nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
Gurrumul’s voice reaches towards poetry in a world more comfortable with prose.
The paradoxes of Gurrumul’s success are striking. Blind from birth and deeply introverted as a performer, Gurrumul has become one of the most iconic and successful artists in Australia. While his work extends an exceptional hospitality to non-Indigenous audiences, offering access to Yolngu culture and language, he no longer writes English lyrics. In bringing his focus to the textures and languages of Yolngu experience, his work has become increasingly audible, in every sense of the word. His collaborator and close friend Michael Hohnen, creative director of Skinnyfish, speaks of audiences, from the start of Gurrumul’s solo career, responding with tears to the beauty of the music.
Gurrumul’s audience continues to grow and his accolades to multiply. As well as rising Australian and international album sales, he has accumulated music awards including the 2008 ARIA Best Independent Release, and in 2011 two Deadly Awards for Rrakala: Album of the Year and Male Artist of the Year, the latter for the third time. In 2013, ‘Gurrumul: His Life and Music’, conducted and with arrangements by Erkki Veltheim, premiered. Featuring Gurrumul, members of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and with a backdrop of documentary footage of Gurrumul’s life, it was presented at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Vivid Festival. The work coincided with the publication of Robert Hillman’s book of the same name. A live recording was subsequently released, and in 2014 a version of this show was presented at the Darwin Festival and reprised at the Sydney Opera House, this time with the addition of a choir. In May this year, Gurrumul began touring the United States.
In 2009 Guy Maestri’s portrait of Gurrumul won the Archibald Prize. Maestri writes about the forty-minute interview he had with his subject, during which he made sketches and studied his face. Like Cook, the word Maestri uses is ‘quiet’. He aimed to evoke a ‘sense of [Gurrumul’s] presence’:
and this determined the nature of the portrait: quiet and strong. I usually work in a very liberal, gestural way but this time I built up the image quietly and slowly with many glazes in an attempt to capture the beautiful quality of his skin. I worked on it for over a month, mostly while listening to his music. I made sure to read the lyrics and understand the meaning of each song. The whole process became quite an emotional experience.
Gurrumul’s brief moment with Maestri is typical of truncated meetings which interlocutors experience as quietly intense. Among the paradoxes of his success is a refusal of conventional Western modes of celebrity: he gives no interviews and eschews the media. The papers might want to know, as David Bowie once put it, ‘whose shirts you wear’, but Gurrumul – the admirable sartorial elegance of his Rolling Stone image notwithstanding – isn’t saying. Instead, he directs his creative energy into his work.
Faced with a trio of powerful people in 2011 – he met Barack Obama and European royals – Gurrumul, according to Sarah Whyte of the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘didn’t say a word’. Whyte added this wry footnote: ‘Yet on the eve of his ARIA performance tonight … Gurrumul was a lot more talkative. “Hello”, he said to The Sun Herald before being whisked off by minders.’ Obama and Gurrumul shared what Hohnen called a ‘very intimate and physical moment’: Obama grabbed Gurrumul’s hand and put his arm around his neck.
In place of the words so often expected of him, Gurrumul offers something Hohnen describes as a ‘deafening silence’. Instead of construing his avoidance of talk as a lack, this stripping away of celebrity puffery may be thought of as a radical gesture, at once strange and transformative amid the white noise of a ‘connected’ culture. With Western artists’ lives often disturbed by and encrusted with self-conscious observation of the minutiae of their existence, and with Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame radically expanded to allow anyone to tweet and Instagram to their heart’s content, Gurrumul’s refusal to comment on his work is subversive and refreshing. His deafening silence in a culture averse to such allows a purity of access to the music and a washing away of distraction.
