At the time of this cover, after decades in the music industry but just three years into his solo career, Gurrumul had accumulated an array of awards and sold more than half a million copies of his first album, Gurrumul (Skinnyfish, 2008). With the release of his second album Rrakala (Skinnyfish, 2011), his reputation and acclaim were burgeoning. He was touring extensively, collecting rapturous reviews from Switzerland to the United States, Malaysia to Ireland.

There is something soaring and exquisite about his music that invites the words angelic and celestial. The importance of his voice – to borrow Rolling Stone’s epithet – is multifaceted. Gurrumul’s voice and reception are freighted with ideas of cultural bridging and questions about the nature and rules of celebrity – and the place of an anarchist within that culture. The fragility of his high tenor voice reminds me of e.e. cummings’s tender poem ‘somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond’, which evokes the power of such gentle intensity:

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

Gurrumul’s voice reaches towards poetry in a world more comfortable with prose.

The paradoxes of Gurrumul’s success are striking. Blind from birth and deeply introverted as a performer, Gurrumul has become one of the most iconic and successful artists in Australia. While his work extends an exceptional hospitality to non-indigenous audiences, offering access to Yolngu culture and language, he no longer writes English lyrics. In bringing his focus to the textures and languages of Yolngu experience, his work has become increasingly audible, in every sense of the word. His collaborator and close friend Michael Hohnen, creative director of Skinnyfish, speaks of audiences, from the start of Gurrumul’s solo career, responding with tears to the beauty of the music.

‘Gurrumul’s voice reaches towards poetry in a world more comfortable with prose’

Gurrumul’s audience continues to grow and his accolades to multiply. As well as rising Australian and international album sales, he has accumulated music awards including the 2008 ARIA Best Independent Release, and in 2011 two Deadly Awards for Rrakala: Album of the Year and Male Artist of the Year, the latter for the third time. In 2013, ‘Gurrumul: His Life and Music’, conducted and with arrangements by Erkki Veltheim, premièred. Featuring Gurrumul, members of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and with a backdrop of documentary footage of Gurrumul’s life, it was presented at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Vivid Festival. The work coincided with the publication of Robert Hillman’s book of the same name. A live recording was subsequently released, and in 2014 a version of this show was presented at the Darwin Festival and reprised at the Sydney Opera House, this time with the addition of a choir. In May this year, Gurrumul began touring the United States.

Gurrumul performs with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as part of Vivid 2013 (photograph by Prudence Upton)

In 2009 Guy Maestri’s portrait of Gurrumul won the Archibald Prize. Maestri writes about the forty-minute interview he had with his subject, during which he made sketches and studied his face. Like Cook, the word Maestri uses is ‘quiet’. He aimed to evoke a ‘sense of [Gurrumul’s] presence’:

and this determined the nature of the portrait: quiet and strong. I usually work in a very liberal, gestural way but this time I built up the image quietly and slowly with many glazes in an attempt to capture the beautiful quality of his skin. I worked on it for over a month, mostly while listening to his music. I made sure to read the lyrics and understand the meaning of each song. The whole process became quite an emotional experience.

Gurrumul’s brief moment with Maestri is typical of truncated meetings which interlocutors experience as quietly intense. Among the paradoxes of his success is a refusal of conventional Western modes of celebrity: he gives no interviews and eschews the media. The papers might want to know, as David Bowie once put it, ‘whose shirts you wear’, but Gurrumul – the admirable sartorial elegance of his Rolling Stone image notwithstanding – isn’t saying. Instead, he directs his creative energy into his work.

Faced with a trio of powerful people in 2011 – he met Barack Obama and European royals – Gurrumul, according to Sarah Whyte of the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘didn’t say a word’. Whyte added this wry footnote: ‘Yet on the eve of his ARIA performance tonight … Gurrumul was a lot more talkative. “Hello”, he said to The Sun Herald before being whisked off by minders.’ Obama and Gurrumul shared what Hohnen called a ‘very intimate and physical moment’: Obama grabbed Gurrumul’s hand and put his arm around his neck.

‘Among the paradoxes of his success is a refusal of conventional Western modes of celebrity: he gives no interviews and eschews the media’

In place of the words so often expected of him, Gurrumul offers something Hohnen describes as a ‘deafening silence’. Instead of construing his avoidance of talk as a lack, this stripping away of celebrity puffery may be thought of as a radical gesture, at once strange and transformative amid the white noise of a ‘connected’ culture. With Western artists’ lives often disturbed by and encrusted with self-conscious observation of the minutiae of their existence, and with Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame radically expanded to allow anyone to tweet and Instagram to their heart’s content, Gurrumul’s refusal to comment on his work is subversive and refreshing. His deafening silence in a culture averse to such allows a purity of access to the music and a washing away of distraction.

