Groundbreaking Yolngu artist Gurrumul inducted into musical hall of fame

The groundbreaking Yolngu artist Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, best-known simply as Gurrumul, will be inducted into the National Indigenous Music Awards (NIMAs) hall of fame in Darwin this weekend.

The late Dr G Yunupingu is the most commercially successful Indigenous artist in Australia and one of the first known for singing in language, using several Yolngu languages including Galpu, Gumatj and Djambarrpuyngu as well as English. His songs - some using traditional chants dating back thousands of years - discuss identity, spirit, connection with the land and its elements.

Gurrumul is being inducted into the National Indigenous Music Awards hall of fame.

Blind from birth, he taught himself to play guitar, drums and the didgeridoo. Left-handed, he played a right-handed guitar upside down throughout his career. He started his career as Yothu Yindi’s drummer and co-wrote their massive hit Treaty, which became an anthem for Indigenous rights.

Even though Gurrumul was an accomplished instrumentalist, it was his sublime voice that proved most remarkable: his songs are moving, uplifting and transformative.

Mark Smith, executive director of Music Northern Territory, describes him as one of the most important voices this country has ever produced, adding “this was almost this ethereal, other sound”. Whenever he saw Gurrumul play, he says, there was this sense of time stopping.

“Something happens that a particular song or a sound moves from being, ‘That’s a really great song’ to being something that embeds itself in the psyche of people... it felt that Gurrumul and the sound of those albums was fairly universal, as was the appreciation for it.”

“He was special in so many ways, in Western and Yolngu worlds,” his niece, Miriam Yirrininba Dhurrkay, told The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in 2018. “He was writing these songs and the words just came into his mind and heart. Even though he couldn’t see the nature, he was born to feel the nature... He had a special place to see, which was his heart.”

Gurrumul’s self-titled first solo album was released in 2008 and made its debut at number one on the independent charts, reaching number three on the ARIA charts. In 2009, he was named best new independent artist and the album won both best independent release and best independent blues/roots release at the Australian Independent Record (AIR) Awards.

A still from the documentary Gurrumul.

His second album, Rrakala, followed in 2011, his third, The Gospel Album, in 2015. In April 2018, his posthumously released fourth studio album, Djarimirri (Child of the Rainbow) debuted at number one on the ARIA charts, won multiple ARIA awards, and the Australian Music Prize. Djarimirri sets ancient Yolngu chants, some more than 4000 years old, against an orchestral background.

Fans included Elton John and Sting, Peter Garrett and Paul Kelly; he performed before Queen Elizabeth II and former US president Barack Obama – who also included him on his playlist of 2011.

A documentary released in 2018 showed Gurrumul behind the scenes and revealed he was his own man and didn’t run to schedules set by the outside world. It also revealed the challenges of balancing his desire to live a traditional life at home on Elcho Island, off the coast of north-east Arnhem Land, alongside the pressures of being a high profile, internationally acclaimed artist. In 2017, just days after signing off on the documentary, he died aged 46, of organ failure relating to the hepatitis B he’d contracted in childhood.

He was shy and rarely spoke in interviews, preferring his close friend and longtime collaborator Michael Hohnen to do so for him.

His legacy lives on through the Gurrumul Yunupingu Foundation, established in 2013 to engage and support young Indigenous Australians, particularly in remote communities, through long-term community-devised and driven programs across the arts, sport, language and cultural knowledge. One program underway currently is the Children’s Songs project, which sees the Foundation collaborate with teachers, musicians and translators of six remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory to collect, translate and perform their children’s songs.

Manuel Dhurrkay, former Saltwater Band singer and Gurrumul’s cousin, and other artists will perform at the induction ceremony at the NIMAs ceremony on Saturday.

The artist’s legacy will also be honoured on Thursday when Buŋgul is performed with the Darwin Symphony Orchestra, as part of the Darwin Festival. The event will commemorate his life, culture and final work Djarimirri, which was the first album in an Indigenous language to chart at number one.

The news comes in a week that has seen a massive outpouring of love and respect for the great Archie Roach. Like Roach, Gurrumul helped open people’s hearts and minds to the depth of our First Nations culture and his work helped teach generations of Australians about Indigenous history, people and philosophy.

Previous inductees to the hall of fame include Gurrumul’s former band Yothu Yindi, the Warumpi Band, Tiddas, Kev Carmody, Ruby Hunter and the late Archie Roach.

The NIMAs will be simulcast on NITV and SBS VICELAND on August 6.

A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.