Halfway to here
Get Gone. Six Hours from Brisbane. Timetables. CQ Skyline. You knew from reading the song titles on the cover of Halfway’s debut album, Farewell to the Fainthearted, that this was a different kind of band writing about a world that only occasionally appeared in Australian music. Heat shimmer on the road, the grass cracking to dust. And leaving, always leaving, the pain and the hope. It painted a picture.
This was 2004, which you might assume was near the start of the story. But you could write a book about the roads travelled that brought them to that point.
Singers and songwriters John Busby and Chris Dale and drummer Elwin Hawtin met in the central Queensland city of Rockhampton. As is the way far from the capitals of the music business, the misfits, the dreamers, the kids with cassettes of The Smiths’ Queen Is Dead and Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, seemed to find each other. Bands played DIY shows under high-set houses, two bucks on the door.
“It was a tiny scene,” Busby says. “Maybe 50 people tops.” As a teenager he would visit a fishing village where an uncle had a place and play a cassette of The Queen is Dead over and over. This was near a river called The Styx. Busby didn’t know anything of Greek mythology but saw the beauty and the danger there just the same. On fishing trips with his father and a cast of characters who might have walked out of the pages of a Steinbeck story, he must have heard a hundred times: “People drown in here.” Seeds were planted.
Records take on deep meaning for people still searching for their tribe. The cover, the art, the label, the story. Songs are like beacons from another kind of world, where people wrote something that spoke clearly to you, where their art was valued, loved. No cliches, no sentimentality. The Triffids’ Born Sandy Devotional. Cattle and Cane by The Go-Betweens. Grant McLennan was born in Rockhampton. It could be done.
In Brisbane in 1995, Dale, Busby and Hawtin formed an indie rock band, St Jude. It was a big step up from gigs under the house with touring and recording, but the songs they began writing were asking for something more, a band big enough to handle the widescreen effect. Halfway formed in Brisbane in 2000, with the Rockhampton trio joined by bassist Ben Johnson and Irish brothers Noel and Liam Fitzpatrick on pedal steel, mandolin and banjo, members to this day.
Once people had taken in that cover of Farewell to the Fainthearted, the titles, the pic of the rusty ute, they found music inside that lived up to the promise, a band that burned with a rock’n’roll intensity yet played with a delicate touch. This was something deeper than just another set of tunes, a band that cared deeply about the album as an art form. Everything mattered, every lyric line, every picture on the cover, every credit in the liner notes.
Right from the start, Busby says, the goal was just to make great records and anything else that followed would come from that. This belief would be their guiding star, and it is to this day with the release of their ninth album. The Styx.
Few Australian bands survive for 25 years and make nine critically acclaimed studio albums, with their core line-up intact and an audience that is equally loyal. Of those that do, almost all are aided by some big break along the way, a smash single, big stages on the major festivals.
Halfway had to find another way. Like the songs that first turned them on to music, their songs were like beacons too, leading them to great people and bands who helped them find their feet. They worked with Australian songwriter and producer Wayne Connolly on Farewell, released on the Laughing Outlaw label. Their single Patience Back was picked up for national airplay on Triple J. They toured nationally and the album was rated among the top 10 albums of the year by The Courier-Mail.
Remember the River, released in 2006, was produced by Connolly and Radio Birdman’s Rob Younger. The songs found them digging deeper into personal experience. Cherri Ann was for Busby’s sister, who died in a car accident in 1994. Favour for a Friend features the first of many pubs that would appear in Halfway songs. Even if the audience did not know the stories behind the songs, they felt their essential truth.
Adele Pickvance of The Go-Betweens loved Farewell and introduced her bandmate Robert Forster to it. Forster says: “I thought it was a great title and I really liked the album. Patience Back knocked me out, it had an Exile on Main Street vibe. I saw this was another great Brisbane band and they weren’t doing indie rock, there was something else going on.”
The band played supports with The Black Keys, Richard Hawley, Gomez, You Am I, Band of Horses, J Mascis and Gary Louris and Mark Olsen of The Jayhawks.
In 2008 Busby and Dale received the prestigious Queensland songwriting award The Grant McLennan Fellowship. This allowed them to travel to London where they rehearsed, played acoustic shows and wrote songs that pointed the way to the band’s third LP.
After months of rehearsal under Forster’s instruction, An Outpost of Promise was recorded in Brisbane in September 2009 with Forster producing and Connolly as recording engineer. The album revealed the broadening scope of their songwriting. The ghosts of Rockhampton floated through songs like Monster City, while Tortilla Code took inspiration from Steinbeck’s novel Tortilla Flat.
