The campaign to save the last of our ‘old-growth forests,’ with the help of the song, broke through to many people in Perth who had no idea of what was happening in our forests. The video clip went to all sorts of places, including straight to the leader of the opposition and his party in the parliament. After watching it, he adopted the “stopping the logging” policy and won the next election. It was even playing at the Perth International Airport. The campaign went from a minority of people knowing or caring about the forests to around 90% of the people in Western Australia calling on our government to stop the logging. We saved hundreds of thousands of hectares of old-growth forest, which are now protected.
GERMAN CONCERTS
After winning this battle, in 2000, we went with our three children to live in Germany. My music attracted the attention of German businesspeople and promoters, which led to many concerts in Germany and sponsorship to fly back and forth from Australia to Germany with a major international airline.
In 2002, I created a concert tour with German business partners whereby I sang my songs with over two hundred slides showing the beauty of Western Australia. However, when I sang at a Western Australia forest town festival, people did not want to buy my CDs because I had been campaigning to “stop the logging.” The residents of that town depended on logging for their income.
This so concerned me that I had a meeting with the head of tourism at that time in Germany. I found out most German tourists went to the eastern states of Australia, not Western Australia. It seemed we found a solution to the loss of income caused by stopping the logging, by bringing tourists to come and see the beauty of our home state. Our promotion significantly increased the number of German tourists coming to Western Australia. I did thirty concerts in twenty-nine cities in Germany and was told that this was the largest concert tour in Germany that any Australian artist had ever done.
WORLD PEACE CONCERT IN INDIA
In 2005, I was invited to sing at the World Peace Concert in Ladakh, India. There were thousands of soldiers with machine guns present, as there was at that time a dangerous military standoff between India and Pakistan, with around a million troops on their Himalayan border. Initially, the concert was to be in the state of Kashmir. But after terrorists blew up the stage, the organisers relocated it to the Himalayan state of Ladakh. The organisers asked the performing artists not to speak about peace because the subject was too sensitive.
Nevertheless, I called for peace in the songs I sang and wrote for the occasion. After the songs, when I walked through the crowd, the soldiers placed their hands on their hearts and bowed their heads. It was a complete change. Previously, there had been an edgy, distrustful, and dangerous feeling among them. It was a profound experience of how music can completely change the mood and attitude of people.
The General of the Indian army, who had been at the concert with his family, invited William and me to go with him on a trip to the top of one of the mountains in the Himalayas. He wanted me to sing for the whole of the Indian army and the Dali Lama. Since I had to perform at a concert in Delhi and then fly on to New York, I could not accept his heart-warming invitation. But I did many more concerts in India after that.
KING OF THAILAND’S BIRTHDAY & USA TOUR
These journeys led to an American businessman asking to manage me worldwide. This section of the adventure led me to sing in Thailand and all around the world. In 2007, I wrote a song for King Bhumibol, the King of Thailand. The Thai people loved it so much that they invited me to sing at his palace for his 80th birthday. There were around 500,000 people there. Hello magazine launched a special addition for his birthday with my CD and sold over one hundred thousand copies. In the history of the magazine, this had never happened before.