The story of a man in search of triumph
Archie Roach’s biography is revealing, brutally honest and transformative.
Archie Roach begins the extraordinary story of his life with these transformative words: “Sometimes you can go years without changing as a person. Maybe you get a little rounder, a little balder, but inside you’re the same man. Same values, same hopes, pretty much the same bloke. Sometimes, though, it can change in a day. In the morning you have one life ahead of you and in the afternoon another. That happened to me once when I was a boy.”
This is how he sets up the mind-bending childhood experience of receiving a letter from a sister he didn’t know he had, about the death of the birth mother he didn’t know he had, which began to shine a light into the darker corners of a family history that had been kept from him. These few sentences lay out exactly the sort of book this is to be: plain-spoken, truthful, deeply felt and beautifully written.
Many of us know Roach through the incandescent power of his folk-styled songs, from his 1990 debut album, Charcoal Lane — which won two ARIA awards the following year, including best new talent — through to the recently released collection of his work that shares its name with this memoir.
Yet in Tell Me Why, music doesn’t become the focus until about halfway through. Before that point we learn — in striking, clear-eyed and often emotional recollections — of the child, then the teenager, then the young man Roach was before his voice found a national audience.
After deciding to leave his kind and loving adoptive parents in Melbourne in search of members of his blood family in Sydney, Roach truly begins his life on the road. Yet the path is littered with pitfalls for, as he outlines, a significant period of his late teens and young adulthood was spent self-medicating with alcohol while sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation.
“The charge”, he and his mates called it; not so much a pleasant outlet as a necessary numbing agent that each day helped them get to the desired state. “Carefree and happy,” he writes. “That’s where we all wanted to be. The charge got us there.”
In the midst of fondly remembering all those hours spent drinking, laughing and singing in pubs and parks, despite the deleterious health effects, the Roach of today interjects with one of the most insightful observations in a book littered with such moments: “I look back and see the darkness that would have touched every moment unless we numbed it with beer and port and sherry. We were part of an obliterated culture, just intact enough to know it exists but so broken we didn’t think we could ever be put together again. We’d lost mates and family young, and we would again. We have lineages we knew so little about. There was death in our past and death in our future, but we craved a carefree and happy present, and booze offered us that. We wanted to forget and retell the stories of our lives as triumphs and comedies, not tragedies. That’s why we drank, I think.”
Even back then, though, Roach was far from blind to the consequences of his actions. After a period of sobriety following the birth of his first son, he relapsed and became so consumed with shame that he attempted suicide.
Luckily, he was discovered before that final act was completed, and rushed to hospital, then to a sanatorium. These scary scenes are rendered in the same stark, matter-of-fact tone that the author uses throughout. Conversely, when his long-time partner, Ruby Hunter, enters the picture, the writing fairly crackles with the electricity of an all-encompassing love. How they met is a story of chance in itself, as Roach stood alongside a highway and flipped a 20c piece to determine whether he’d hitchhike to Melbourne or Adelaide.
“The spin sent me west, and I reckon few men have gained more from a simple coin flip,” he writes.
“See, there was a girl waiting for me in Adelaide, one who would change my life forever. “
Their life together was not without its challenges but it is clear in the telling here that Hunter’s positive influence on the shape of his story is greater than any other single force. They were both keen songwriters, with Roach describing his own writing as inspired by people and their stories: “It was concerned about the people around me whose pain and joy I felt so deeply I had to write about them. Empathy was my impetus.”
Soon others began to take notice of those stories, particularly singer-songwriter Paul Kelly and guitarist Steve Connolly, who liked what they heard and offered to record and produce his songs. When Roach initially showed little interest at following through on their kind suggestion, Hunter had some firm but fair words for him: “Even if I live to be a thousand years, I’ll never forget what happened next. Ruby seemed to gather herself up taller than I’d ever seen her before, put her hands on her hips and told me: ‘It’s not all about you, Archie Roach. How many blackfellas you reckon get to record an album?’. She turned sharply and went about her day, leaving me with a lot to think about. I knew exactly what Ruby was saying by the way she said it. If I go through that door of making an album, how many more might get the opportunity to follow behind me?”
His musical success, when it came, was perhaps more hard-earned and deserved than any other Australian artist of the past three decades. And, as we now know, his actions did indeed inspire the following generations of indigenous artists to pursue their art and find significant audiences, just like Roach did.
This book has been a long time in the making: Roach is now 63 and, as he details here, he has had his fair share of health problems along the way, including a grand mal seizure, a stroke and lung cancer. Yet, happily, he is still here — and as a nation, we are all the richer for Roach having taken such great care in penning the story of his life.
Just like his early songs, Tell Me Why was written with empathy as its impetus and that intent shines through on every page. This is a phenomenal work by one of the most articulate and recognisable members of the Stolen Generations. It will be read, studied and discussed for many years to come.
Andrew McMillen is The Australian’s music writer.
Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music
Archie Roach
Simon & Schuster, 378pp, $49.99 (HB)
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