Down to the sea with Torres Strait singer-songwriter Seaman Dan

A NEW book and CD chart the life and work of a singular Torres Strait troubadour.

Torres Strait Islands musician Henry 'Seaman' Dan in Cairns.

IT was midmorning in mid-January 1999 when the phone rang in Seaman Dan's home on Horn Island, close by the waters of the Torres Strait. A friend was on the line, a local musician, with strange news. There was an academic researcher in town on nearby Thursday Island, looking for indigenous performers to interview.

And Seaman was still playing his music and singing, from time to time, at family house parties and in the old TI hotels: would he come over for a talk? "Well," said Seaman, who was doing his laundry that morning and prefers to take life at an even pace, "I'm a bit tied up, I'll come over tomorrow", and so he did, and met that most unusual musical impresario, Central Queensland University's Karl Neuenfeldt. The two men spoke and took each other's measure. Seaman borrowed Neuenfeldt's guitar, tuned it, and sang a handful of his songs.

At lunchtime they repaired to the Grand Hotel, where almost every story of importance in the Torres Strait begins. "You know," said Neuenfeldt in his downbeat mid-Canadian way, "you have a nice voice. Would you like to make a recording?" Seaman remembers: "I put my knife and fork down, took my hanky out, wiped my brow. And I thought to myself, this is the opportunity I've been waiting for, for a long time. I grabbed it with both hands and I said, yes please."

At the outset of this all-transforming friendship, Henry "Seaman" Dan was closing in on his 70th birthday and had already packed a fair bit into his life. He was born on Thursday Island into a large, enfolding family and a fast-changing frontier society. He spent his happy childhood years there, went to the convent school, saw movies from the stalls in the open-air cinema and watched his uncles coming back from their hard spells out at sea. But by the age of 11, he and his family had moved on to Cape York, to little, tranquil Coen, and he was already attached to the local station, working, droving cattle down the peninsula's long, dusty tracks.

At 18 he was back on TI, and on the water, crewing for his uncle's pearling lugger. Soon the day came for him to make his first dive to the sea floor where the pearl shell lies: he put on the heavy diving suit and brass helmet and sank into a new world, one where the currents run and the light from the water's distant surface glimmers and shades away.

For years he was a pearl-shell diver in the Strait, the Gulf, the Arafura Sea, but he also spent time on land, in different trades, in Cairns and Broome, in the Territory, even in the Papua New Guinea highlands, and everywhere he went he met with music. At Silver Plains station on the Cape he fell in with Top End songwriter Val McGinness and picked up his first guitar chords. When he lived in Darwin's Parap camp. he played in string bands at the Sunshine Club where cultures crossed. He heard Nat King Cole songs in Cairns and Louis Armstrong cover versions in the Kimberley, and he stored them all up in his head. Such was the engaging, round-faced, well-travelled man who put in at the TI wharf that January morning and said hello.

Neuenfeldt had a very different kind of story. He was a singer-songwriter who had taken the academic route. He specialised in anthropology and cultural studies and found his niche as an associate professor in Bundaberg. "In some ways," Neuenfeldt writes, "Seaman Dan and I are a bit of a mismatch: he's an elderly Torres Strait Islander and ex-pearl diver and I'm an immigrant academic. Sort of the bluesman and the boffin from one perspective, but from another we are not mismatched at all. We both love music - especially music from the Torres Strait."

There have been several close crosscultural partnerships in the brief history of Australia's indigenous music scene: the evolving collaboration between the classically trained Michael Hohnen of Skinnyfish Music and Gurrumul Yunupingu from northeast Arnhem Land is the best-known of them today. Neuenfeldt's role in Seaman Dan's career is distinctive: he has been more the enabler than the shaper, as much the clarifier as the collaborator. For Seaman was a master of his own style and his material; he simply hadn't been discovered. There was luck in their meeting, but luck is never enough: it provides a moment of opportunity, nothing more. "A singer still needs a good voice, a recognisable style, good songs and the natural ability to entertain people," Neuenfeldt says. "Seaman Dan had all those skills ready to go at the age of 70."

The musicians in the backing band gathered at Select Sound studios on Water Street in Cairns. How to bring out the themes and accents in Seaman's songs, and balance them? There were elements of hula, blues and jazz, but above all it was marine music, it was the sea's lilting, rhythmic sound. Audio engineer Nigel Pegrum realised what to do: "As soon as I heard his voice, I recognised the rich, velvety quality he possessed. But also that he sings quite quietly, and in a very low register." It would have to be a recording of gentle accompaniments: lightly strummed guitar, ukulele or mandolin; and accordion, maybe, or soft piano notes. So was born Seaman Dan's sound, at once insistent and reticent.

The first album appeared, Follow the Sun. Its charm was infectious, it was instantly popular, appealing to mainstream as well as indigenous audiences - but with every song, there was more than surface sweetness in the music; there was a faint tone of wistfulness, a sense of time's swift passage and life's impenetrable scale. The favourites from the band nights at the Grand Hotel were all there: Island Lady, Sunset Blues and Old T.I.. There was Seaman's dark evocation of the diving life, Forty Fathoms, and there was his special greeting anthem, Welcome to the Torres Strait.

