Busby Marou find their voice

Jeremy Marou and Thomas Busby, aka Busby Marou. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

For more than a decade, Thomas Busby and Jeremy Marou have been in the public eye while performing as the chart-topping Queensland acoustic pop duo Busby Marou. The two musicians featured in a Tourism Queensland advertising campaign last year, yet since joining forces in Rockhampton in 2007, the pair has preferred to let its art speak for itself.

“On the last album we start mentioning that, yeah, it’s a blackfella and a whitefella — so what? What you see is what you get. We’re best mates playing music,” Busby told me when I met the duo in Brisbane a fortnight ago, ahead of the release of their fourth album The Great Divide. “Now we’re established, we’ve got goals, we’ve got a profile and we can probably use it for good.”

For Marou, whose roots are on Murray Island in the Torres Strait, this realisation extends to recently accepting a role as a community facilitator for the Queensland state department of environment and science.

“I didn’t realise how bad climate change was affecting the Torres Strait Islands,” Marou told me. “Not so much Murray Island, because it’s a volcanic rock — but all the coral cays, it’s horrific. There’s people losing their houses from rising sea levels. Climate change is definitely affecting the islands, for sure. They need to sandbag beaches, and if there’s a few weeks of bad weather, there’s no access to the island and they run out of [fresh] water. It’s something that the rest of the country wouldn’t even know about. If there was houses underwater in Sydney, it’d be world news.”

Marou’s first involvement with the program was a community meeting held at Yorke Island — traditionally known as Masig, population 270 — last month.

“My role was to have a familiar face, as I’ve got so much family all through the Torres Strait,” he said. “It’s something that the government is serious about. The one thing we do know is that global warming is not going away, so they will throw dollars at it. That’s what I’m saying [to those communities]: if you’re on the front foot, you will get those dollars to help fix the island. If I can play my part in that, I think I’m doing the right thing. Torres Strait Islanders are a very quiet people; we’re not the type of people to jump up and go, ‘We need to fix our shores’.”

Prior to his music career with Busby taking off, Marou worked as a public servant, first at the state department of natural resources and mines, then with the department of communities.

Of his new role, Marou said, “I made it clear from the start when they asked me: I can do it, but I’m there to facilitate, to get people to sit down and yarn about some projects, and maybe help with some translating. I’m not there as a Busby Marou musician; I’m not there as a public servant or a bureaucrat — I’m there as a Torres Strait Islander.”

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