Australian Art Orchestra
Gig

Daughter of the River

Review of Ruby's Story

Ruby Hunter’s journey has been a tough one, but she has found contentment at last.

The scene at the home of Ruby Hunter and Archie Roach could be seen as a happy ending. Walking around their property at Monash, near Berri in the South Australian Riverland, the couple are a picture of contentment.

To understand how they arrived at that point, however, one has to travel across challenging territory.

Hunter’s story begins and ends on the Murray River. She was born near its banks, left it in tragic circumstances as part of the stolen generation, when she was four years old, and now lives close to it with her partner Roach and their family.

Roach grew up in Framlingham, Victoria, and is also one of the stolen generation, but it is Hunter’s story that forms the basis of their most recent collaboration.

Her life is inexorably linked with the Murray-Darling River Basin, which plays a significant role in Ruby’s Story.

The show – a collaboration with a 10-piece orchestra and a marked departure from the couple’s usual style – is an integral part of this year’s Message Sticks indigenous arts festival at the Sydney Opera House.

Hunter and Roach wrote it together, and it not only traces her history but also tells the stories – personal, political and cultural – that have shaped her life and the environment around the Murray. It was a process, she says, both harrowing and rewarding.

*“I’m at the point now where it is starting to affect me. I have to say ‘hang on, this is about me’,” she says. “I’m now asking myself questions about my own life, so it’s a journey in a way.

It’s the stories that have meant a lot to me in life. Reflections on the memories I have of those times.”*

Hunter’s journey took its first dramatic turn when she was taken from her family. She grew up in foster homes and on the streets of Adelaide, and was a teenage alcoholic.

Only after she moved to Melbourne and met Roach did her life start to take a more positive course.

Together and individually, they have forged music careers that cross musical and cultural boundaries.

The couple have spent the last few months writing material for the Ruby’s Story project, which makes its debut at the Sydney Opera House on Friday.

“We were both writing about me, which took a bit of getting used to,” says Hunter. “It turned out pretty well. We collaborated by talking, then he’ll go away and write his and I go away and write mine.”

She describes Roach as “a man of vision”. But his vision of her, or at least one of them, has been kept under wraps.

“It’s a secret.” Hunter says, coyly.

One song he has written for Ruby’s Story is about how the couple met in Melbourne more than 30 years ago, but Roach is keeping the lyrics to himself.

Of the other material, she says that although the songs are primarily about her, issues such as the environment and human rights weave their way through them.

“If people are looking for political things in the songs, I guess they’ll find them,” she says.

The calibre of collaboration on the project underlines the couple’s status as musicians.

Musical director for Ruby’s Story is celebrated Melbourne composer Paul Grabowsky, who is joined by the 10-piece Australian Art Orchestra featuring the likes of saxophonist Sandy Evans and trumpeter Phil Slater.

Grabowsky says that there is a celebratory feel to the work and a strength in the writing that is not confined to indigenous issues.

“There doesn’t have to be a self-conscious tilt towards Aboriginality in making these songs resonant,” he says.

“Ruby just has to get up and sing them for that to happen. She’s testifying really.”

Grabowsky spent four days in South Australia listening to Hunter’s testimony in order to shape the music around it. “I wanted to use the interesting line-up we have, playing to their strengths and bring Ruby and Archie’s story into that context, where the music takes on a dramatic role in shaping the songs and putting it into a narrative flow,” Grabowsky says.

*“There are influences in the music that are germane to the influences that shaped their lives, such as country music, the church … it’s all in there.

And I bring my own slant to it, too. There are jazz influences in there and even bits that might be interpreted as classical as well.

It’s a challenge, because musically they are very simple songs and very powerful. They range from nursery rhymes to very political songs. I’m really excited about it.”*

Hunter, more used to performing just with Roach or in a small band line-up, says she is looking forward to singing in this new, larger company. “We come from different areas of music so we have a lot of discovering to do,” she says.

Most of all, however, she would like the public to learn something from the experience, whether it is about her life or the culture that surrounds it. “I’d like people to be mesmerised by it,” she says. “To listen to the lyrics. They are very important. They are the story.”

- The Australian (Iain Shedden), 1 June 2004

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