The Quiet Achiever
By Tony Hilliers

If mainstream Australia has any awareness of Neil Murray – headline act at this weekend’s Tableland Folk Festival – it is as the man who wrote Christine Anu’s smash hit, My Island Home.

Serious rock fans may well know him as the white fella at the heart of the Warumpi Band, one of the first indigenous bands to make a dent on public conscious.

Those whose interest extends beyond the superficial and capricious world of pop music might recognize Murray as a highly gifted singer – songwriter, with three excellent solo albums (Calm and Crystal Clear, These Hands and Dust) to his credit since 1989. But even they are probably blissfully unaware of the man’s other talents.

Neil Murray, a Northern Territory – based western Victorian, is a national treasure, perhaps one of Australia’s best kept secrets. A few weeks ago, he attended the legendary Edinburgh Festival for the second successive year – not only as a musician and an award winning songwriter (courtesy of APRA ‘Song of the Year’, the aforementioned My Island Home), but also as a successful author and performance poet. During his sojourn at the Scottish culturefest, Murray sold the last copy of his first novel, Sing For Me, Countryman, which has become something of a cult classic for outback travelers.

Sing For Me, Countryman is a book which give the reader a penetrating insight into black-white relationships in Australia. Murray describes it as “auto fictionary”. “It was drawn from my experiences with the Warumpi Band,” he says, adding with a laugh, “I changed the characters’ names to protect the innocent”. Although the novel has sold 4000 copies, despite being “virtually ignored by the literary establishment” (something that pisses him off, you suspect) there is no plan for a second print. But Murray has already applied some thought to a sequel. He has also been hawking around a film screenplay, also loosely based on his life with the Warumpi Band. “It’s about an Aboriginal desert band who turn their back on the international big-time to return to their community,” he relates. “It’s a kind of Commitments set in the outback”. Although Murray believes Desert Stars, to give the film its working title, has commercial appeal, he has yet to find backers prepared to commit the 4 or 5 million dollars he estimates it would take to make the movie. “I haven’t got the time to take it around any more – I’m not good at selling myself”

Murray is currently concentrating on the development of a stage play. He has already written several drafts of King for This Place, and hopes to take the work a stage further during a week on Cape York (at Lockhart River). If all goes according to plan, the play will go into rehearsal early next year and will be performed at Fremantle’s Deckchair Theatre soon after. “It’s not based on music,” says Murray when asked about the play, “it’s abut the transformation of a quintessential Aussie hoon into someone with something approaching sensibilities, someone with soul”. Needlesstosay, it has a strong Aboriginal element.

He also hopes to record another solo album before the year’s out and a CD of poetry. Murray writes and performs poetry and often incorporates spoken word performances at his concerts, as those who saw him on an edition of ABC TV’s Australian Story (which went to air in April of last year) will realize. Neil has been trying for five years to get his poetry published and is now resigned to the fact that he will have to do it himself.

As with poets, Murray also maintains that serious singer/songwriters are not given the respect and recognition their creativity merits. “It’s a legitimate art form, but is not regarded as such. It’s been so much corrupted by the commercial music industry; it doesn’t have the respect here that it does overseas and the art establishment tends to look down its nose at the genre. In a place like Ireland someone who chooses to be a writer or a musician is accorded a lot more respect. I believe they even get some sort of tax exemption.”

Having a hit with My Island Home has been a “modest” help, he indicates. “It has helped me to continue in the business – it has kept my profile up.” In other words, he hasn’t been forced to take what is blandly described by those who think that writers and musos are little more than layabouts, as a “proper job”.

Back in the early ‘eighties, Murray was employed as an outstation worker and teacher in the remote western desert communities of Papunya and Kintore in the Northern Territory. After-work jam sessions with local indigenous musos led to the birth of the Warumpi Band, and after three years the band was sufficiently successful to prompt Murray to give up his ‘day job’. Neil has recently renewed his association with the Warumpies. “We’ve done four gigs this year so far and we look like doing a few more,” he says, alluding to a possible spot on the huge Big Day Out tour in January. There are no plans at this stage, he says, for a fourth album. “We’re a special events’ band these days,” he indicates.

Murray has been in demand on the festival circuit home and overseas, where he has also appeared at the Nukanya Dreaming Festival in Germany. He describes playing in the 1930’s styled Speigeltent at the Edinburgh Festival (sole and with fellow Aussies Kavisha Mazella and Dave Steel) as “a blast”, but says the festival itself is simply “too huge; too unwieldy” to make a big impact. “It’s a good place to network, but you would need to go back five years in a row to make any sort of impact. When you go out in the street to distribute your own flyers; you get at least half-a-dozen back in return from other artists!”

Neil is looking forward to this weekend’s Tableland Festival at Yungaburra, where the atmosphere will be much more intimate. Although he’ll be “throwing in” a couple of spoken word performances, he’ll be concentrating on the songwriting, via two concert spots and a workshop. He enjoys workshopping. “I’ve done a few now and I’m beginning to get a handle on it.” He reports that a significant song to be recorded by the ABC, entitled We’ll Build a Nation, emerged from a recent workshop he conducted at the National Reconciliation Youth Conference in Darwin. “That’s the thing about workshops – they can be quite rewarding. You often get back as much as you give”.

Murray maintains it’s not necessary to be overt to get a message across in a song. “It’s often better to take a smaller view of the bigger issues,” he imparts. “You run the risk of turning people off if you try too hard to get your message across,” he adds. That utterance neatly encapsulates Neil Murray. In many ways he’s the quiet achiever of Australian music. Yet some shrewd judges rate him up there with the likes of Paul Kelly, who, these days, is rightly regarded as a national icon.