The Best Australian Essays 2015 (37 page)

Salinger was particularly focused on this quality. He observed that, ‘
The Catcher in the Rye
is a very novelistic novel. There are readymade “scenes” – only a fool would deny that – but for me the weight of the book is in the narrator's voice, the nonstop peculiarities of it, his personal, extremely discriminating attitude to his reader-listener. He can't legitimately be separated from his first-person technique.'

Holden's resurrection, if you like, lies in the fact that he is telling you his story. He has found a way through. And now he seeks apostles.

His gospel of apartness penetrated me deeply, isolated as I was from my family in an informal boarding arrangement with my grandmother while I went through high school during my teens. Reading
The Catcher in the Rye
made me feel both less alone and somehow anointed in my boyish suffering.

One sees this sliver of light in Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-book project,
My Struggle
. Indeed, I think of Knausgaard as something of an overgrown Holden Caulfield, reincarnated into his adulthood in Norway, his obsessional speaking voice still intact, still seeking us out.

Knausgaard blurs the lines entirely between what can be defined as a novel or a memoir. On a number of occasions he has called writing ‘a way of being'. It's a telling description. In a recent interview he used that phrase again, adding: ‘It's unthinkable not to write. It's the only place where I can find complete calm and harmony. Where, at the same time, I am not my present self, I am somewhere else.'

This ‘way of being' is how it is for readers too, taken outside of our worlds, yet deep into our selves. Whether or not that leads us towards the transcendent, however, is another question entirely as we ‘come of age' again and again.

There are few apparently darker sentences than the one at the end of
A Death in the Family
, the first novel in Knausgaard's series, where he has been forced to confront memories that have arisen while cleaning the debased home of his estranged and deceased alcoholic father: ‘And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension in life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a coat hanger and falls to the floor.'

In my opinion Knausgaard is hinting at forgiveness and freedom, and perhaps even love, in those final words. I could be wrong, of course. Things may be just as they appear. But I've only to look back at my copy of
Coming Through Slaughter
to be reminded of the paradoxical relationship between pessimism and possibility, damage and awakening: ‘The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.'

The Weekend Australian

Sound Bridges: A Profile of Gurrumul

Felicity Plunkett

In April 2011 the Australian edition of
Rolling Stone
featured a cover photo of Yolngu multi-instrumentalist and singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. The headline ‘Australia's most important voice' crawls along the sleeve of Gurrumul's pinstriped suit, while the band names The National and Primal Scream hover above his shoulder. In the midst of so much noise, the portrait by Sydney photographer Adrian Cook embodies a still silence. Across Gurrumul's torso lies the body of his guitar, held by lithe-fingered hands. Both gesture and posture suggest reserve and quiet: a stark juxtaposition with the idea of a ‘national primal scream' that adjacent cover lines scramble to invent.

The shoot was quiet and intimate. Cook uses an old Hasselblad camera on a tripod, which means that he is face-to-face with his subjects. His own face is not, as it generally would be in contemporary photography, obscured. Cook stood a foot or so away from Gurrumul throughout the shoot and touched his face gently to pose each shot, tilting his face or lowering his chin. The sense of unrushed harmony is evident in these intimate photos.

At the time of this cover, after decades in the music industry but just three years into his solo career, Gurrumul had accumulated an array of awards and sold more than half a million copies of his first album,
Gurrumul
(Skinnyfish, 2008). With the release of his second album
Rrakala
(Skinnyfish, 2011), his reputation and acclaim were burgeoning. He was touring extensively, collecting rapturous reviews from Switzerland to the United States, Malaysia to Ireland.

There is something soaring and exquisite about his music that invites the words
angelic
and
celestial
. The importance of his voice – to borrow
Rolling Stone
's epithet – is multifaceted. Gurrumul's voice and reception are freighted with ideas of cultural bridging and questions about the nature and rules of celebrity – and the place of an anarchist within that culture. The fragility of his high tenor voice reminds me of e.e. cummings' tender poem ‘somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond', which evokes the power of such gentle intensity:

Gurrumul's voice reaches towards poetry in a world more comfortable with prose.

The paradoxes of Gurrumul's success are striking. Blind from birth and deeply introverted as a performer, Gurrumul has become one of the most iconic and successful artists in Australia. While his work extends an exceptional hospitality to non-Indigenous audiences, offering access to Yolngu culture and language, he no longer writes English lyrics. In bringing his focus to the textures and languages of Yolngu experience, his work has become increasingly audible, in every sense of the word. His collaborator and close friend Michael Hohnen, creative director of Skinnyfish, speaks of audiences, from the start of Gurrumul's solo career, responding with tears to the beauty of the music.