Author Don DeLillo predicted the eclipse of reality by the screen in his novel White Noise (1985), where television determines the importance of an event. When characters fleeing a toxic cloud find that it has rated ‘no film footage, no live report’, they worry that they have gone through the experience for nothing. DeLillo’s depiction of experience rendered invisible and inaudible by the white noise around it – if it isn’t onscreen it vanishes – has been magnified by the multiplicity of screens most of us interact with daily. Jean Baudrillard published a series of provocative articles in 1991, later collected as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. He argued, using ideas of simulacra and the hyperreal, that the First Gulf War may as well have been a carefully scripted media construction. Beyond the filters, inconvenient histories slip away.

Gurrumul provides a rare counterpoint to this, dismantling filters and clutter. What is left is magnificent clarity. And partly because of this refusal of celebrity mores, Gurrumul preserves in his work something larger than the baubles and trinkets of the paparazzi universe, something akin to the clarity of meditation. Instead of conforming to the dictates of Western media, Gurrumul retains an independent voice. He doesn’t tweet, but he does sing.

Yet it is from within rather than beyond Gurrumul’s music that a sense of who he is emerges. In one of his few songs to include English lyrics, ‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)’, he sings of his origins and destination in pared phrases beginning with the stark statement: ‘I was born blind.’

Gurrumul performs at Vivid 2013 (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Gurrumul was born in 1970 in Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island, 300 kilometres east of Darwin off the coast of Arnhem Land, where he grew up as part of the Gumatj clan. Settled by Methodist missionaries in 1942, Galiwin’ku is a traditional community, entry to which requires permission from the Galiwin’ku Council or the Northern Land Council. Its entwined history of long Yolngu traditions and strong Methodist teachings finds its way into the music of the area. Gurrumul was drawn to music from an early age. Among his relatives is musician and teacher Dr M.Yunupingu – the first indigenous Australian school principal, lead singer in Yothu Yindi, and 1992 Australian of the Year. Although they don’t have the same parents, Gurrumul describes him as his older brother.

Elcho Island is associated with a rich musical tradition. The band Soft Sands formed in the year Gurrumul was born and later mentored younger bands, including Yothu Yindi and Saltwater Band, both of which have had Gurrumul as a member. ‘My Island Home’, a song celebrating Elcho Island written by Neil Murray of the Warumpi Band, was made famous when Christine Anu performed it at the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Academic Aaron Corn describes the influence of Soft Sands on other musicians in Arnhem Land. Corn’s work explains that ‘durable canons of hereditary names, songs, dances and designs’ form a crucial part of song composition in the area.

In 2010, ABC Television aired an episode of Australian Story ‘You’re the Voice’, the bones of a documentary-in-progress about Gurrumul by Naina Sen. ‘You’re the Voice’ shows Gurrumul’s work emerging from a strong tradition of Yolngu music within and beyond his family. Gurrumul’s aunt Dhangal Gurruwiwi, one of a number of multilingual relatives shown in the film, remembers his musical beginnings: ‘We used to just sit them in the church and he used to listen to harmonies and guitar people playing and keyboards. And they used to sing joke song with tins drumming and making a stick as a lead guitar and the bass.’

Gurrumul was given his first guitar at the age of six. The left-handed child intuitively played it upside down, a solution shared, with variations, by Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, and Kurt Cobain. There was an early recognition in the community, says Hohnen, that Gurrumul was ‘a little musical genius’.

‘There was an early recognition in the community, says Hohnen, that Gurrumul was ‘‘a little musical genius’’’

Gurrumul learned numerous instruments. His reputation as a drummer led Yothu Yindi’s manager Alan James to invite him to join the band in 1988 when they toured the United States and Canada supporting Midnight Oil. In a scene from ‘You’re the Voice’, his uncle Djunga Djunga Yunupingu recalls: ‘We were worried, because he was blind. But also we thought and said it is the only opportunity for him to carry on his career.’

Gurrumul later resigned from Yothu Yindi. Asked why, he said that he didn’t like playing the drums. Once this was clarified, he stayed on to sing and play guitar and keyboards with the band. He enjoyed being in bands, so much so that when Hohnen heard his voice and suggested he do some solo work, he responded with an emphatic ‘no’. Part of this may have involved his shyness and the possibilities of concealment in collaborative performance. But from Hohnen’s continued encouragement over a number of years came the exploration of solo performance, pared back to spare, gentle acoustic music. From here came Gurrumul in 2008.

‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)’ is the fourth song on Gurrumul and the first to contain English. Its autobiographical lines describe the way music became central to learning – or, as the song says, discovering that his ‘spirit knew’ he had to learn – ‘to readthe world of destruction’. The song’s refrain ‘united we stand / divided we fall / together we’ll stand in solidarity’ bridges lyrics in his original Gumatj language, which, along with lyrics in the Galpu and Djambarrpuynu languages, gives his songs most of their words.

The song’s next verse describes growing up amid mourning for culture. Gurrumul sings of his parents: ‘crying their hearts in confusion’. ‘How can I walk straight and tall?’ becomes the boy’s – and the song’s – central question and within this lies the philosophical centre of the work. From this begins a quest: ‘to bridge and to build Yolngu culture’. The phrase is entered more hesitantly than that, with the humility of ‘trying’: ‘trying to bridge’. But the hesitancy drops away as he sings in his Yolngu languages, describing his lineage:

arranydja dhuwala Batumaŋ
ŋarranydja dhuwala Djarrami
ŋarranydja dhuwala Djeŋarra’
ŋarranydja dhuwala Gurrumulŋa

The song, like all his songs, ripples and soars. There is such range and grace in the voice that his work evokes from reviewers and listeners the most poetic responses.

Peter Garrett, former lead singer of Midnight Oil and federal minister, puts it this way: Gurrumul ‘sings so deeply and sweetly about his connection to family and country, the effect is transcendental’. Music critic Bruce Elder used similar terms in a Sydney Morning Herald review of Gurrumul: ‘It is as though Yunupingu has reached into a wellspring so deep it transcends cultural barriers. He has found an emotional bridge which is genuinely universal.’

‘‘‘How can I walk straight and tall?’’ becomes the boy’s – and the song’s – central question and within this lies the philosophical centre of the work’

Robert Forster, formerly of The Go-Betweens and one of Australia’s most perceptive writers on music, brings an additional term into his discussion of the ‘trans’ or crossing aspect of the work – translation. Yet he uses the term in an effaced way, suggesting that the work transcends translation. In an essay in The Monthly about Rrakala, Forster writes:

Yes, his songs are a mantra of home, family, ancestors, sunsets, mourning and crying – that’s what it says in the English translations of his lyrics. But through his art and the care he takes, he’s able to skip the ‘translation’ stage and go where only great musicians can go – straight to the heart.

Forster draws an illuminating comparison with the music of New York-based Antony Hegarty, singer and member of Antony and the Johnsons. He describes the way each singer – much the same age yet from vastly different backgrounds – seeks redemption in nature. For Gurrumul, Forster suggests, this means the place of his birth, while for Antony it is an idea of the feminine. The key word in his comparison is ‘otherworldly’. This is ‘beyond’ again: the destination of translation, transcendence, and the kinds of metaphysical bridge recurrent in discussion of Gurrumul. Each artist creates ‘an otherworldly record that seems instantly to exist on no other terms but its own’. Both Antony and Gurrumul, Forster suggests, ‘offer up songs sung in angelic voices that chronicle, in surprisingly similar ways, an intuitive, highly sensitive response to their surroundings’.

One well-known depiction of Antony sees him seemingly shy and hunched at the microphone, eyes closed throughout an intense and inward rendering of Leonard Cohen’s ‘If It Be Your Will’. The performance conveys a powerful introversion common to both singers’ work. The intense and prayer-like mood of Cohen’s song is also apposite to the work of each singer as is the idea of the visitation upon a person of the gift of song: ‘If it be your will / to let me sing … from this broken hill / all your praises they shall ring.’

The video of Antony is from the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (directed by Lian Lunson in 2005). He appears self-effacing, his hair falling across his face, his hands obscuring his mouth as he sings. In a voice-over and intercut interview, Cohen describes the song as a response to ‘what struck me as beauty … that curious emanation … I prayed to have some response to the things that were so clearly beautiful.’ Ideas of what beauty might be sear through the performance as they do through Gurrumul’s work, transcending the terms and dynamics of beauty Cohen himself has made central to his song-writing, poetry, and fiction. Forster’s comparison illuminates the quiet, intense work created by artists whose exceptional openness coexists with, and perhaps emanates from, shyness.

British musician Sting, who performed a duet with Gurrumul in 2009, implies an idea of transcendence similar to Forster’s, calling Gurrumul’s voice ‘spiritual … the sound of a higher being’. In terms of bridging and translation, Gurrumul’s televised duet with Sting in Paris for French television show Taratata exemplifies the technical aspects of the intuitive dynamics of Gurrumul’s work.

