Songs of a Defiant Heart
By Martin Flanagan, The AGE, 23 May 2003.

I first met Neil Murray at Yuendumu in 1987. He wasn't disrespectful but I felt his impatience for journalists.

We might not have met again but a few years later I read Sing For Me Countryman, his autobiographical novel based on the history of the Warumpi Band. There are moments when you commit to an artist and that was when I committed to him; I knew I'd read one of the great Australian books of the period. The fact that it is now out of print confirms the paradox of Murray's career: the more he has walked towards the centre of this country the more he has moved out of sight of most Australians.

I subsequently did a story on him in The Age and found him difficult to get on with but in a way I could cop. His art is about precision and, if you're going to represent him, you better be precise. If you want to write crap about him, that's your business, but don't expect him to talk to you in the future.

Murray has seen things most Australians will never see. He was living in the desert of central Australia when there were still old Aboriginal people about who had grown up and lived totally outside the ambit of white culture. Most of them are dead now.

It seems that if whitefellas pursue Aboriginality far enough it eventually leads them back to the place they're from, even if that's at the other end of the country. Dust, the album Murray wrote after returning to Lake Bolac in western Victoria in the mid-'90s, is the first time I connected seriously with his music. Melbourne Town, my favourite Melbourne song, is about a solitary man walking home in the rain on a Saturday afternoon after the footy.

It has one line that I associate with Neil Murray above all others: "This wind that blows knows me now too damn well." The wind features often in his poetry as a symbol of the elemental nature of truth.

Another more jaunty song on Dust about Burke and Wills has a line a mutual friend, Shane Howard, is fond of quoting: "Mr Burke, where did all the blackfellas go?" Without the blackfellas, the explorers are doomed: Burke has shooed them away. When he was a young man, Murray spent a night sleeping out on the bank of Cooper's Creek where Burke died, revolver in hand.

Dust has several hymns to the earth and Native Born, his anthem to Australia, which begins: "Australia, where are your caretakers gone?" Whitefellas with an interest in Aboriginal culture are now ritually ridiculed for being impractical romantics; much of Murray's fascination with Aboriginal culture derives from the fact he grew up on a farm corrupted by salination and instinctively appreciated a culture that lived in balance with such a harsh environment.

Murray's engagement with Aboriginal Australia has lasted now in various forms for 25 years and I am one of those anxiously awaiting the sequel to Sing for me Countryman. It is yet to arrive, although there was a book of poetry, One Man Tribe, published two years ago. What he has kept producing regularly is music.

His previous album, The Wondering Kind, had a lot of grief in it. Many of the lyrics concern a child taken from her father by the courts. That is also the subject of several songs on his new album, Going the Distance, but the music is gentler now, lighter in touch. One of the love songs to his children, Over the Moon, is almost playful.

Murray has always spoken of what he doesn't like and the new album has two sardonic songs, one about the male beer culture, which risks being misunderstood since it is sung in the voice of one of their number. The most beautiful song on the new album, Myall Creek, is about reconciliation. If I said it sounds like running creek water, maybe it's because there's a sense of recoverable innocence about it.

Somewhere along the way, Neil Murray and I became friends although he still thinks I ask too many questions. He wrote the last song on the album, Tom Wills Would, after reading my novel, The Call, about the founder of Australian football, Tom Wills.

Murray and Wills are from the same part of western Victoria, what Aboriginal people would call Tjapwurrung country. Wills's father was the first white settler in the area; Tom Wills spoke Tjapwurrung, knew their games and dances.

Neil Murray's Tom Wills is different to mine. I saw a man destroyed by the weight of contradictions bearing down on him, caught as he was between black and white culture. Murray sees a man who acted from choice throughout, even choosing a self-inflicted death.

His Tom Wills is the man who supports the local team when no-one else will, who won't abide being dropped from the team ("I won't go happy I'll go mean, bugger me age and me cranky ways, I'll send my bones to the contest again"). He's the man who won't bootlick to authority:

"And when the shadows draw long on my final day of play,
Don't drag me to a cold room, don't send me out that way,
Let me run on burning bright with dancing song,
And stun the opposition, as Tom Wills would."

I don't pretend to see Neil Murray's work as critics do. I see him as being like the Tom Wills he sings about, a solitary defiant man who has gone his own way and will do so until the end.
Neil Murray launches Going the Distance at the Corner Hotel in Richmond next Thursday night.