The Best Australian Essays 2015 (39 page)

The words – a mixture of English and Gumatj languages – mourn the hollowness of words without action, like Rudd's ‘clanging gong'. But as the centrality of djatpangarri suggests, the song also celebrates traditional Yolngu culture. ‘Treaty' was written in collaboration with members of Yothu Yindi, including Gurrumul, as well as Paul Kelly and members of Midnight Oil.

The song is a passionate cry for reconciliation and Indigenous land rights. Although Midnight Oil's lyricists include lawyers Peter Garrett and Rob Hirst, it is a bit unclear what action the song proposes. Its stark syllables variously mandate that non-Indigenous Australians ‘pay the rent' or ‘give it back', quite different possibilities in legal terms. The band's most famous performance of this song was at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. The musicians wore black suits emblazoned with the word ‘Sorry'. The suits were revealed only moments before the performance in a profoundly subversive image, given the context of the ‘history wars' and the Howard government's refusal to apologise.

If Rudd's Apology seven years later was an arm over dark waters, its reach, as Rudd himself foreshadowed, is dependent on continued flexibility. Embedded in the Apology is the idea of empathy, and it includes a direct appeal to non-Indigenous Australians resistant to apology:

This kind of imagining – this empathy – is central to any reconciliation. Imagining another's life is something that documentary portraiture and life writing have in common. Naina Sen's documentary explores and exemplifies some complex problems of empathy, and specifically about bridges and bridging in relation to Gurrumul. Portraiture – Cook's, Maestri's or Sen's – at its best enacts a kind of bridging.

But central to ‘You're the Voice' is the idea of Gurrumul's resistance to, and discomfort with, conventional forms of celebrity. As Neil Finn, musician and former member of Split Enz and Crowded House, points out in his introduction to the episode, Gurrumul has never spoken to the media. While Sen's film may have initially hoped to change that, it instead goes on to explore Gurrumul's silence. Sen's work seeks to revise the terms of life writing so as to consider what it is that Gurrumul's relationship with the various forms of portraiture might reveal.

‘You're the Voice' highlights Gurrumul's intense opposition to that process and opens up life writing's complex ethical questions about capturing someone who may not want to be caught. It recalls the tenth rule in Hermione Lee's tongue-in-cheek account of the rules of life writing: ‘There are no rules.'

Yet some insist on rules. In a deeply disturbing scene in ‘You're the Voice', Gurrumul is brought to a television studio where Sharon O'Neil interviews him in a blaze of lights and cameras. When he does not respond to her questions, she lectures him: ‘You're going to have to get used to this … you're going to have to learn to enjoy it.' The invasive nature of the comment and its terse delivery reveal a kind of covert – or perhaps not so covert – violence enacted by the media in relation to those considered its subjects. It is an ugly moment underlining questions of respect. Would this journalist have used the same tone to speak to Barack Obama, Sting or Michael Hohnen?

The moment recalls an exchange in Sylvia Plath's final radio interview in 1962, where her status as an American woman frames a condescending kind of dialogue. First, the terms of the conversation are settled. She is to be the American poet ‘straddling the Atlantic' (‘That's a rather awkward position, but I'll accept it'), while her interviewer, Peter Orr, is polite-with-a-hint-of-frost-British. During the interview, Plath talks about the ‘old role' of the poet ‘to speak to a group of people; to come across'. Orr corrects her, saying: ‘To
sing
…' ‘To sing to a group of people. Quite,' Plath echoes politely, evidently aware of the power struggle. The idea of an obligation to ‘come across' resonates in the case of Gurrumul, while the notion of learning to enjoy something implies a transgression of instinct and intuition. Things we might learn to enjoy, at the benevolent end of the spectrum, include olives and bitter chocolate. But the phrase has overtones of darker kinds of coercion.

In ‘You're the Voice', Hohnen describes Gurrumul as having something ‘intangible, mysterious, enigmatic … I've never met anyone who holds so much information in his head but doesn't let a skerrick of it out unless they mean to.' He says that Gurrumul, having experienced a taste of fame during his time with Yothu Yindi, ‘values his privacy and family over fame' and ‘doesn't want people to see him'.

