In this age of the ghost-written celebrity memoir, it felt like rolling the dice to hope that Peter Garrett, Midnight Oil frontman and former Australian federal minister, wrote Big blue sky himself. But there were some hints. Nowhere does he credit anyone else, even in the usual cryptic shorthand that would suggest a bit more than editing help lurked in the wings. Nor did commissioning a ghostwriter feel consistent with Garrett's roll-up-your-sleeves style which throughout this book finds the musician turned environmental activist turned politician doggedly doing for himself what countless others in his position would have had done for him. Moreover, there's the stamp of the amateur here, a sometimes confusing chronology and a certain lopsidedness to the telling that suggests that in the end it was hard enough just to get close to half a century of public life all down on the page. The final clue, however, was confirmation. I received the following statement from his office a day after emailing Garrett directly: "Peter is away at the moment but I can confirm that all the writing in the book is by Peter and there was no ghostwriter involved."
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