We won't cry as Archie Roach makes his inspirational comeback

NOT long ago, Archie Roach thought his career, and perhaps his life, had come to an end. He talks about those dark days and his inspirational comeback.

Archie Roach

THE old St Brigid's church at Crossley in southwestern Victoria has a special place in Archie Roach's heart. Three years ago the singer and his wife, Ruby Hunter, played a fundraising concert in the church hall.

The building, a centrepiece of the small Crossley community for 130 years, was up for sale. Many locals were upset at the prospect of losing it as a public space. They rallied around, raised money. And they bought it.

"We were part of the fight and it was a good fight," Roach says. "We won and got the church back into community hands."

Roach is unquestionably a fighter. That the 56-year-old singer is here, alive and spruiking a new album after the tragedy and life-threatening illness that has overwhelmed him in the past few years, is testament to that.

In February 2010, Hunter, Roach's partner and musical collaborator of 30 years, died from a heart attack at their home in Killarney, just a few kilometres from Crossley. Roach was inconsolable. Months later, a stroke left him struggling to speak, walk or move his hands. Then last year, while still in recovery, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

One can understand why, at that point, he thought his career, at the very least, was over. "I didn't feel I had any more in me," he says. "Ruby passing knocked me down hard and I really didn't want to get up."

Roach, a quietly affable man with strong features, is sitting in The Australian's Sydney studio. The oxygen canister by his side is a precaution, the result of having half a lung removed to cure him of cancer.

He's preparing to play a few songs from his new album, Into the Bloodstream, his first since 1988 three years ago and his eighth studio album since Charcoal Lane, the record that launched his career 22 years ago and that featured the song for which he has become best known, Took the Children Away.

There's a sense of coming full circle on Into the Bloodstream as well. The song We Won't Cry was co-written with Paul Kelly (who contributes guest vocals), the man who convinced the shy Aboriginal performer to make that first album. Also the achingly beautiful closing song, Old Mission Road, returns Roach in a deeply personal way to Took the Children Away, to the pain he has carried for most of his life of being wrenched from his family as a three-year-old as one of the Stolen Generations of indigenous children.

The mission mentioned in the song is Rumbalara, where the Roach family lived in the mid-1950s until they were rehoused to nearby Framlingham, where Roach's mother came from.

Oh I wish I had grown with my mother back home / Coz I miss her sweet kisses and her smile / And when I'm alone I wish I had known / My mother for just a while.

"I love that song." Roach says. "Every time I sing it or hear it, it makes me feel at peace. It puts me in that place where I'm walking down the road at the mission with my Mum and Dad, which I never got the chance to do."

ROACH has few memories of those first years of his life, although he had a sudden realisation as a young adult. "I don't remember much about the mission," he says, "but the first time I went back there, when I was a young man, I was walking through the bracken, down to the river, and 'bang!'; the bracken was so familiar. there was something about it.

"My older cousin looked at me and told me that the cousins were looking after me and were running away from the police and the welfare and they hid me in the bracken. I would have been about three when that happened. That's the only recollection I have of there. The rest is just of the homes and the institutions."

That's what befell Roach after he was taken from his family, a tough life in foster homes and institutions in Melbourne and elsewhere, from which he finally fled as a teenager to live on the streets, travelling to Sydney and Adelaide, armed with an acoustic guitar.

The singer considers himself fortunate that he had music to fall back on and that he has been able to use that to channel some of the anger he felt at the injustice imposed on him during the Stolen Generations era. He is not a bitter man.

"I know a lot of cantankerous old fellas who won't forgive and won't forget. I seem to be a lot more at ease with it now than I was as a young man. I'll always be grateful that I have music. Not everyone can do that."

When Roach met Hunter in the 80s they formed a professional as well as personal bond. They had a family, rearing two of their own children as well as three others, "a nephew and a niece and a little fella who was dropped off one time by his mother when he was 10 days old".

"He's 23 now and has a baby of his own," Roach says. "So that's five children we've brought up, really."

Throughout their careers the two songwriters and performers informed each other's work and collaborated on many occasions on stage and on record. His first appearance on a recording was with Hunter on her album Koorie in 1989. They would sit together at home, writing songs, talking about them, reshaping them.