‘Ideas of what beauty might be sear through the performance as they do through Gurrumul’s work, transcending the terms and dynamics of beauty Cohen himself has made central to his song-writing, poetry, and fiction’

Gurrumul, whose childhood musical education was enthusiastic and eclectic but not subject to the conventional dictates of a mainstream media diet of hits and stars, didn’t know of Sting or the song, ‘Every Breath You Take’. To prepare the song for performance, he asked his uncles on Elcho Island to translate the song into the Gumatj language, but with minutes to go before the performance Gurrumul had not had time to learn the words. He began by singing in the bridge behind Sting in a traditional way, but then created his counterpoint in an intuitive way, singing the second verse in Gumatj, creating his own ‘soothing words’. He proceeded to hum and trade melodies with Sting as the two voices united for the final phrases of the song. Hohnen comments on the transformation of the song: ‘changing what sounds like a sour love-obsessed song to a love poem.’ After the show aired with its duet (and another song by Gurrumul) The Australian reported that Gurrumul entered the French iTunes charts at number nine and Sting’s record reached number ten, an interesting twist on the theme of transcendence.

The duet with Sting took place between Gurrumul’s two solo albums. The first, Gurrumul contains ‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)’ and one other song, ‘Baywara’, which intersperses English lyrics with those of his original languages. His second album, Rrakala contains no English lyrics. So the rare statement of purpose in ‘I Was Born Blind’ – ‘to bridge and to build Yolngu culture’ – positioned as a preface to the two recordings, speaks in English to an Anglophone audience to describe the poetics of a work that would go on immediately to resonate internationally.

As well as travelling well beyond his Galiwin’ku home, the music transcends categories in all sorts of ways. Not everyone perceives this multifariousness positively. In an interview in Paris Match, Hohnen says that Gurrumul was rejected by the World Music Expo WOMEX because his work was ‘not Aboriginal enough’. This is the more benign face of a debate about ideas of indigenous identity. It also connects with discussions about the category of world music having become ‘outdated and offensive’ and used to put non-Western musicians into a ghetto, as Guardian writer Ian Birrell puts it. The idea of what it might mean to be ‘Aboriginal enough’ is explored by other indigenous artists, such as Anita Heiss in her memoir Am I Black Enough For You? (2012). Heiss’s book is in part a response to journalist Andrew Bolt. In 2010 she and eight other indigenous people took Bolt and his publisher, News Ltd, to court in order to defend charges under the Racial Discrimination Act. Bolt had suggested that lighter-skinned indigenous people chose to identify as black purely for personal gain. Bolt and his publisher were found guilty in 2011.

In a musical context, the question implies the existence of certain stereotypes or prescriptions of what indigenous music is allowed to be. Hohnen, perhaps a bit flippantly, describes the ‘music side’ of Gurrumul’s work as ‘mainstream pop’ – ‘more folk pop than world music’. Traditional storytelling is melded with it, producing something new, although, as Corn illustrates, Soft Sands and other bands before Gurrumul were engaged in comparable meldings.

‘As well as travelling well beyond his Galiwin’ku home, the music transcends categories in all sorts of ways’

Fusion and reimagining are ideas circulating throughout Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text (1973), which distinguishes between the text of pleasure and the text of bliss. Texts of bliss are radical, multifarious, sometimes unsettling, and, yes, transcendent:

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

Pleasure, in this context, involves the meeting of expectation. In textual terms, it can only offer texts bordered by what David Buchbinder, talking about similar ideas in the context of gender, calls ‘prescriptions and proscriptions’. Barthes’s texts of bliss involve a poetics of bridging; of translation and transcendence, as well as some of the refusals and silences such as those Gurrumul’s work and public persona enact. Such bridging has the capacity to heal ruptures, but it also points to their existence.

President Barack Obama, Gurrumul, Michael Hohnen, and Prime Minister Julia Gillard, November 2011 (photograph by Howard Moffatt, courtsey of AUSPIC/DPS)

Gurrumul’s emergence as a solo performer took place in an Australia without reconciliation. On Australia Day 2008, a ‘private individual’ commissioned a sky-writer to inscribe the single word ‘Sorry’ in the sky above the festivities celebrating the arrival in Australia of European settlers. A month later, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his Apology which states that ‘the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end’. In apologising to indigenous Australians, Rudd’s speech centres on the image of the bridge. The Apology, as he put it, was:

aimed at building a bridge between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians – a bridge based on a real respect rather than a thinly veiled contempt … Our challenge for the future is to cross that bridge and, in so doing, to embrace a new partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians – to embrace, as part of that partnership, expanded Link-up and other critical services to help the stolen generations to trace their families if at all possible and to provide dignity to their lives.

