By Larry Schwartz
IT SAYS something about his regard for the ways of an old friend and indigenous Australians that Neil Murray declines to name a former bandmate who died a few years ago.
“I avoid saying his name,” he says after mentioning a tribute he attended to George Rrurrambu, lead-singer of the central Australian Warumpi Band co-founded by Murray, its only non-indigenous member. “You can write it.”
Three decades have passed since the quietly-spoken musician and writer left home in western Victoria on “a kind of a quest for belonging, to go and learn from people who have lived here the longest.”
He helped set up the rock group while working as a teacher, supply truck driver and outstation worker in the remote Western Desert Aboriginal communities of Papunya and Kintore. They toured Australia extensively including the1986 on Blackfella/Whitefella Tour with Midnight Oil.
“The Warumpis were legend, a formidable unit,” Oils guitarist Jim Moginie, who produced Murray’s recently released 10th solo album, Witness, has written of a first encounter at Docker River settlement on a clear winter night. “The Central Desert was their turf.”
When the Warumpi’s lone whitefella came back home to Victoria’s western district in the late 1980s, it was at the suggestion of Aboriginal friends including Warumpi guitarist Sammy Butcher who told him, “That’s your country – you should sit down there.”
“They’d ask me, ‘Where you from?’ I’d say, ‘From Victoria’. They’d say, ‘Ah that’s your country – you should go back there’. I said, ‘Ah, I will go and check it out and investigate this idea of my country, a sense of attachment to place’.”
Murray grew up on a property near Lake Bolac, where his family farmed sheep and crops until the mid-1970s. It was here that his father and grandfather showed him grindstones and axe heads.
“That was the first idea I had that people had lived there before. Of course, it set in motion the trail of wondering what happened to these people.”
His paternal great-great-grandfather came to Australia from the mountainous north of Scotland in 1848, among the countless driven out by unscrupulous landlords in the historic “Highland clearances”. “There was an ancestral pull, I must admit. But I couldn’t say I felt I belonged.”
His music and writing are not the only eis ndeavours informed by the challenge of finding his place here. He won an award in 2005 for instigating the overland Healing Walk along the watercourses in the region and inspiring the annual Lake Bolac Eel festival.
“Neil Murray is a white man who grew up in Victoria’s Western district, but which he also identifies as Tjapwurrung Country,” historian Peter Read wrote of him in his book, Belonging, Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership.
He cites a section in Murray’s autobiographical novel, Sing for me Countryman, in which the singer-songwriter recounts returning with a Pintupi elder to an ancestral creation site where the old man points to the lines of ochre and blood on the cave wall .
It occurs to Murray that he has “not a stone or a claypan or a bush that I could attest to being me…”
“Neil Murray’s experiences cannot easily be generalised,” Read writes. “Some may admire, but we cannot easily emulate his hard-won sense of belonging.”
“I have released several solo albums, but more than that I returned to being a native man to the region where I was born and raised,” says Murray, who launched his solo career in 1990. “And to a large extent that quest has been successful, although one is continually confronted with the enormous loss of traditional knowledge that has been obliterated from the landscape.
“All that profound poetry and wisdom is gone forever. I sometimes think that if traditional indigenous language, lore and culture were still intact in Western Victoria, I would never have been a songwriter. Neither would Archie Roach or Shane Howard as well probably. There would have been no need. We would have had it all given to us and carried it.”
Shane Howard has said that Murray’s work speaks to him in a way few artists can, about “the loss and longing, the need for those of us, as migrant Australians, to understand this Aboriginal country and create a new way of belonging here”.
Murray wrote his most famous song, My Island Home, in 1985 for the man the lead singer he respectfully declines to name, inspired by a visit to the Rrurrambu’s home on Elcho Island, off Arnhem Land.
He co-wrote tracks with Rrurrambu including the classic Blackfella/Whitefella which appeared on their mid-1980s debut album Big Name, No Blankets. ”It doesn’t matter what your colour/,” they sang, “As long as you a true fella.”
He returns to the Central Desert each year and remains in contact with Sammy Butcher and others from the band that continued to perform occasionally until 2006.
Murray went up north last September for a memorial service and tribute performance for Rrurrambu. “It was a very emotional event but very fulfilling,” he says. “It felt like it was closure. It was also like handing the torch on to these younger blokes who are playing.”
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Larry Schwartz Writer 