Neil Murray: Warumpi Band
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Neil Murray: Warumpi Band

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Archie Roach is an aboriginal singer/songwriter who wrote the song Took the Children Away, Shane Howard was the frontman of Goanna who had a massive hit with the strikingly anti-hegemonic Solid Rock and then there is Neil Murray who was the guitarist and primary songwriter for the Warumpi Band who wrote the song My Island Home.

The Warumnpi Band was the first Australian rock group to get into the charts that featured predominantly Aboriginal members. Murray, a white Australian originally from Lake Bolac in Western Victoria, in 1979 moved to The Northern Territory to work as a labourer.

“I worked at the aboriginal community of Papunya in 1980 which is about 250kms north-west of Alice Springs. I worked as a labourer on the out stations at first and then I got a job teaching on the out stations and I was working in Papunya for about three weeks when word got around there was this young bloke with a guitar [Murray is referring to himself].” From here two local aboriginals from the community, Sammy and Gordon Butcher, approached Neil and they started rehearsing after they had “cobbled together some instruments and would meet in the town hall a couple of times a week.”

“About midway through 1980 a fella from up north named George came to town because he was going to marry Sammy’s sister. He was known as a singer so I asked him if he wanted to join the band so we would have a full line-up,” explains Murray. George Burrarrwanga was a Yolngu man, an aboriginal people that inhabit the Northern most tip of Arnhem land, with George coming from an island called Elcho Island.

“Look George was our lead singer and English wasn’t his first language and I was still singing a lot of songs in our sets and he would accompany me but I was always trying to write songs that he would want to sing. It was hard to come up with a song that he would really want to get his head around,” explains Neil.

“After our first album tour I got a chance to spend time with George in his own country with his parents and brothers and he took to me to his favourite part of the island and we lived off the land three or four days, touring around in a tinnie getting crayfish and fishing. It brought home to me a lot of boyhood dreams to live off the land.”

What happened next was Murray came back to the homeland with George and set about writing the song that would become My Island Home, that while being only a minor hit for the Warumpi band, many years later in 1995, was given by Murray to a young backing dancer from Cairns with Torres Strait Islander heritage, Christine Anu.

In Australia’s music history what the Warumpi band did was truly innovative and for its time, with Neil Bringing three Northern Territory aboriginal men into pop music, was unheard of. Murray now explains how it felt at the time, “Initially it was about fun and just making music and the joy of playing together but then once we started to write our songs especially the ones in their native language and we changed audience attitudes on how they viewed the communities it was something more then entertainment – we actually had a ‘voice’ rather then just an image.” Murray pauses before continuing to explain the band’s journey to realising what they were doing was going to change the face of Australian music. “We realised that what we were doing was really important for social change and for influencing attitudes in the mainstream. We felt that it was important that we keep going and make the aboriginal people proud.”

The Warumpi Band were not the only band writing songs about the plight of the aboriginal people in the 1980s because in 1983 you had Victorian band Goanna’s massive hit Solid Rock and a Sydney punk band called Midnight Oil making grumblings about how unhappy Australians were with the conservative governments of the time.

Murray talks about the Warumpi band’s relationship with Midnight Oil and, very modestly, takes responsibility for showing the now Environment Minister Peter Garret how things really were in Aboriginal communities. “Awww, I don’t know if you could say we were responsible for making them ‘passionate about the plight of the Aboriginal people’ but what I will say is they got to know us because we played supports with them at The Hordern Pavilion in Sydney around ’84/’85 and I think they naturally became curious about how we toured the remote areas of The Northern Territory.

The next thing I know their manager is calling me up saying take down these dates we’re going to do a tour of the Territory with you.” What ensued was the 1986 Black Fell/White Fella tour, named after the Warumpi band’s most successful song to date. Murray now talks about the tour, “Well you know what they were like at the time? They were pretty much getting on every bandwagon like with the Uranium thing so the aboriginal thing just became another contentious issue for them to bring to mainstream attention.”

Murray now explains the real value of the tour for Midnight Oil, “Up until the tour I think they were really naïve about the aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory but that tour really opened their eyes about the real problems facing aboriginal communities and that there was no quick fix. I talk about the tour in detail in my book Sing For Me Country Man.”