Music

Mark Seymour From Hunters & Collectors Is Very Pissed Off That Reclaim Australia Are Using His Music

"We are opposed to bigotry, race hate and fascism. 'Reclaim Australia' has no place in Australian Society."

by Alex McKinnon  23 November 2015

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Collection of Hitler Youth wannabes Reclaim Australia held another assortment of bizarre, hateful and extraordinarily incoherent rallies over the weekend. Exclusive footage of the group preparing for one such rally is available below:

Besides the usual amount of quarreling with counter-protesters, poorly spelled signs and extremely weird costume choices, a couple of incidents highlighted how violent and potentially dangerous the group’s mindset is becoming. Melbourne far-right campaigner Phillip Galea was due to attend a Reclaim rally in Melbourne on Sunday, only to be arrested by police for stashing five tasers and a large quantity of mercury in his house. One attendee at the Melbourne rally punched a police horse, while some guy seemingly made himself look like Adolf Hitler for reasons we’ll not go into here.

Some of the rallies also tried to rev the crowds up with music — a tactic that’s getting more and more difficult for Reclaim, since Aussie music icons like Jimmy Barnes, John Farnham and Redgum have publicly rebuked the protests for using their songs and expressed distaste for the group’s beliefs. Rapidly running out of classic pub-rock tunes, the group have turned to Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Holy Grail’, which has about as little to do with paranoia around Sharia law and halal food as you’d suspect.

Now Reclaim have once again earned the ire of a famous Australian muso whose music they’ve lifted without permission. Mark Seymour, the former lead singer of Hunters & Collectors and the writer of ‘Holy Grail’, has accused the group of “race hate” and “fascism” and called them “a race hate organisation”.

This really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody; besides his musical career with band The Undertows, Seymour is a vocal campaigner for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, and a harsh critic of the government’s offshore detention policies. In other words, he’s not exactly the kind of dude you’d find wearing an Australian-flag facemask at a rally where the organisers can’t even get the microphone to work. But given the average intelligence of Reclaim Australia enthusiasts, we can probably expect a little more of this thing before we’re through.