Rob Hirst, the man who spent five decades providing the percussive heartbeat for Midnight Oil, has finally opted out of the human experiment at the age of seventy. While the Australian music industry scrambles to assemble the requisite platitudes and the necrophilic nostalgia machine kicks into high gear, we are left with the grim reality that the 'powerhouse' has finally run out of steam. It is a fitting metaphor for the very causes Hirst and his cohort spent their lives championing: a lot of loud noise, a significant amount of sweat, and absolutely zero impact on the trajectory of a species hell-bent on its own incineration.

Midnight Oil was always the quintessential exercise in performative frustration. They were the sonic equivalent of shouting at a brick wall, except the wall was the Australian government and the shouting was choreographed to a 4/4 beat. Hirst, as the co-founder and rhythmic engine, was the one responsible for making sure the message arrived with enough force to vibrate the sternums of suburbanites who would later go home to their air-conditioned villas and forget everything they had just heard. He was a master of the craft, hitting skins with a ferocity that suggested he believed, however briefly, that a well-timed snare hit could somehow reverse the colonial displacement of the Pintupi people or stop a coal mine from devouring the outback. It was a charming delusion, one that we are all expected to applaud now that the drummer has left the stage.

Let us look at the legacy Hirst leaves behind, stripped of the hagiographic varnish. Midnight Oil’s brand of 'protest rock' provided a comfortable outlet for the self-congratulatory Left. It allowed a generation of middle-class Australians to feel revolutionary while doing nothing more radical than buying a record and nodding vigorously in a mosh pit. The band’s most famous anthem, 'Beds are Burning,' demanded that we 'give it back'—referring, of course, to the land. Decades later, the land remains firmly in the hands of the highest bidder, the beds are indeed burning due to record-breaking heatwaves, and the only thing anyone is giving back is their lunch when they see the latest polling numbers. Hirst’s drums provided the soundtrack to a slow-motion car crash that we all watched while humming along to the melody.

On the other side of the aisle, the Right treated Hirst and the Oils with the kind of bored contempt one reserves for a buzzing fly. They understood what the band didn't: that art is a harmless pressure valve. As long as the youth were jumping around to Hirst’s impeccable timing, they weren’t actually seizing the means of production or blocking the ports. The establishment even had the last laugh when lead singer Peter Garrett decided to trade his 'Dead Heart' for a seat in the Cabinet, proving once and for all that every rebel has a price and it usually involves a government pension and a slightly better suit. Hirst stayed behind the kit, the eternal engine room of a vessel that had already been sold for scrap metal.

Australia itself is a masterpiece of irony that Hirst’s passing highlights perfectly. It is a nation that prides itself on 'larrikin' spirit and rugged independence while remaining a subservient extraction colony for global capital. The environmentalism Hirst advocated for has been reduced to a series of glossy brochures while the Great Barrier Reef is bleached into a skeletal graveyard. His death at seventy is perhaps the only sensible move left; he gets to exit before the final act, where the 'Blue Sky Mining' they sang about becomes a literal description of the desperate search for breathable air.

To analyze Hirst’s career is to analyze the futility of the artist in the face of the bureaucrat. He was a brilliant technician, a man of immense energy and, by all accounts, genuine conviction. But conviction is a lead weight in the modern world. We live in an era where 'activism' is a social media metric and 'protest' is a lifestyle brand. Hirst belonged to an era that actually believed music could be a weapon. Instead, it turned out to be a sedative—a way to make the apocalypse feel like a stadium tour.

As the tributes pour in, expect to hear much about his 'passion' and his 'integrity.' These are the words we use for people who fought a war and lost every single battle. The drums have stopped, the rhythm has faded, and we are left in the silence of our own stupidity. Rob Hirst is dead, and the world he tried to save is still quite happily burning to the ground. At least he won't have to hear the encore.