Peerless Archie Roach honoured by his performer peers

Archie Roach is to receive the Ted Albert Award for Services to Australian Music.

Singer songwriter Archie Roach is to receive the Ted Albert award for Outstanding Services to Australian Music at the APRA Music Awards. Picture: Aaron Francis

A tribute to Archie Roach’s ­enduring charisma as a performer came at the WOMADelaide Festival this month.

A crowd of thousands braved the heaviest downpour of the weekend in Adelaide’s Botanic Park to hear the veteran singer tell stories from his life and sing landmark songs from his most ­famous album, Charcoal Lane.

“People just sat there in the rain — I couldn’t believe it,” he said in Melbourne yesterday.

Roach, 61, whose 1990 song Took the Children Away documents his experience as one of the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children, will receive further ­acknowledgment of his craft, this time from his peers, on Monday in Sydney.

The singer will be presented with the Ted Albert Award for Services to Australian Music, one of the highest accolades in the Australian music industry, during the annual APRA music awards that recognise our best songwriters.

“It’s hard to know what to say about that,” said Roach, who is based in Warrnambool in Vic­toria. “I’m still enjoying performing. I don’t know what else I’d do if I wasn’t playing.”

Roach grew up in an orphanage and foster homes in Melbourne after he and his sisters were forcibly removed from their family in rural Victoria in the late 1950s. He spent time travelling around Australia and living on the streets before embarking on a music career in his 30s.

The singer got his big break after moving back to Melbourne with his wife, singer Ruby Hunter. Roach was encouraged to make an album by fellow songwriter Paul Kelly. That album, Charcoal Lane, was released in 1990 and set him on a 27-year musical journey.

“My first recording was Charcoal Lane and I really didn’t know what was going to happen after that,” he said.

Roach has released a string of albums since, including last year’s Let Love Rule, and collected five ARIA awards along the way.

He has also inspired a generation of indigenous and non-indigenous performers in Australia. Roach was joined on stage at WOMADelaide by Aboriginal hip-hop duo AB Original, whose debut album, Reclaim Australia, won this year’s Australian Music Prize. “It’s great to see artists like AB Original continuing what I started,” he said. “There are other young indigenous artists coming through who don’t necessarily have an agenda. That’s OK, too.”

Roach, who survived a stroke in 2010 and cancer in 2011, said Hunter, who died from a heart ­attack in 2010, would have been proud of his Ted Albert Award: “She was very much a part of what I do, and the reason for what I do.”