It's a funny old business, this music business. A couple of years ago, singer/songwriter Neil Murray saw a song he wrote for the band he'd help found, the Warumpi Band, back in 1980 and recorded with them in 1987, win Christine Anu her first ARIA Award and him an APRA Award for Song of the Year. The song was My Island Home, and the irony was, Murray no longer had a record deal himself.

"I'd been beavering away recording songs for the last 14 months or so and I was looking for an outlet for them and I heard about the Songwriters Series so I approached the ABC and they jumped at it."

And that's how Murray got himself signed to ABC Music and got his latest album, Dust, out into the shops. As it happened the release of Dust was quickly followed by the release of the first Warumpi Band album in nearly nine years, so from drought, Murray suddenly had two albums, in a sense, out there.

"They were recorded at different times but it just worked out they were released almost together, and it just happened we ended up using the same rhythm section. The original drummer in the Warumpis couldn't do it because of bereavement and we'd done a few gigs using the Rainmakers rhythm section so they just asked if I could get them."

Dust really is a songwriters album, showcasing the broad spectrum of styles Murray's writing takes, so that, while he might use his band, The Rainmakers', rhythm section, it's very much a solo album. Though there are the odd collaborative efforts, including a song credited to one-time rock journalist and chronicler of the notorious Midnight Oil/Warumpi Band tour of 1985, Andrew McMillan.

"I was up in the Territory doing some songwriting workshops and Andrew was involved in coordinating it because at the time he was Northern Territory community writer or some such position, overseeing different projects all over the Territory. In the course of the workshop he had an attempt at writing a song and he had one good line which was 'The moon hangs like a coolamon in the sky' and I told him it was a good line and I'd try to work it into something."

And unlike the majority of Murray's songwriting, Coolamon Moon and a track that looks at the Burke and Wills exploration disaster from quite a different angle, Menindee, follow a more narrative form.

"They kind of more readily link to the poetry/bush ballad thing. I like narrative songs - I just haven't been able to write that many I suppose. Menindee came form a visit to Menindee - I was living in Sydney at the time and wanted to get out of the rat race and jumped on the Indian Pacific heading for Ivanhoe but this guy told me Menindee was the place. So I got off there with me swag and guitar and saw this old pub, the Maiden's Hotel, and checked in for three days. It's on the site where there used to be a grog shanty even in the late 1850s and that's where Burke and Wills were dragging all their gear up from Melbourne, setting up their base camp before they struck off into the interior.

"So I'm aware of all the historical design on the place and reflecting on the fact that here they are, on the hottest summer on record and trying to get these men organised for the expedition and they're all on the grog for, like, 11 weeks. It's just chaos. So they're having to hire these unproven replacements, one of whom is Wright, whose job was supposed to be to follow them up to Cooper's Creek after the initial party left and he never did. He stayed cooling his heels at Menindee the whole time! It's sort of where the rot set in on the whole ill-fated enterprise, so I'm reflecting on all this while having a few beers and that's how the song came out."

As different as Menindee might be from Murray's more usual songwriting style, it reflects his deep, abiding commitment to Australia, it's history and people, a commitment that creates this intense sense of place in many of his songs. That sense of place was magnified in Murray when he toured Europe with the Warumpis year before last. The result was the song Native Born, on the Dust album.