Archie Roach, who has died aged 66, was an Indigenous Australian singer-songwriter, guitarist and writer whose most famous song, Took the Children Away, described his own painful life story, and in the process helped educate Australians about one of the darkest chapters in their history. It won him two Aria Awards (Australia’s equivalent of a Grammy) and an International Human Rights Achievement Award, and established him as one of Australia’s most distinguished and celebrated performers, who would go on to tour alongside Bob Dylan , Billy Bragg and Patti Smith.
He was one of the stolen generations of Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their families by government agencies for almost a hundred years, under the laws and policies of the protection era. Aboriginal children were placed in homes and orphanages, or raised by white foster families. The goal was to assimilate them into the white community, reject their heritage and language and adopt white culture. Through her songs and later her powerful 2019 memoir Tell Me Why, Roach revealed the suffering these policies inflicted on Aboriginal families for generations.
Born in Mooroopna, northern Victoria, and brought up at Framlingham Mission near Warrnambool, south-west Victoria, he was taken from his parents, Nellie Austin and Archie Roach Sr, at the age of “three or four”, together with his two sisters, and raised in Melbourne by a white family, Alex and Dulcie Cox, who had moved to Australia from Scotland. They were told that his parents had died in a house fire and that, he said, they were “blameless as far as I’m concerned. They were used.”
Growing up as a member of the Cox family, Roach listened to his adoptive father’s record collection, which included albums by the Ink Spots, Nat King Cole and Mahalia Jackson. He went to church and here he heard a woman playing a Hank Williams song on the guitar. Roach decided that he too would become a guitarist.
Remembering Archie Roach through his songs – video obituary
His life changed dramatically when he was 15, when he received a letter from a blood sister, Myrtle, then living in Sydney, whom he had never heard of until then. She told him that his real mother, Nellie, had just died and that he was one of seven siblings. A few months later he left home on a quest to track them down, taking his guitar with him.
He was lucky to survive. It took time for him to find his sister and, as he recounted in his memoirs, he spent years as an alcoholic, drinking in the parks and ‘buida’ (the empty buildings) of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. He suffered from epilepsy, spent time in hospital and prison, was charged with vagrancy, and attempted suicide after a failed attempt to dry himself out. But at the age of 17, at a Salvation Army center in Adelaide, he met another homeless Indigenous Australian teenager with a story similar to his, which would change his life.
Ruby Hunter was another child of the stolen generations, and a musician too. They married and became inseparable partners, but, as the mother of his two children, Hunter threatened to leave if she did not stop drinking. “It changed my life,” she said.
Roach began working at a homeless shelter while concentrating on music and songwriting. He wrote Take the Children Away after being encouraged by an uncle to write about his own experiences. He sang it on a community radio station, then in pubs and on television, and came to the attention of one of Australia’s best-known singer-songwriters, Paul Kelly.
Archie Roach, right, with uncle Jack Charles at South Australia’s Womadelaide festival in 2017. Picture: Scott Oates/The Guardian
Kelly invited Roach to open for him at the Melbourne Concert Hall, where Took the Children Away wowed an audience that had never heard of Roach. At first he was met with silence, Roach said, “and then the applause started. It sounded like rain that starts with a patter and builds up and turns into a downpour. It was the most amazing experience I’ve ever had never”.
Soon after, Roach was offered a recording contract. His first solo album, Charcoal Lane (1990), was produced by Kelly and Steve Connelly, and won the Aria Awards for Best New Talent and Best Indigenous Album. It included Took the Children Away and a powerful song written by Hunter, Down City Streets, which described her time as a homeless alcoholic. This brought her to national attention and four years later she recorded her own solo album.
Roach recorded a number of solo albums, including Jamu Dreaming (1993) and Looking for Butter Boy (1997), and provided the soundtrack to the film The Tracker in 2002. In 2008 he sang Took the Children Away , with Hunter joining. he as backing vocals, when the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a public apology to the Stolen Generations.
Roach and Hunter also performed with the Black Arm Band, a political multimedia project involving white and indigenous performers, who made a powerful appearance at Britain’s Womad festival in 2009. In the same year, both appeared alongside superstar Yolngu Gurrumul Yunupingu in compilation. album Aboriginal Soul. Roach contributed the song Liyarn Ngarn.
Archie Roach performing with the Black Arm Band in 2006
Alongside such high-profile events, he and Hunter spent time teaching music and performing in remote indigenous communities, and held an open house for homeless and disadvantaged youth. He died in 2010, the start of a sad and difficult time for Roach. Later that year he suffered a stroke, and the following year, after returning to performing live, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and had a lung removed.
Announcing that she “wanted to write about pain in a positive way”, she recorded her 2012 album Into the Bloodstream “with an oxygen bottle on hold”. His new songs include Mulyawongk, a tribute to Hunter, and Old Mission Road, a lament for lost childhood.
In 2016 he released Let Love Rule, followed by Tell Me Why (2019), a companion album to his memoir of the same name. It included reworkings of favorite songs, including Open Up Your Eyes, which was the first song he had written, while in rehab in the late 1970s, but had never been recorded before. There was also Rally Round the Drum, a song with Kelly, which they had written together in the early 90s, and a Hank Williams favorite, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. It proved to be the most successful album of Roach’s career and the first to be a top 10 seller in Australia.
In 2015 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honors for his “significant service to the performing arts as a singer, songwriter and guitarist, and to the community as a spokesperson for social justice “.
In October 2020, Roach launched Archie Roach Stolen Generation Educational Resources – a free package of educational support materials, developed by First Nations curriculum writers, to teach young Australians about Indigenous Australia, cultural identity and the stolen generations.
Roach, whose Charcoal Lane re-recording album was released in November 2020, was inducted into Aria’s Hall of Fame later that month. Roach, who lived with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for years, was taken from Warrnambool Base Hospital in an ambulance to accept the award via a broadcast from the nearby Lighthouse Theatre. He performed Take the Children Away in the theater while breathing through a nasal cannula and while an ambulance waited outside.
He is survived by two children and three foster children.
Archibald William Roach, singer, songwriter and activist, born 8 January 1956; died on July 30, 2022