Kids, gather round for an Australian TV, culture, and music history lesson.

On Instagram ABC TV’s Rage account posted:

Anyone remember when @abctv used to close down overnight? …. Neither do we 😏 Back before rage took control of the late night silver screen in 1987, this station closer was played out to signify the end of the day’s programming to the tune of Mike Oldfield’s track ‘Wonderful Land’. Another beauty from the rage archives!"

Which is missing an unimportant piece of fact which is linked to an only slightly more interesting story about Australian music.

Back in the old old days ABC TV would close overnight and it would be a number of hours - dependent on day and programming etc - until Rage would start. For the uninitiated, Rage is like MTV in 1982 if it was public access, government-funded, basically no hosts unless there was a band guest-hosting for a few hours. It was just non-stop music videos.

And for those of us (darn youth) who might have stayed up that late at night, ‘waiting for Rage’ became a thing … if you were lazy or had no video tapes to watch or nothing else to do you’d leave the TV on waiting for Rage to begin in silence with nothing on the screen.

This lead to the bad Seven 8ths Torn self-titled album final track called “Waiting for Rage!” which was something like 16 minutes of silence.

And yes, I am contemplating spending $44 just to buy this album on eBay, the listing from which I grabbed those images, it’s potentially the last remaining copy.

I say all that to say this, that Seven 8ths Torn left an impact on my youth, I saw them live at a local sound shell in a park, and it’s kind of amazing that they exist in like two places on the Internet now and one of them is an eBay listing. There was a whole Triple J Unearthed series in the 90s and it doesn’t exist online, like anywhere I can find. Triple J Unearthed held a live in-person music competition at the Canelands Sound Shell and according to what I can find online that event never occurred.

Some of my favourite albums I still listen to today don’t exist online.

It’s just kind of wild how much knowledge, culture, wisdom, art, truth, beauty exists outside the realms of Californian data centres.

The Canelands Sound Shell in Mackay, Queensland, being demolished in 2009