Remembering Ruby Hunter (1955-2010)
March 12, 2010Ruby Hunter’s sudden death at the age of 55 on February 18 leaves a hole in the heart of Australian music. By Jonathan Alley
I only ever spoke to Ruby Hunter once. It was 1994: I was at an inner city pub in Melbourne where I was staging an event for The Melbourne Fringe Festival. Hunter was due to sit on the panel I’d organised, but was nowhere to be seen. The phone rang a short while later: a cackling warmth floated down the phoneline. “I don’t think I’m going to make it today, love. It’s a bit far: I’m driving 500km back to Melbourne from out the back of South Australia,” she said from across the country.
“A bit far?” I laughed quietly to myself later. The thought that occured to me afterward was that Hunter didn’t just know the land, it was in her. “I was born in South Australia in the Riverland at a billabong. When I was born, I was rubbed in the ashes and held up to the moon. It was up at The Coorong and that’s where I remember the music there ‘cause we used to have family nights and have a sing-along,” she told ABC TV’s Talking Heads in 2008.
“We were supposed to really actually forget about that lifestyle. But it’d come back to me in song. I was eight years of age when I was taken from The Coorong.” Hunter was a member of the Stolen Generations, handballed from foster family to foster family, ending up on the streets aged 16, where she met a young man named Archie Roach, a story later told in the widely acclaimed TV documentary Archie and Ruby. Hunter’s music resonated with her life: all of tragedy and triumph, humour and pride, love and pain. There’s no artifice in the music of Ruby Hunter; if you listen to Thoughts Within or Feeling Good, it’s a completely pure experience.
Those who saw Ruby’s Story, the live show that told the tale of her life through music and the spoken word, in collaboration with Archie Roach and Paul Grabowsky, will know the weight of what she sang from her heart. When Kevin Rudd gave the national apology in 2007, Ruby Hunter and Archie Roach sang Took the Children Away together in Melbourne’s Federation Square. It was the performance for the day this country stopped and thought.
Ruby Hunter was a Ngarrindjeri woman. She is survived by her lifelong partner Archie Roach, and her sons Amos and Eban.
