‘My God, how courageous’: the British choirboys taking on an Indigenous family’s painful story

The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge will sing a poem by Judith Nangala Crispin during their tour of Australia Photograph: Supplied

When Musica Viva approached the Indigenous artist and poet Judith Nangala Crispin with the idea of collaborating with Britain’s 583-year-old Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, she thought the proposal was ludicrous.

“I’m like, you’ve got to be joking, this is going to be a nightmare,” Crispin says. “I spent 20 years wandering around the desert looking for my ancestors because of people like this, because of this super English colonial thing. You’d have to get a group of snowmen together to get a whiter bunch.”