Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I pay respect to George Burarrawanga, the charismatic former leader, advocate and character who passed away recently. My comments draw on the moving and appropriate tribute of Chips Mackinolty published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 12 June, which I commend to the House.

George was best known as a frontman for the Warumpi Band. He brought a raw vitality and stage presence to the music, earning the apt name of the Mick Jagger of Aboriginal music. With his Warumpi Band mates—Gordon and Sammy Butcher and Neil Murray—he took Aboriginal rock music from the bush right to the national stage using Aboriginal language. The band formed in the early eighties in the Aboriginal community at Papunya. The name Warumpi is derived from the honey ant dreaming site located near Papunya. Mackinolty describes the band’s formation:

Burarrawanga was an unlikely frontman for a desert-based rock band. Born at Galiwin’ku into the Yolngu Matha-speaking Gumatj clan, he broke the rules as a saltwater man and worked as a linguist at Yuendumu, a Warlpiri language stronghold in the southern Tanami in 1981. Luritja men Sammy and Gordon Butcher, along with a white teacher, Neil Murray, were forming a band at Papunya, 100 kilometres away. They had heard “there was this bloke at Yuendumu who was doing Mick Jagger covers”. Burarrawanga moved to Papunya, learnt yet another Aboriginal language, and Warumpi was born.

The band wrote, recorded and released what was the first rock song in an Aboriginal language, Jailanguru Pakarnu, or Out From Jail. The article goes on:

Over the next 15 years Warumpi toured extensively in Australia and overseas, releasing two more albums, Go Bush (1988) and Too Much Humbug (1996).

Warumpi is perhaps best known, and indeed George is best known, for the anthem My Island Home. George rewrote this song and would only perform it in his mother tongue of Gumatj. In 1986, Warumpi Band inspired and accompanied Midnight Oil on a month-long tour of Aboriginal communities. Peter Garrett, of former Oils fame, commented earlier this week on George’s passing and described him as one of the world’s best stage performers, up there with the Rolling Stones and INXS. He said:

If you think of Mick Jagger or James Brown or Michael Hutchence or you know any of the sort of really charismatic performers that just sort of take over a stage, whether they are on the back of a flat-bed truck in a dusty community or whether they’re in a theatre in Sydney or Melbourne, this bloke had it and he had it in spades.

In 2004, George was recognised for his lifetime achievement at the inaugural Northern Territory Indigenous Music Awards. The Warumpi Band was similarly honoured at the 2006 awards. George’s 25-year career emphasised reconciliation and the importance of sharing knowledge in a quest to unite not to divide, and to bring happiness not conflict. It is fitting that he passed away on his island home of Galiwinku, surrounded by his loving Gumatj family. A public memorial service will be held on Friday in Galiwinku. He will be sadly missed.

We need to know that this man never allowed bad experiences to colour his wonderful music or his emphatically Aboriginal politics. As I said, his 25-year career was to emphasise the importance of sharing Aboriginal knowledge in a quest to unite not divide, and to bring happiness not conflict.