So I'm sitting there watching the telly and up comes Between The Lines, The ABC book program on a Wednesday night and who gets the profile treatment? Neil Murray. He's certainly come a long way from those dusty days out in the desert communities with Warumpi Band. But then, Murray's career has never been particularly orthodox.

Before he went out into the Aboriginal communities of the western desert, he was like a lot of young guys from the Melbourne of the early 70s, strumming his guitar in folk and rock pubs, reading his poetry where he could. So we wouldn't have been surprised that Murray would eventually write a novel, Sing For Me Countryman, as well as pursue his peripatetic solo career, as well as still playing with the Warumpis. But now he's on this ABC-TV book show talking about a play he's been asked to write.

"I'd forgotten about that!" he tells me when I mentioned the TV interview. "The Deckchair Theatre in Fremantle approached me to write a play. Angela Chaplin, who directed Ningali and was in Sydney recently working on Black Mary, approached me after reading the book. Part of the company's agenda is to break new work and they thought I was worth a punt in writing a play. I was quite intrigued by the idea and it was the 'new' thing I needed to do. Having experience in that medium can only help what I'm doing in other media.

"I've done a kind of first draft. We went up to Broome for three weeks and we bounced around a few ideas, workshopped a few and then I just went ahead and wrote out a rough draft. At the moment it's with Deckchair so I'm waiting for feedback and I'll probably be going over to Perth soon to work on it again. It was pretty open-ended - she just said write what you wanna write! She's a pretty good judge of stuff so I trust her judgment. I kind of kicked the bogey that it had to be a musical just because I do music as well, so it's not a musical, at the moment."

And what, you might wonder, did Murray decide to tackle in his first dramatic effort for the theatre?

"The transformation of the Australian yobbo! That's just the theme. That's loosely the idea anyway. I'm trying to give a typical young white Australian male hoon yobbo, who has the bloody car and chicks and booze, trying to inject him with a bit of soul and spirit, and we're doing that via the influence of Aboriginal people."

Not that Neil Murray has forsaken the musical side of things. He's got a new single out, a remix of the duet Give This Day he did with Christine Anu for his last album, Dust, which he's launching in Sydney this week, and he's just back from a tour of Ireland, Scotland and Germany that took him to the Edinburgh Festival and the Nukanya Dreaming Festival in Bonn.