Down Under: The Songs That Shaped Australia
State Theatre Centre of Western Australia
Thursday, January 22 2026
South Australian collective We Rally Creative and multi-award-winning cabaret artist Michelle Pearson returned to one of their favourite cities and festivals with Down Under: The Songs That Shaped Australia. With an earlier iteration of the show having claimed the overall music category win at Fringe World 2024, it was clear that Pearson’s affection for Perth was genuine and heartfelt.
Wonderfully staged in the open-air courtyard of the State Theatre Centre, and under the fake stars of the canopy lighting, it did not take an extended stretch of imagination to transport the performance to a rural or outback setting, perhaps around a campfire, under the Milky Way, tonight—ironically, that being one of the few rock classics not to get a guernsey this evening.
The artists filed onto stage, the dress code distinctly Australian Music Week, with everyone other than Pearson resplendent in band t-shirts. Starting the night was Midnight Oil’s searingly powerful ode to Wittenoom, Blue Sky Mine. As Pearson explained, it just made sense to begin a performance in Western Australia with the piece and then dedicate the entire show to Oils alum Robert Hirst, who passed away just a few days ago. Hirst was recognised by tonight’s group not just as a drummer and artist, but probably foremost as an activist—Pearson further related that it would have been very easy to make the entire evening solely about the Oils.
Indeed, the concept of fitting the entirety of Australian music into a tight seventy-minute runtime was impressively brave in its ambition. Merely cut down to the rock genre, as much of tonight was, the performance could have been twice as long and still not even have touched the sides.
The band asked the Perth audience to humour them for a moment, to place a spotlight on how great Adelaide was—in the form of Paul Kelly’s To Her Door and Chisel’s Khe Sanh, the latter one of the first songs globally to bring Vietnam War veterans to the fore. With such quality delivered, the crowd was more than happy to celebrate South Australia this way.
As Pearson and company made their way through the country’s musical landscape, they also wove a story of modern Australia, both the positive and otherwise. Taken back to 1966 with The Easybeats as the first local rock band to break internationally, through the comfortable ubiquity of John Farnham and Daryl Braithwaite in the 1980s, to the Oils—again—this time quite literally wearing their hearts on their sleeves at the Sydney Olympics, all through to the 2008 Apology.
Near the midpoint of the show, Pearson invited former bandmate and fellow Fringe producer, Jessica Bigg, to the stage. As Bigg delicately worked her way through The Whitlams’ Blow Up the Pokies, Pearson narrated the band’s rise through the Newtown and Inner West pub scene, the tragedies that befell two of the original members, and the creeping changes that were happening to Sydney itself.
Culminating in Andy Lewis’ suicide in 2000, after he had lost an entire week’s wages to pokies, this gently sung yet devastatingly scathing composition was the absolute emotional crux of the evening. Harrowing, melancholy, yet also pure and gorgeous, after this the overall performance pivoted from an entertaining history lesson to more, perhaps, historical entertainment.
Pearson and company ran through medleys in celebration of the women in Australian music, highlighting The Divinyls, Kylie, and Tina Arena, then went more contemporary with a string of hits from the 2000s—it’s an impossible challenge to do anything but smile along to Missy Higgins’ Scar—before the evening wound up, and it could only ever be thus, with AC/DC’s Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll).
With AC/DC themselves no longer playing the track as a permanent in memoriam to Bon Scott, to hear it live was a stark reminder of how joyfully energetic the song actually is, as audience members danced both at the front and at the back of the venue.
Pearson and the band had managed to take songs, most of which had been heard a thousand times before by those attending, and somehow made them fresh. This was not a covers tribute, nor an evening of elevated karaoke; it was a series of heartfelt connections to music, lyrics, time, and place.
As much as the nostalgia for all these pieces flooded in over the course of the night, Down Under: The Songs That Shaped Australia fully embraced the challenge to make these classics anew. Pearson’s voice soared, especially with Kylie, Tina, and the surprise encore Bow River, and her band backed her up superbly. One of the easiest recommendations to make this Fringe.