“That’s where I was taken from,” he says. He has lived in this little house close to Warrnambool for the past 10 years but part of his early life was lived here, too, or near here anyway, on the Framlingham Aboriginal Station, a Church of England mission established just down the road in 1865.
He points to the horizon outside, where it all began. “It’s not something I’d care to do again.” But it’s exhausting,” he continues, fidgeting with a pair of red, yellow and black necklaces. These things you haven’t thought of in so long. You get surprised at the things you remember, good and bad. He tells me it isn’t easy, revisiting and exposing all his years in this world. What does that mean? What does it say that this vivid tale of a formative pivot point – the moment Roach found a fulcrum against which to grapple with the decimation of his heritage – is nothing but an off-cut left on the editing floor of his biography? It tells me that the life of this stolen child and artistic leader is one bloody big story, which makes Roach laugh heartily with his belly, before taking another sip of black tea from his tall mug (emblazoned with the words THE KEY TO SURVIVAL IS STRONG COFFEE). It was officially released on November 1, in conjunction with a beautiful album of the same name, featuring fresh recordings of new and old songs: 18 tracks to accompany 18 chapters of his life.īut it doesn’t include the story from the shed. I’ve also devoured an advance copy of Tell Me Why, the long-awaited memoir of the legendary singer and poet, alcoholic and activist. I’ve been interviewing Roach for two hours when he shares this moment. “It was as if there was more to all this life than meets the eye. It was a turning point,” Roach says, nodding. “Why don’t we talk language? Why don’t we go out and hunt?” They looked at him funny. “Why don’t we dance?” he asked his friends.
#House flipper game roach sound skin#
His skin was blacker from his time on the road, under the sun, and his soul was, too – his insides warmer and darker from his cultural reckoning. Roach had left home at 15, ended up in Sydney at 16, seen Adelaide at 17 and visited that hot shed outside Cairns not long after, before heading south again, home to Melbourne. They wanted the green, wet country first. The white men came to your country long before they came up here. “I’m sorry about that, my boy,” the old man said. That’s when I asked the old fella, ‘What’s all this? We don’t do this down south where I come from.’ ” “They danced pretty much through the night. They danced and they danced!” he says, big eyes opening. His head sways into that rollicking past now, and his eyeballs frolic under soft, waxy eyelids. And the sounds they made then are the sounds he sings out now in his lounge room: “Eeeeeh, hup! Chick-chick-chick, aaaaahhhh!” Roach didn’t know it then, but warrma means corroboree. The old fella said a few other words and they come out with some boomerangs and clap sticks, and the old fella said one word that I remember: warrma.” And they’re standin’ ’round just in their jeans. And then the young fellas, those ringers, they went inside the shed and took off their hats and their boots and their shirts.
“I’d never heard Aboriginal language – never in my life. “Old fella started talkin’ language,” says Roach, eyes still closed. They have guitars and they sing into the night, then an old, snowy-haired bloke arrives. They’re horsemen from the stations around Cape York. A few trucks roll in, he says, and blackfellas in Akubras and cowboy boots and chequered shirts get out. Roach, 63, is maybe 18 in this memory from the Atherton Tablelands, which begins on an Indigenous settlement, sitting in the dust, drinking beer. As he falls more deeply into his trance, I notice the looseness in his skin, his basset-hound cheeks and the steady rocking of his smooth, bald scalp, like the bottom of a big, brown egg. Roach is in his own mind, inside a boiling hot tin shed in far north Queensland, and he’s a young man again, experiencing a seminal moment closer to the beginning of his lifelong itinerant journey of self-discovery than to its end. He’s no longer with me at his dining table, in his white brick cottage near the coastal town of Warrnambool, four hours west of Melbourne, where the sky is cool grey and his nectarine tree blossom is hot pink. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text sizeĪrchie Roach closes his eyes and bows his head, and knits his fingers together as if in prayer, and I realise he’s not here any more.