Angus Fontaine, Daily Telegraph Mirror, June 13, 1996
"I talk to my country for she is woman
The water and the soil of life
That the smoke of her fires encircle him in the night
And her strong loins hold him...
I cry to my country that her voice shall sing in his blood
And her hot suns fire him"
- Aboriginal love song
Neil Murray has gone home. Home to the pulsing sun, the dusty gales and the parched red earth. Home to the crackling scrub fires and the pounding rain. Home to sit in reflection writing and mulling over the great mass of arid emptiness that stretches for miles in every direction.
It was there in western Victoria that the young singer-songwriter held in his hands the ancient Aboriginal grinding stones and axeheads he'd found on his grandfather's farm and asked where and why the old world had gone.
"It just set in motion this train of wondering: where are these people now?" recalled Murray. "Later, looking around me at the impact of European farming in western Victoria, I reacted against that; I found myself yearning for unspoilt wilderness. That led me to the Northern Territory."
In 1985 (sic) he packed his swag and headed for the desert. Long days followed. Murray sweated it out as a teacher and an outstation worker in the remote Aboriginal communities of Papunya and Kintore.
"I was fairly romantic and highly idealistic at the time," Murray said. "I thought it would be an incredible adventure with the Aborigines and everything would be groovy. It didn't quite go that way. In the end though I was thankful that it hadn't been groovy straight off. I had to learn a few things first."
Murray wasn't sure what he was looking for, he felt only a need to "find the sorts of things I would find meaning for and in time feel the need to express".
In the heaving heart of the desert Murray formed the Warumpi Band.
The Warumpi Band released two albums, Big Name, No Blankets (1985) and Go Bush (1987). They toured relentlessly and it was there that Murray's gritty, lyrical patriotism found a foothold in the national subconscious.
"I just had these songs coming out of me and the only thing I wanted to do was to get them out and get them heard," he said. "I don't think I realised it was a career until I realised I wasn't on the dole any more."
Murray left the Warumpi Band in 1989 and headed to Sydney where a debut album was cut, the critically lauded Calm And Crystal Clear, a new band formed, the Rainmakers, and a development of the songwriting graft that Murray had whittled to a finely wrought, poetic point.
"I just try and make sense of my experience in this country: I throw these things up like sign posts which the community may or may not accept," said Murray. "To be a writer at the vanguard as in years gone by you're always ahead of community change and community attitudes. The views you're espousing now will one day be commonplace. I think if the songs work they have feeling and relevance to everyone. I don't strive to be distinctly anything, I just strive to make clear whatever it is I've produced."
The latest of Murray's solo outpourings is Dust, a beautifully languid and sparsely arranged album full of rich rural legend and wry personal observation.
Dust marks Murray's most focused effort yet, on one hand grappling with the shame of an ancestry that destroyed it's indigenous people, on the other a bold attempt to eulogise the future as a chance to amend that past. Helping out on the album are old comrades Archie Roach and Christine Anu, for who Murray wrote My Island Home, and effort that earned him Song of the Year at the 1995 APRA awards.
However it is Murray's words and the passion with which he songs them that has seen him dubbed one of the country's finest songwriters. "I'm one of these writers who writes form the heart, from his own consciousness," he said. "A song like Native Born [which closes Dust] is a real prayer, a real plea to all those people who feel like they belong here. For me Dust represents what we are and what we will become. There's a sense of repose to it; these are the songs that remain, these are the bones that will stand up after everything else."