Do we like them?Do we like Jim Moginie?
Our score: 7 out of 10. No harmful words or acts turned up and the record reads as decent, but the pages I could read were thin.
Moginie was adopted and raised on Sydney's north shore. At school he met drummer Rob Hirst, and the pair started a band in 1971 that became Midnight Oil once Peter Garrett joined as frontman. The band went on to make 13 studio albums with a political edge.
The Guardian's review of his 2024 memoir, The Silver River, says the band later weighed on him. He was uneasy about the radio-friendlier sound of Earth and Sun and Moon in 1992 and felt his own identity was being swallowed by the group. That's a bloke being honest about his own ambivalence, which is rarer than it should be in rock memoirs.
The most affecting part of the book, per the reviewer, comes when he finds his birth parents in his 40s. He describes meeting his birth mother as meeting someone “more fragile than I had imagined”. It's a story of curiosity and tenderness rather than score-settling.
On the harm check: I found no harmful words or acts of his own, nothing aimed at LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or public health, and no slide into conspiracy or grievance. I couldn't open much reporting, so this is an absence in thin records, not a deep audit. He's also done work beyond Midnight Oil, with Silverchair, Sarah Blasko and Neil Finn, none of it flagging a problem.
On the good-person side, no allegations, lawsuits or court outcomes against him turned up. When Rob Hirst died in January 2026, the band's statement was signed “Jim, Martin & Pete” and said they were “shattered and grieving the loss of our brother Rob”. Moginie's own memoir line on Hirst, as quoted by Variety, is warm and funny.
Nothing new on him lately that raises any red flags. He's been touring with The Family Dog, and the loss of his oldest musical partner is the big story of his year. Midnight Oil's activism is part of their history, but I couldn't open pages that detail his personal role, so I won't dress that up.