Gurrumul's audience continues to grow and his accolades to multiply. As well as rising Australian and international album sales, he has accumulated music awards including the 2008 ARIA Best Independent Release, and in 2011 two Deadly Awards for
Rrakala
: Album of the Year and Male Artist of the Year, the latter for the third time. In 2013, ‘Gurrumul: His Life and Music', conducted and with arrangements by Erkki Veltheim, premiered. Featuring Gurrumul, members of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and with a backdrop of documentary footage of Gurrumul's life, it was presented at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Vivid Festival. The work coincided with the publication of Robert Hillman's book of the same name. A live recording was subsequently released, and in 2014 a version of this show was presented at the Darwin Festival and reprised at the Sydney Opera House, this time with the addition of a choir. In May this year, Gurrumul began touring the United States.

In 2009 Guy Maestri's portrait of Gurrumul won the Archibald Prize. Maestri writes about the forty-minute interview he had with his subject, during which he made sketches and studied his face. Like Cook, the word Maestri uses is ‘quiet'. He aimed to evoke a ‘sense of [Gurrumul's] presence':

Gurrumul's brief moment with Maestri is typical of truncated meetings which interlocutors experience as quietly intense. Among the paradoxes of his success is a refusal of conventional Western modes of celebrity: he gives no interviews and eschews the media. The papers might want to know, as David Bowie once put it, ‘whose shirts you wear', but Gurrumul – the admirable sartorial elegance of his
Rolling Stone
image notwithstanding – isn't saying. Instead, he directs his creative energy into his work.

Faced with a trio of powerful people in 2011 – he met Barack Obama and European royals – Gurrumul, according to Sarah Whyte of the
Sydney Morning Herald
, ‘didn't say a word'. Whyte added this wry footnote: ‘Yet on the eve of his ARIA performance tonight … Gurrumul was a lot more talkative. “Hello”, he said to
The Sun Herald
before being whisked off by minders.' Obama and Gurrumul shared what Hohnen called a ‘very intimate and physical moment': Obama grabbed Gurrumul's hand and put his arm around his neck.

In place of the words so often expected of him, Gurrumul offers something Hohnen describes as a ‘deafening silence'. Instead of construing his avoidance of talk as a lack, this stripping away of celebrity puffery may be thought of as a radical gesture, at once strange and transformative amid the white noise of a ‘connected' culture. With Western artists' lives often disturbed by and encrusted with self-conscious observation of the minutiae of their existence, and with Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame radically expanded to allow anyone to tweet and Instagram to their heart's content, Gurrumul's refusal to comment on his work is subversive and refreshing. His deafening silence in a culture averse to such allows a purity of access to the music and a washing away of distraction.

Author Don DeLillo predicted the eclipse of reality by the screen in his novel
White Noise
(1985), where television determines the importance of an event. When characters fleeing a toxic cloud find that it has rated ‘no film footage, no live report', they worry that they have gone through the experience for nothing. DeLillo's depiction of experience rendered invisible and inaudible by the white noise around it – if it isn't onscreen it vanishes – has been magnified by the multiplicity of screens most of us interact with daily. Jean Baudrillard published a series of provocative articles in 1991, later collected as
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
. He argued, using ideas of simulacra and the hyper-real, that the First Gulf War may as well have been a carefully scripted media construction. Beyond the filters, inconvenient histories slip away.

Gurrumul provides a rare counterpoint to this, dismantling filters and clutter. What is left is magnificent clarity. And partly because of this refusal of celebrity mores, Gurrumul preserves in his work something larger than the baubles and trinkets of the paparazzi universe, something akin to the clarity of meditation. Instead of conforming to the dictates of Western media, Gurrumul retains an independent voice. He doesn't tweet, but he does sing.

Yet it is from within rather than beyond Gurrumul's music that a sense of who he is emerges. In one of his few songs to include English lyrics, ‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)', he sings of his origins and destination in pared phrases beginning with the stark statement: ‘I was born blind.'