Rudd’s speech concludes with a call to action. He urges Australians to: ‘seize the day. Let it not become a moment of mere sentimental reflection.‘ Nonetheless, the translation of words into action has been slow. The bridging promised by the Apology remains, at best, hypothetical. As Rudd made clear at the time, the value of the speech would lie in its connection with restorative action.

Gurrumul’s sung or sonic bridging brings to mind the concept of the sound bridge. The sound bridge comes from the language of film to describe sound that carries over from one scene to another. In practice, a sound bridge allows us to hear the sound from the next sequence before we see it. Beyond the technical meaning of the term, the sound bridge does something figurative, too. Literally, a sound bridge creates continuity, but figuratively it also foreshadows connection: an aural telegram from the future. It prophesies or promises the possibility of a scene as yet unseen.

‘Gurrumul’s sung or sonic bridging brings to mind the concept of the sound bridge’

While songs have bridges which connect their components, other artists in other media explore the idea that actual bridges have songs. Jodi Rose is an artist who works with singing bridges. For more than a decade she has travelled the world listening to bridges and recording their ‘music’. Amid discussion of figurative bridgings in the contexts of film, music, and politics, Rose works under real bridges, capturing their songs. She has produced albums featuring her own recordings of bridges and remixes by other artists. In bridges, she writes, lies the spiritual: ‘The city has become our temple, electronic networks our religion, and the inaudible vibrations of the bridge cables are the voice of the divine. The word of the universe soaks through my cochlea into the nerve centres. I am wired to god.’

Her work reaches into the idea of found poetics and the unconstrained songs that exist around us to be captured. But her work also contains the idea of attuning ourselves to what is and isn’t audible. In this very orientation is something radical and fresh, pertinent to Gurrumul’s music, of what we might listen to, or for. Critic Douglas Khan comments of Rose’s work: ‘The bridge can no longer pass itself off as anything but a church.’

Another artist of the bridge is Brisbane poet Samuel Wagan Watson, the first indigenous poet to win the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, for his poetry collection Smoke-Encrypted Whispers (2005), which slowly revolves around images of water, while its individual poems are swift and compact. In one of the most striking poems, ‘Jetty Nights’, a jetty is imagined as ‘an arm that stretched over the mud and sharks’ and later becomes, for the children in the poem ‘the clatter of dead wood / our lifeline home’.

A jetty’s arm is the first part of a bridge. To bridge is to extend such an arm, and this is what Gurrumul’s music does and what was promised in Rudd’s 2008 speech. The arm across dark water is a potent symbol of reconciliation as a possibility, not to be taken for granted; it holds the idea of a ‘future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility’. While Rudd acknowledged that no words can erase past injuries and atrocities, the speech ‘is symbolic, and yet also has to be more than this: symbolism is important but, unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance, it is little more than a clanging gong’.

Gurrumul follows a line of indigenous singer-songwriters before him who have sung more overtly about reconciliation in English. Kev Carmody, Archie Roach, and Ruby Hunter, all members of the Stolen Generation, are prominent examples. Carmody’s whimsical line in ‘Travellin’ North’ that ‘human constructs are just a passin’ phase’ captures the drift of his passionate work, but each has written unflinchingly about issues such as Aboriginal deaths in custody, land rights, and the Stolen Generations.

Each of these artists has collaborated with indigenous and non-indigenous musicians. Carmody’s ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’, about land rights and reconciliation, was co-written with Paul Kelly and has been covered by numerous artists, including Roach. In 2008 the song was performed by a group of artists with samples from Kevin Rudd’s Apology in a collaboration organised by online activist group GetUp to raise funds for indigenous projects.

‘Gurrumul follows a line of indigenous singer-songwriters before him who have sung more overtly about reconciliation in English’

Perhaps the most famous example is the song ‘Treaty’ by Yothu Yindi, fronted by Dr Yunupingu and of which Gurrumul was then a member. When Prime Minister Bob Hawke visited the Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory in 1988, Northern and Central Land Councils chairmen Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Wenten Rubuntja presented him with the Barunga Statement, framed with traditional painting. The Statement urged the government to acknowledge indigenous land rights and to create a treaty. Hawke responded emotionally and promised that such a treaty would be created by 1990. When 1990 passed, ‘Treaty’ was written. As Dr Yunupingu put it: ‘The intention of this song was to raise public awareness about this so that the government would be encouraged to hold to his promise.’

The song had two film clips. The second is a remix by British band Filthy Lucre, made without the involvement of Yothu Yindi, which became an international hit. The first clip shows images of Bob Hawke at the Barunga Festival variously throwing spears, laughing, playing the didgeridoo, and speaking with what looks like earnest conviction. These images are shown on tele-vision screens, to reflect the song’s opening line: ‘Well I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television.’ The images look confected. The clip suggests that Hawke’s promise, like Baudrillard’s Gulf War, may never have happened. And yet, at the same time, it is evidence of the making of promises, however flimsy, ‘words are easy, words are cheap’. These televisual images are interspersed with scenes of kids playing, tribal dance and the band performing, all of which are vital and colour-saturated. And in a fleeting moment in the clip, a twenty-year-old Gurrumul can be seen playing keyboards and singing.

Dr Yunupingu said: ‘Though it borrows from rock ’n’ roll, the whole structure of ‘‘Treaty’’ is driven by the beat of the djatpangarri that I’ve incorporated in it. It was an old recording of this historic djatpangarri that triggered the song’s composition.’ Djatpangarri is a style of music and dancing dating back to the 1930s and performed by Yolngu men. It is light-hearted and informal, unlik more ceremonial musical modes.

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:

I ask those non-indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you. I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive.

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.

‘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’

‘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’.

‘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’

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.’

‘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’’’

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 début 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.’

‘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?’

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:

So, he approaches audiences with the understanding he’s not going to please everyone. He doesn’t want to please everyone. We were advised a couple of years ago, by a very successful producer, that Dewayne needed to change his repertoire and sound if he wished to be commercially successful – that his chosen style really wasn’t going to make it big with the audiences who bought tickets, CDs and downloads. But he performs because he loves his music and has no desire to be a ‘manufactured’ success.

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.

In considering the engineering of bridges in Gurrumul’s work, two other aspects deserve attention. One is the collaboration between Hohnen and Gurrumul. The gentle and intuitive relationship between the self-effacing Hohnen and Gurrumul is evident.

Hohnen, as the number of mentions of his name here suggests, is a crucial figure in the story of Gurrumul’s success. Almost twenty years ago, at the height of his own musical career, touring with orchestras, jazz bands, and independent band The Killjoys, Hohnen, who is a couple of years older than Gurrumul, left Melbourne and set off with his double bass in the back of his car. This was in response to the hollowness and egocentricity in the Western music industry. Hohnen worked as a lecturer at the then Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University), teaching indigenous musicians and later establishing Skinnyfish Music.

Gurrumul and Michael Hohnen perform at Vivid, 2013 (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Hohnen’s encouragement of Gurrumul’s talent and his careful directing of his career underpins Gurrumul’s success. As Hohnen mentions in ‘You’re the Voice’, he is mindful of the ethical complexity of a white man speaking for a black man. My own observation of Hohnen in concert with Gurrumul is that he is an enabler, doing what needs to be done so as to foreground his talent.

The second is the broader sweep of music courses and initiatives in improving the lives of indigenous Australians. In the Northern Territory, Hohnen, again, has been a key player in this transformation. Martin Jarvis, musician and academic at Charles Darwin University, whose work has attracted an Order of Australia award, writes about the work done through the University, The Northern Territory Indigenous Music Education program, and the Darwin Symphony Orchestra. Jarvis has lived in the Northern Territory for more than two decades and has seen the conditions in which many indigenous people in the area are living as a result of European settlement. He writes: ‘I’m now tempted to believe that there is an unspoken and deliberate plan to carry out a form of genocide through simple non-action on the part of government.’ He argues that ‘seeking better social justice outcomes for Australia’s Indigenous people demands that we examine different ways in which we can implement educational outcomes’ and prefaces a paper on the subject with the deceptively simple comment by Yolngu musician G. Rrurrumbu, founder of the Warumpi Band, that ‘we learn through song and dance’. The point, though, is essential. Indigenous communities do not learn through writing down their history, so Western education needs to find ways of being more hospitable to indigenous students if it is to have anything to offer them.

‘As Hohnen mentions in ‘‘You’re the Voice’’, he is mindful of the ethical complexity of a white man speaking for a black man’

In a paper whose title invokes the idea of active bridging – ‘Music, Dance & Culture – Building Bridges & Opening Doors’ – Jarvis outlines the delivery of contemporary music programs in indigenous communities of the Northern Territory, starting with the Northern Territory University and growing to extend into high schools through the Northern Territory’s Education Department. While the programs’ broader initial aim was the linking of ‘contemporary music with traditional ceremony to give a unique voice to indigenous music’, he quotes Hohnen as saying that developing income for the communities is crucial.

