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Australian story strikes chord in UK

By Stephanie Bunbury

1 July 2008 - The Black Arm Band's musical journey through indigenous Australian history proves a broad traveller.

Pete Postlethwaite Sydney 2008

Archie Roach and Shane Howard Sydney 2008

"WHAT a party!" exclaimed a crisp English voice behind me as the Black Arm Band came on stage for a final bow at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall last week.

By that time, the capacity audience of 900 or so was on its feet, clapping and cheering the mob of indigenous Australian singers and their assembled backing musicians with an abandon unusual in the land of the stiff upper lip. Producer and director Steven Richardson admitted afterwards that he had worried that the show wouldn't travel. It looks as if it does.

The Black Arm Band's Murundak, a musical journey through the indigenous Australian experience, was first performed at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2006. The show was revived this year for the Sydney Festival and has since gone to festivals in Perth and Adelaide; their next stop is Brisbane.

This first overseas gig was part of LIFT, the London International Festival of Theatre.

British actor Pete Postlethwaite gave an English version of the "welcome to country" usually given by a local elder before performances in Australia. After the show, he said, two unrelated English audience members had come up to tell him the show was "off the planet".

"That's how it took them. The joy, the love, the communication going on between the Black Arm Band and the audience was phenomenal," he said. "

Murundak is a vast show. The instrument of choice in Aboriginal communities, according to the co-musical director and former Goanna frontman, Shane Howard, is the guitar. Murundak, however, has a horn section pumping behind the didgeridoo and a string quartet is ranged behind a grand piano.

They seem to cover every musical genre from reggae to country. And while many of the songs are political — some angry, some sombre, some rallying — there is also a lullaby, a jaunty paean to one mum's fish and rice dinners and a desperate, searing song about a street alcoholic from Ruby Hunter.

The songs are counterpointed and contextualised on a screen showing archival images of Aboriginal community life on outback stations and key moments in the successive struggles for indigenous rights, ranging from the Aboriginal embassy that was set up outside Parliament House in the '70s to Kevin Rudd's speech of apology. Grim as some of the footage and statistics are, however, the mood is irrepressibly one of celebration and hope.

"Australia's answer to the Buena Vista Social Club" was how one British newspaper summed them up

Murundak was conceived in 2003, when those involved in the Black Arm Band had the gloomy sense that the indigenous struggle was going backwards "to some strange form of paternalism," recalled Howard.

The show's backbone of content has not changed, however, since Kevin Rudd's landmark apology. According to featured artist Peter Rotumah, the issues remain the same. "An apology is fine, but there are still things to be addressed," he said. "We'll still be doing the Black Arm Band the same way until we've got something to celebrate as far as those issues are concerned."

But there is, in fact, a celebration going on up there. "We had some beautiful playing tonight; everyone really lifted to another notch," Howard said afterwards. Put it down, he grinned, to "the spirit of place". Performing at the South Bank Centre on the Thames, less than a kilometre from the dock where the first convicts sent to Australia were confined on hulks, gave the show a new and different resonance.

Richardson, who is the artistic director of Melbourne's Artspace, said two decades before he began thinking about this show in 2003 he had toured the top end of Australia with Circus Oz: "I was a pretty naive young whitefella from the south and that little trip opened my eyes to what was happening — some amazing things and some really confronting things — and stayed with me for a long time. I have spent the last 25 years, I reckon, getting the skills, expertise and contacts to do this project."

The Black Arm Band will present its second show in Melbourne later this year. Ultimately, Richardson hopes it will perform a similar ongoing role for indigenous musicians as Bangarra Dance Theatre does in its field.

Source: The Age

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