Author Don DeLillo predicted the eclipse of reality by the screen in his novel White Noise (1985), where television determines the importance of an event. When characters fleeing a toxic cloud find that it has rated ‘no film footage, no live report’, they worry that they have gone through the experience for nothing. DeLillo’s depiction of experience rendered invisible and inaudible by the white noise around it – if it isn’t onscreen it vanishes – has been magnified by the multiplicity of screens most of us interact with daily. Jean Baudrillard published a series of provocative articles in 1991, later collected as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. He argued, using ideas of simulacra and the hyper-real, that the First Gulf War may as well have been a carefully scripted media construction. Beyond the filters, inconvenient histories slip away.
Gurrumul provides a rare counterpoint to this, dismantling filters and clutter. What is left is magnificent clarity. And partly because of this refusal of celebrity mores, Gurrumul preserves in his work something larger than the baubles and trinkets of the paparazzi universe, something akin to the clarity of meditation. Instead of conforming to the dictates of Western media, Gurrumul retains an independent voice. He doesn’t tweet, but he does sing.
Yet it is from within rather than beyond Gurrumul’s music that a sense of who he is emerges. In one of his few songs to include English lyrics, ‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)’, he sings of his origins and destination in pared phrases beginning with the stark statement: ‘I was born blind.’
Gurrumul was born in 1970 in Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island, 300 kilometres east of Darwin off the coast of Arnhem Land, where he grew up as part of the Gumatj clan. Settled by Methodist missionaries in 1942, Galiwin’ku is a traditional community, entry to which requires permission from the Galiwin’ku Council or the Northern Land Council. Its entwined history of long Yolngu traditions and strong Methodist teachings finds its way into the music of the area. Gurrumul was drawn to music from an early age. Among his relatives is musician and teacher Dr M. Yunupingu – the first Indigenous Australian school principal, lead singer in Yothu Yindi, and 1992 Australian of the Year. Although they don’t have the same parents, Gurrumul describes him as his older brother.
Elcho Island is associated with a rich musical tradition. The band Soft Sands formed in the year Gurrumul was born and later mentored younger bands, including Yothu Yindi and Saltwater Band, both of which have had Gurrumul as a member. ‘My Island Home’, a song celebrating Elcho Island written by Neil Murray of the Warumpi Band, was made famous when Christine Anu performed it at the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Academic Aaron Corn describes the influence of Soft Sands on other musicians in Arnhem Land. Corn’s work explains that ‘durable canons of hereditary names, songs, dances and designs’ form a crucial part of song composition in the area.
In 2010, ABC Television aired an episode of Australian Story ‘You’re the Voice’, the bones of a documentary-in-progress about Gurrumul by Naina Sen. ‘You’re the Voice’ shows Gurrumul’s work emerging from a strong tradition of Yolngu music within and beyond his family. Gurrumul’s aunt Dhangal Gurruwiwi, one of a number of multilingual relatives shown in the film, remembers his musical beginnings: ‘We used to just sit them in the church and he used to listen to harmonies and guitar people playing and keyboards. And they used to sing joke song with tins drumming and making a stick as a lead guitar and the bass.’
Gurrumul was given his first guitar at the age of six. The left-handed child intuitively played it upside down, a solution shared, with variations, by Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney and Kurt Cobain. There was an early recognition in the community, says Hohnen, that Gurrumul was ‘a little musical genius’.
Gurrumul learned numerous inst
ruments. His reputation as a drummer led Yothu Yindi’s manager, Alan James, to invite him to join the band in 1988 when they toured the United States and Canada supporting Midnight Oil. In a scene from ‘You’re the Voice’, his uncle Djunga Djunga Yunupingu recalls: ‘We were worried, because he was blind. But also we thought and said it is the only opportunity for him to carry on his career.’
Gurrumul later resigned from Yothu Yindi. Asked why, he said that he didn’t like playing the drums. Once this was clarified, he stayed on to sing and play guitar and keyboards with the band. He enjoyed being in bands, so much so that when Hohnen heard his voice and suggested he do some solo work, he responded with an emphatic ‘no’. Part of this may have involved his shyness and the possibilities of concealment in collaborative performance. But from Hohnen’s continued encouragement over a number of years came the exploration of solo performance, pared back to spare, gentle acoustic music. From here came Gurrumul in 2008.
‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)’ is the fourth song on Gurrumul and the first to contain English. Its autobiographical lines describe the way music became central to learning – or, as the song says, discovering that his ‘spirit knew’ he had to learn – ‘to read the world of destruction’. The song’s refrain ‘united we stand / divided we fall / together we’ll stand in solidarity’ bridges lyrics in his original Gumatj language, which, along with lyrics in the Galpu and Djambarrpuynu languages, gives his songs most of their words.
The song’s next verse describes growing up amid mourning for culture. Gurrumul sings of his parents: ‘crying their hearts in confusion’. ‘How can I walk straight and tall?’ becomes the boy’s – and the song’s – central question and within this lies the philosophical centre of the work. From this begins a quest: ‘to bridge and to build Yolngu culture’. The phrase is entered more hesitantly than that, with the humility of ‘trying’: ‘trying to bridge’. But the hesitancy drops away as he sings in his Yolngu languages, describing his lineage:
arranydja dhuwala Batumaŋ
ŋarranydja dhuwala Djarrami
ŋarranydja dhuwala Djeŋarra’
ŋarranydja dhuwala Gurrumulŋa
The song, like all his songs, ripples and soars. There is such range and grace in the voice that his work evokes from reviewers and listeners the most poetic responses.
Peter Garrett, former lead singer of Midnight Oil and federal minister, puts it this way: Gurrumul ‘sings so deeply and sweetly about his connection to family and country, the effect is transcendental’. Music critic Bruce Elder used similar terms in a Sydney Morning Herald review of Gurrumul: ‘It is as though Yunupingu has reached into a wellspring so deep it transcends cultural barriers. He has found an emotional bridge which is genuinely universal.’
Robert Forster, formerly of the Go-Betweens and one of Australia’s most perceptive writers on music, brings an additional term into his discussion of the ‘trans’ or crossing aspect of the work – translation. Yet he uses the term in an effaced way, suggesting that the work transcends translation. In an essay in the Monthly about Rrakala, Forster writes:
Yes, his songs are a mantra of home, family, ancestors, sunsets, mourning and crying – that’s what it says in the English translations of his lyrics. But through his art and the care he takes, he’s able to skip the ‘translation’ stage and go where only great musicians can go – straight to the heart.
Forster draws an illuminating comparison with the music of New York-based Antony Hegarty, singer and member of Antony and the Johnsons. He describes the way each singer – much the same age yet from vastly different backgrounds – seeks redemption in nature. For Gurrumul, Forster suggests, this means the place of his birth, while for Antony it is an idea of the feminine. The key word in his comparison is ‘otherworldly’. This is ‘beyond’ again: the destination of translation, transcendence, and the kinds of metaphysical bridge recurrent in discussion of Gurrumul. Each artist creates ‘an otherworldly record that seems instantly to exist on no other terms but its own’. Both Antony and Gurrumul, Forster suggests, ‘offer up songs sung in angelic voices that chronicle, in surprisingly similar ways, an intuitive, highly sensitive response to their surroundings’.
One well-known depiction of Antony sees her seemingly shy and hunched at the microphone, eyes closed throughout an intense and inward rendering of Leonard Cohen’s ‘If It Be Your Will’. The performance conveys a powerful introversion common to both singers’ work. The intense and prayer-like mood of Cohen’s song is also apposite to the work of each singer as is the idea of the visitation upon a person of the gift of song: ‘If it be your will / to let me sing … from this broken hill / all your praises they shall ring.’
The video of Antony is from the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (directed by Lian Lunson in 2005). She appears self-effacing, her hair falling across her face, her hands obscuring her mouth as she sings. In a voice-over and intercut interview, Cohen describes the song as a response to ‘what struck me as beauty … that curious emanation … I prayed to have some response to the things that were so clearly beautiful.’ Ideas of what beauty might be sear through the performance as they do through Gurrumul’s work, transcending the terms and dynamics of beauty Cohen himself has made central to his song-writing, poetry and fiction. Forster’s comparison illuminates the quiet, intense work created by artists whose exceptional openness coexists with, and perhaps emanates from, shyness.
