The Best Australian Essays 2015 (38 page)

Forster draws an illuminating comparison with the music of New York-based Antony Hegarty, singer and member of Antony and the Johnsons. He describes the way each singer – much the same age yet from vastly different backgrounds – seeks redemption in nature. For Gurrumul, Forster suggests, this means the place of his birth, while for Antony it is an idea of the feminine. The key word in his comparison is ‘otherworldly'. This is ‘beyond' again: the destination of translation, transcendence, and the kinds of metaphysical bridge recurrent in discussion of Gurrumul. Each artist creates ‘an otherworldly record that seems instantly to exist on no other terms but its own'. Both Antony and Gurrumul, Forster suggests, ‘offer up songs sung in angelic voices that chronicle, in surprisingly similar ways, an intuitive, highly sensitive response to their surroundings'.

One well-known depiction of Antony sees her seemingly shy and hunched at the microphone, eyes closed throughout an intense and inward rendering of Leonard Cohen's ‘If It Be Your Will'. The performance conveys a powerful introversion common to both singers' work. The intense and prayer-like mood of Cohen's song is also apposite to the work of each singer as is the idea of the visitation upon a person of the gift of song: ‘If it be your will / to let me sing … from this broken hill / all your praises they shall ring.'

The video of Antony is from the documentary
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
(directed by Lian Lunson in 2005). She appears self-effacing, her hair falling across her face, her hands obscuring her mouth as she sings. In a voice-over and intercut interview, Cohen describes the song as a response to ‘what struck me as beauty … that curious emanation … I prayed to have some response to the things that were so clearly beautiful.' Ideas of what beauty might be sear through the performance as they do through Gurrumul's work, transcending the terms and dynamics of beauty Cohen himself has made central to his song-writing, poetry and fiction. Forster's comparison illuminates the quiet, intense work created by artists whose exceptional openness coexists with, and perhaps emanates from, shyness.

British musician Sting, who performed a duet with Gurrumul in 2009, implies an idea of transcendence similar to Forster's, calling Gurrumul's voice ‘spiritual … the sound of a higher being'. In terms of bridging and translation, Gurrumul's televised duet with Sting in Paris for French television show
Taratata
exemplifies the technical aspects of the intuitive dynamics of Gurrumul's work.

Gurrumul, whose childhood musical education was enthusiastic and eclectic but not subject to the conventional dictates of a mainstream media diet of hits and stars, didn't know of Sting or the song, ‘Every Breath You Take'. To prepare the song for performance, he asked his uncles on Elcho Island to translate the song into the Gumatj language, but with minutes to go before the performance Gurrumul had not had time to learn the words. He began by singing in the bridge behind Sting in a traditional way, but then created his counterpoint in an intuitive way, singing the second verse in Gumatj, creating his own ‘soothing words'. He proceeded to hum and trade melodies with Sting as the two voices united for the final phrases of the song. Hohnen comments on the transformation of the song: ‘changing what sounds like a sour love-obsessed song to a love poem'. After the show aired with its duet (and another song by Gurrumul)
The Australian
reported that
Gurrumul
entered the French iTunes charts at number nine and Sting's record reached number ten, an interesting twist on the theme of transcendence.

The duet with Sting took place between Gurrumul's two solo albums. The first,
Gurrumul
, contains ‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)' and one other song, ‘Baywara', which intersperses English lyrics with those of his original languages. His second album,
Rrakala
, contains no English lyrics. So the rare statement of purpose in ‘I Was Born Blind' – ‘to bridge and to build Yolngu culture' – positioned as a preface to the two recordings, speaks in English to an Anglophone audience to describe the poetics of a work that would go on immediately to resonate internationally.

As well as travelling well beyond his Galiwin'ku home, the music transcends categories in all sorts of ways. Not everyone perceives this multifariousness positively. In an interview in
Paris Match
, Hohnen says that Gurrumul was rejected by the World Music Expo WOMEX because his work was ‘not Aboriginal enough'. This is the more benign face of a debate about ideas of Indigenous identity. It also connects with discussions about the category of world music having become ‘outdated and offensive' and used to put non-Western musicians into a ghetto, as
Guardian
writer Ian Birrell puts it. The idea of what it might mean to be ‘Aboriginal enough' is explored by other Indigenous artists, such as Anita Heiss in her memoir
Am I Black Enough For You?
(2012). Heiss's book is in part a response to journalist Andrew Bolt. In 2010 she and eight other Indigenous people took Bolt and his publisher, News Ltd, to court in order to defend charges under the Racial Discrimination Act. Bolt had suggested that lighter-skinned Indigenous people chose to identify as black purely for personal gain. Bolt and his publisher were found guilty in 2011.

In a musical context, the question implies the existence of certain stereotypes or prescriptions of what Indigenous music is allowed to be. Hohnen, perhaps a bit flippantly, describes the ‘music side' of Gurrumul's work as ‘mainstream pop' – ‘more folk pop than world music'. Traditional storytelling is melded with it, producing something new, although, as Corn illustrates, Soft Sands and other bands before Gurrumul were engaged in comparable meldings.

Fusion and reimagining are ideas circulating throughout Roland Barthes'
The Pleasure of the Text
(1973), which distinguishes between the text of pleasure and the text of bliss. Texts of bliss are radical, multifarious, sometimes unsettling, and, yes, transcendent:

Pleasure, in this context, involves the meeting of expectation. In textual terms, it can only offer texts bordered by what David Buchbinder, talking about similar ideas in the context of gender, calls ‘prescriptions and proscriptions'. Barthes' texts of bliss involve a poetics of bridging; of translation and transcendence, as well as some of the refusals and silences such as those Gurrumul's work and public persona enact. Such bridging has the capacity to heal ruptures, but it also points to their existence.

