Gurrumul’s emergence as a solo performer took place in an Australia without reconciliation. On Australia Day 2008, a ‘private individual’ commissioned a sky-writer to inscribe the single word ‘Sorry’ in the sky above the festivities celebrating the arrival in Australia of European settlers. A month later, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his Apology which states that ‘the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end’. In apologising to Indigenous Australians, Rudd’s speech centres on the image of the bridge. The Apology, as he put it, was:
aimed at building a bridge between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians – a bridge based on a real respect rather than a thinly veiled contempt … Our challenge for the future is to cross that bridge and, in so doing, to embrace a new partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians – to embrace, as part of that partnership, expanded Link-up and other critical services to help the stolen generations to trace their families if at all possible and to provide dignity to their lives.
Rudd’s speech concludes with a call to action. He urges Australians to: ‘seize the day. Let it not become a moment of mere sentimental reflection.’ Nonetheless, the translation of words into action has been slow. The bridging promised by the Apology remains, at best, hypothetical. As Rudd made clear at the time, the value of the speech would lie in its connection with restorative action.
Gurrumul’s sung or sonic bridging brings to mind the concept of the sound bridge. The sound bridge comes from the language of film to describe sound that carries over from one scene to another. In practice, a sound bridge allows us to hear the sound from the next sequence before we see it. Beyond the technical meaning of the term, the sound bridge does something figurative, too. Literally, a sound bridge creates continuity, but figuratively it also foreshadows connection: an aural telegram from the future. It prophesies or promises the possibility of a scene as yet unseen.
While songs have bridges which connect their components, other artists in other media explore the idea that actual bridges have songs. Jodi Rose is an artist who works with singing bridges. For more than a decade she has travelled the world listening to bridges and recording their ‘music’. Amid discussion of figurative bridgings in the contexts of film, music, and politics, Rose works under real bridges, capturing their songs. She has produced albums featuring her own recordings of bridges and remixes by other artists. In bridges, she writes, lies the spiritual: ‘The city has become our temple, electronic networks our religion, and the inaudible vibrations of the bridge cables are the voice of the divine. The word of the universe soaks through my cochlea into the nerve centres. I am wired to god.’
Her work reaches into the idea of found poetics and the unconstrained songs that exist around us to be captured. But her work also contains the idea of attuning ourselves to what is and isn’t audible. In this very orientation is something radical and fresh, pertinent to Gurrumul’s music, of what we might listen to, or for. Critic Douglas Khan comments of Rose’s work: ‘The bridge can no longer pass itself off as anything but a church.’
Another artist of the bridge is Brisbane poet Samuel Wagan Watson, the first Indigenous poet to win the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, for his poetry collection Smoke-Encrypted Whispers (2005), which slowly revolves around images of water, while its individual poems are swift and compact. In one of the most striking poems, ‘Jetty Nights’, a jetty is imagined as ‘an arm that stretched over the mud and sharks’ and later becomes, for the children in the poem ‘the clatter of dead wood / our lifeline home’.
A jetty’s arm is the first part of a bridge. To bridge is to extend such an arm, and this is what Gurrumul’s music does and what was promised in Rudd’s 2008 speech. The arm across dark water is a potent symbol of reconciliation as a possibility, not to be taken for granted; it holds the idea of a ‘future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility’. While Rudd acknowledged that no words can erase past injuries and atrocities, the speech ‘is symbolic, and yet also has to be more than this: symbolism is important but, unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance, it is little more than a clanging gong’.
Gurrumul follows a line of Indigenous singer-songwriters before him who have sung more overtly about reconciliation in English. Kev Carmody, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter, all members of the Stolen Generation, are prominent examples. Carmody’s whimsical line in ‘Travellin’ North’ that ‘human constructs are just a passin’ phase’ captures the drift of his passionate work, but each has written unflinchingly about issues such as Aboriginal deaths in custody, land rights, and the Stolen Generations.
