Standing ovation for Seaman Dan’s lifetime of music in Torres Strait

Far Northern music legend Seaman Dan has been honoured at the Queensland Music Awards with a lifetime award.

HONOURED: Torres Strait Island singer-songwriter Seaman Dan was recognised at the 2019 Queensland Music Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

FORMER pearl diver Henry Gibson was 70 before he entered the recording studio to lay down his blends of jazz, hula and islander blues.

Now 89 and better known as Seaman Dan, he was honoured at the 2019 Queensland Music Awards in Brisbane with a 500-strong standing ovation when he received the Grant McLennan Lifetime Achievement Award for his take on traditional Torres Strait songs.

Born on Thursday Island in 1929, Seaman Dan made the 2100km journey from his home on Horn Island to accept the honour, the latest of many.

Growing up in the heyday of pearling, when 350 luggers anchored off Thursday Island, he worked in a Cairns plywood factory during WWII and as a drover in Cape York before skippering a pearl lugger at 19 and diving for pearls.

PEARLER: Henry Gibson’s days as a diver and skipper on a pearl lugger in the Torres Strait influenced many of his songs in later life.

One of his best known songs, T.I Blues, was written in 1983 and became synonymous with the Mills Sisters, the first international touring artists from the Torres Strait.

But it wasn’t until 1999 that Seaman Dan was “discovered” by musical impresario and Central Queensland University academic Karl Neuenfeldt.

That led to a series of albums, tours, road trips and festival appearances, where Seaman Dan shared such musical gems as Island Lady, Sunset Blues and Forty Fathoms.

His music is a reflection of Seaman himself, from calypso rhythms and island chants to reggae, ukulele and classic melodies. Influenced by African-Americans in WWII and Japanese and Malay divers on the pearl luggers, his own background includes a Jamaican great-grandfather, a New Caledonian great-grandmother and a Niuean grandfather.

LEGEND: Seaman Dan, 89, with his great-grandchildren (clockwise from bottom left) Edward Raymond, 7, Tiarna-Rae Mills, 12, Shaneequah Mills, 14, Jacky Mills, 13, Henry Mills, 10, and Quintin Mills, 7. Picture: ROMY BULLERJAHN

Seaman Dan became the oldest award winner in ARIA history at 75 with his third album, Perfect Pearl, keeping the title at 80 with the album, Sailing Home.

He also holds the 2005 Red Ochre Award for Indigenous Artist of the Year from the Australia Council for the Arts, took out the Jimmy Little Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 and was inducted into the National Indigenous Music Awards’ Hall of Fame in 2013.

Seaman Dan retired from music last year and turns 90 in August this year.

Originally published as Standing ovation for Seaman Dan’s lifetime of music in Torres Strait