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Australian history in the songlines

17 June 2008 - The Times UK - Three decades of Aboriginal artists will be singing the stories of their people's struggles in London this month.

Archie Roach and Shane Howard

Every time I write a song, it has to do with something that's actually happened, an event that's part of my life,” declares Ruby Hunter down the line from a motel room in Melbourne. As the first indigenous Australian woman to record a solo album (Thoughts Within in 1994) and a member of the country's “stolen generation” who was once a homeless, drunken “juvenile delinquent”, she's got plenty of hard-lived experience to draw on. “You gotta walk the walk to talk the talk,” she says.

With her partner Archie Roach and about a dozen others (the Black Arm Band), Hunter will be appearing at the Royal Festival Hall on June 26 for the British premiere of Murundak. The show is a celebration of contemporary Aboriginal lives and a soundtrack of their long struggle for basic civil rights. Accompanied by video footage, photography, a narrator and a 13-piece band, many of the leading Aboriginal artists of the past three decades will tell their stories in song.

Roach's song Took the Children Away narrates his experience of being forcibly removed from his family by Australian government agencies and dumped in an orphanage at the age of 3. Much the same thing happened to Hunter when she was 8: “They told my grandmum they were taking us to the circus that day. We didn't go to a circus; we were transferred to a place where they had bars on the windows,” she recalls.

Although the didgeridoo player Mark Atkins will be appearing in Murundak, anyone expecting traditional music sung in indigenous languages may be surprised that most of the show is in English, with country, folk, rock, reggae and soul the main styles.

“We have to be with the times,” Hunter says. “If we sing in our languages, they wouldn't understand us anyway.”

“A lot of people have come up to me and said: ‘Why don't you use some didgeridoo or sing some more in [your own] language',” Roach says. “And I go: ‘You know, a lot of language was ... [wiped out]. We're from the southern parts of Australia, where the brunt of the [European] settlement took place.”

With its messages of resistance and emancipation, the popularity of reggae among Aboriginal Australians isn't hard to understand, but the reasons that they have embraced country & western - despite its redneck associations - are more complex. According to Roach, some of the credit lies with Australia's legendary country troubadour Slim Dusty, whose pioneering Outback tours from the 1950s onwards included remote Aboriginal communities: “Country music struck a chord with Aboriginal people because there were stories in it. I think we related more to the storytelling.”

Another surprising thing about Murundak is the appearance of several “whitefellas”, including Shane Howard, one of its musical directors. His 1982 hit Solid Rock opened the eyes and ears of many to the injustices suffered by the “first Australians”. Then there's the British actor Pete Postlethwaite, who will introduce the show. He recently collaborated with Roach on the documentary Liyarn Ngarn, about the racist murder of an Aboriginal youth adopted by an old expat schoolfriend. Postlethwaite acknowledges his own English forefathers' role in Aboriginal disenfranchisement and worse, spending much of the film looking terribly guilt-ridden, but does Roach think the audience here will react the same way to Murundak?

“Well, I never set about trying to make anybody feel guilty. I'm trying to recount things that happened to us for the simple reason that we're Aboriginal people.”

The name Black Arm Band refers to an infamous speech by the former Australian Prime Minister John Howard in 1996, when he rejected the “black armband view of Australian history” - in other words, that white Australians shouldn't apologise for the past. But November's elections ushered in a sea change in Australian politics, with the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, making a formal apology to the “stolen generation” in February.

“There's been a big shift in the thinking of a lot of Australians, black and white,” Roach says. “It's given us a bit more courage to go ahead with trying to improve the situations that adversely affect Aboriginal communities. It feels right to address our health, our well-being physically or mentally, our spirituality.”

While the huge gulfs that exist between the Aborigines and other Australians in areas such as life expectancy, housing and income will take a long time to narrow significantly, there are encouraging signs in Australian cultural life. A new hip-hop version of the 1991 land-rights anthem From Little Things Big Things Grow (featuring samples of Rudd's apology) recently soared into the Australian Top Ten. And the line-up of the Black Arm Band itself now features several female performers - something that would have been unthinkable when Hunter took her first steps on the stage.

Another young member whom Roach describes as “a black Elvis/James Brown type” is Dan Sultan. He won't be singing “protest” songs, and Roach reckons that's a good thing: “Young fellas now are comin' up saying: ‘Well, I just wanna write love songs.' I reckon it's beautiful.”

But why should Londoners flock to see a bunch of little-known or unknown artists? Peter Garrett, the former Midnight Oil frontman, now Australia's Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts, says: “Some of the strongest work in Australia by contemporary musicians has been by the musicians in this show. They're reflecting a really searing and at times difficult set of experiences and they do it in a way that I think really opens up a sense of what has happened and what might be possible.”

Murundak is the Royal Festival Hall, SE1 (0871 6632500; www.southbankcentre. co.uk), on June 26

Source: The Times UK

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