home | news l

Crying for the place we could become

By Tracee Hutchison

2 June 2007 - I'VE always believed in the power of music as a potent catalyst for socialchange. I believed it when I first heard Bart Willoughby's voice out front of No Fixed Address in 1981 proudly proclaiming We Have Survived. I believed itwhen Shane Howard's band Goanna made the first non-indigenous musical statement about land rights with Solid Rock.

I believed it as I sang my lungs out in tiny pubs in Sydney watching a bandfrom Papunya called the Warumpi Band in the mid-1980s. I believed it when a little known act called Yothu Yindi, from Yirrkala, Northern Territory, turnedup in my Triple J radio studio in 1986 with an acoustic version of a song called Treaty.

I believed it in Joe Geia's anthemic Yil Lull. And with every listen to PaulKelly's Bicentennial.

I believed it when the Oils wore Sorry T-shirts at the Sydney Olympics and Ibelieved it last weekend standing with a solid crowd at Federation Square and singing about walking together with former AFL footy star turned activist Michael Long.

Onstage with Longy were a couple of the architects of the genre — Archie Roach and Shane Howard — and it couldn't have been more fitting. I doubt there was a dry eye in that square as we sang: "Walk with me, come talk with me, set your spirit free, come dream with me, create history."

It seemed so simple — all wrapped up in a chorus. As we walked to the MCG for the annual Dreamtime football game, shuffling and bumping along an overcrowded Birrarung Marr walkway, I kept hearing people apologising to each other. Sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry.

Maybe it was just the poignancy of hearing that word over and over as we commemorated its namesake day that made me notice, but it was as though we were all just craving to hear it. And there was something profoundly moving about it. Like we all knew we were better people than our Federal Government would have us believe.

That we desperately needed to find some peace. With our past, our present and our future. And with each other.

And there was a sense that the window of hope is opening again. That anniversaries create more than pause for thought on opportunities lost. And while the Federal Government's been busy turning an arrogant blind eye, it has made itself an irrelevant bystander in this process.

For what kind of government offers a trinkets-style deal to the people of Muckaty Station to poison their Dreaming with uranium waste in exchange for the basic rights of all Australians — money for health care, housing and education?

What kind of paternalistic idiocy has informed the English-language impositions on young Aboriginal students by the federal Indigenous Affairs Minister? And how can a Prime Minister who, in the words of Lowitja O'Donoghue "either doesn't get it or doesn't care" be remembered as anything other than a national disgrace for the era he has presided over?

The 40,000 signatories to the Get Up/Close the Gap coalition campaign to demand the implementation of strategies to rectify the 17-year life expectancy gap between black and white Australians is critically telling.

Get Up read the public mood on David Hicks well before John Howard's mob cottoned on. Now Get Up is reading the mood on reconciliation and they're on the money again. And it has to start with Sorry. So we can start moving forward. Together. Because we know that we cannot call ourselves a civilised, humane country while statistics on Aboriginal health, education and incarceration tell us the opposite.

We are sitting on the precipice to own our history, once and for all. The momentum of Paul Keating's Redfern speech and the reconciliation marches of 2000 is kickstarting — and it has to triumph this time. It may be the last chance we get.

And, perhaps, it is time for us to start singing from the same songbook. A songbook that celebrates the words of Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter, of Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly, of Joe Geia, Bart Willoughby and Richard Frankland, of Lou Bennett, Sally Dastey and Amy Saunders, of George Rrurrambu, Sammy Butcher and Neil Murray and of Shane Howard, to name but a handful.

"Heart of my country, never surrender. Have to keep your dreaming. Gotta keep believing." To my mind it's Shane Howard's finest moment as a
songwriter.

I don't know about anyone else's tears in Federation Square last Saturday night, but mine were for the country I know we can be. Bring it on.

Tracee Hutchison is a Melbourne writer and broadcaster.

Source: The Age

Further information: social justice issues page - includes news index and external links

|| click to go to the top of this page