Legal Aid Song
Legal Aid Song
Words and music (c) Ian Hills 1983 Chorus With a briefcase and a dilly bag With thongs and wig and spade Here come the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid. The deck's pretty stacked if you're poor and you're black And it's good if a lawyer's there Just to be sure that the black and the poor Get treated more or less fair. It's not long ago Aborigines know In the Alice Springs magistrates court They got ten days hard in the prison yard For having no means of support. There took place an important case, Anunga versus the Queen, This man just couldn't understand What that policeman mean. So the Legal Aid lawyer said to the judge "Judge that don't make sense" And the judge said he "I've got to agree I can't accept that evidence". Well it's not very funny when you've got no money And your creditors can't be paid And you have to depend for the money you spend On the type of the grant that's made. And when you succeed you find that you need About twice what they will pay And they'll always claim that you're to blame Because it couldn't be the DAA. Out at Yuendumu there was a terrible todo: Seventy case one day, And the lawyers couldn't show because the cars wouldn't go And the repair bills couldn't be paid. Then the Magistrate thought and he said that the court Ought to be delayed, Because he'd always doubt a court without Aboriginal Legal Aid. |
Background to the songI wrote the Legal Aid Song when I was consulting to the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service (CAALAS) in Alice Springs.
CAALAS had an ongoing battle with the Northern Territory Government who took exception to some of the court battles they mounted and were keen to starve them of money. As a result they were so short of money that most of the staff (including me) were not paid for some months. We struggled on and managed somehow, but morale was understandably quite low. I was asked to use my songwriting skills to cheer them up and I came up with this song. It seemed to help. A few months later the money started to flow, we all got paid and the song was forgotten for a while. A year or so later the ABC "Law Report" broadcast a program about the work of CAALAS and interviewed me for the program. A little later they rang back and said that they would like to use the Legal Aid Song as the music for the show. Of course I agreed. And they actually paid me for it. The incidents in the song are all about actual events that happened around the time I was working with CAALAS and which all the staff working there at the time could relate to. If you want to learn more about the very influential Anunga case you can read about it here and here. If you'd like to know more about William Forster the Chief Justice of the NT Supreme Court who presided over the Anunga case click here. The Words and the MusicI wanted to make this song jolly - my brief after all was to cheer people up. So the tempo is a bouncy 2/4 and the words have as many middle and end rhymes as I could invent which also tends to lift the mood.
I wrote the song in the key of E which has a full sound when played on acoustic guitar which adds to its jolly feel. The tune and chord progression is straightforward to contribute to the natural feel. I fitted the words and the music together as much as I could so that the song sounds as close to declamatory story-telling speech as I could make it. Having said all that I don't want to give the impression that the song was meticulously constructed - it wasn't. The words and the music flowed fairly naturally for the first draft and after playing it over to myself for a few days (with some changes) it was ready for it's first public performance at a CAALAS staff meeting. Guitar Chords
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