By Larry Schwartz
RUBY Hunter’s voice is husky but amiable. She’s remembering paper and string she touched the day officials came to take her from her family.
“When they come to the house they had these brown parcels with the string and it was tied in a bow,” Hunter recalls.
“When they put things in front of me, if I didn’t know what it was, I’d take me time. They thought I was scared of it. But I was just appreciating feeling the string. I was appreciating feeling paper. And when my hand went like this, hey, that paper makes noise.”
You wonder why she might mention the parcels, whatever they might have contained. Then it dawns on you: she could touch these things. At least they were real.
At eight years old, she was not sure of the officials who had come with a promise to her family that she would be back that day after an outing to the circus. She wondered if they were not phantoms come back to this world from the next.
“When I was taken away,” the singer-songwriter says, “all I saw in front of me was white people. Or they wouldn’t be people. They’d be ghosts. White ghosts. Because we had no name for you fellas. I’m a person who’s not speaking English right at the age of eight. To me, you’re ghosts. You’re
not people. Shut them out. That’s how you was with me.”
Sounds of traffic on a busy road outside. Record company staff pass by the office where we meet. A telephone rings.
I sit across the way from her and wonder at this disclosure. Whites as ghosts. It’s a notion some might associate with an Aboriginal experience of the first white men to step ashore at Botany Bay. But Hunter is in her 40s. She is not talking about a bygone era. “I only learned that you’re people
because you taught me,” she says.
Hunter was born in the mid-1950s of the Ngarrindjeri clan. Home was the bush around a billabong in the South Australian riverland. “My billabong,” says the musician, who has relocated from Melbourne after several years here and lives in suburban Adelaide with singer-songwriter
husband, Archie Roach, and their children. “I’ve got trees and hills. There’s no other houses around there.”
She is determined to go back and settle where she once lived and is bemused by obstacles to her return. “Course I can live there,” she says. “The only thing that’s stopping from actually going back to my land is the government. And the red tape, all right? For me to get back to my land, I have to buy it. Why should I buy something that was never anyone else’s?” She laughs.
“Ain’t no time for me to ever complain,” she sings on her new album. She describes Feeling Good as “a personal attack on my own heart to make me feel good when other people are making my heart saddened …”
Such is her apparent cheer, you wonder what right you might have to grumble with pettier problems.
“We cannot always carry on feelings of hopelessness,” she says. “There’s got to be hope in everybody’s life.”
These are not simple platitudes. By her own account, it’s been a rough year for her family.
She and Roach found themselves in the Victorian County Court late last year when their second son, Eban, and three other young men pleaded guilty to bashing a policeman in the early hours of January 27, 1999.
The four young men were each sentenced to six months, with the sentences to be served within the community under the terms of an intensive corrections order. Hunter says Eban is a mental health worker with the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service.
She says Eban has moved on since the incident and defied negative typecasting. “He’s only seen as a bad boy because he’s black.” She is convinced the case attracted attention primarily because Eban is the son of high-profile parents.
“Now if it had have been another Aboriginal child, another family, there wouldn’t have been anything said about it.”
Only when I ask about perceptions of innocence or guilt, does she balk at the questioning and asks what, after all, this has to do with the new album, her second since the ARIA award-winning debut, Thoughts Within, in 1994.
HUNTER has had more than her share of adversity. Who among us who has not been there, can fathom the hurt of removal? As she says: “You cannot explain something that never ever happened to you before.”
She concedes that she did not really know what a circus was, but she did not doubt the promise that she would be brought back with her family after an outing. “I thought it was a real thing,” she says. “It was a real promise.”
At eight, she knew no words to communicate her fear in the language spoken by the people who took her to the institution where she was placed before being sent on to live with foster parents.
“They prayed for us not to stray/ while they preyed upon our mother’s land/ while we were locked away …” she sings on the new album.
Hunter has sought to inform through her music. “I’m letting the people know,” she says of one song, “that when the time of taking of children was in force, the reasons beyond taking the children was to take the land.”
In a strange environment, longing for her kin, she resorted to touch to reassure her this was not a place of phantoms. “I was feeling the tables, feeling the things around me. If they locked me in the room, it was feeling and understanding.”
She believes her captors were determined to block out her past and force a break with her heritage. “When they took me away, they put me into solitary,” Hunter says.
