My introduction to Archie Roach was hearing him singing live at a Koorie Heritage Trust fundraising dinner decades ago. His book and album Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music are absorbing and enriching. They vocalise the inspiration and pain of his isolation from his mother, a Gunditjmara woman, his father, a Bundjalung man, brother, sisters and extended family.
Genevieve Grieves, a Worimi woman, an oral historian at the Koorie Heritage Trust at the time, invited me to attend that fundraising dinner. She also introduced me to Uncle Jim Berg, Gunditjmara Elder, and the Founder of the Koorie Heritage Trust. The privilege of being allowed to view the collections of spears, boomerangs, tools and weapons, held by the Trust, was a stunning revelation for me into the Aboriginal Australian apocalypse – the battles against colonisers, and their bravery and skills.
My earliest experience of Aboriginal culture was the word “Yarramundi” spoken by my parents the night before we went there for a picnic. It was long before I was old enough to go to school. A place abundant with time worn river stones, sharpening grooves and fish traps before quarrying tore it apart. I managed to lift a heavy river stone only to have pull me down with it squashing the top joint of middle of my left hand into a flat and bloody mess.
ABOVE: Detail from Brothers (The Prodigal Son) by Aboriginal Australian artist Tony Albert at National Art School, Biennale of Sydney 2020 NIRIN.
My first contact with an Aboriginal Australian was on the school bus. There was an empty space on a seat close to the door. The boy sitting on one half of the bench seat was about the same age as me. What I remember most is his controlled anger. I saw it in the brief eye contact we made when I sat down next to him – anger at everything but not directed at me.
We lived on what was left of the old family farm on the edge of the remaining bush in an old but well maintained drop slab cottage built around 1860 by my great great grandfather, a migrant from Germany, with trees from the surrounding bush. I heard stories of my grandmother, the daughter of Irish settlers, walking through ‘black camps’ as a young girl on her way to school.
One afternoon after school my friend from down the road and I found a canoe floating on a billabong near a creek close to home where we used to go fishing for gudgeons with the rods we made from sticks, string and pieces of fencing wire bent into hooks. The canoe was made from an old sheet of corrugated iron folded in two along its length and pinched together at each end against pieces of thick bark, and secured with nails.
I shared my childhood stories (via Instagram) with Koori artist Blak Douglas who has proud Dhungatti origins. He now has a higher profile than ever following his incredible portrait of Peter Garrett painted to coincide with Midnight Oil’s Makarrata Project album in support of The Uluru Statement from the Heart. “Painted my first ever painting there at the Public School on Elizabeth Street (Riverstone, where he was an Art Assistant).”
My mother and father built a three bedroom weatherboard house at 51 Elizabeth Street, Riverstone, on a block of land he bought from his father who used to own the house next door where my father was born. I said goodbye to my enchanted childhood when we left the bush to move there to be modern, when I was 9 years old. I went to that school and was Dux long before Blak Douglas was an Art Assistant there.
ABOVE: 250 by Blak Douglas, Dhungatti man, Mosman Art Gallery 2020, marking the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s landing in Australia.
In my fourth year at Riverstone High School in 1967 our young fresh faced history teacher Mr (Alan) Bowd, son of Hawkesbury historian Douglas Bowd, also a teacher, asked us to put up our hands if we thought Aborigines had smaller brains than white people? We all put up our hands up unanimously, innocently and naively in complete ignorance without shame or hesitation. Mr Bowd exposed a chasm in the Australian History taught in Australian schools. The historic referendum on the inclusion of Aboriginals in the Australian census was held on Saturday 27 May that year:
Do you approve the proposed law for the alteration of the Constitution entitled 'An Act to alter the Constitution so as to omit certain words relating to the people of the Aboriginal race in any state so that Aboriginals are to be counted in reckoning the population'?
Almost 94 percent of eligible voters turned out with all states and over 90 percent of total votes in favour of the proposed law (Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) 1967) giving the Australian Parliament the power to make laws with respect to Aboriginal people and for them to be included in national censuses.
When I started studying at UNSW in 1970 a new student friend pointed out Paul Coe, the first Indigenous Australian on the UNSW campus to enrol in law, with him was another young Indigenous activist Gary Foley who was involved in the establishment of the Aboriginal Embassy on the lawns opposite Parliament House in Canberra on 26 January 1972 which still stands proudly and defiantly against attempts to dismantle it.
ABOVE: Of Aboriginal D-scent by Blak Douglas, a Dhungatti man, Sydney Festival 2020 Three Views exhibition, Armoured Casemates, Chowder Bay Road, Georges Head, Mosman.
More than 400 Indigenous Australians have died in custody since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. Archie Roach’s father died in a prison cell long before the Royal Commission. Archie carried his father’s name and was held in custody himself in Sydney’s notorious Long Bay Prison when he was just sixteen, charged with vagrancy.
After I was clean and clothed I was dropped into general population and was quickly found by some older Aboriginal fellas. ‘You don’t look nineteen, you look about sixteen,’ one of them said after I gave them the information I’d given the cops. ‘Don’t worry, brother, we’ll look after you.’
page 58 Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music Archie Roach
Archie, like his father, was a tent boxer at country shows taking on all comers, captured in Rally Round the Drum the song he co-wrote with Paul Kelly. On 13 February 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a heart felt apology to the Stolen Generations on behalf of all Australians:
We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.
ABOVE: Flannel Flowers by Sharyn Egan, a Wadjuk Nyoongar woman, Blacktown Native Institution heritage site. Da dunarang wingara ya gurung ngana wawu maniau angara ngil bubunna da mootang dyi. The flannel flowers remember the children who were taken from their families to live here.
Sorry Day 25 May and National Reconciliation Week 27 May – 3 June, annually restate the slow but unstoppable momentum towards Indigenous human and land rights, for their future and the future of Country for everyone in Australia.
As I watched the Australian Prime Minister delivering what felt like a sincere apology – an apology to me and to Ruby (Hunter) and to our families, and all of my people who were taken from their parents and their culture – I thought about my mother, Nellie, and father, Archie. This apology was for them too.
This gesture meant something. It wasn’t final justice and it didn’t bring ultimate comfort, but it was a small step toward both.
page 298 Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music Archie Roach
Since 2014 Archie has been officially and actively walking alongside those working in the arts and young people heading down the wrong track by supporting opportunities for First Nation artists with his Archie Roach Foundation.
LINKS
Archie Roach Instagram @archieroachmusic
Tony Albert Instagram @tonyalbert
Biennale of Sydney Instagram @biennalesydney
Blacktown Arts Instagram @blacktownarts
Blak Douglas Instagram @blakdouglas
Sharyn Egan, Instagram @sharyn_egan
Adrian Cooke Photography Instagram @adriancookphotography