by Robert Manne
As soon as you send them, Warumpi Band CDs disappear. They spirit out of houses, rooms, cars, bags. Vanish into scrub. No one person retains them very long.
‘Yo, I’ll post them.’
A silence. I think, is this the last time we’ll speak? A freight of emotion arrived.
‘I love you and I’ll miss you,’ he sobbed.
‘I love you too.’ I was choking up. ‘I’ll see you down the track one day.’
‘Is it heaven?’
He was asking me the question. He really wanted to know: would he go to heaven? I sensed fears, and a guilt he was struggling with.
‘Yo. I’ll see you there, brother.’
Three weeks came and went. George was alive. Two months later I found myself in Nhulunbuy for a show with Shane Howard. George was alive. I chartered a plane to Elcho Island. His emaciated body, his face shrunken into its skull, strange hospital dressings attached to his chest – even in this weakened state he managed a lazy smile. Gently I embraced him. ‘I’m trying,’ he murmured, ‘very hard.’
George wanted to live. He loved this life. He had more to give, more to create. He had songs and recordings to do with the Birdwave boys, who along with George’s family were providing 24/7 care.
They said he’d been up all night. One of his aunties implored him, in language, to lie down and rest. George said he’d sleep when he’s dead.
We went out the backyard. Someone produced an acoustic guitar. Helped onto an old bed, George lay back. I sat on a plastic chair. Nearby was his mother’s grave. Softly I strummed and began singing ‘Fitzroy Crossing’. If you see me on the track way out west of Rabbit Flat … George joined in the chorus, a croaky whisper. Some of his family were tearing up. I tried a couple of other song fragments. Too much for him; he didn’t have the strength. We would never sing these songs again. But George remained stoic. He was, after all, surrounded by family – and he had everyone’s attention. When he was momentarily distracted I took the chance to expunge a few tears. Mostly we sat and said nothing. I watched his grandchildren play. Hours passed. A heavy feeling I’d had since arriving began to lift. Finally George was helped to a chair further down the yard. I went with him. When it was just the two of us I spoke.
‘You know, we did good work in the Warumpi Band. We made the country take notice. And we had the best fun.’
George struggled to get up, the emotion rising in him. ‘You, me and Sammy. Warumpi Band was the first—’
That’s all he could say. He stayed half-standing, leaning forward, staring at the ground, his hands clutching the chair’s arms, his mouth agape as if puzzled why his body would not respond.
Out front a Toyota was waiting to take me to the airstrip, where a return flight was booked. I clasped hands with regal old Matjuwi Burarrwanga, George’s father, slim, tall, long grey-white hair, a straggly beard. Nearly blind and confined mostly to a wheelchair, his intellect, authority and spiritual strength were intact. I had lost my father; now Matjuwi was losing a son. As I bid Matjuwi goodbye I hoped to convey my gratitude and respect for him as my kinship father, and for having known his son.
Everybody came out to see me off – but seeing George there surprised me. He could not stand unaided but he was showing me his spirit was buoyant. Same as it ever was. Climbing into the Toyota, I turned to him.
‘Goodbye,’ I said.
‘Goodnight,’ he said – a parting quip.
From out the Cessna’s window I stared blankly while we accelerated along the asphalt before lurching into the air, a slab of turquoise sea opening up beneath the plane’s wings, and as we swung left over the community I tried, in vain, to pinpoint George or his family’s house before they were swallowed by the scrub, then the shore.
*
In a studio in east Balmain, where I was recording my second solo album in 1991, I had a visitor one evening – not unusual, musos were always dropping in, generally to see one of the producers, either Mark Moffatt or Jim Moginie. This muso was different. He was Yolngu. And he was blind.
Gurrumul entered and stood quietly, an interested smile on his attentive face as he listened to the studio sounds. I remembered seeing him play with Yothu Yindi. I knew he was gifted. We touched hands briefly, softly, and I sensed respect and admiration, also connection – via my long-time association with one of his countrymen, George. I hoped to reciprocate the same feelings to him. We didn’t engage in conversation. He was pleased just to say hello and soak up the studio ambience. I had the distinct feeling this was where he wanted to be: in a recording studio, so he could paint the colours of the sounds in his head. The next time we shook hands he would be a multi-platinum artist.
*
The last song of Paul Kelly’s set at a 1993 gig I played with him in Dee Why was a moving ballad called ‘Took the Children Away’ – written, he announced, by Archie Roach. Afterwards PK asked if I’d heard of him. Archie was originally from Framlingham in south-west Victoria, less than an hour’s drive from where I was born and raised, but of course I couldn’t possibly have known him: Archie was taken away, aged three. In my local district Aboriginal people were absent, or at least not conspicuous. Somehow I formed the idea they were all up north and set a course for the Northern Territory. Paradoxically, it was only by going to Papunya that I came to realise what had been lost in my home country – and what could be gained.
When Archie and I finally met at the Annandale Hotel that same year he said straight off: ‘We like the Warumpi Band – that George, he’s really something.’ I told him I was from the Lake Bolac district. ‘It’s funny,’ said Archie, ‘how a lot of us from western Victoria got into music.’ Amy Saunders, Shane, Damian and Marcia Howard, Rose Bygrave, Richard Frankland, Dave Steel, Brett Clarke, Lee Morgan … Discovering that Archie and others came from where I came from became a cumulative influence on my decision to return.
At first I was desperate to get close to Archie. But he was reclusive, and not forthcoming about confiding in anyone beyond his partner Ruby and immediate family. I began to realise he was struggling with his own stuff. I have since learnt a lot more when we have shared a stage, where he readily opens himself up to a live audience. He has humbled me with some generous remarks, saying my songs and writing taught him an important truth: you don’t have to be Aboriginal to have a connection and spirituality with the land. When I first mentioned Archie to Sammy and George I told them, proudly, that he was my countryman.
*
Kev Carmody is from a Queensland droving family and it was Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, it seems to me, that put the fire in his belly. Kev’s mission is to expose, in song, hypocrisy and truth. For someone who writes such weighty, powerful material he is jovial company. We did some music workshops in jails, and at one particular maximum-security centre in Lithgow – where indigenous inmates were grossly over-represented, just like in all the other jails – the female warden was leading us through security barrier after barrier. As we paused in a confined space before a heavily fortified door, the one that would finally get us inside, I had in my head the doors-opening-and-closing title sequence from Get Smart.
‘You know,’ said the warden, ‘we’ve got the worst of the worst in here.’
‘Oh, really, what are the inmates like?’
Kev was quick.
*
I only heard Brian Murphy after he was gone. A Tennant Creek producer and engineer, Jeff McLaughlin, kept pushing into my hands, twice in two years, a CD of Brian’s songs. ‘You gotta hear this,’ he’d say.
People are always giving me CDs. They wave them in my face. I gotta take them. They want me to take them. I don’t know why. They must think I can make something happen for them. I’m flat out making something happen for myself. Even if the stuff is good, I say, what am I gonna do? I’m not a record company. I’m not a publisher.
Back in Tennant Creek the next time Jeff was still talking about Brian – telling me of the occasion at Winanjjikari Studio when Brian turned up unannounced i
n a taxi with a bunch of elderly grandmothers and said, ‘We’re recording now.’ Jeff barely had time to get the leads plugged in. Brian launched into an acoustic-driven lament, in Warlpiri, while the grandmothers fired up a traditional chant around him. It was a one-take only.
On the drive back to Alice I put on that track – ‘Jipirunpa’ – the final song on Brian’s 2009 album Freedom Road, released by Winanjjikari Music through Barkly Arts. It sounds chaotic, random even, Brian alone on an acoustic guitar, and after a while he starts singing low, a melancholic refrain, and suddenly a bunch of old women erupt with a traditional chant except this chant of theirs has a totally different structure. The piece turns and repeats on itself, compelling you to take in the cyclical melody, it’s enchanting, Brian’s world-weary vocal rising and falling with the tough grit of the grandmothers until – finally I’m forced to concede to Jeff – it makes powerful emotional sense. ‘I have heard nothing like it,’ I say. ‘I love it.’
Maybe I’d met Brian years ago, briefly, somewhere? Maybe at a Warumpi Band gig? We played in Tennant many times. Maybe he watched us from the shadows? Maybe I shook his hand? I would never know. Why is Brian dead?
Brian Murphy was born in Tennant Creek and raised in Ali Curung. He was of Warlpiri and Warumungu parentage. He had – as far as can be known – a normal indigenous-community childhood. His father Albert played guitar. One day Brian wagged school and stayed home to play that guitar. His father admonished him for that. In general, Brian was too smart for school and was mucking up.
Were the school or Brian’s parents or Brian looking for opportunities outside Ali Curung? For when Brian was fourteen or fifteen a fateful decision was made. Somehow it was arranged for Brian to go – indeed, he went willingly – to Darwin, to a white man. In 1987 the man took Brian to Papua New Guinea. Brian’s family thought Brian was in boarding school. For four years Brian was the victim of sexual abuse and exploitation. He poured himself into music, learning all he could. At nineteen, and presumably too old for the man (who had ‘adopted’ another, younger boy), Brian was sent back to Tennant Creek.
When Brian returned he brought with him dozens of cassettes. Songs were burning in his chest. He formed Band Nomadic, one of the Barkly region’s top bands of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Brian’s voice was deep, fearless, heartfelt. It was the authentic voice of painful lived experience yet capable of great tenderness. His songs – stunning lyrically and melodically – expressed the anguish, pain, loss and love in his own life and his people’s lives. He had a grasp of Western song structure far ahead of his peers. One song, ‘The Rock’, about the 1985 handback of Uluru to its traditional owners, was recorded by popular Top End band Blekbala Mujik. Brian received no acknowledgement or royalties.
He found it difficult to resettle and cope with family pressures in Tennant Creek. Alcohol and drug abuse went hand in hand with petty crimes that escalated to him spending time in and out of prison. Jasmin Afianos, editor of the Tennant & District Times, was one who knew him well. ‘Brian emerged from his childhood experiences so very torn,’ she says. ‘Torn between two cultures, heterosexuality and homosexuality, success and failure, love and hate, and good and evil. He often tumbled from the tightrope into a dark, raging, angry void, surfacing only to the sounds of music.’
When in jail Brian continued to write and record; Jeff has dozens of recordings made in prison. When out of jail he often took off interstate. He made a living busking around Flinders Street Station and jammed with musicians such as Joe Camilleri. Jeff, trying doggedly to complete the recording of many of Brian’s songs, tracked him down in Melbourne. They recorded a vocal take live onto a laptop beside the Yarra River. Afterwards, Jeff recalls, Brian passed out in a bar.
With warrants out for his arrest, Brian kept ahead of the police. He went to Adelaide. He had family there. He busked around Hindley Street and Rundle Street mall but was always falling in with unsavoury types. And alcohol, drugs and hard living were taking their toll. He succumbed to serious illness, ending up in an Adelaide hospital, where he died in June 2010. His body was flown home and buried in Tennant Creek. That August, Brian was posthumously inducted into the Northern Territory Music Hall of Fame.
All we have are the songs he left us, which ring resonant, clear and irresistible to all those who seek them. If royalties ever eventuate his family want to erect a headstone for him.
*
It happened in the Gulf Country. I was booked to do a gig at a mine where a lot of local indigenous people were employed. They knew me from decades ago with the Warumpi Band, and they also knew that with the passing of the lead singer that band was no more. When I got the phone call to come and play I was incredulous.
‘You sure you want me? I’m not in the pop charts. I’m not even in the mainstream.’
‘We’re not in the mainstream either, bro. We want you.’
I didn’t need a publicist. Blackfellas don’t forget you. Later we were having a few post-gig beers in the warm night air, insects chucking themselves at the yellow lights blazing above the accommodation dongas, and me being introduced to some indigenous men I’d never met but who seemed keen to meet me. Some were near my age, most were younger. Gig organisers Patrick Wheeler and Alec Doomadgee were doing the introductions. One young man, waiting patiently in the shadows, came forward when it was his turn and clasped my hand in his.
‘If not for your music, I wouldn’t be alive now.’
The other blokes nodded. They must have known the lad’s history. Suddenly the decades of struggle, sacrifice and hardship in the music game mattered naught.
‘Brother,’ I said, ‘that is the best thing I’ve ever heard. Thanks for telling me.’ I glanced around. ‘And what about this mine? Is it a good thing?’
‘If we had our way,’ said Alec, ‘we’d say fill in the hole, put it back the way it was. But what can you do? We got no right of veto, only to negotiate. If we don’t negotiate they gonna dig it up anyway. So we try to make the best of a bad situation.’
The Best Music Writing Under the Australian Sun
The War of the Worlds
Noel Pearson
The inspiration for The War of the Worlds came one day when Wells and his brother Frank were strolling through the peaceful countryside in Surrey, south of London. They were discussing the invasion of the Australian island of Tasmania in the early 1800s by European settlers, who hunted down and killed most of the primitive people who lived there. To emphasise the reaction of these people, Frank said, ‘Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly and begin taking over Surrey and then all of England!’
-MALVINA G. VOGEL, ‘Foreword’ (2005)
to H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
A personal quadrant of the Australian landscape
I came upon this foreword some years ago when sharing an enthusiasm of my youth for H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds with my young son. Even as he makes his way through his own all-consuming passions of boyhood – Thomas, the Crocodile Hunter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings, Minecraft and now Harry Potter – I indulge my own nostalgia by sharing those things that possessed me when I was a boy. We’ve done Richard III, to which we will doubtless return. We’ve read Charles Portis’s masterpiece True Grit, and watched the original John Wayne film and the Coen brothers’ remake a hundred times. We’ve acted out the shoot-out scenes; he’s always Rooster. We are yet to get to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Hound of the Baskervilles. His younger sister and I have started Great Expectations.
First turned on by Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds in early high school, aware of Orson Welles’s radio hoax and having read the Wells book, I was stunned to have been unaware of the inspiration for the idea of a Martian invasion of England – its origin in what was called the ‘extirpation’ of the original Tasmanians. I was disquieted that the source of this extraordinary production in world culture was unknown to me. I knew it was likely unknown to everyone
around me, and to almost all of my fellow Australians. How come?
H.G. Wells knew of the original Tasmanians, but that did not mean he felt empathy for the fate of this ‘inferior race’ at the hands of the British. Instead he subscribed to the scientific racism of his era, believing them ‘Palaeolithic’, and writing, ‘The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants.’
In The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (2014), the English historian Tom Lawson shows how the destruction of the Tasmanians played out in British culture. We will return to Lawson’s contribution to the debate on genocide in Tasmania soon, after we lift the scales from our eyes concerning some of the most revered figures of that culture in the nineteenth century.
The novelist Anthony Trollope, in his emigration guide Australia and New Zealand, demanded his British readers squarely face the fact that colonisation involved the theft of land and the destruction of its original owners – which fact was not morally wrong but an advancement of civilisation. Lawson writes that Trollope cannot be taken as other than calling for genocide when he wrote: ‘of the Australian black man we may say certainly that he has to go. That he should perish without unnecessary suffering should be the aim of all who are concerned in this matter.’
Charles Darwin, the century’s greatest scientist (whom Lawson calls ‘a self-conscious liberal humanitarian’), while opposing polygenist theories that various races were distinct species, nevertheless proposed culture as the basis of inferiority and superiority (Lawson: ‘indigenous Tasmanians in Darwin’s formulation had been swept aside by a more culturally developed, more civilised people’). Lawson writes: ‘The Descent of Man was Darwin’s answer to that new political context, in which he asserted that while biologically the human race was singular there were in effect cultural differences that allowed for some form of racial hierarchy. The Tasmanians appeared at the bottom of this hierarchy.’