Western culture, arguably, overvalues being seen and appearances to an increasingly skewed extent. New media enable more kinds of seeing, so that hearing without seeing is becoming rare. While sound might be a way of correcting and transcending this, our culture hungers to look at people, including those who offer a way beyond the visual.

Yet, paradoxically, deeper modes of portraiture may offer just such a way beyond the visual. A good portrait can provide a response to this question: ‘What is it like to be you?' suggests Robert Dessaix in ‘Caught You! Reflections on Being Painted', an essay about having his portrait painted by Robert Hannaford. Dessaix argues that if there is a way of capturing ‘what it's like to be you', such capture will be provisional and mobile: ‘a kind of endless “becoming” or changing connection with the world, experienced uniquely'.

Mobility and provisionality are ideas circulating through work by Virginia Woolf, one of the most perceptive commentators on the difficulties of life writing. Her essay ‘A Sketch of the Past' begins by conjuring an idyllic childhood memory, but soon confronts an absence. ‘Memoirs', she writes, ‘leave out the person to whom things happened.' She writes about the futility of life writing; the self as ‘a fish in the stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream'.

Dessaix notes a related illusion when observing visitors to a portrait gallery. He finds hocus-pocus in the collective cries: ‘“There's Nick Cave!” or “That's Kylie!” Well, no, it's not. It's actually dabs of pigment on a piece of stretched canvas.' Musing through selves, essences, souls, written and painted portraits, and homing in on ideas of significant moments – like Woolf's ‘moments of being' – and the transcendent, he arrives at the idea of wonder. Wonder springs ‘from a half-dark place beyond your understanding, it pierces you unexpectedly and incomprehensibly, like sorcery or a religious vision, leaving you half-bereaved, nostalgic for the instant you were first transfixed, while at the same time hankering for a reasonable explanation of what you've seen'. What great portraits do, Dessaix suggests, has to do with ‘the rhythmic articulation of space that breathes life into these paintings, rather than any easy
aide-mémoire
likeness to living people'.

Dessaix's idea of an easier version of
aide-mémoire
portraiture gets at what underpins criticisms of Gurrumul's reserve. Sharon O'Neil is not alone in identifying reserve as a deficiency. Two contrasting reviews of Gurrumul's London performance at the Barbican in 2011 illustrate this.

The first, by Chris Mugan for
The Independent
, cites a vox pop of Indigenous audience members, one of whom describes Gurrumul as ‘making a bridge, telling our stories; it's very important for us'. For Mugan, an ‘easygoing humour' pervades the performance through Hohnen's repartee and creates an intimate atmosphere. He gives the example of Hohnen's telling the audience that, like Bob Dylan, Gurrumul doesn't talk to his band. ‘Sure enough, during the next song, a gruff voice shouts: “Yo! Take it away boys.” With smart comic timing, Gurrumul breaks his silence.'

Robin Denselow reminds
Guardian
readers that he predicted Gurrumul's success when he saw him perform two years earlier. But, he suggests, ‘he hasn't quite fulfilled his extraordinary potential'. The central compliment of his review is a large one, but it defines Gurrumul's success in terms of harnessing Western musical modes: ‘He's still a spine-tingling performer, with a remarkable, soulful voice and the ability to write powerful melodies that are accessible to western audiences because they sound so much like western folk, soul or gospel, with the occasional dash of reggae.' Then he qualifies this. Denselow feels that
Rrakala
‘lacks sufficient variety' and ‘doesn't have the emotional power of that remarkable debut'. The cause, for Denselow, is ‘a matter of presentation'. He uses the idea of a refusal. ‘Gurrumul refuses to talk to his audience.' He argues that ‘Hohnen's comments about the singer's silence emphasised his lack of contact, both with his band and his audience'. For Denselow, this is exacerbated by an absence of the translations that were provided above the stage for the touring of
Gurrumul
. He is more enthusiastic about the finale, a performance of ‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)' ‘with the singer at last communicating fully with his audience, in English'. The assumption of a white, Anglophone audience is striking.