Gurrumul was born in 1970 in Galiwin'ku on Elcho Island, 300 kilometres east of Darwin off the coast of Arnhem Land, where he grew up as part of the Gumatj clan. Settled by Methodist missionaries in 1942, Galiwin'ku is a traditional community, entry to which requires permission from the Galiwin'ku Council or the Northern Land Council. Its entwined history of long Yolngu traditions and strong Methodist teachings finds its way into the music of the area. Gurrumul was drawn to music from an early age. Among his relatives is musician and teacher Dr M. Yunupingu – the first Indigenous Australian school principal, lead singer in Yothu Yindi, and 1992 Australian of the Year. Although they don't have the same parents, Gurrumul describes him as his older brother.

Elcho Island is associated with a rich musical tradition. The band Soft Sands formed in the year Gurrumul was born and later mentored younger bands, including Yothu Yindi and Saltwater Band, both of which have had Gurrumul as a member. ‘My Island Home', a song celebrating Elcho Island written by Neil Murray of the Warumpi Band, was made famous when Christine Anu performed it at the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Academic Aaron Corn describes the influence of Soft Sands on other musicians in Arnhem Land. Corn's work explains that ‘durable canons of hereditary names, songs, dances and designs' form a crucial part of song composition in the area.

In 2010, ABC Television aired an episode of
Australian Story
‘You're the Voice', the bones of a documentary-in-progress about Gurrumul by Naina Sen. ‘You're the Voice' shows Gurrumul's work emerging from a strong tradition of Yolngu music within and beyond his family. Gurrumul's aunt Dhangal Gurruwiwi, one of a number of multilingual relatives shown in the film, remembers his musical beginnings: ‘We used to just sit them in the church and he used to listen to harmonies and guitar people playing and keyboards. And they used to sing joke song with tins drumming and making a stick as a lead guitar and the bass.'

Gurrumul was given his first guitar at the age of six. The left-handed child intuitively played it upside down, a solution shared, with variations, by Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney and Kurt Cobain. There was an early recognition in the community, says Hohnen, that Gurrumul was ‘a little musical genius'.

Gurrumul learned numerous instruments. His reputation as a drummer led Yothu Yindi's manager, Alan James, to invite him to join the band in 1988 when they toured the United States and Canada supporting Midnight Oil. In a scene from ‘You're the Voice', his uncle Djunga Djunga Yunupingu recalls: ‘We were worried, because he was blind. But also we thought and said it is the only opportunity for him to carry on his career.'

Gurrumul later resigned from Yothu Yindi. Asked why, he said that he didn't like playing the drums. Once this was clarified, he stayed on to sing and play guitar and keyboards with the band. He enjoyed being in bands, so much so that when Hohnen heard his voice and suggested he do some solo work, he responded with an emphatic ‘no'. Part of this may have involved his shyness and the possibilities of concealment in collaborative performance. But from Hohnen's continued encouragement over a number of years came the exploration of solo performance, pared back to spare, gentle acoustic music. From here came
Gurrumul
in 2008.

‘Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind)' is the fourth song on
Gurrumul
and the first to contain English. Its autobiographical lines describe the way music became central to learning – or, as the song says, discovering that his ‘spirit knew' he had to learn – ‘to read the world of destruction'. The song's refrain ‘united we stand / divided we fall / together we'll stand in solidarity' bridges lyrics in his original Gumatj language, which, along with lyrics in the Galpu and Djambarrpuynu languages, gives his songs most of their words.

The song's next verse describes growing up amid mourning for culture. Gurrumul sings of his parents: ‘crying their hearts in confusion'. ‘How can I walk straight and tall?' becomes the boy's – and the song's – central question and within this lies the philosophical centre of the work. From this begins a quest: ‘to bridge and to build Yolngu culture'. The phrase is entered more hesitantly than that, with the humility of ‘trying': ‘trying to bridge'. But the hesitancy drops away as he sings in his Yolngu languages, describing his lineage:

The song, like all his songs, ripples and soars. There is such range and grace in the voice that his work evokes from reviewers and listeners the most poetic responses.

Peter Garrett, former lead singer of Midnight Oil and federal minister, puts it this way: Gurrumul ‘sings so deeply and sweetly about his connection to family and country, the effect is transcendental'. Music critic Bruce Elder used similar terms in a
Sydney Morning Herald
review of Gurrumul: ‘It is as though Yunupingu has reached into a wellspring so deep it transcends cultural barriers. He has found an emotional bridge which is genuinely universal.'

Robert Forster, formerly of the Go-Betweens and one of Australia's most perceptive writers on music, brings an additional term into his discussion of the ‘trans' or crossing aspect of the work – translation. Yet he uses the term in an effaced way, suggesting that the work transcends translation. In an essay in the
Monthly
about
Rrakala
, Forster writes: