Uncle Archie Roach and Aunty Ruby Hunter
A big game changer in my life as an Australian was understanding the real story of the stolen generation. We’d all heard about it. But sometimes as a white fella here, you can hear about these things and it brings all of our kind of innate prejudices to the surface because we're always thinking about ‘them’ as the ‘other’. It happened to ‘them’, but you don't feel in any way that you're complicit in that. Or if you are accepting of complicity, it's like, ‘well, there was nothing I could do about it. You know, it wasn't me’. And yet, of course, it was you. You know, it was all of us. We were all complicit. It's like saying, you know, as a German, I was never complicit in the Holocaust. It's just that most people weren't prepared to kind of deal with it. Or they were quite happy to go along with it, as long as they didn't smell it. And I think that that's probably true of the Stolen Generations in Australia.
This sort of screaming absence, which is what that story was sort of about, really was brought home to me with great love and affection by Archie and Ruby. They’d managed to find this extraordinary way of finding each other, both as stolen children of young people that had their identities effectively stripped away from them. They were just, you know, other sorts of statistics in a rather statistical world of social welfare and ‘looking after’ Aboriginals. They found each other, they fell in love, and out of the love they had for each other, they rebuilt their lives. It's a great, great story, and it's a story about the redemptive power of love. And it's a story of courage of two individuals, and their extraordinary generosity. The beauty that they were able to share their story with the world around them.
Archie, I initially met doing a TV show. The next time I met him I told him how much I would like to work with him. I told him about the Australian Art Orchestra. I went to hear Archie and Ruby playing and for some reason I was given this very strong sense of a river flowing. I went to see Archie at his place in Reservoir and talked to them about my vision for the river. It turned out Ruby was very much born in the river. Her mother gave birth to her in the Abilabon, part of the Murray River. She was wrapped in ashes as a baby. That's the way that people gave birth. So, we went up to the river land and we got permission from her elders to tell these stories.
It was quite a trip to the river. Meeting these Elders who asked who I was. Archie told them ‘he's alright, he's this guy who's on television’. The Blackfellas are just looking at me and going, basically, I don't give a f**k’. And finally Richard Hunter, he said he could give us the permission to sing the songs.
But he looked at me and said, ‘but you tell me something that I don't know’. As in, good luck with that. White man, you know.
I've always felt this incredible responsibility hanging over me. That I had to make sure the music rose to the occasion. When we premiered Ruby's Story at Sydney Opera House I remember traveling to the show and calling my wife Margot from the taxi and feeling very, very overwhelmed. All of a sudden this rush of emotion came over me. And I said to her ‘this is the first time in my life that I think I understand why I am a musician. Why I have been made a musician in my life. This is the moment where it's finally come home to me’. That performance was amazing. I mean, everybody in that room was in tears at the end of that performance. It was so incredible. That was the power of those two people.
When Ruby left us, it was so sudden and so unexpected. She'd been in ill health, I know that. But, you know, when she died, you know, some old friend of mine and a friend of hers, rang me and told me, I just couldn't believe it. Such a shock. We drove up to the funeral, which was up in the Riverland, and Archie was just destroyed. I just didn't know what would happen with him. But he managed to get himself back. He brought himself back from the brink really. He had cancer and failing health and he just had that courage, that grit. All the way to the end.
That last gig we did together at the Sydney Myer Music Bowl, there were 6000 people there and I doubt if there was a dry eye there either. So to be near that, that integrity, that kind of that deep soul, I've been very lucky like that. And it's come from, in my experience, largely from First Nations Australians. They are special people. They are the soul of this nation. They are the earth from which this country springs.
