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Archie Roach: Tell Me Why

For the Gunditjmara people of south-west Victoria, the Kneeangar – what white Australians call the Wedge-tailed Eagle – is the creator of the landscape. For the Bundjalung of north-east New South Wales, it is the Gunggayay, or red-bellied black snake.

On the spine of Archie Roach’s memoir, Tell Me Why, the Gunggayay encircles the Kneeangar, a logo that encapsulates the Indigenous songwriter’s heritage: his Bundjalung father Archie Senior, and his Gunditjmara mother Nellie Austin.

But Roach, who first came to national attention in 1990 with his celebrated song Took The Children Away and accompanying debut album Charcoal Lane, is also the foster son of Alex and Dulcie Cox: Dad Alex and Mum Dulcie, as he calls them.

The Coxes were told that Archie’s birth parents had died in a house fire. In fact, he had been stolen from them in the late 1950s at Framlingham mission, near Warrnambool. “They were used,” Roach, now 63, says when we meet, as he rests in a Sydney hotel room. “They’re blameless, as far as I’m concerned.”

Alex and Dulcie cherished Archie but, he writes, “there was always a restlessness in me, like a faultline waiting to rupture”. When he was 15, he received a letter from a hitherto unknown sister, Myrtle – one of six siblings – telling him Nellie had died.… Read more..

A mic drop on the nation

Music / December 31, 2017 / 5 minutes of reading

Archie Roach is normally the gentlest of our Indigenous protest singers. He writes songs of great moral force and clarity but his voice, even after the ravages of age and illness, is quiet and hymnal, giving his work a bittersweet quality that allows him to connect easily with a broad audience.

The song that introduced him to most Australians, Took The Children Away, remains the one for which he is most famous. Its opening lines are:

“This story’s right, this story’s true
I would not tell lies to you.”

The song was released in 1990, when few of us knew about the stolen generations of Aboriginal children. Its impact was profound, on both Indigenous people, who finally heard their intergenerational trauma being articulated with such grace on a national stage, and on white Australia. By itself, it may not have precipitated the royal commission that produced the Bringing Them Home report, or then prime minister Kevin Rudd’s national apology in February 2008. But its resonance was crucial. Like Yothu Yindi’s Treaty, released the following year, it did what great protest songs do: it started a conversation.

Uncle Archie is an elder now and, on AB Original’s album from last year, Reclaim Australia – which won two Arias on Tuesday night – he brought his considerable gravitas to the album’s opening monologue.… Read more..

A mic drop on the nation Read More »