Perry Keyes Jim Salmon's Lament CD

Australia's storyteller is back. Back among the people whose lives he knows like the shortcuts and backstreets of the inner city he still rolls around.

Perry Keyes grew up in and around Redfern, on the fringes of Sydney's CBD, when most of the families around him worked in the factories and the warehouses nearby, drank in the pubs you could walk to for a beer or bet, and maybe kept an eye on the local footy team that once had tasted glory. Some of those families made it week-to-week, on benefits and good will; others did whatever it took to get by. Some were shunted off to barebones new estates in the western suburbs; others didn't make it at all.

Nobody was telling their stories then, but since his first album in 2005, that's been Keyes' territory, including in 2007's The Last Ghost Train Home, which was Radio National's Album of the Year and shortlisted for the Australian Music Prize. Jim Salmon's Lament is a Sydney story. An Australian story. Hell, it's a universal one.