Alongside these achievements other results have emerged. Jarvis includes a letter from Judith Hummerstoll, remote area nurse at the Willowra Health Centre. She comments that communities receive ‘many well-intentioned visitors and programs which fail to meet their stated objectives’. The music programs, though, have lifted social and emotional well-being as a result of increased self-esteem, productivity, and purpose.

Students performed with the Darwin Symphony Orchestra, which has a long history of interaction with indigenous musicians. One involved song-man Don Weluk and brass teacher at Maningrida Secondary College Scott Trenwith writing and performing material for the brass ensemble and the Orchestra, with Don as vocalist. Another was the collaboration of the Maningrida’s brass ensemble with the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Simone de Haan. The resulting fusion of traditional and Western music went on to be performed at the Fusions World Music Conference in Canberra.

Fusions and reciprocal bridgings in terms of translation through music and performance are central to the work of Sri-Lankan-born Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. Ondaatje has made ideas of a poetics of bridging central to his work. His novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987) begins with literal bridge-making with some of his characters building the Bloor St Viaduct. Ondaatje shuffles the key figurative elements of the novel so that translation, masquerade, fusion, and metaphor itself move to stand in for one another like the complicated dances he describes throughout his work.

One of the key bridge-builders, Nicholas Temelcoff, is new to Canada and to the English language. His dreams are filled with translation. Temelcoff himself is ‘a spinner … he links everyone’. His dreams are a tumult of change and bridging: ‘In the dreams trees changed not just their names but their looks and character. Men started answering in falsettos. Dogs spoke out fast to him on the street.’

‘‘‘I’m now tempted to believe that there is an unspoken and deliberate plan to carry out a form of genocide through simple non-action on the part of government.’’’

Ideas of translation in Ondaatje’s work, and in Gurrumul’s, as Robert Forster suggests, move quickly beyond the most literal meaning of the term. While translation is most obviously the rendering of something into another language, its secondary meanings open up other layers: change or conversion to another form or appearance; transformation, the idea of a translation of thought into action. Implicit in this is the act or process of translating, and the state of being translated. At its heart are ideas of fluidity and about the dynamic nature of identity. The word comes from the Latin word: translatus: past participle: conveyed, transferred. And since language is itself a translation of object into word and migration involves a translation of self, ideas of a space beyond translation, forged anew by bridgings, are implicit in it.

This is something suggested by comparisons of Gurrumul’s work with that of Icelandic band Sigur Rós, many of whose lyrics are in an invented language, Hopelandic. But Gurrumul’s languages are not invented, though the music has a capacity to go beyond semantic meanings into something higher. In this, Gurrumul is perhaps closer to Romanian poet Paul Celan, whose postwar poetry moved away from frameworks of narrative clarity towards a poetics of the ineffable. Paradoxically, in doing so his work perhaps comes close to responding to Adorno’s dictate ‘after Auschwitz, no poetry’.

While translation comes from the Latin word for conveying, its Greek counterpart is metaphor. Like translation, metaphor has an obvious aspect – saying one thing is another – while its imaginative implications revolve around the understanding that, actually, one thing is not another. Metaphor invites complicity – let’s imagine this together – and requires an imagining not unlike a form of empathy. It asks not ‘what is it like to be you?’ but ‘what if this were that’, or even: ‘What if I were you?’

It is for reasons such as these that, as one of the protagonists in Ondaatje’s novel says: ‘You reach people through metaphor.’ If metaphor is a kind of translation, Gurrumul’s music invites a metaphorical bridge back into Yolngu culture, rather than moving further away – taking Yolngu experience into the twittering Western world of celebrity. It is important, then, to look for a Yolngu metaphor to express this.

There is a specific metaphor from Yolngu culture that gives an indigenous perspective on the idea of bridging. Rather than going over water, though, it is about the merging of waters. I discovered the idea of ganma in the work of Karl W.M. Neuenfeldt, who uses it to describe ‘the specific message Yothu Yindi is striving to broadcast to non-Aboriginal Australia. That message is that there are Aboriginal methods for melding the disparate worlds of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians and one such method is ganma understanding, mediated through music in this case.’ He provides a succinct definition of ganma via the educational program ‘Ganma’, or ‘Both Ways’, at Yirrkala in the Northern Territory, which describes its namesake in these terms:

Ganma is a metaphor describing the situation where a river of water from the sea (Western knowledge) and a river of water from the land (Yolngu knowledge) mutually engulf each other on flowing into a common lagoon and becoming one. In coming together the streams of water mix across the interface of the two currents and foam is created at the surface so that the process of ganma is marked by lines of foam along the interface of the two currents.

