Rob Hirst, the drummer and founding member with legendary Australian rock band Midnight Oil, is fighting pancreatic cancer.
Speaking exclusively with The Australian’s Andrew McMillen, Hirst has lived with the disease for two years, but remains optimistic.
“So it’s ongoing,” he told the national newspaper for an interview conducted in March. “I’ve had pretty much every treatment known to man – every scan, ultrasound, MRI. I’ve kind of had ‘the works’ – but today I’m feeling really good,” he continued.
Pancreatic cancer has one of the highest mortality rates of all cancers due, in part, to its tendency to remain asymptomatic in its early stages.
The numbers aren’t kind. From 2016–2020, just 12% of men diagnosed with pancreatic cancer had the chance to survive for five years, according to Cancer Australia. It was pancreatic cancer that took Steve Jobs in 2011, aged 56.
The illness has sidelined Hirst from his instrument. “I haven’t got the breath power to play drums anymore,” he tells The Australian.
Hirst formed the Oils in 1976 and, with Peter Garrett, then a young law student, taking frontman duties, the politically charged group would take on the world. By the time the Oils called it a day in 2022, the group had logged six ARIA No. 1 albums, including Resist, their first full-length studio album in two decades, and apparently their last as a unit.
Resist “does not mean the end of the Oils,” a message read from the band, at the time. “Each of the members will continue their own projects over the years ahead. They remain very open to recording new music together in future and supporting causes in which they believe but this will be their last tour.”
The group previously led the national tally with The Makarrata Project, an EP with First Nations Collaborators, which went to the top in November 2020.
Sadly, bass player Bones Hillman passed that month following a battle with cancer, at the age of 62. Bones died just a few hours after the band received confirmation that The Makarrata Project hitting No. 1.
The Oils also went to the top with Red Sails in the Sunset (November 1984), Diesel and Dust (August 1987), Blue Sky Mining (March 1990) and 20,000 Watt RSL – The Midnight Oil Collection (October 1997).
In 2006, the group was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, and in 2018, its members were feted with the Ted Albert Award for Outstanding Services to Australian Music, one of the country’s highest music honors.
The unthinkable happened when Midnight Oil reunited for The Great Circle World Tour in 2017, a trek that spanned two years and circumnavigated the globe. It was The Oils’ first tour in over 15 years.
An avowed environmentalist, Hirst has played, sung and written songs in The Ghostwriters, Backsliders, Hirst & Greene, The Angry Tradesmen and The Break, an instrumental lineup which features two of his fellow members of Midnight Oil (Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey) as well as bass player Brian Ritchie from the Violent Femmes.
One of the finest drummers produced by this country, Hirst also provided the dynamite intro for the early ‘80s ABC weekly youth program Beatbox. In 2020, Hirst and his daughter Jay O’Shea released a collaborative album.
