The Modern Indigenous Voices: The Song that Did Not Fall Silent (1964–today)

And yet the music survived. It survived in the spaces that the prohibition could not reach, in the remote communities of the north and center where the colonial presence was more tenuous, in the memory of the elders who passed on the songs when there were no hostile ears nearby.

What happened in the second half of the 20th century was the return of that music to the public space — first timidly, then with a conviction that no assimilation policy had been able to extinguish. Contemporary indigenous artists were not recovering something lost: they were continuing something that had never ceased to exist.

Jimmy Little: The First

Jimmy Little is considered the first Aboriginal artist to achieve commercial success, with his 1964 debut song "The Royal Telephone".

Jimmy Little — born in 1937 in Cummeragunja, on the border between New South Wales and Victoria — was the pioneer: an Aboriginal artist who sang country and gospel in English, having learned music in the missions where his family had been confined, and who found in that adopted music the vehicle to bring his presence to the Australian mainstream.

Little's limitation was also his achievement: to reach the white radios of the sixties, an Aboriginal artist had to sing in the language and style of the dominant culture. That's what he did — and in doing so, he opened a door that subsequent generations would pass through with far fewer concessions.

Archie Roach: Took the Children Away

Archie Roach — born in 1954 in Framlingham, Victoria, of Gunditjmara and Bundjalung heritage — is the artist who most directly turned the experience of the Stolen Generations into music: into art that white Australia could not ignore because it was too well made and said too clearly what needed to be said.

"Took the Children Away" (1990) — the song about how government officials would come to Aboriginal communities and take children to missions and boarding schools to "assimilate" them — was the most powerful musical document of the history of the Stolen Generations: Roach singing his own story, that of his family, that of hundreds of thousands of families, with the calm voice of someone who knows that the truth does not need to shout to be devastating.

Archie Roach's song spoke powerfully of the truth about the stolen generations at the time it was released in 1990. It is a song of mourning and loss but also of hope that helped make that painful story part of the shared cultural knowledge.

Roach had been one of those stolen children: taken from his family at the age of three, raised on a mission in Victoria, not knowing for years that he had a family, that he had a history, that he had a language that was his own. The song was the act of reclaiming all that — not with anger but with the specific dignity of someone who has survived something that should not have happened and who needs to name it so that it does not happen again.

He died on July 30, 2022, in Warrnambool, Victoria. The Australian parliament held a minute of silence in his honor.

Yothu Yindi: Treaty

Yothu Yindi — formed in 1986 in Yirrkala, in Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory — was the band that most completely demonstrated that contemporary indigenous music could be simultaneously faithful to its traditional roots and competitive in the Australian pop market.

The name Yothu Yindi means "mother and child" in the Yolŋu language — the relationship between two clans that the band embodied: Yolŋu Aboriginal musicians alongside balanda (non-Aboriginal) musicians. The band's performances were based on traditional Yolŋu dance and embodied a cultural exchange.

It was Yothu Yindi who brought indigenous music to the mainstream, with their 1991 song "Treaty," from the album Tribal Voice, which became a hit.

"Treaty" was written as a protest song denouncing the failure of Australia's political leaders to fulfill the promise of a treaty between black and white Australians.

In 1988, Prime Minister Bob Hawke attended the Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory, where he was presented with a statement on Aboriginal self-determination. Hawke responded with a promise that a treaty with Australian Indigenous peoples would be concluded by 1990. By 1991, the promise had not been fulfilled. Yothu Yindi turned it into a song.

Although the song draws from rock and roll, the rhythm and dominant melody come from traditional Yolŋu music. The chorus is catchy and straightforward — "Treaty yeah, Treaty now" — equally suitable for singing at a concert or chanting at a political rally.

Australia still does not have a formal treaty with its Indigenous peoples — the only Anglo-Saxon nation to have colonized a continent without concluding any treaty with its original inhabitants. "Treaty" remains the most listened-to song about that absence, more than thirty years after its release.

Gurrumul: The Most Beautiful Voice of Australia

Geoffrey Gurrumul YunupinguGurrumul — was born in 1971 on Elcho Island, in Arnhem Land, blind from birth. He was a founding member of Yothu Yindi and later built a solo career of such beauty and depth that no Australian critic fully knew how to describe it.

His music was specifically Yolŋu — he sang mainly in his native language, about his land, about his cosmology — but with arrangements that mixed acoustic guitar with contemporary production in a way that made the music accessible without making it less profound. His countertenor voice was so extraordinary that critics compared it to the great voices of European classical singing, although Gurrumul had never heard opera and had no particular interest in it.

Gurrumul (2008) — his debut solo album — reached number two on the Australian charts, an unprecedented milestone for an album sung mainly in the Yolŋu language. It was nominated for seven ARIA awards and won four. When the album was released in Europe, the Financial Times described it as "the most beautiful music we have heard in years."

Gurrumul never learned to speak English well and rarely spoke publicly about his music — he let the music speak. He died on July 25, 2017, from liver complications. He was forty-six years old.

Baker Boy: The New Generation

Danzel BakerBaker Boy — was born in 1999 in Darwin and is one of the most visible representatives of the generation that brings Australian indigenous music into the 21st century without feeling the need to choose between his Yolŋu heritage and contemporary urban music.

He raps in English and Yolŋu matha — his mother tongue — mixing hip-hop and dancehall with the traditions of northern Australia. In 2018, he added a verse to a new version of "Treaty" by Yothu Yindi: "Still no treaty" — still no treaty, thirty years after Hawke's promise.

Baker Boy won the ARIA Award for Indigenous Artist of the Year in 2018 and the Australian of the Year in 2023 — exactly thirty years after Mandawuy Yunupingu of Yothu Yindi received the same recognition in 1992. The circle closes, although the treaty still does not exist.

Paul Kelly and White Music on Black Stories

No story of contemporary Australian Indigenous music would be complete without mentioning Paul Kelly — the white singer-songwriter from Adelaide who co-wrote "Treaty" with Mandawuy Yunupingu. Kelly is the most important example of a non-Indigenous Australian artist who built a significant part of his work on the stories and struggles of Aboriginal peoples — with the explicit collaboration of those communities, not from the distance of an observer.

His songs — "Bicentennial" about the European invasion, "Treaty" written with Yunupingu, "From St Kilda to King's Cross" about life on the margins of Australian cities — are documents of an Australia that the mainstream preferred not to see, written by someone who looked with the attention of one who knows that what they see matters.

Editorial note: Australia is the only English-speaking country that colonized a continent without concluding any treaty with its original inhabitants. New Zealand has the Treaty of Waitangi. Canada has its treaties. The United States has — with all its violations — a history of formal treaties. Australia has nothing. "Treaty" by Yothu Yindi has been asking for more than thirty years for what in no other comparable country is considered optional. Every time that song plays at an Australian concert — and it continues to play, every year, at every Indigenous music festival on the continent — the chorus "Treaty yeah, Treaty now" is simultaneously a celebration of cultural resistance and a reminder of a promise that has yet to be fulfilled. Australian Aboriginal music has survived 65,000 years. It can wait a little longer. Although it shouldn't have to.

End of the Australia Series

Complete Australia series. 7 out of 7 chapters.

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