As the songs started forming for a fourth album, the band knew they wanted to expand the palette even more with a set of songs built around a connecting theme.
The quality of these songs drew in a crew of respected hands to help them reach their goals, with Forster producing and co-production from John Willsteed (working with Forster for the first time since The Go-Betweens’ 16 Lovers Lane) and Peter Jesperson (the American talent spotter who was discoverer and manager of one of Halfway’s favourite bands, The Replacements.) Willsteed joined the band as a full-time member, as did keys player Luke Peacock.
Any Old Love, released on Plus One Records in 2014, featured songs like Shakespeare Hotel, Sunlight on the Sills and Hard Life Loving You, telling the story of a young couple breaking up in a western Queensland town. These were drawn from Busby’s own family story when they lived in Barcaldine in the ’70s. The album introduced a powerful set of songs which would feature in the band’s sets for years to come including Dropout and Erebus & Terror. The pub on the front cover is Barcaldine’s Shakespeare Hotel.
This was a pivotal release for the band, with their profile aided by five-star reviews. The album won the Independent Music Award (AIR Awards) for Best Country Album. Lead single Dulcify won Song of the Year at the Queensland Music Awards. The band joined the Queensland greats acknowledged by a plaque on the Brisbane Valley Mall and received an APRA Award nomination for Best Blues and Roots Single.
In 2015 the band played the Americana Music Festival in Nashville after recording there with producer Mark Nevers (Bonnie Prince Billy, Lambchop, Calexico, George Jones). Fifth album The Golden Halfway Record (ABC Music/Plus One Records) was released in 2016 to rave reviews and received a QMA Award for the single Three in and Nothing but the Stars and an AIR Award nomination for Best Country Album.
In 2017 the band began two recording projects. The first was Rain Lover, an album taking inspiration from Busby’s late father John Snr, a one-time leading jockey and trainer for the track. The album introduced classic new songs including Crescent Lagoon (it’s in Rockhampton) and Two and a Half Percent of a Dream. The album was released in August 2018 and received a five-star review from Andrew McMillen in The Australian: “The sound of one of Australia’s best rock bands devoting itself to the search for originality, and finding it.”
The second project, Restless Dream, was a collaboration with Indigenous elder Bob Weatherall. Halfway supplied the cinematic landscapes and songs to a story narrated by Weatherall, telling of his work in the repatriation of Indigenous remains from museums around the world. Both projects were recorded at QUT Skyline Studios in Brisbane by Yanto Browning and mixed by Mark Nevers at The Beech House. Restless Dream was launched at the 2021 Brisbane Festival and nominated for an ARIA Award for Best World Music Album.
Eighth album On the Ghostline, with Hands of Lightning, released in 2022, was recorded by Browning and produced and mixed by Malcolm Burn (Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Patti Smith, The Neville Brothers) at La Maison Bleu Studio, Kingston, New York. Again the album took listeners deep into a landscape seldom reflected in rock music, with songs inspired by Busby’s move to Darwin. The title refers to the “ghost nets” which break free from trawlers in the Arafura Sea, transformed into decorative items and art by First Nations Australians when they wash ashore.
This was the only Halfway album released without input from founder member Dale, who had stepped back from the band in 2019. But he was never far from their thoughts, as revealed in the album’s One Dreamer Down.
For 20 years the band met for weekly rehearsal sessions in Brisbane. Busby’s move meant rehearsals were less frequent but they found a new way to keep the creative momentum flowing for The Styx, released in July 2025 on Plus One Records. For the first time they recorded the album themselves, at the home studios of Busby and Ben Johnson and the band rehearsal space in Brisbane. It was mixed by Nevers and Busby at The Beech House studio, South Carolina.
Personal experience, those childhood fishing trips, John’s father and his fishing crew, the cassettes like The Queen is Dead, are all fuel for this story of two brothers set amid the danger and beauty of The Styx. Guests include Pickvance and keys player Chris Abrahams (The Necks, Midnight Oil). Desert Light features the lyrics of the late historian and poet Ross Gibson, the great champion of Australian storytellers who wrote the liner notes for Any Old Love.
In 2024, Chris Dale returned to the stage for a triumphant concert marking the 10th anniversary of the release of Any Old Love. He contributed to the completion of The Styx and has now rejoined the band.
As in their songs, as in life. Love lost and found, the pain and the hope, the past and the landscape ever-present. Great songwriting often finds a way to make the deeply personal feel universal. Few bands navigate that path as surely as Halfway across these nine timeless albums.
NOEL MENGEL
