Obit: Archie Roach(1956-2022)Indigenous Australian

Subject: Obit: Archie Roach (1956-2022) Indig. Aust
From: rich-joy
Date: 30 Jul 22 - 07:03 AM

"Archie Roach, Aboriginal musician, songwriter and artist, dead at 66.

His sons have released a statement saying they are "heartbroken" to announce the death of the Gunditjmara (Kirrae Whurrong/Djab Wurrung), Bundjalung Senior Elder, songman and storyteller.

His sons Amos and Eban Roach say Archie died surrounded by his family and loved ones at Warrnambool Base Hospital in Victoria, after a long illness.

"We thank all the staff who have cared for Archie over the past month," his sons said in their statement.

"Archie wanted all of his many fans to know how much he loves you for supporting him along the way.

"We are so proud of everything our dad achieved in his remarkable life. He was a healer and unifying force. His music brought people together."

A private ceremony will follow.

His family have asked the media to please respect the their privacy.

Archie's sons have given permission for Archie's name, image and music to be used, so that his legacy will continue to inspire.

More to come."



https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-30/archie-roach-aboriginal-musician-songwriter-and-artist-dead-at-6/101285620

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Roach


A most beautiful soul, a lovely singer, a man important for all Australians. No doubt there will be more reports coming through soon .....

VALE, Archie.


R-J

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach (1956-2022) Indig. Aust
From: Helen
Date: 30 Jul 22 - 07:44 AM

Thanks R-J.

I'm so sad to see that Archie Roach has passed. I had just read the ABC article and I was going to open a memorial thread.

I bought Mr Roach's first album, Charcoal Lane when it was released in 1990 and I bought the 25th anniversary re-released album which included a second album featuring his songs performed by other musicians.

Always a gentle soul, and he has been a beacon for us for many years.

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach (1956-2022) Indig. Aust
From: Bonnie Shaljean
Date: 30 Jul 22 - 09:44 AM

I'm so sorry to read this, and wish he could have had more years to share his music with us.

I first heard of him (and became a fan) years ago, when one of the guests on Desert Island Discs chose Took The Children Away as one of their must-have recordings. I was hooked from the first note, and by the story it tells.

You can hear it on YouTube, and the comments are interesting too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL_DBNkkcSE

Subject: ADD: Took the Children Away (Archie Roach)
From: Bonnie Shaljean
Date: 30 Jul 22 - 09:46 AM

TOOK THE CHILDREN AWAY
(Archie Roach)

This story's right, this story's true
I would not tell lies to you
Like the promises they did not keep
And how they fenced us in like sheep
Said to us, Come take our hand
Then sent us off to mission land
Taught us to read, to write and pray
Then they took the children away

        Took the children away
        The children away
        Snatched from their mother's breast
        Said it was for the best
        Took them away

The welfare and the policeman
They said, You've got to understand
We'll give to them what you can't give
Teach them how to really live
Teach them how to live, they said
Humiliated them instead
Taught them that and taught them this
Then others taught them prejudice

        You took the children away
        The children away
        Breaking their mothers heart
        Tearing us all apart
        Took them away

One dark day on Framlingham
They came and didn't give a damn
My mother cried, Go get their dad
He came running, fighting mad
My mother's tears were running down
Dad faced up and stood his ground
He said, Touch my kids
And you fight me
But they took us from our family

        Took us away
        They took us away
        Snatched from our mother's breast
        Said it was for the best
        Took us away

They told us what to do and say
Taught us all the white man's ways
Then they split us up again
And gave us gifts to ease the pain
They sent us off to foster homes
As we grew up we felt alone
Acting white yet feeling black
Then one sweet day
All the children came back

        The children came back
        The children came back
        Back where their hearts grew strong
        Back where they all belong
        The children came back

        I said the children come back
        The children come back
        Back where they understand
        Back to their mother's land
        The children come back
        The children come back
        The children come back

Back to their mother
Back to their father
Back to their sister
Back to their brother
Back to their people
Back to their land
All the children come back
The children come back
The children come back
Yes I came back


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_KuEoUDWoU

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach (1956-2022) Indigenous Aust
From: Helen
Date: 30 Jul 22 - 04:27 PM

Thanks Bonnie,

I thought of posting the lyrics to his song Took the Children Away but you beat me to it.

There was another thread about Mr Roach:

Archie Roach at The Fringe (2016)

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach (1956-2022) Indigenous Aust
From: Helen
Date: 30 Jul 22 - 04:38 PM

A tribute to Archie Roach

Archie Roach, pioneering Indigenous singer behind Took The Children Away, offered message of hope and solidarity

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach (1956-2022) Indigenous Aust
From: Amergin
Date: 30 Jul 22 - 04:45 PM

Man, this is heartbreaking news. 66 is way too young.

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach (1956-2022) Indigenous Aust
From: rich-joy
Date: 30 Jul 22 - 06:23 PM

I always loved "Down City Streets", my introduction to the music of Archie and his Beloved, Ruby Hunter (who wrote the song) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RCcs6AOdT0

They were both top favourites with my late Mother.