Mugan is happy about the absence of stage surtitle translations, writing: ‘This is not Italian operetta.' He paraphrases Hohnen's comment to the audience that ‘Whether … Gurrumul is singing about crocodiles or fish, the real subject matter is his visceral need to connect to nature and the place he is from.'

In Australia, Bruce Elder, like Denselow, followed up a rapturous welcome to the debut album with more conditional praise for his second tour. Awarding one of Gurrumul's two shows at the Sydney Opera House in August 2011 three stars out of five, he remarks: ‘If there has been one criticism of Gurrumul, it has been that his melancholy songs lack a certain light and shade. While no two songs are the same, collectively they create a certain slow-burning, emotionally intense ambience as though the singer is carrying the pain and sadness of his people.'

Why should Gurrumul's expression of the sadness and pain of his people be read negatively? What kind of language might Indigenous Australians be allowed, under such restrictions? Elder's praise is for happier reworkings of the songs – a joyful up-tempo reading of ‘Gathu Mawula' and countrified and rock interpretations of other songs. Yet he notes that ‘part of Gurrumul's importance lies in the way he has opened the Indigenous music scene to a quieter, more sophisticated sound'. His real praise comes at the end of the piece, when he writes about Gurrumul's supporting act, Indigenous singer-songwriter Dewayne Everettsmith: ‘a uniquely gifted singer with hints of the soul of Marvin Gaye and the sunny beauty of Johnny Nash. His short opening set, full of memorable songs and glorious harmonies, was spellbinding.'

I was at that performance. An unsettling ambivalence was apparent. Excitement was high and such was the shouted ‘love' for Gurrumul that Michael Hohnen eventually replied with the affectionate riposte: ‘He's not the messiah, you know!' This and other related quips – the kind of ‘easygoing humour' Mugan experienced at the Barbican performance a few weeks later – probed the complexities of Gurrumul's reception. Hohnen's wry commentary shows an awareness of the limitations of the pop-star reception Gurrumul receives.

When Everettsmith opened the night, his energy and talent were evident. Everettsmith radiates the very openness and engagement with audiences that Gurrumul is chided for lacking. Yet a rustle of derision and a hostile shout greeted him: ‘Where's Gurrumul?' There was a long, uneasy pause. Everettsmith must have considered walking offstage. Then he said words to the effect ‘I love you too'. The musicians were given encouragement in the form of loud applause from other audience members, but this did not obscure an ugly moment, with its sense as to how provisional and conditional the kind of respect offered to Gurrumul might be.

I thought of Bob Dylan's unforgettable riposte ‘I don't
believe
you … you're a
liar
!' in response to shouts of ‘Judas!' at a concert at Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966 after he ‘went electric' in 1965. On that occasion Dylan did address his band, adding: ‘Play it LOUD!' But the terms of the argument weren't quite the same.

What kind of person calls out from the dark belly of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall? It sounded like a middle-aged woman. The shout followed Everettsmith's description of his mother's inability to care for him and his subsequent adoption (one of the ‘startlingly blunt stories he tells between songs', as his manager, Martine Delaney, puts it; Everettsmith does not conceal the fact that his background has been traumatic). The heckle was violent enough, but its timing was heartless.

When I asked Delaney about the incident, she talked about his difficult background, and the resilience this has built in him:

Delaney notes that other members of the group were a bit thrown. ‘Sadly for the heckler,' she adds, ‘the guys recovered from that incident quite rapidly because of the much louder and consistent positive feedback they received from everyone else.' But the moment carried the reminder that bridges are subject to destruction. Their careful engineering may be destroyed by bombing or natural disasters. They may prove structurally weak in some way, susceptible to breakage. There is a two-way balance required for bridging, and the outstretched arm of a jetty like Wagan Watson's invites and needs a reciprocal gesture.