One of Australia’s greatest storytellers doesn’t write novels. He writes songs. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get to stand a few feet away and watch him disappear into one.

I came to Cold Chisel a little late. In fact, it wasn’t until they were breaking up in 1983 that I really started paying attention.

I was in Year 10 in 1984, and there was a core group of Year 12 students at school who were serious Cold Chisel devotees. I can vividly remember the astonishment one morning when a student arrived wearing a Jimmy Barnes T-shirt. The reaction was almost disbelief. How the hell had he managed to get hold of one so quickly?

It was a small moment, but it said plenty about the extraordinary loyalty Cold Chisel had inspired. The band had barely finished saying goodbye, and Jimmy Barnes already had a fan base ready to follow him anywhere.

Barnes wasted little time. His debut solo album, Bodyswerve, arrived in September 1984, and the next chapter of his career was underway.

But there was another member of Cold Chisel whose next move interested me even more.

Somewhere between Iron Maiden and Chris de Burgh

My musical tastes at the time were, to put it mildly, a little confused.

I’d started with Kiss, particularly Dynasty in 1979, before graduating to Iron Maiden when The Number of the Beast arrived in 1982. Loud guitars, theatrical performances and a healthy disregard for the neighbours were all part of the attraction.

Yet running alongside this was a completely different musical obsession: Chris de Burgh.

Yes, Chris de Burgh.

Long before The Lady in Red threatened to obscure everything else he’d ever recorded, de Burgh was producing some remarkable narrative-driven music. His 1982 album The Getaway, with Don’t Pay the Ferryman and the extraordinary The Revolution sequence, was a particular favourite. I loved playing his music on the piano.

On the face of it, Iron Maiden and Chris de Burgh occupied entirely different musical universes. But somewhere between the heavy guitars and the elaborate storytelling, I found Cold Chisel.

Here was a band with the raw energy of rock and roll, the emotional force of the blues and lyrics that could stop you in your tracks.

And the more I listened, the more I wanted to know who was writing those words.

Who writes this stuff?

Take Showtime, from Cold Chisel’s 1979 album Breakfast at Sweethearts.

It’s a song about the weary routine of performing, but there’s nothing routine about the writing. The narrator surveys the audience with a mixture of contempt, exhaustion and resignation. Another night, another performance, another small piece of himself surrendered to the job.

The imagery is wonderfully cynical. You can practically smell the stale beer and cigarette smoke.

What kind of songwriter thinks like that?

His name is Don Walker.

The quiet bloke behind the keyboards. The one who rarely seemed interested in commanding the spotlight. And, as I gradually discovered, the creative force behind an astonishing proportion of Cold Chisel’s greatest songs.

Khe Sanh. Cheap Wine. Choirgirl. Saturday Night. Four Walls. Standing on the Outside.

And, alongside Steve Prestwich, Flame Trees.

These weren’t simply songs with catchy choruses. They were stories about people. People making mistakes, falling in love, getting drunk, leaving town, coming home and wondering where the years had gone.

Walker seemed capable of constructing an entire life in four minutes.

And he did it without explaining everything. Sometimes the most important part of a Don Walker song is what he chooses to leave unsaid.

I became fascinated by the idea of hearing this man perform his own material.

Would he ever release a solo record? What would it sound like without Jimmy Barnes delivering the words at full throttle?

And, perhaps most intriguingly, could Don Walker actually sing?

Enter Catfish

I had to wait until 1988.

By then, Jimmy Barnes was firmly established as a solo star. Ian Moss was preparing his own breakthrough, and Cold Chisel’s former members were pursuing quite different musical directions.

Then along came Catfish.

Walker released Unlimited Address in October 1988, almost five years after Cold Chisel’s farewell concerts.

And what an intriguing record it was.

There was blues, jazz, rock, atmospheric arrangements and a collection of songs that seemed to inhabit their own peculiar world. This wasn’t an attempt to recreate Cold Chisel with a different singer. It was something altogether more personal.

The voice was different, too.

Walker wasn’t Jimmy Barnes, and he had absolutely no intention of pretending otherwise. His delivery was conversational, understated and occasionally almost detached. But that turned out to be part of the attraction.

Rather than belting the stories into submission, he simply told them.

One track that particularly captured my imagination was One Night in Soviet Russia.

The song evokes a fleeting encounter in an unfamiliar country, with its images of Siberia, Lake Baikal and a woman named Yelena. The arrangement carries an Eastern European atmosphere that makes the whole experience feel almost cinematic.

It’s the sort of song that leaves you wondering whether Walker is recalling something that actually happened or inventing an entire world from a handful of observations.

Either way, it doesn’t matter.

For a few minutes, you’re there.

And that’s the trick with Don Walker. He doesn’t just describe a place. He somehow manages to put you inside it.

A cigar, a suit and 150 mesmerised people

In 1991, around the release of Catfish’s second album, Ruby, I finally got to see Don Walker perform.

The venue was the Central Club Hotel in Swan Street, Richmond.

There were probably 150 people in the room, perhaps fewer. It was wonderfully intimate, and I managed to position myself almost directly in front of the man I’d spent years wanting to see.

I can still picture him.

A double-breasted suit. No tie. And an enormously thick cigar.

Not exactly your conventional rock frontman.

