 10.
A year later he changed his name to Slim Dusty and later went on to record a string of hits including The Pub With No Beer the biggest selling record by an Australian.
He was the first Australian to receive a Gold Record, the first to have an international record hit, and the first singer in the world to have his voice beamed to earth from space.
In June this year, Dusty was recording his 106th album and at the time his management denied he was battling cancer.
Dusty had his left kidney removed after a cancerous tumour was detected in November 2001 and received continuous treatment.
His wife Joy, son David and daughter Anne were at his bedside when the 76-year-old singer passed away at his home in Sydney, Mr O'Hearne said.

Posted by Ozguru at September 20, 2003 04:09 PM

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