You know that warm feeling you got when you watched a bunch of high school kids take more affirmative action on climate change in a national protest than the sitting cabinet? You get the same feeling when you watch the Marliya choral group of young Indigenous women singing protest songs in pitch perfect unison and tight harmonies about mining practices, incarceration, and community closures in the Concert Hall at Sydney Opera House. You can’t help but think that ‘the kids are alright’.
The song cycle of Spinifex Gum, a one-off performance as part of Sydney Festival, was one developed over five years of community visits to the north western corner of Australia by Felix Riebel and Ollie McGill (of Cat Empire fame), but even with the addition of star power from the lanky, flailing performative style of Peter Garrett on a reworking of Midnight Oil’s classic ‘The Dead Heart’, the young women owned the stage.
Photograph: Jamie Williams
The whole performance sat somewhere between a Glee-style dance choir and activism as art. At times, songs in language about ideas of home and friendship, coupled with projections of the Pilbara landscape, felt as wholesome as a Qantas ad – but a song dedicated to the memory of Julieka Dhu, who died of septicemia while incarcerated for unpaid fines, was heartbreaking. It was especially poignant given the concert’s timing on the evening before January 26 when tensions concerning Invasion Day are at its peak.
Emma Donovan provided bruising soul vocals on ‘Make it Rain’ and led a beautiful cover of Christine Anu’s ‘My Island Home’ with the choir, but Briggs was the emphatic full stop on the evening with a rendition of his 2015 sequel to Archie Roach’s ‘They Took the Children Away’, ‘The Children Came Back’. It was at once uplifting and devastating, and that oscillation characterised the performance as a whole.
We’ve come some way, but there’s a lot further to go to achieve reconciliation with our First Nations peoples. But this performance cemented the knowledge that the incoming generation are informed, political, and ready to join the fray.
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