Archie RoachAt last year's Screen Music Awards, Archie Roach and Shane Howard took home the award for Best Original Song Composed For The Screen for their composition A Secret River (from the ABC TV series based on Kate Grenville's book The Secret River). They also performed this song live on the night during the awards ceremony at Melbourne Recital Centre, and this scribe will never forget the moving atmosphere created. When asked whether such an atmosphere can be felt from the stage, Roach offers, "There's certainly a feeling and it's just, you know, this interaction between yourself and everyone - it's a two-way street." And Roach admits he experiences outpourings of love from his audience "a lot". "One of the most amazing ones was at Port Fairy after Ruby Hunter passed away," he recalls, "and we'd just come back from her funeral and I didn't even know if I was gonna perform that day, you know, and I can't remember much about what I sung but what I do remember is the audience being... while I was on stage performing, the energy was, like, that they just lifted me, lifted me up into this place and I could feel the full support and love, and it was amazing."
"There was this fella that had Parkinson's really bad - he could hardly walk or stand … they put on the music and the next minute he just started dancing around the floor like nothing was wrong with him."
Roach obviously continues to grieve the loss of Hunter, his soul mate, and over the past few years he's also experienced some setbacks health-wise: a stroke followed by an early-stage lung cancer diagnosis that required surgery to remove half a lung. After acknowledging his friends, particularly manager Jill Shelton, were instrumental to his recovery, Roach praises the "healing quality" of music. "I saw a program on TV where music was helping people," Roach shares. "There was this fella that had Parkinson's really bad - he could hardly walk or stand - and I remember he needed assistance, or a device, to help him get around. And they put on the music and the next minute he just started dancing around the floor like nothing was wrong with him. And another woman had sort of dementia and they played this song - a hymn - that she remembered as a child, and she started singing it and knew it word for word. And after she sang it she started recalling things and started talking about things. So that's something that people - you know, even in medicine they don't realise that there is a healing aspect to music."
Singing with one-and-a-half lungs has taken some getting used to, he says: "You notice it's a little different, you know, you're singing from different parts of your body - your head voice, and your chest voice, and your voice from your diaphragm." His voice is beautifully showcased on Please Don't Give Up On Me, a standout track with stripped-back arrangement on Roach's new Let Love Rule set. When asked how he would say his voice has developed over the years, Roach laughs. "Developed? Well, it's changed over the years, that's for sure. But, you know, you just know what you can do with your voice now whereas before - when I first kicked off - you weren't sure; I mean, you'd just use what was there but you didn't really know it so much as, like, I do now."
Roach is sitting in an office at Mushroom HQ in Albert Park together with his producer/guitarist Craig Pilkington, who also produced Roach's previous Into The Bloodstream album. Pilkington points out that, for a few songs on Let Love Rule, they would "start pulling things back so that the voice and the lyrics were really centre stage... to really let Archie's vocal shine".
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The piano-driven title track from Let Love Rule, which features Dhungala Children's Choir and heartfelt string flourishes, is a plea from Roach "to let love be the dominant sentiment". "We've become a little bit less inclusive today, because of what's been happening around the world," Roach posits. Although he stresses, "There is hope," Roach believes that in order to implement positive change: "You've gotta keep focused on what people are doing on a grass roots level, on the ground, and there's a lotta good stuff happening... change has always been people-motivated and I think that'll continue."
"My great grandmother and her two sisters, how they used to be out on this island out in the middle of the Clarence River..."
When asked about the story behind his song Mighty Clarence River, Roach remarks, "It's amazing how we came by that". A few years back, Roach was up Byron Bay way to play Boomerang Festival and manager Shelton encouraged him to take a road trip on a day off. "'Cause she knows where my father comes from - my people come from, my father's people - she said, 'Let's take a drive down to Lawrence, where your father's from'," Roach tells, "but we didn't realise it was about two hours away... so it took us the best part of the day." Once there, they located "an old church that they'd converted; it was a historic society". Pilkington marvels, "I think that historical society was open for about four hours a week!" Roach continues, "As soon as we walked in... down this hallway on the wall was this big photo of my father... when he was younger and his family, brothers and sisters, and his mother, you know, my grandmother.
"And so we went in and had a look around, and there was an elderly lady in there and she kept confusing me with my father 'cause his name was Archie, too - I was named after dad, Archie. And she said, 'Oh, yeah, so maybe if you go along to this old fella by the name of Doug Suprian he might be able to tell you a bit more about your family.' And she kept looking at me saying, 'You remember Dougie, don't ya?' I said, 'No, no, that's me dad.'... And she said, 'Yeah, you remember. It's a golf course now but just behind where the golf course is, [was] the Aboriginal camps; you remember the Aboriginal camps, don't ya?' I said, 'No, that was my dad' [laughs]. Anyway, we ended up going to this place to visit Doug Suprian and he knew my family when he was younger; he went to school with my uncles."
Suprian was "about 90 years old" at the time and Roach remembers, "He was sort of, like, laying back [with] his eyes closed. And we walked up and knocked on his door. And somebody came and said, 'Who is it?' and I said, 'Oh, I wondered if Doug Suprian was here,' and he said, 'Yeah, he's just having a bit of a rest now. What do you wanna see him for?' I said, 'I just wanna talk to him. He might know a bit about my family.' He said, 'Oh, who are you?' I said, 'Archie. Archie Roach'... I went up and spoke to this old fella Doug Suprian. And as soon as he heard my name his eyes just shot open, and he sat up, 'Archie Roach. I knew Archie Roach!' They said, 'Doug, this is his son.' I sat down and we talked and he just lit up. And he just spurted out everything about my family. And then he talked about... my great grandmother and her two sisters, how they used to be out on this island out in the middle of the Clarence River... Have you heard of the Northern Rivers? Mighty - they're big rivers, just huge. And on the islands they used to put the Aboriginal people."
After lamenting "they weren't treated too well sometimes, unfortunately", Roach continues. "But they decided to escape and jumped into the river... and they swam across the Clarence River to a place called Lawrence where my great grandmother had her family and, yeah! [That's] where dad was born. So that's what the song's about: it's about those girls, you know, getting off the island and deciding to escape and [look for a] better life on the mainland.
"It was just amazing. It was just like old Doug, old Dougie Suprian; it's like he'd been just waiting for somebody to come back so he could tell those stories... 'I need to get this out. I need to tell somebody about this family,' you know?"
On whether he'll be able to get a copy of this song to Suprian, Roach ponders, "I'd like to think he was still around, yeah. If he was I'd like to give that song to him actually."
