Their songs have been the soundtrack to countless marches for justice, family gatherings and community barbecues. Now, Aboriginal music legends Uncle Archie Roach and Aunty Ruby Hunter have been immortalised in bronze.
The permanent tribute to the acclaimed musical couple was unveiled at Atherton Gardens on Saturday in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, with family and friends travelling from across the country to mark the occasion.
“It was such a beautiful moment,” Amos Roach, their son, told Guardian Australia.
Roach, a Gunditjmara and Bundjalung man, and Hunter, a Ngarrindjeri woman, were both taken during the Stolen Generations, when thousands of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed by government from their families up until the 1970s.
The pair bonded as teenagers, through a shared love of music, after a chance meeting at a Salvation Army drop-in centre when they were sleeping rough on the streets of Adelaide.
The couple went on to become ARIA award-winning singer songwriters, performers and music industry stalwarts, winning critical and commercial acclaim. They built a loving home in Melbourne, raising two sons and three foster children.
Their intensely personal songs expressed the loss of family, culture and homelessness.
“The song ‘Took the Children Away’ and the whole ‘Charcoal Lane’ album, that was very, very big for dad and mum,” Amos Roach says.
“He was a songman carrying his story, carrying his song and a big, powerful message of his country. For somebody that was taken away from his language, his culture, he is very much our cultural song man – and the same with mum, she was a song woman.”
In 1994, Hunter was the first Black woman in Australia to get a recording contract and record her own solo album. Also a talented actress, she appeared in several films and toured with Paul Grabowsky and the Australian Art Orchestra for ‘Ruby’s Story’, a dramatisation of her life.
Amos says the couple’s immortalisation wouldn’t come as a shock to his mother.
“Mum, she was a very smart woman, she could see things, and so she probably wouldn’t surprise her much,” he says.
Local artist Darien Pullen made the statues, and the surrounding park space was designed by Melbourne-based Wailwan and Kamilaroi architect Jefa Greenaway and landscape architect Paul Herzich, a Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri man.
The bronze statue shows Roach standing with his guitar, and his arm wrapped around Ruby who is holding a tambourine.
The likeness was taken from a family photo album, Roach said. “People would have seen them standing just like that at a gig somewhere … we thought that was the way to capture mum and dad.”
Roach said that the unveiling of the statue comes after a difficult time. “We’ve had so much loss the last couple of years. We need something happy and some joy to celebrate, we wanted to get everyone together for some happiness and joy.”
Their music has a special place in the hearts of so many Indigenous families because of the central themes of pain and loss, but also of home and resilience, he said.
“They connect and they relate to the songs.
“They know the stories from other families coming together … they’re family songs, it’s that singing and dancing up of Country and songs from this land.”