Each of these artists has collaborated with Indigenous and non-Indigenous musicians. Carmody’s ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’, about land rights and reconciliation, was cowritten with Paul Kelly and has been covered by numerous artists, including Roach. In 2008 the song was performed by a group of artists with samples from Kevin Rudd’s Apology in a collaboration organised by online activist group GetUp! to raise funds for Indigenous projects.
Perhaps the most famous example is the song ‘Treaty’ by Yothu Yindi, fronted by Dr Yunupingu and of which Gurrumul was then a member. When Prime Minister Bob Hawke visited the Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory in 1988, Northern and Central Land Councils chairmen Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Wenten Rubuntja presented him with the Barunga Statement, framed with traditional painting. The Statement urged the government to acknowledge Indigenous land rights and to create a treaty. Hawke responded emotionally and promised that such a treaty would be created by 1990. When 1990 passed, ‘Treaty’ was written. As Dr Yunupingu put it: ‘The intention of this song was to raise public awareness about this so that the government would be encouraged to hold to his promise.’
The song had two film clips. The second is a remix by British band Filthy Lucre, made without the involvement of Yothu Yindi, which became an international hit. The first clip shows images of Bob Hawke at the Barunga Festival variously throwing spears, laughing, playing the didgeridoo, and speaking with what looks like earnest conviction. These images are shown on television screens, to reflect the song’s opening line: ‘Well I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television.’ The images look confected. The clip suggests that Hawke’s promise, like Baudrillard’s Gulf War, may never have happened. And yet, at the same time, it is evidence of the making of promises, however flimsy, ‘words are easy, words are cheap’. These televisual images are interspersed with scenes of kids playing, tribal dance and the band performing, all of which are vital and colour-saturated. And in a fleeting moment in the clip, a twenty-year-old Gurrumul can be seen playing keyboards and singing.
Dr Yunupingu said: ‘Though it borrows from rock ’n’ roll, the whole structure of “Treaty” is driven by the beat of the djatpangarri that I’ve incorporated in it. It was an old recording of this historic djatpangarri that triggered the song’s composition.’ Djatpangarri is a style of music and dancing dating back to the 1930s and performed by Yolngu men. It is light-hearted and informal, unlike more ceremonial musical modes.
The words – a mixture of English and Gumatj languages – mourn the hollowness of words without action, like Rudd’s ‘clanging gong’. But as the centrality of djatpangarri suggests, the song also celebrates traditional Yolngu culture. ‘Treaty’ was written in collaboration with members of Yothu Yindi, including Gurrumul, as well as Paul Kelly and members of Midnight Oil.
The song is a passionate cry for reconciliation and Indigenous land rights. Although Midnight Oil’s lyricists include lawyers Peter Garrett and Rob Hirst, it is a bit unclear what action the song proposes. Its stark syllables variously mandate that non-Indigenous Australians ‘pay the rent’ or ‘give it back’, quite different possibilities in legal terms. The band’s most famous performance of this song was at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. The musicians wore black suits emblazoned with the word ‘Sorry’. The suits were revealed on
ly moments before the performance in a profoundly subversive image, given the context of the ‘history wars’ and the Howard government’s refusal to apologise.
If Rudd’s Apology seven years later was an arm over dark waters, its reach, as Rudd himself foreshadowed, is dependent on continued flexibility. Embedded in the Apology is the idea of empathy, and it includes a direct appeal to non-Indigenous Australians resistant to apology:
I ask those non-indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you. I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive.
This kind of imagining – this empathy – is central to any reconciliation. Imagining another’s life is something that documentary portraiture and life writing have in common. Naina Sen’s documentary explores and exemplifies some complex problems of empathy, and specifically about bridges and bridging in relation to Gurrumul. Portraiture – Cook’s, Maestri’s or Sen’s – at its best enacts a kind of bridging.
But central to ‘You’re the Voice’ is the idea of Gurrumul’s resistance to, and discomfort with, conventional forms of celebrity. As Neil Finn, musician and former member of Split Enz and Crowded House, points out in his introduction to the episode, Gurrumul has never spoken to the media. While Sen’s film may have initially hoped to change that, it instead goes on to explore Gurrumul’s silence. Sen’s work seeks to revise the terms of life writing so as to consider what it is that Gurrumul’s relationship with the various forms of portraiture might reveal.
