G'day again, especially katluaghing,

Yothu Yindi are pretty much a rock band - rock 'n roll being the pretty much the most popular musical idiom among modern, particularly urbanised, Aboriginal groups.

I have the rather remote distinction of sharing a place in a poster series with them. The Australian Broadcasting Commission, in 1990, brought out a second edition of "The ABC Book of Musical Instruments", a book by Michael Atherton aimed as junior high schools. As with the 1980 edition, they had an accompanying series of posters of different band types and suggested class activities.

Their marketing people asked me to arrange a bush band, but they kept changing the date, time and place. In the end they wanted a band at 5.30pm on a Wednesday afternoon at their Gore Hill practice studios. It was a very 'scratch' band! Myself with Anglo concertina(and my button accordion, bones, whistle, mouthorgan and "Barcoo Dog" rattler scattered in the foreground), a lass named Meg Ryan ( a schoolteacher who played mandolin) and a fiddling friend named Ralph Pride who brought his 7 and 11-year-old daughters who played my lagerphone and bush (tea chest) bass.

This went into the final poster series along with the Sydney Chamber Quartet, a Latin American group 'Papalote', the Sydney University Gamelan, ... and Yothu(u?) Yindi. The ABC reckoned they liked ours the best because the target audience, 12 to 14 year-olds, could identify with the range of ages in our 'band'.

Regards,

Bob Bolton