Archie Roach awarded posthumous AC in 2023 Australia Day Honours

Archie Roach was awarded a posthumous Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to the performing arts as a musician, and for supporting emerging artists.

Archie Roach.

On January 26, 1988, Archie Roach was among an estimated crowd of 40,000 people who gathered in southeastern Sydney for a Survival Day protest event.

From where he and his family pitched their tents at La Perouse parklands, they could see the approach into Botany Bay where the 11 ships of the First Fleet had arrived on these shores 200 years prior.

With his wife, Ruby Hunter, and their sons Amos and Eban, Roach was happy to be just one among many at an event held in opposition to the 1988 bicentenary of European colonisation.

“It was incredible to be around Aboriginal people from all around the country, old and young,” he wrote in his award-winning 2019 memoir. “My ears filled with the sounds of didgeridoo and songs in language, my nose filled with the smoke of campfires. It was beautiful, and made more sublime by the fact I was sharing it all with Ruby and the boys.”

Yet this man carried with him stories and an urge to tell them, and it was there, 35 years ago today, that he first performed what would become his signature song.

As the 32-year-old Roach walked on to an elevated stage with an acoustic guitar, he could see the headlands where his people would have gathered two centuries earlier, uncertain about these new arrivals. After a deep breath, he began to strum and sing a new song, whose opening lines were these: “This story’s right, this story’s true / I would not tell lies to you.”

Titled Took the Children Away, it was a landmark song about the Stolen Generations, of which Roach was a member.

“As soon as those lines were out, I felt no fear, no trepidation,” he later wrote in Tell Me Why.

“I was alone in my thoughts. The crowd was somewhere else. My mind was on my old dad and mum, and my brothers and sisters, and uncle Banjo. I didn’t try to sing to impress, or to educate … I sang to honour.”

Roach died at Warrnambool, Victoria, on July 30 last year, aged 66, after a string of health ­concerns.

But what happened up on that stage in Sydney 35 years ago set in train a series of events that announced him as a major musical talent, an award-winning recording artist, and a giant cultural figure who helped to educate his fellow Australians through decades of songs and stories, all of them right and true.

On Thursday, Roach was awarded a posthumous Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to the performing arts as a songwriter and musician, to Indigenous rights and reconciliation, and through his support for emerging First ­Nations artists.

The award follows an OAM for which he was appointed in 2015.

Speaking with The Australian this week from Melbourne, his son Amos said: “It seems fitting that he’s getting this award. It was sad that he’s not here to be accepting it, but we know that Dad had already put this all in play, and set this in motion.”

Now 44, and a musician himself, Amos Roach was a child at that Survival Day event in 1988, but he recalls how his father “got up and sang this song, and that was it; that was the song that caught everyone’s attention”.

“It wasn’t just about Dad; it was actually part of the story of this country, and it needed to be told,” he said.

Because of what happened on that stage in Sydney that day, and the recognition that followed for his straightforward style of storytelling that blended folk and country music, Roach kicked open a door through which many Indigenous artists have since walked.

In 2014, he established the ­Archie Roach Foundation, with the goal of nurturing meaningful and potentially life-changing opportunities for fellow artists, while noting that music had always been a healing force to bring him out of a dark space.

“He opened that pathway, and created these avenues for First Nations emerging artists,” said Amos Roach. “A lot of them have come through the Foundation, and I’ve worked with a few of them in the last couple of years. In the future, we’ll be doing more stuff.”

With a laugh, he said, “Dad’s given us lots of work!”