‘You’re the Voice’ highlights Gurrumul’s intense opposition to that process and opens up life writing’s complex ethical questions about capturing someone who may not want to be caught. It recalls the tenth rule in Hermione Lee’s tongue-in-cheek account of the rules of life writing: ‘There are no rules.’
Yet some insist on rules. In a deeply disturbing scene in ‘You’re the Voice’, Gurrumul is brought to a television studio where Sharon O’Neil interviews him in a blaze of lights and cameras. When he does not respond to her questions, she lectures him: ‘You’re going to have to get used to this … you’re going to have to learn to enjoy it.’ The invasive nature of the comment and its terse delivery reveal a kind of covert – or perhaps not so covert – violence enacted by the media in relation to those considered its subjects. It is an ugly moment underlining questions of respect. Would this journalist have used the same tone to speak to Barack Obama, Sting or Michael Hohnen?
The moment recalls an exchange in Sylvia Plath’s final radio interview in 1962, where her status as an American woman frames a condescending kind of dialogue. First, the terms of the conversation are settled. She is to be the American poet ‘straddling the Atlantic’ (‘That’s a rather awkward position, but I’ll accept it’), while her interviewer, Peter Orr, is polite-with-a-hint-of-frost-British. During the interview, Plath talks about the ‘old role’ of the poet ‘to speak to a group of people; to come across’. Orr corrects her, saying: ‘To sing …’ ‘To sing to a group of people. Quite,’ Plath echoes politely, evidently aware of the power struggle. The idea of an obligation to ‘come across’ resonates in the case of Gurrumul, while the notion of learning to enjoy something implies a transgression of instinct and intuition. Things we might learn to enjoy, at the benevolent end of the spectrum, include olives and bitter chocolate. But the phrase has overtones of darker kinds of coercion.
In ‘You’re the Voice’, Hohnen describes Gurrumul as having something ‘intangible, mysterious, enigmatic … I’ve never met anyone who holds so much information in his head but doesn’t let a skerrick of it out unless they mean to.’ He says that Gurrumul, having experienced a taste of fame during his time with Yothu Yindi, ‘values his privacy and family over fame’ and ‘doesn’t want people to see him’.
Western culture, arguably, overvalues being seen and appearances to an increasingly skewed extent. New media enable more kinds of seeing, so that hearing without seeing is becoming rare. While sound might be a way of correcting and transcending this, our culture hungers to look at people, including those who offer a way beyond the visual.
Yet, paradoxically, deeper modes of portraiture may offer just such a way beyond the visual. A good portrait can provide a response to this question: ‘What is it like to be you?’ suggests Robert Dessaix in ‘Caught You! Reflections on Being Painted’, an essay about having his portrait painted by Robert Hannaford. Dessaix argues that if there is a way of capturing ‘what it’s like to be you’, such capture will be provisional and mobile: ‘a kind of endless “becoming” or changing connection with the world, experienced uniquely’.
Mobility and provisionality are ideas circulating through work by Virginia Woolf, one of the most perceptive commentators on the difficulties of life writing. Her essay ‘A Sketch of the Past’ begins by conjuring an idyllic childhood memory, but soon confronts an absence. ‘Memoirs’, she writes, ‘leave out the person to whom things happened.’ She writes about the futility of life writing; the self as ‘a fish in the stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream’.
Dessaix notes a related illusion when observing visitors to a portrait gallery. He finds hocus-pocus in the collective cries: ‘“There’s Nick Cave!” or “That’s Kylie!” Well, no, it’s not. It’s actually dabs of pigment on a piece of stretched canvas.’ Musing through selves, essences, souls, written and painted portraits, and homing in on ideas of significant moments – like Woolf’s ‘moments of being’ – and the transcendent, he arrives at the idea of wonder. Wonder springs ‘from a half-dark place beyond your understanding, it pierces you unexpectedly and incomprehensibly, like sorcery or a religious vision, leaving you half-bereaved, nostalgic for the instant you were first transfixed, while at the same time hankering for a reasonable explanation of what you’ve seen’. What great portraits do, Dessaix suggests, has to do with ‘the rhythmic articulation of space that breathes life into these paintings, rather than any easy aide-mémoire likeness to living people’.