Ganma is made in whirling water. Fiona Magowan writes about the introduction of ganma ideas to balanda (non-Yolngu) people:

If flowing water carries ‘feelingful’ emotion, it is because the aqua-aesthetics of Yolngu ancestral waters embody identities and personalities. Where these waters come together, an interaction of different personalities is implied in their ebb and flow. And a conjunction of personalities is also a conjunction of groups and kinship relations. Each water has its own flavor, design, and temperament held in its names, which are ritually intoned.

‘Treaty’ contains a dream of ganma:

Now two rivers run their course
Separated for so long
I’m dreaming of a brighter day
When the waters will be one

In Gurrumul’s music, metaphor and translation are part of a bridging that offers transcendence. His own musical re-imaginings create texts of bliss, the effects of which are heightened by the scaffolding of silence. In the context of a reconciliation-in-progress, Gurrumul’s music is a sound bridge that shows a way forward into the possibilities of ‘both ways’ and fusion.

 

References

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text, Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Indiana University Press, 1995.
Birrell, Ian. ‘The term ‘‘world music’’ is outdated and offensive’, The Guardian, 23 March 2012.
Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties: Re-Producing Masculinity, Allen & Unwin, 1998.
Corn, Aaron. Reflections & Voices: Exploring the Music of Yothu Yindi with Mandawuy Yunupingu, Sydney University Press, 2009.
Corn, Aaron with Neparrŋa Gumbula. ‘Ancestral precedent as creative inspiration: The influence of Soft Sands on popular song composition in Arnhem Land’ in Graeme Ward & Muckle, Adrian (eds), The Power of Knowledge, The Resonance of Tradition (Electronic publication of papers from the AIATSIS Conference September 2001, AIATSIS, 2005).
DeLillo, Don. White Noise, Viking, 1985.
Elder, Bruce. ‘Gurrumul’, album review, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 April 2008.
Forster, Robert. ‘To the Heart: Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s ‘‘Rrakala’’’, The Monthly, April 2011.
Heiss, Anita, Am I Black Enough For You?, Random House, 2012.
Khan, Douglas. Excerpt from review of ‘Sound in Space’ at Sydney’s MCA Published in Realtime 8, August-September 1995, on the Singing Bridges website.
Maestri, Guy. ‘Archibald Prize 2009 interview’ on the Art Gallery of NSW website.
Magowan, Fiona. ‘Ganma: Negotiating Indigenous Water Knowledge in a Global Water Crisis’, Cultural Survival Quarterly 26.2 (Summer 2002) Nurturing the Sacred in Aboriginal Australia.
Rudd, Kevin. ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’, Parliament of Australia, 13 February 2008.
Shedden, Iain. ‘Sting's Encounter with Gurrumul’, The Australia, 5 December 2009.
Wagan Watson, Samuel. Smoke-Encrypted Whispers, University of Queensland Press, 2004.
Whyte, Sarah. ‘Music the language to lower all barriers’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 2011.
Yunupingu, Mandawuy. Discussion of ‘Treaty’ on the Yothu Yindi website.
Yunupingu, Galarrwuy. ‘Tradition, Truth & Tomorrow’, The Monthly, December 2008.
‘You're the Voice’, ABC Australian Story, 25 October 2010.

Albums and songs

‘Beds Are Burning’, by Midnight Oil, Diesel and Dust, 1987.
‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’, by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly, Bloodlines, 1993.
‘Let My Children Be’, by Ruby Hunter, Thoughts Within, 1994.
‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’, by Kev Carmody, Pillars of Society, 1989.
‘Took the Children Away’, by Archie Roach, Charcoal Lane, 1990.
‘Travellin’ North’ by Kev Carmody, Images and Illusions, 1995.
‘Treaty’, by Mandawuy Yunupingu, Gurrumul Yunupingu, Paul Kelly, Stuart Kellaway, Cal Williams, Milkayngu Mununggurr, and Banula Marika, Yothu Yindi, Tribal Voice, 1991.

My deep thanks to the Sidney Myer Fund, Peter Rose, Amy Baillieu, Mireille Juchau, Samuel Wagan Watson, Martine Delaney, Adrian Cook, John Turner, and Dean Biron – and especially to Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.

The ABR Fellowships, funded by private patrons and philanthropic foundations, are intended to generate fine, incisive writing and to broaden the magazine’s content. This is the second ABR Sidney Myer Fund Fellowship we have offered, and we are most grateful to the Sidney Myer Fund. Each Fellowship is worth $5,000.