“They didn’t know that at the time, I already had my information. So they locked me away and they thought, `She’ll get no information’. But I had my information with me. So when I come out, I still had my language and everything. My uncles, my sisters …
“So even though they took me away physically, they didn’t take away the stories that were implanted into my mind.”
She had to learn much that we take for granted. “I had to learn to use a knife and fork,” she says. “First time I put clothing on, I put the petticoat through the leg and some other article round somewhere else. And then they had to come around and take all the articles off me and dress me
up.
“So I had to actually be taught how to sit on a chair, use a toilet. At the age of eight, I had to learn all the baby stuff.
“At the age of eight, they treat you like a baby. And then other people think you’ve got a problem. That’s why I had to learn very quickly because I didn’t want to have a problem.”
She remembers too the day she was finally considered to be ready for a foster home. An official took her to a suburban house. “We got out the car and stood at the front fence and she said, `You see this place here?’ I said, `Yes’.
“She said, `Little girl, this little house is going to be yours. The people in the house … You can call them mum, dad, auntie, uncle whatever.’
“When I saw the people, they were white. They were ghosts again. And I was thinking, `I’ve never had a ghost as a mum or dad.”‘
She laughs. “Ghost gum trees, ghost gum people.”
For all that, Hunter remains fond of her foster parents. “Actually, mum went around to visit Archie the other day. I haven’t seen her for years. She went and had a cup of tea with Arch. My foster mum. She’s English.”
She met Roach, who is of the Gunditjmara, from western Victoria, and was also taken from his family, at a Salvation Army drop-in centre in Adelaide. “When I was 16,” she says. “He was about 17 but he looked 21. That’s how massive he was.”
She first heard him sing while waiting for a bus. They were sitting around listening to one of her cousins play when he turned to Roach and said: `Hey, you play guitar there, brother?’
“And Archie sat and started strumming. I’m thinking, `Hey, I didn’t even know he could do that.”‘
It was Roach who inspired her to play guitar. “I asked Archie. I said, `What you doing?’ I said, `Gee, you men seem to do everything. Give us a go!”‘
She laughs again. “What I used to do with Archie is I used to say, `Play this for me now. I’m going to sing this.’ And he turned around and said, `Listen, if you’re going to sing songs start playing yourself.’ So he put his foot down.
“He said, `I’m not going to be your guitarist all your life. Do your own thing.
“If you want to sing, you know don’t fool around.”‘
One of her first songs, Down City Streets, was recorded by Roach on his debut album, Charcoal Lane.
Roach has remained home in Adelaide to look after their 11-year-old, Terence. The eldest of their five children, Amos, a musician and dancer, will travel overseas soon with the South Australian Police Band. “One takes my son overseas,” she laughs at the contrast with Eban’s troubles, “one keeps them here.”
She takes obvious pride in her husband and marvels at the way he conducted himself as interviewer and narrator of a recent documentary, Little Kings, in which he travelled around Australia, talking to Aborigines of the “stolen generation”.
“I thought it was beautiful the way he put it across and it made me cry when I saw him put his arm around people. I thought, `Yeah, that’s real sincerity.”‘
Hunter and Roach have toured the world and played on the same bill as international stars. Tracy Chapman and Joan Armatrading, for instance, each sing with a quiet strength that reminds her of Roach.
She laughs recalling the day Paul Simon visited their home in Melbourne a few years ago. She had tried to serve him meat sandwiches. She’d heard him say he was a vegetarian but thought he might eat them anyway.
She has a larrikin’s twinkle in the eye. “Archie Roach, Tracy Chapman, Joan Armatrading and Paul Simon,” she says. “They all call me The Forward Woman. That’s beautiful.”
Hunter says her next project is likely to be a movie: she has been approached to act in a film.
She lives in outer suburbia but looks beyond. “I know that the story has been told about children being taken away,” she says. “There’s children that can still go home. And that’s all we ask. Let us go home. We can still work together. But let us have our own space.”
She’s weary of life “in a cramped up little house” at the edge of a city. She longs for the hills, trees and billabongs of her people. “I’m not a wardrobe woman, I’m a bush woman.”
The Sunday Age. 23rd of July 2000
Larry Schwartz Writer 