The Australian’s Australian of the Year: John Farnham’s courageous voice inspires all of us

In 2024, John Farnham overcame facial disfigurement from radical cancer surgery as well as a very public reckoning with abhorrent historic abuse – in the process reminding us all of his inspiring courage and tenacity.

John Farnham performs in February 2020 in Sydney. Picture: Getty Images

John Farnham, the Voice, had all but gone silent. Slowly receding from public view, he let his generation-defining music speak to his legacy, and made few headlines beyond piecemeal insights into his slow recovery from cancer.

It is why Farnham’s visceral honesty in recounting the abuse he overcame in forging a part of the nation’s musical history has crowned him with a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year.

Farnham’s memoir The Voice Inside.

Farnham’s composition of the 1986 album Whispering Jack was a last-ditch attempt to seize control of a career that had aged past the adulation of his teen rock stardom. Its elevation to the Rushmore of Australian albums, crowned by the iconic single You’re the Voice, brought Farnham into view as a cornerstone of Australia’s larrikin spirit.

It remains the highest-selling Australian album in the country. However, few understood how significant that moment was for the musician personally, until the release of the 2023 documentary John Farnham: Finding the Voice, and his eventual memoir The Voice Inside last year.

His autobiography, co-written by Poppy Stockell, gave a remarkable insight into previously guarded interior. “For the first time in my career, I got to sing and be me in the way I wanted,” Farnham writes.

His sense of freedom upon creating Whispering Jack became obvious to readers, who heard for the first time his account of the serial abuse lumped upon him by former manager Darryl Sambell. Through the ’60s and ’70s, Sambell exercised total control over young Johnny Farnham. Recording through the night, he would lace the 18-year-old’s coffee with amphetamines, then dope him with sleeping pills come morning.

Where the drug-induced coercion ended, Sambell would be there to emotionally control him. He was “sexually aggressive”, controlling and viewed Farnham as a “piece of meat”. Any attempt to deny his advances “turned his attraction into jealousy, hatred and a desire for control”.

For years Farnham had little control over where he performed, what he wore or when he ate.

Following an oral cancer diagnosis, Farnham has reckoned with surgery and facial reconstruction.

“He isolated me from my friends and family, he tried to keep me away from Jill, he drugged me, and he made me believe that all my success, everything I had, was because of him,” Farnham writes.

“(I still feel) so ashamed of myself for not realising what Darryl was up to or speaking up more often. I still don’t know why I didn’t react more.”

His battles endured into later life when he was diagnosed in 2022 with oral cancer, culminating in a 12-hour surgery that relegated him to months of recovery from a facial reconstruction.

Farnham’s honesty and courage have once again reminded his fans never to sit in silence.