Follow the Sun appealed to the new breed of world-music aficionados. It was hybrid music, fusion music; a wealth of styles and influences were mixed and jumbled and refashioned in its songs - but this was scarcely a pose or piece of clever marketing. Rather, it was a reflection of Seaman himself, with his mingled background: a Jamaican great-grandfather, a great-grandmother from the Loyalty Islands off New Caledonia and a grandfather from Niue.

This was the pattern of the Torres Strait region in early contact times, and of all the north - of the coastline country and the inland tropics, that hazy realm where sailors, traders, indigenes and incomers shared their lives. It is the complex, elusive region described by Henry Reynolds in his North of Capricorn, that other Australia the authorities in southern cities tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to control and regulate: the multiracial zone that gave rise to the vivid cultures of today's Broome and Cape York coast communities and the Top End.

Okinawan and Filipino divers, Torres Strait fishermen and Aboriginal stockmen were key parts of this working north, and of its soundscape: these were the influences Seaman met and stored in memory through his life. At his TI convent school he was a pupil alongside twin sisters Ina and Cessa Mills from Mt Ernest Island, who went on to form the Mills Sisters singing group and become the first international touring artists from the Strait. In Darwin he heard saltwater and inland Aboriginal rhythms. On pearling boats he heard snatches of music from far away - Malaya, Polynesia, Japan - and their interwoven echoes surface in his cover of Saltwater Cowboy, the jewel of north coast pearling lugger songs.

Seaman and Neuenfeldt stayed in partnership after their first release: they toured and wrote lyrics and tunes together; one of their first collaborations became famous and caught the core of Seaman's view of life. This was Steady Steady, the title song of his best-known album. How are you, Seaman, his friends and fans would ask him, and the reply would always be the same: "Steady, steady." But what do those words mean? The song gives a hint of explanation: one's approach to life should be even, measured, gentle, just like one's approach to romance. It should mirror the pace of the Steady Steady tune, a "slow-drag", rather like a "slow foxtrot, like a boat drifting backwards - like you and your partner on the dance floor".

But there was something more to the idea as well. Here's Seaman's explanation: "It's about working on a pearling lugger. If the current is too strong and the seas are too big and the boat is drifting too fast away from the diver, you turn around. You just make your boat run upwind, up against the sea, steady, steady. Face up against the sea, the motor going slowly, the prop turning slowly, and it drifts backwards to make the boat slower. Drifting backwards, so the diver can walk along steady, steady to follow the boat." That was the way to deal with what came to you: constant movement to maintain stability, adaptation to stay balanced in the flow of life.

Further albums followed in quick succession and each one explored fresh aspects of Seaman's multiplicit memory and past: PNG songs, Pacific Island Christian songs, swing numbers, quick-times and blues. With the albums came live tours and road trips, but at a tranquil pace. Thus Seaman and his band embarked on the Steady Steady Backroads Tour in mid-2002, travelling through Cape York and on west via Burketown, Doomadgee, Mt Isa, Tennant Creek and Elliott, following the stock routes Seaman had ridden in his teenage droving days. Its climax came in Darwin, at the Stringbands and Shakehands concert, the only event the northern capital has staged in serious tribute to its multicultural past. Dance troupes gathered together, along with a Filipino rondalla band. Ted Egan, who played football alongside Seaman in the 1950s, and would soon become administrator of the Northern Territory, was compere for the night.

Similar events were staged elsewhere once the idea took hold. There was a House Party Hula in Cairns to play the music of Torres Strait Islander house parties from decades gone by. There was an indigenous culture concert at the National Museum in Canberra, where Seaman forged a bond with Jimmy Little, the Aboriginal country music star. They sang a duet version of Pearly Shells, and later recorded it, complete with spectral backing vocals, shortly before Little's death from kidney disease.

The circle of that friendship was completed in 2009 when Seaman received the Jimmy Little lifetime achievement award at the Sydney Opera House - a long way, as Neuenfeldt remarks, "from the verandas of TI or the backyard of a country pub on the Cape York peninsula".

Such, though, is the journey, now complete with Seaman's retirement from performance, the release of his final studio album and this handsome volume, a record of his music and his life. The CD slipped inside the back cover offers new versions of old favourites, made with the Cairns Gondwana Indigenous Children's Choir: 30 young voices and one old one, singing timeless songs.

Neuenfeldt closes his labour of love with a tribute to his friend and to the open, undogmatic aspect of Seaman's musical art: "It can mean what listeners want it to mean and it can be enjoyed on different levels - be they musical, aesthetic or cultural. Importantly, like Seaman himself, it lacks artifice. It does not claim to be greater than it is, but rather is an honest and heartfelt effort to document, circulate and celebrate Torres Strait Islander music."

More than this, it is the music of a generation and their experiences: what they faced, the changes they saw, the lessons they hope to pass on. It was made in time's flow and is preserved here, caught forever - a portrait of the north's great troubadour.

Steady Steady: The Life and Music of Seaman Dan
By Henry 'Seaman' Dan and Karl Neuenfeldt
Bound with CD, Still on Deck
Aboriginal Studies Press, 170pp, $40

Nicolas Rothwell is a senior writer on The Australian, based in Darwin.