Singing up country as a force for reconciliation

When Archie Roach sang about about being forcibly removed from his family as a child on his 1990 album Charcoal Lane, it prompted a national reckoning, one we didn’t learn about at school. His music underlined the brutal impact of Australian government policy on First Nations Australians.

Roach’s powerful personal story Took the Children Away shook the nation into acknowledging the intergenerational trauma of the stolen generations and fed into calls for a royal commission and, eventually, a national apology.

When Adam Briggs reworked the song in 2014 and name-checked First Nations people – from Cathy Freeman, Patty Mills, Lionel Rose, Doug Nicholls and Adam Goodes to Jimmy Little – we were schooled again, by a song.

Archie Roach and Rapper “Briggs” in “Charcoal Lane”.Credit: Justin McManus

Australia still has a long road to travel to repair the damage of this single policy, but it’s hard to imagine any other song having as potent an impact on national truth-telling in Australian music history.

Roach’s living legacy, built alongside his late partner Ruby Hunter, is an inspiration. Their shared musical story of love and country is documented in a new film, Wash My Soul in the River’s Flow.

For 23-year-old Townsville-born, Melbourne-based singer/songwriter Kee’ahn, Roach led the way. “Growing up listening to his albums was really impactful to me as a young First Nations person,” she says. “To hear the conversations through music, through a practice we’ve been using to tell our stories, tell our truth, tell our message through song and dance and storytelling, it just felt like for a collective of First Nations people it was one way of being heard. Hearing that story of people being stolen, and that is still felt today, it was so personal, sung through Uncle Archie. It’s difficult to talk about.”

Kee’ahn.Credit:

As the 2020 recipient of the Archie Roach Foundation Award, she says the impact is profound. “I felt like I’d been heard and that my experience as a young black woman was validated by my community and by an idol for me. It’s not just having the support of Uncle Archie, it was also like ‘we hear the struggles you’re going through and we support your message’.”

The ripples play on, but there were many artists who lit the path. In 1962, a young Queensland jazz and blues singer, Georgia Lee, released what is credited as the first Indigenous blues album, Georgia Lee Sings the Blues DownUnder. She toured with Nat King Cole in the 1950s, while her niece Wilma Reading played the New York club circuit and toured with Duke Ellington.

By the late 1960s, non-Aboriginal singer/songwriters were singing the songs of black Australia, embracing the spirit of the civil rights movement in folk-inspired storytelling such as Ted Egan’s Gurindji Blues. Written in 1969 at the height of the Gurindji land rights struggle, it tells the story of Vincent Lingiari leading a walk-off of workers over unpaid wages at Wave Hill.

Two years later, in 1971, a young Gumatj leader from north-east Arnhem Land, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, released his own version of Gurindji Blues in solidarity. The Gumatj had led the land-rights movement from the Top End through the 1960s, opposing mining licences granted on traditional land and delivering the famed Yirrkala Bark Petitions to Federal Parliament in 1963. The songlines of protest were singing up from the land.

That same Gurindji storyline would resurface 20 years later, in the Kev Carmody/Paul Kelly co-write From Little Things, Big Things Grow:

“Gurindji were working for nothing but rations …/ At Wattie Creek they sat themselves down.”

That lyric references a monumental meeting in 1975, when then prime minister Gough Whitlam met Vincent Lingiari and granted Gurindji the deeds to the land. Last month the songline came to life again in a powerful take by First Nations artist/activist Ziggy Ramo. Another generation holding a mirror to our past.

But how many of us would know that truth if it weren’t for that song?

When I started broadcasting in the early 1980s I firmly believed that music could change the world. Back then, it was a reggae-inspired rock band from South Australia called No Fixed Address and their powerful call to arms We Have Survived that paved the way for a new force in contemporary music, from the desert to the Top End.

From Papunya’s Warumpi Band recording the first rock song in traditional language, Jailanguru Pakernu (Out from Jail), to Coloured Stone’s Black Boy, Joe Geia’s Lil Yull, Kev Carmody’s unflinching Thou Shalt Not Steal, Yothu Yindi’s clarion call for a Treaty, to the much-loved Tiddas and revered local elder Kutcha Edwards’ social justice songbook.

Decades on, the chorus keeps building: from Shellie Morris and the Borroloola Songwomen, Emma Donovan, Jessie Lloyd, Dan Sultan, Briggs and Ziggy Ramo to Mo’Ju, Emily Wurramara, Alice Skye, Tasman Keith and Baker Boy, to name a few.

While politics ducks for cover on Australia’s black history, the music doesn’t flinch.

But it is also a heavy burden, one Kee’ahn wrestles every day. “All First Nations people are navigating that burden, but having a platform to sing about it for me is such a privilege that a lot of blackfellas today don’t have … I think of my grandma and my ancestors and that lack of privilege, so it is a burden but it is also a privilege, one that I hope I can uplift and open doors for the rest of my community.”

The Warumpi Band.Credit:

Music has led the way to reconciliation, lifting the veil on the devastating dispossession that white settlement imposed on the traditional custodians of this land. Songs of connection to country, spirit of place and the oldest living culture on earth, singing up the songlines of truth. As we look to NAIDOC week in early July and this year’s theme, “Heal Country”, we need to do more than sing along.

Tracee Hutchison is a broadcaster, writer and educator.

https://www.naidoc.org.au/news/2021-naidoc-week-theme-announced-heal-country

Spotify: @Tracee Hutch - Singing Up Country - Songs for Reconciliation and Healing

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7kkGbzfj1WOTLy5CTR3W1f

Alice Skye plays The Curtin Hotel (https://www.johncurtinhotel.com/) on Friday July 2, the Bridge Hotel Castlemaine (https://thebridgehotelcastlemaine.com/) on July 3 and the Volta Ballarat (https://www.voltaballarat.com.au/) on Sunday July 4 and the Bad Apples House Party at Fitzroy Town Hall as part of Leaps and Bounds Festival on July 23. https://badapplesmusic.com.au/events/bad-apples-house-party-fitzroy-town-hall/

Kutcha Edwards’ new album Circling Time out through Wantok Music on July 9, for NAIDOC, features his new single Singing Up Country https://ffm.to/circlingtime

Archie Roach continues his Tell My Why national tour in July & August, singing and telling stories from his memoir. https://www.archieroach.com/tour

https://www.archieroach.com/store/tell-me-why-book

The world premiere of Wash My Soul in the Rivers Flow, the musical love story of Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter, screens at Melbourne International Film Festival, August 5-22. https://miff.com.au/program/film/wash-my-soul-in-the-rivers-flow.

Dan Sultan headlines Fitzroyalty at Fitzroy Mills on Saturday July 17 and Bart Willoughby, founder of No Fixed Address, plays Live at Charcoal Lane on Tuesday July 20, part of the Leaps and Bounds Festival. https://www.lbmf.com.au/

Ziggy Ramo plays Splendour in the Grass Virtual Festival on Sunday July 25

https://splendourxr.com/lineup/ziggy-ramo

Kee’Ahn headlines the Northcote Social Club on Saturday August 14, and the City Recital Hall, Sydney on Saturday, August 21 with Babitha

https://northcotesocialclub.com/gig/154346900735/ https://www.cityrecitalhall.com/whats-on/events/singular-voices-keeahn-with-babitha/

Emma Donovan plays Geelong on Sunday August 29 https://www.emmadonovan.com/live