What surprised me most was that Walker spent much of the performance standing out front as a traditional lead singer. After years of watching him tucked away behind the keyboards with Cold Chisel, it seemed almost unnatural.

But he was completely at ease.

He didn’t need to leap around the stage or demand the audience’s attention. He simply began telling his stories, and the room came with him.

The performance was mesmerising.

There was something almost hypnotic about the combination of his voice, the arrangements and those extraordinary lyrics. You could feel yourself being drawn deeper into whatever world he happened to be describing.

At one point, I remember becoming so absorbed in the music that its abrupt ending almost startled me.

It appeared Walker had been equally absorbed.

He glanced down and discovered that his enormous cigar had gone out during the performance.

There was no theatrical gesture. No clever remark to the audience. No attempt to turn the moment into something it wasn’t.

He simply relit the cigar.

And off we went into the next story.

Thirty-five years later, I can still see that moment.

For some reason, it captures everything I admire about Don Walker. Completely absorbed in the music, utterly indifferent to the usual business of being a rock star, and somehow cooler than just about anyone else in the room.

When the words become literature

In 2009, Walker published Songs, a collection of his lyrics presented independently of the recordings.

It’s a book worth tracking down.

I remember hearing Walker express some discomfort with the idea of separating lyrics from their music. His point, as I understood it, was that the words and music had been conceived together. Neither was necessarily intended to stand alone.

Initially, I found that a little perplexing.

Surely great lyrics are great lyrics, regardless of whether someone is playing a guitar behind them?

But over time, I’ve come to appreciate what he meant.

Try reading the lyrics of a song you know intimately without hearing the melody in your head. It’s surprisingly difficult. The phrasing feels incomplete. The spaces between the words seem wrong. You almost feel guilty, as though you’re doing the song a disservice.

The music isn’t simply an accompaniment to the story.

It’s part of the storytelling.

And Walker understands that better than most.

His induction into the Australian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012 was thoroughly deserved. By then, his catalogue had already established him as one of the country’s most distinctive musical voices.

But there’s one composition that, for me, takes his storytelling into another realm entirely.

Three Blackbirds

In 1995, Walker released We’re All Gunna Die, his first album under his own name.

Among its tracks was an extraordinary composition called Three Blackbirds.

It runs for almost 18 minutes.

Eighteen minutes.

In an industry obsessed with three-minute singles, catchy hooks and getting to the chorus before the listener loses interest, Walker had created something that belonged to an entirely different tradition.

A historical ballad.

The song takes us into the brutal world of colonial north-western Australia, where Aboriginal people were captured, displaced and forced into labour associated with the pearling industry.

It is a confronting subject, rooted in a particularly dark chapter of Australian history.

Walker had encountered the historical material during his travels through the Kimberley in 1984. More than a decade later, he transformed it into an extended musical narrative.

What makes Three Blackbirds so extraordinary is not simply its length or subject matter.

It’s the way the story unfolds.

Walker allows the narrative room to breathe. Characters emerge. Landscapes take shape. Events accumulate. The music creates a sense of place and unease, drawing the listener further into a world that becomes increasingly difficult to escape.

There’s no attempt to make the material comfortable. Nor does he reduce the story to a neat moral lesson wrapped up in a memorable chorus.

He trusts the listener to stay with him.

And if you do, the experience is remarkable.

It also demonstrates something fundamental about Walker’s talent. His songwriting isn’t limited by the conventions of rock music. Give him three minutes and he can produce Cheap Wine. Give him eighteen and he can construct an entire historical narrative.

Both are unmistakably Don Walker.

For me, Three Blackbirds is the ultimate expression of his ambition as a songwriter. It’s music that demands your attention rather than competing for it.

And in an age when so much music is consumed as background noise, that feels increasingly valuable.

The quiet bloke behind the keyboards

There’s something wonderfully Australian about Don Walker’s career.

While Jimmy Barnes became one of the country’s most recognisable rock stars, Walker seemed content to remain a little harder to find.

He continued writing, recording and collaborating, including his work with Tex Perkins and Charlie Owen in Tex, Don and Charlie.

He also continued producing songs that sound as though they’ve been discovered rather than manufactured. Songs populated by people who don’t usually get songs written about them.

The drifters. The dreamers. The exhausted. The disappointed. The people who have made a mess of things and the people trying desperately not to.

His characters rarely announce themselves as important.

Neither does he.

And perhaps that’s why the songs endure.

I sometimes think back to that afternoon at school in 1984, when a Jimmy Barnes T-shirt caused such excitement among a group of Cold Chisel fans.

At the time, I was only beginning to understand what made that band special.

I certainly couldn’t have imagined that, seven years later, I’d be standing a few feet from its principal songwriter in a Richmond pub, watching him relight a cigar after disappearing so completely into one of his own songs.

Or that decades later I’d still be discovering new things in the music he created.

So, to borrow a well-worn Australian rock cliché, do yourself a favour.

Find your best-quality over-ear headphones. Set aside eighteen uninterrupted minutes. Put on Three Blackbirds.

Don’t check your phone. Don’t do the dishes. Don’t treat it as background music.

Just listen.

It will take you to another time and another place.

And when it’s finished, you might understand why I reckon Don Walker is not simply one of Australia’s greatest songwriters.

He’s one of Australia’s greatest storytellers. Full stop.