Judith Durham to be honoured at the Australian Women in Music Awards
Ahead of being honoured in Brisbane this week, legendary Australian singer and former Queenslander Judith Durham is keeping a positive mindset in the face of serious health challenges, writes Phil Brown.
Confidential
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JUDITH Durham is a little sad she won’t be in Brisbane for the Australian Women in Music Awards tomorrow night.
Durham will be inducted into the AWMA honour roll during a ceremony at the Brisbane Powerhouse and will attend by video link.
It sometimes makes awards night attendees grumpy when people who get major gongs don’t turn up but how could anyone get grumpy with Judith Durham?
The former lead singer of much-loved Aussie supergroup The Seekers is an Australian icon and she has a very good reason for not attending.
“It’s not wise for me to travel and my doctor has advised against it,” Durham says when she chats by phone from her home in Melbourne.
“I want people to understand why I’m not coming.”
The event will consist of an awards ceremony with nominees including Chrisine Anu, Marcia Hines and Lindy Morrison; a concert featuring the likes of Renee Reyer, Katie Noonan and Melinda Schneider and a two day forum.
It’s the second year we’ve hosted the awards and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk says it’s an important event “profiling our state’s commitment to gender equality and providing opportunities to women”.
Honouring Judith Durham, with or without her, will be a highlight according to AWMA founding executive director and executive producer Vicki Gordon.
“Judith Durham has one of the world’s purest voices, she has a rare musical gift and is one of Australia’s most esteemed cultural leaders,” Gordon says.
“An unforgettable singer, a visionary songwriter and composer, an uncompromising advocate for First Nations justice and numerous charities, Judith’s legacy is indelible”.
She joins another music legend, Helen Reddy, on the honour roll.
And she says she would definitely have come to receive the honour in person if her health had allowed.
In May 2013 during The Seekers’ Golden Jubilee tour Durham, now 76, suffered a stroke.
In the years since she has withdrawn from the limelight somewhat and now enjoys arranging music rather than singing.
Still she’ll be with us in spirit.
After all, she points out, she’s at least partly a Queenslander and would love to come back to visit.
We tend to claim people as our own and sometimes we draw a long bow in that regard but we can safely say Durham qualifies as a Maroon.
“I lived up there for nine years,” Durham says. “We had an apartment in Brisbane for a little while and loved being there but lived mostly in the bush outside Nambour.”
The “we” was Durham and her late husband Ron Edgeworth, a jazz pianist, who died in 1994.
Bringing up their happy life together in Queensland, I’m aware I may be touching a raw nerve but Durham is a very positive person and doesn’t mind at all.
“They are happy memories,” she says. “It has blessed me to speak to you about them.”
Durham’s conversation is punctuated with blessings and it’s obvious she has strong spiritual beliefs.
She follows a guru (she won’t say which one) and remains upbeat despite her troubles.
She has seen her fair share of suffering including the car accident that nearly killed her in 1990.
After recovering from that and just as The Seekers reunion was taking off Edgeworth was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
Durham nursed him until his death. Her stroke in 2013 affected her but she was still able to sing then.
It was reported that her doctor asked her to test her voice so she sang Morningtown Ride, one of the band’s biggest hits.
“The boys” as she refers to the other Seekers - Athol Guy, Bruce Woodley and Keith Potger are still touring, most recently with Brisbane singer Mirusia Louwerse standing in for Durham.
That’s fine with Durham who has had enough fame including a pop stardom in the 1960s that rivalled that of The Beatles (They even recorded at the famous Abbey Road studios at the same time as the Fab Four although Durham says she was too shy to say hello to them).
The Seekers had Top 10 hits with I’ll Never Find Another You, A World of Our Own, Morningtown Ride, Someday, One Day (written by Paul Simon), Georgy Girl (the title song of the film of the same name and, more recently, a musical), and The Carnival Is Over.
Their bright, breezy folksy sound made them accessible to generations and there was mass adulation of the group.
In 1967 The Seekers set an attendance record at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne when more than 200,000 people turned up for their concert.
Her public was devastated when Durham left the group in 1968 but she has come back for reunions, always remaining a little elusive.
She loved her time in Brisbane and even wrote a song in praise of the Queen Street Mall.
It’s called Meet Me in The Mall in Brisbane and is from her 2008 album The Australian Cities Suite.
It might be an appropriate week for Brisbane City Council to have the song piped through the city.
If not you can listen to it on YouTube or Spotify. It’s a catchy tune and the voice is bright and sweet and so familiar.
Visit: womeninmusicawards.com.au
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