Dessaix’s idea of an easier version of aide-mémoire portraiture gets at what underpins criticisms of Gurrumul’s reserve. Sharon O’Neil is not alone in identifying reserve as a deficiency. Two contrasting reviews of Gurrumul’s London performance at the Barbican in 2011 illustrate this.
The first, by Chris Mugan for The Independent, cites a vox pop of Indigenous audience members, one of whom describes Gurrumul as ‘making a bridge, telling our stories; it’s very important for us’. For Mugan, an ‘easygoing humour’ pervades the performance through Hohnen’s repartee and creates an intimate atmosphere. He gives the example of Hohnen’s telling the audience that, like Bob Dylan, Gurrumul doesn’t talk to his band. ‘Sure enough, during the next song, a gruff voice shouts: “Yo! Take it away boys.” With smart comic timing, Gurrumul breaks his silence.’
Robin Denselow reminds Guardian readers that he predicted Gurrumul’s success when he saw him perform two years earlier. But, he suggests, ‘he hasn’t quite fulfilled his extraordinary potential’. The central compliment of his review is a large one, but it defines Gurrumul’s success in terms of harnessing Western musical modes: ‘He’s still a spine-tingling performer, with a remarkable, soulful voice and the ability to write powerful melodies that are accessible to western audiences because they sound so much like western folk, soul or gospel, with the occasional dash of reggae.’ Then he qualifies this. Denselow feels that Rrakala ‘lacks sufficient variety’ and ‘doesn’t have the emotional power of that remarkable debut’. The cause, for Denselow, is ‘a matter of presentation’. He uses the idea of a refusal. ‘Gurrumul refuses to talk to his audience.’ He argues that ‘Hohnen’s comments about the singer’s silence emphasised his lack of contact, both with his band and his audience’. For Denselow, this is exacerbated by an absence of the translations that were provided above the stage for the touring of Gurrumul. He is mor
e enthusiastic about the finale, a performance of ‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)’ ‘with the singer at last communicating fully with his audience, in English’. The assumption of a white, Anglophone audience is striking.
Mugan is happy about the absence of stage surtitle translations, writing: ‘This is not Italian operetta.’ He paraphrases Hohnen’s comment to the audience that ‘Whether … Gurrumul is singing about crocodiles or fish, the real subject matter is his visceral need to connect to nature and the place he is from.’
In Australia, Bruce Elder, like Denselow, followed up a rapturous welcome to the debut album with more conditional praise for his second tour. Awarding one of Gurrumul’s two shows at the Sydney Opera House in August 2011 three stars out of five, he remarks: ‘If there has been one criticism of Gurrumul, it has been that his melancholy songs lack a certain light and shade. While no two songs are the same, collectively they create a certain slow-burning, emotionally intense ambience as though the singer is carrying the pain and sadness of his people.’
Why should Gurrumul’s expression of the sadness and pain of his people be read negatively? What kind of language might Indigenous Australians be allowed, under such restrictions? Elder’s praise is for happier reworkings of the songs – a joyful up-tempo reading of ‘Gathu Mawula’ and countrified and rock interpretations of other songs. Yet he notes that ‘part of Gurrumul’s importance lies in the way he has opened the Indigenous music scene to a quieter, more sophisticated sound’. His real praise comes at the end of the piece, when he writes about Gurrumul’s supporting act, Indigenous singer-songwriter Dewayne Everettsmith: ‘a uniquely gifted singer with hints of the soul of Marvin Gaye and the sunny beauty of Johnny Nash. His short opening set, full of memorable songs and glorious harmonies, was spellbinding.’
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 38