In The Silver River: A Memoir of Family – Lost, Made and Found, Jim Moginie—founding member of Midnight Oil—recounts a life shaped by both musical brotherhood and personal longing. As the band climbed from Australia’s punk fringes to international acclaim, Moginie quietly wrestled with the mystery of his own origin. This memoir traces parallel journeys: the rise of one of Australia’s most politically charged rock bands and a deeply personal search for belonging, identity, and the meaning of family.
For fifty years, songwriter, guitarist and keyboard player Jim Moginie was a driving force behind one of Australia’s most iconic rock bands, Midnight Oil. As they made their way through the nascent domestic punk scene and the uncharted musical territory of the Western Desert to the concert halls of Europe and America, the band members developed a feeling of ‘five against the world’. For Jim, this de facto family was a bulwark against a nagging sense that something was missing from his life: he’d long known that his biological mother had given him up for adoption as a baby. While Midnight Oil grappled with the challenges of chart success, their political activism and global tours, Jim’s quest to find his birth family increasingly led him in different directions, to the quiet suburbs of Canberra and the meandering rivers and verdant hills of rural Ireland – and emotional reunions with long-lost relatives.
Threaded with vivid recollections of childhood, behind-the-scenes stories of band life and fascinating insights into the creative processes that produced some of this country’s most beloved songs, The Silver River is at once a lyrical coming-of-age story, a heart-warming family chronicle and a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Australian music.