R-J

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach (1956-2022) Indigenous Aust
From: Waddon Pete
Date: 03 Aug 22 - 10:33 AM

Sad news. He will be greatly missed throughout the world. The Internet links are well worth investigating. I have added his name to the "In Memoriam" thread and send my condolences to all those who love and miss him.

RIP

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach (1956-2022) Indigenous Aust
From: Helen
Date: 03 Aug 22 - 05:15 PM

Thanks Waddon Pete.

Sad news, indeed. A true icon of the Indigenous people of Australia and all Australians.

I posted this in the other thread that I refreshed but this is my favourite song by Archie Roach: I've Lied -

I describe his music and lyrics as deceptively simple but there is a depth of understanding and emotion and ethics in every song he wrote and performed.

If you can watch (the amazing) Anh Do's show called Anh's Brush With Fame he simultaneously interviews and - literally - paints a portrait of different people. Every time the episode in which he interviewed and painted Archie Roach is repeated on TV I watch it again. It provided deep insights into Mr Roach's life, who he really was and where his depth of insights came from, and at the end the painted portrait is revealed.

I just checked the TV guide and it says that there will also be a tribute to Mr Roach and his music on this Saturday's episode of Rage on ABC TV, which will be hosted by King Stingray.

And a show on NITV (National Indigenous Television) tonight: Thursday 4th August at 9:00 pm (30 minutes)

"Black Empire: It is easy to feel alone in the Australian music industry, but for First Nations' musicians, the isolation can be overwhelming, especially when racism and exploitation are thrown into the mix. And despite the fact that Black song has played such a transformative role in Australia's history - from Archie Roach's 'Took the Children Away' to Thelma Plum's 'Homecoming Queen' - it's still seen by music execs as just another marketable asset. But what if it could be different? What if there was hope for something better?"

and another show on ABC TV:

Compass, Sunday 14th August at 7:32 pm (30 minutes)
Archie Roach: Australian singer-songwriter Archie Roach talks about his journey of survival and transformation.

Note: ABC TV describes the show as, "Compass explores the Australian soul - our beliefs, our ethical dilemmas and the changing face of our spirituality. Stories of individuals and communities tackling life's big questions."

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach (1956-2022) Indigenous Aust
From: Joe Offer
Date: 09 Aug 22 - 08:27 PM

A YouTube video posted by Archie Roach before his death:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj2SeUt3M38

And another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqG3cXDRqgA

Obituary video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_KuEoUDWoU

Archie Roach YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn3czuOXaK8sz_PicbexF8A

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach(1956-2022)Indigenous Australian
From: Neil D
Date: 15 Aug 22 - 03:31 AM

Very sad news indeed. Being American I didn't discover this amazing artist til they invented You-tube. The first time I heard "Took the Children Away" I was thinking what a poignant song about the stolen generation, When he switched to first person singular in the third verse and I realized he was now singing about his own life, it hit me like a brick. So powerful.

Subject: Obit: Archie Roach
From: EBarnacle
Date: 04 Sep 22 - 10:32 AM

From the New York Times:


Archie Roach, who lived and sang the Aboriginal blues, dies at 66

His song “Took the Children Away,” inspired by his childhood, shook Australians into confronting a grim era when their government tore apart Aboriginal families.

by Alex Traub




NEW YORK, NY.- One day in 1970, Archie Cox’s high school English class in Melbourne, Australia, was interrupted by a voice from the intercom: “Could Archibald William Roach come to the office?”

An uncanny feeling took hold of 14-year-old Archie: This name, which he had no recollection of, he somehow knew to be his own.

A letter to Archibald William Roach awaited him. It announced that Nellie Austin, a name he had never heard, was his mother, and that she had just died. His father and namesake was dead, too, the letter said. It was signed by Myrtle Evans, who identified herself as his sister.

Within a year, Archie had dropped out of school, abandoned Dulcie and Alex Cox — who, he realized, were his foster parents — and embarked on a quest to discover who he really was.

He spent years without a home. He was imprisoned on burglary charges twice. He tried to kill himself. All the while, he kept bumping into revelations about his family and why he had been taken away from them.

When he left home, there was not a name for what Archie was. But today people like him are considered part of the Stolen Generations — Indigenous Australians seized from their families as children to be assimilated into white society.

This history is known thanks in no small part to Roach, who turned his wayward life into the material for a career as one of Australia’s best-loved folk singers, and who in doing so dramatized the plight of his people.

He died July 30 at a hospital in Warrnambool, a city in southeastern Australia, his sons Amos and Eban announced on his website. He was 66.

The announcement did not cite the cause, but Roach had lung cancer and emphysema, requiring him to perform while breathing through a nasal cannula.

His rise to prominence began in the late 1980s and early ’90s, on the strength in particular of one autobiographical song: “Took the Children Away.” He performed it at Melbourne Concert Hall when he opened for popular Australian rock singer Paul Kelly.

“There was this stunned silence; he thought he’d bombed,” Kelly told The Guardian for a 2020 article about the song’s impact. “Then this wave of applause grew and grew. I’d never heard anything like it.”

Kelly was a producer of Roach’s first album, “Charcoal Lane,” released in 1990. When the two toured together, Aboriginal audience members approached Roach, saying they, too, had been taken from their families.

“He started to realize it was a much broader story,” Kelly said.

The song became a national hit. “When he sings ‘Took the Children Away,’ or any of the tracks on ‘Charcoal Lane,’ it cuts through like great blues should,” Rolling Stone Australia wrote in 1990. “The experience becomes universal.”

In a 2020 article commemorating the 30th anniversary of “Charcoal Lane,” Rolling Stone Australia credited “Took the Children Away” with helping to inspire a landmark 1997 government report estimating that as many as 1 in 3 Indigenous children were seized from their families between 1910 and 1970.

Fourteen more albums followed “Charcoal Lane,” ranging in style from blues to gospel, while Roach’s wife, Ruby Hunter, gained renown of her own as a musical partner of Roach’s, and as a songwriter in her own right.

Aboriginal singer and songwriter Emma Donovan told The Guardian that when she was growing up, “we’d see Archie and Ruby on TV.”

“They were our royalty, our king and queen,” she said.

Archibald William Roach was born in the Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve, in southwestern Australia, on Jan. 8, 1956. When he was older, he recovered a memory of a tall man with long limbs and curly hair reaching toward him while police officers were grabbing him. That man, he realized, was Archibald, his father.

He was raised largely by the Coxes. The implications of the fact that he was Black and that the Coxes were white dawned on Archie only gradually.

His foster father, who was Scottish, longed for his homeland, and at night tears came to his eyes as he sang ballads around the family’s organ. “For years I thought I missed Scotland,” Roach wrote in “Tell Me Why,” his 2019 memoir. “I took great joy in sharing those songs with Dad Alex, because I wanted to be close to him, and I also wanted to understand the power that the songs had over him.”

Cox gave Archie his first guitar. After Archie left home at 15, he never saw his foster parents again.

He took a circuitous path to the return address on the letter he had received, in Sydney; by the time he arrived, his sister had left, without informing her neighbors of her next destination.

A homeless one-armed Aboriginal man named Albert took care of Archie, showing him where in Sydney to sleep free of charge and teaching him how to panhandle. Archie began drinking with his new Aboriginal friends from morning till night.

“I look back now and see the darkness that would have touched every moment unless we numbed it with beer and port and sherry,” he wrote in his memoir. “We were part of an obliterated culture.”

He built a life from openness to chance and the coincidences that ensued. Archie found his family by running into one of his sisters at a bar in Sydney. On a coin flip, he decided to visit the South Australia city of Adelaide, where he met Hunter, who would become the love of his life. She, too, was Aboriginal and had been taken from her parents.

Chance also granted Roach knowledge about his past. In 2013, he stumbled across the first photographs he had ever seen of his father as a boy, and of his grandmother.

He learned that there were dangers in trying to recover tradition. He and his peers sought approval from elders before going on dates with other Aboriginal people, to ensure that they were not related. Taking up the old profession of his father and brother, Roach became an itinerant boxer. He realized in the middle of one bout that he was fighting his own first cousin.

At other times he earned a living by picking grapes, pushing sheep up kill runs at an abattoir and doing metalwork at a foundry. He often lost jobs in a blur of drunkenness. The binges induced seizures. During one bender, overcome with despair at his prospects as a father and husband, he tried hanging himself with a belt. After more than a decade of patience, Hunter left him.

Roach was jolted into sobriety. He found work as a health counselor at a rehab center in Melbourne. He rejoined Hunter and their two sons, and he threw himself into writing songs.

“Like my daddy before me/ I set ’em up and knock ’em down/ Like my brother before me/ I’m weaving in your town,” he wrote in “Rally Round the Drum,” a song from the early 1990s about his boxing days.

“Have you got two bob?/ Can you gimme a job?” he wrote in the 1997 song “Beggar Man.”

“At 15 I left my foster home/ Looking for the people I call my own/ But all I found was pain and strife/ And nothing else but an empty life,” he wrote in “Open Up Your Eyes,” which was not released until 2019.

Complete information about his survivors was not available, but in addition to his sons, Roach and Hunter unofficially adopted 15 to 20 children. The impetus in some cases was simply encountering a young person on the street looking “a little worse for wear,” he told Australian newspaper The Age in 2002.

Hunter died suddenly in 2010 at the family home in Gunditjmara country, in southeast Australia, the ancestral land of Roach’s mother.

As “Took the Children Away” grew in fame, even to the point of overshadowing Roach’s other work, he was often asked whether he got sick of singing it.

“I say, ‘Never,’” he told ABC News Australia in 2019. “It’s a healing for me. Each time I sing it, you let some of it go.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Roach(1956-2022)Indigenous Australian
From: Helen
Date: 04 Sep 22 - 04:26 PM

Thank you, EBarnacle.

I cried again reading that article and it makes me feel good knowing that Mr Roach is recognised in other countries.