Dick Diver's Calendar Days

This study of Dick Diver’s acclaimed 2013 album, Calendar Days, discusses the work within its cultural and historical context.

Critically acclaimed upon its 2013 release, Dick Diver’s album Calendar Days was consistently praised for its “Australianness.” Across the album’s 11 tracks, the group poeticises the banality of daily life and distils it into melodic pop music that leans on colloquial language and references sung in thick Australian accents, replete with shimmering guitars, and a lackadaisically lilting rhythm section. It is a sound that would soon become emblematic of the micro-genre of “Dolewave” (referring to social welfare, or the Dole), a joke coined by a user of an online forum that then spurred broader recognition in a series of debates across blog platforms. This particular label sat uncomfortably with a lot of the bands that were plastered with it.

This book uses Calendar Days to tease out the histories of the band and to complicate the notion of Dolewave, situating it all within a broader history of Australian independent music and politics in the early 2010s. In doing so, it not only offers the first historical account of a recent major movement in contemporary music, but also considers the unique conditions that Australian independent music operated in from the late 2000s through to the early 2010s. Through close listening to the album, oral histories, and secondary research, this book will explore the ideas of “Australianness” and (anti-)nationalism that underpinned them.