British musician Sting, who performed a duet with Gurrumul in 2009, implies an idea of transcendence similar to Forster’s, calling Gurrumul’s voice ‘spiritual … the sound of a higher being’. In terms of bridging and translation, Gurrumul’s televised duet with Sting in Paris for French television show Taratata exemplifies the technical aspects of the intuitive dynamics of Gurrumul’s work.
Gurrumul, whose childhood musical education was enthusiastic and eclectic but not subject to the conventional dictates of a mainstream media diet of hits and stars, didn’t know of Sting or the song, ‘Every Breath You Take’. To prepare the song for performance, he asked his uncles on Elcho Island to translate the song into the Gumatj language, but with minutes to go before the performance Gurrumul had not had time to learn the words. He began by singing in the bridge behind Sting in a traditional way, but then created his counterpoint in an intuitive way, singing the second verse in Gumatj, creating his own ‘soothing words’. He proceeded to hum and trade melodies with Sting as the two voices united for the final phrases of the song. Hohnen comments on the transformation of the song: ‘changing what sounds like a sour love-obsessed song to a love poem’. After the show aired with its duet (and another song by Gurrumul) The Australian reported that Gurrumul entered the French iTunes charts at number nine and Sting’s record reached number ten, an interesting twist on the theme of transcendence.
The duet with Sting took place between Gurrumul’s two solo albums. The first, Gurrumul, contains ‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)’ and one other song, ‘Baywara’, which intersperses English lyrics with those of his original languages. His second album, Rrakala, contains no English lyrics. So the rare statement of purpose in ‘I Was Born Blind’ – ‘to bridge and to build Yolngu culture’ – positioned as a preface to the two recordings, speaks in English to an Anglophone audience to describe the poetics of a work that would go on immediately to resonate internationally.
As well as travelling well beyond his Galiwin’ku home, the music transcends categories in all sorts of ways. Not everyone perceives this multifariousness positively. In an interview in Paris Match, Hohnen says that Gurrumul was rejected by the World Music Expo WOMEX because his work was ‘not Aboriginal enough’. This is the more benign face of a debate about ideas of Indigenous identity. It also connects with discussions about the category of world music having become ‘outdated and offensive’ and used to put non-Western musicians into a ghetto, as Guardian writer Ian Birrell puts it. The idea of what it might mean to be ‘Aboriginal enough’ is explored by other Indigenous artis
ts, such as Anita Heiss in her memoir Am I Black Enough For You? (2012). Heiss’s book is in part a response to journalist Andrew Bolt. In 2010 she and eight other Indigenous people took Bolt and his publisher, News Ltd, to court in order to defend charges under the Racial Discrimination Act. Bolt had suggested that lighter-skinned Indigenous people chose to identify as black purely for personal gain. Bolt and his publisher were found guilty in 2011.
In a musical context, the question implies the existence of certain stereotypes or prescriptions of what Indigenous music is allowed to be. Hohnen, perhaps a bit flippantly, describes the ‘music side’ of Gurrumul’s work as ‘mainstream pop’ – ‘more folk pop than world music’. Traditional storytelling is melded with it, producing something new, although, as Corn illustrates, Soft Sands and other bands before Gurrumul were engaged in comparable meldings.
Fusion and reimagining are ideas circulating throughout Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1973), which distinguishes between the text of pleasure and the text of bliss. Texts of bliss are radical, multifarious, sometimes unsettling, and, yes, transcendent:
Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
Pleasure, in this context, involves the meeting of expectation. In textual terms, it can only offer texts bordered by what David Buchbinder, talking about similar ideas in the context of gender, calls ‘prescriptions and proscriptions’. Barthes’ texts of bliss involve a poetics of bridging; of translation and transcendence, as well as some of the refusals and silences such as those Gurrumul’s work and public persona enact. Such bridging has the capacity to heal ruptures, but it also points to their existence.
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 37