For Roach, his partner was an invaluable muse. After her death, he admits, it seemed the world had closed down on him and the idea of making music evaporated. Hunter had been his inspiration, his soul mate. He couldn't imagine where another song would come from without her. He had doubts also about his voice and how it would hold up with half a lung missing.

"I used to write most of my songs around the kitchen table and she would be the first to hear them," Roach says. "She was my sounding board, so when she passed I really didn't have anybody to do that. I found it harder to get inspired."

After the stroke Roach spent months learning how to play guitar again. "I can't play guitar like I used to," he says. "After the stroke I had to learn to play again and to walk again. At first I just thought 'oh no'. I couldn't even write ... couldn't play guitar. That's what I was all about for the past 30 years, was writing songs and playing. When that couldn't happen I thought: 'What do I do now?' "

His return to recording and performing last year came after prompting from his manager Jill Shelton and encouragement from producer and guitarist Craig Pilkington, who had worked with Hunter and had also recorded demos with Roach 12 years ago.

It was one of the songs from that session, Mulyawongk, that became the centrepiece to Into the Bloodstream, using that same vocal track he had recorded in 2000.

Roach says he'd "almost forgotten it". "But as soon as Craig played the first few chords it all came back to me and it hit me hard. It means more now since Ruby's passing than it did when we demoed it."

That song also opened the floodgates to more. Always in the back of his mind was some advice Hunter had given him when he was reluctant to make that first album 22 years ago.

"When I first started off and Paul Kelly asked me if I wanted to do an album I said no. If it did well, I really didn't want the attention. I'm a private, quiet bloke. One thing Ruby said was, 'Archie Roach, it's not all about you, you know.'

"And she was right. What she was saying was that most people, especially Aboriginal people ... when you're one person, a footballer, a singer, an entertainer ... when you excel at your chosen field we all shine. When you do something and you succeed you're not just doing it for yourself, you're doing it for your people as well.

"That's what she meant."

Slowly, after everything he had been through, Roach found the confidence to write again.

"We started doing a few shows here and there," he says. "Jill has been a great help and support and we decided it was about time we did another album. But I wasn't sure if I could get the songs together. Going back into the studio helped, just like going back to a factory ... a familiar place to work and to write."

THE new collection of songs, with titles such as Heal the People, Song to Sing and Top of the Hill, reflects the struggle Roach has gone through in recent times and his determination to win the battle. It's an album also of celebration. Many of the songs have a gospel feel.

"I've always loved gospel music," Roach says, "because of the way it makes me feel. I'm not religious at all, but I'm a spiritual person. Gospel music has a feel to it. It can pick you up."

There's a warm spirit coming off the tracks, a sense that Roach and his collaborators are basking in the music, ready to lift the roof, as they can be seen trying to do in the video for the most rousing song on the album, Song to Sing.

It's no coincidence that the roof in question belongs to the Crossley church. When Roach decided to have a choir on some of the songs to add to its gospel textures, he took Pilkington from the Melbourne studio where most of the album was recorded to check out its acoustics and potential.

"It felt like the right thing to do for a lot of reasons," Roach says. "It's a good space."

It seems also that Roach is in a good place, as much as he can be, and he is looking forward to performing next year at Sydney, Perth and Adelaide festivals and next Thursday at Melbourne's Australasian World Music Expo, which will serve also as the official launch of Into the Bloodstream.

His stage presentation includes a 10-piece choir led by indigenous singer Lou Bennett, who also appears on the album, and a 13-piece band led by Pilkington.

"It's going to be a hoot," he says. "I've already done a rehearsal with the core choir and some strings and the band. It's great to be able to do that."

And no matter where he's performing, one can be sure the spirit of Hunter will be close by.

"She's not very far away at all," Roach says. "Ruby never gave up. She was always a battler, always a fighter, and she wouldn't let anything keep her down, so I've been thinking about that and taking a leaf out of her book. It helped me to carry on.

"I've been doing this for a very long time so I really don't know what I would have done if I wasn't doing this any more."

Into the Bloodstream is out now through Liberation Music and is reviewed here. Roach plays the Arts Centre, Melbourne, on Thursday; Sydney State Theatre on January 25; Chevron Festival Gardens, Perth, on February 10; and Her Majesty's Theatre, Adelaide, on March 15.