At 17, with a few dollars in his pocket after a stint of picking shiraz grapes in Mildura in north-west Victoria, future singer-songwriter Archie Roach walked out on to a highway. He smoked three cigarettes and, to decide where he would go next, he tossed a 20 cent coin.
Heads would mean following the road sign that read Adelaide, where he had never been. Tails meant returning to Melbourne, to catch up with his siblings. They had been reunited years after state authorities had stolen Roach, aged three, and his brothers and sisters from Framlingham Aboriginal mission in the state’s western district, splitting them into separate foster homes.
The coin landed on heads. Roach found lodgings with the Salvation Army in an ornate, late 19th century building in Pirie Street, Adelaide, known as the People’s Palace. There he met Ruby Hunter. The tiny, extroverted Ngarrindjeri teenager was also searching for her identity after being stolen at the age of eight from her grandparents’ home in south-eastern South Australia’s Coorong region. It would become a relationship that allowed them to save each other.
Across Australia, frontier violence had given way to a brutal “protection” era in which the states assumed welfare control of Indigenous people, forcing many on to missions and reserves while often removing children. When he was 14 and in foster care, Roach, a Gunditjmara/Bundjalung man, learned in a letter from his sister that both their parents had died. He would later write Took the Children Away, released in 1990, which would become an anthemic ode to these stolen generations.
Just as Roach wrote of authorities who “gave us gifts to ease the pain”, Hunter and her siblings were promised they were going to the circus but were sent to children’s homes and split up between foster carers. Roach would later recall in his song Old So & So how when he met Hunter that day, “she could not stop talking”.
Roach, now 66, who talks to Guardian Australia from his home on his mother’s country, near Framlingham, where he is Maar nation elder, was always the “shy” one. “I could talk to people in those days if I had a bit of Dutch courage,” he says. “At the time, she was the opposite of who I was.”
Their love story is the subject of writer-director Philippa Bateman’s new documentary Wash My Soul in the River’s Flow, to be released in cinemas in March. In it, Roach and Hunter’s relationship is recounted in the songs they performed together in the 2004 premiere of their Kura Tungar – Songs from the River concerts with composer-pianist Paul Grabowksy and the Australian Art Orchestra, as well as backstage and rehearsal footage and interviews, interspersed with footage of the Coorong.
“Archie is my silent hero and I’m his rowdy troublemaker,” Hunter says in the film.
“She just had this cheeky way about her,” Roach recalls. “Not so much making trouble but had this glint in her eye.”
The couple had many children of their own, including sons Amos and Eban and foster children Kriss, Arthur and Terrence. Unofficially they looked after a further 15 to 20 children over the years, Roach estimates, admitting that he’s never stopped to tally the number. I tell Roach I vividly recall interviewing the couple at their Melbourne kitchen table in 1998, various children dashing past, and how lovely it was when Hunter kept calling me “bub”. “She’d welcome people wherever she was,” says Roach, “whether at home or when we went around the country.”
When they began singing Took the Children Away or one of the early songs Hunter penned, Down City Streets, which dealt with their homeless years fighting battles with alcohol, were they conscious of opening audience hearts to recognise shared history and truth?
“People made us aware by coming up and talking to us,” he says. “They said: ‘We weren’t taught anything about this at school, stolen generations and being removed from families.’ There was nothing being taught about contemporary Aboriginal people and their lives in the cities.”
In the concert featured in the new documentary, Hunter wears a headdress made from pelican feathers from her traditional home as well as rock cockatoo feathers amid raffia, sequins and mirrors. The pelican “is really Ruby’s spirit”, says Roach. “In the dreamtime she was a pelican, before she came to Earth and was born as a baby girl. When she passed away, of course, she became a pelican again.”
As Roach would sing at the end of Took the Children Away, the children “came back”. When as adults Hunter and Roach returned to the Coorong, “everything just came back to her from when she was a child and they were taken. She just wailed and hit the ground. I felt guilty about taking her back there, you know? I said, ‘Oh, sorry I brought you back here, bub. We’ll go.’ She just looked at me and said, ‘Grab my shoes, I’ll walk around here barefoot.’” Hunter would die of a heart attack, aged 54, in 2010.
Roach’s own health has deteriorated. He has lived with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for years and wears a nasal cannula to access oxygen. In late 2020, an ambulance waited on standby outside a theatre, where he was inducted into the Aria hall of fame via live telecast, to ferry him back to hospital, mostly for observation. “I use oxygen most of the day,” he says now. “It’s something that helps me get through and do things.”
Roach wrote philosophically in 2012: “My recent bouts of illness, I’m sure, are a result of the Pain of being removed from my family at a young age and more recently the loss of someone I loved so dearly. But Pain can also bring about change in one’s life for the better, we can choose to ignore the Pain until it becomes unbearable or we can do something.”
The excellent news is that Roach is feeling well enough to perform in a free concert with Grabowsky and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at the Myer Music Bowl in February, and in April will undertake his last road tour of New South Wales, with Queensland dates added. He plans to make more albums and play more concerts. “This is the last tour as far as getting on the road, but I’ll still be doing shows wherever I can.” He has also been making Kitchen Table Yarn vodcasts, giving a platform to young up-and-coming music-makers.
Writing still alleviates pain, he says. “There’s a healing power in music and I realise that more today, I’m relying more on that healing. It’s a place you can go to when you’re down and not well, but it’s also a place you can go to when you’re on top of the world.”
One Song: The Music of Archie Roach is at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl on 19 February. Wash My Soul in the River’s Flow will be released in cinemas across Australia from 10 March. Roach’s NSW and Queensland tour runs from 31 March to 23 April, with Adelaide and Perth concerts to follow