Gurrumul's emergence as a solo performer took place in an Australia without reconciliation. On Australia Day 2008, a ‘private individual' commissioned a sky-writer to inscribe the single word ‘Sorry' in the sky above the festivities celebrating the arrival in Australia of European settlers. A month later, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his Apology which states that ‘the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end'. In apologising to Indigenous Australians, Rudd's speech centres on the image of the bridge. The Apology, as he put it, was:

Rudd's speech concludes with a call to action. He urges Australians to: ‘seize the day. Let it not become a moment of mere sentimental reflection.' Nonetheless, the translation of words into action has been slow. The bridging promised by the Apology remains, at best, hypothetical. As Rudd made clear at the time, the value of the speech would lie in its connection with restorative action.

Gurrumul's sung or sonic bridging brings to mind the concept of the sound bridge. The sound bridge comes from the language of film to describe sound that carries over from one scene to another. In practice, a sound bridge allows us to hear the sound from the next sequence before we see it. Beyond the technical meaning of the term, the sound bridge does something figurative, too. Literally, a sound bridge creates continuity, but figuratively it also foreshadows connection: an aural telegram from the future. It prophesies or promises the possibility of a scene as yet unseen.

While songs have bridges which connect their components, other artists in other media explore the idea that actual bridges have songs. Jodi Rose is an artist who works with singing bridges. For more than a decade she has travelled the world listening to bridges and recording their ‘music'. Amid discussion of figurative bridgings in the contexts of film, music, and politics, Rose works under real bridges, capturing their songs. She has produced albums featuring her own recordings of bridges and remixes by other artists. In bridges, she writes, lies the spiritual: ‘The city has become our temple, electronic networks our religion, and the inaudible vibrations of the bridge cables are the voice of the divine. The word of the universe soaks through my cochlea into the nerve centres. I am wired to god.'

Her work reaches into the idea of found poetics and the unconstrained songs that exist around us to be captured. But her work also contains the idea of attuning ourselves to what is and isn't audible. In this very orientation is something radical and fresh, pertinent to Gurrumul's music, of what we might listen to, or for. Critic Douglas Khan comments of Rose's work: ‘The bridge can no longer pass itself off as anything but a church.'

Another artist of the bridge is Brisbane poet Samuel Wagan Watson, the first Indigenous poet to win the NSW Premier's Kenneth Slessor Prize, for his poetry collection
Smoke-Encrypted Whispers
(2005), which slowly revolves around images of water, while its individual poems are swift and compact. In one of the most striking poems, ‘Jetty Nights', a jetty is imagined as ‘an arm that stretched over the mud and sharks' and later becomes, for the children in the poem ‘the clatter of dead wood / our lifeline home'.

A jetty's arm is the first part of a bridge. To bridge is to extend such an arm, and this is what Gurrumul's music does and what was promised in Rudd's 2008 speech. The arm across dark water is a potent symbol of reconciliation as a possibility, not to be taken for granted; it holds the idea of a ‘future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility'. While Rudd acknowledged that no words can erase past injuries and atrocities, the speech ‘is symbolic, and yet also has to be more than this: symbolism is important but, unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance, it is little more than a clanging gong'.

Gurrumul follows a line of Indigenous singer-songwriters before him who have sung more overtly about reconciliation in English. Kev Carmody, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter, all members of the Stolen Generation, are prominent examples. Carmody's whimsical line in ‘Travellin' North' that ‘human constructs are just a passin' phase' captures the drift of his passionate work, but each has written unflinchingly about issues such as Aboriginal deaths in custody, land rights, and the Stolen Generations.

Each of these artists has collaborated with Indigenous and non-Indigenous musicians. Carmody's ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow', about land rights and reconciliation, was cowritten with Paul Kelly and has been covered by numerous artists, including Roach. In 2008 the song was performed by a group of artists with samples from Kevin Rudd's Apology in a collaboration organised by online activist group GetUp! to raise funds for Indigenous projects.

Perhaps the most famous example is the song ‘Treaty' by Yothu Yindi, fronted by Dr Yunupingu and of which Gurrumul was then a member. When Prime Minister Bob Hawke visited the Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory in 1988, Northern and Central Land Councils chairmen Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Wenten Rubuntja presented him with the Barunga Statement, framed with traditional painting. The Statement urged the government to acknowledge Indigenous land rights and to create a treaty. Hawke responded emotionally and promised that such a treaty would be created by 1990. When 1990 passed, ‘Treaty' was written. As Dr Yunupingu put it: ‘The intention of this song was to raise public awareness about this so that the government would be encouraged to hold to his promise.'

The song had two film clips. The second is a remix by British band Filthy Lucre, made without the involvement of Yothu Yindi, which became an international hit. The first clip shows images of Bob Hawke at the Barunga Festival variously throwing spears, laughing, playing the didgeridoo, and speaking with what looks like earnest conviction. These images are shown on television screens, to reflect the song's opening line: ‘Well I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television.' The images look confected. The clip suggests that Hawke's promise, like Baudrillard's Gulf War, may never have happened. And yet, at the same time, it is evidence of the making of promises, however flimsy, ‘words are easy, words are cheap'. These televisual images are interspersed with scenes of kids playing, tribal dance and the band performing, all of which are vital and colour-saturated. And in a fleeting moment in the clip, a twenty-year-old Gurrumul can be seen playing keyboards and singing.

Dr Yunupingu said: ‘Though it borrows from rock 'n' roll, the whole structure of “Treaty” is driven by the beat of the djatpangarri that I've incorporated in it. It was an old recording of this historic djatpangarri that triggered the song's composition.' Djatpangarri is a style of music and dancing dating back to the 1930s and performed by Yolngu men. It is light-hearted and informal, unlike more ceremonial musical modes.