[PB 14.1 (2013) 33-53] Perfect Beat (print) ISSN 1038-2909doi:10.1558/prbt.v14i1.33 Perfect Beat (online) ISSN 1836-0343

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.

Jon Stratton

Whose home; which island?:displacement and identity in ‘My Island Home’

Jon Stratton is Professor of Cultural Studies at Curtin University. Jon has published widely in Cultural Studies, Australian Studies, Jewish Studies and Popular Music Studies. Jon's most recent book is Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011). At present Jon is publishing When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines 1945–2010 (forthcoming, Ash-gate, 2014).

School of Media, Culture and Creative ArtsCurtin University, GPO Box U1987Perth 6845Western Australiaj.stratton@curtin.edu.au

Abstract‘My Island Home’ has become a well-known musical assertion of Australian identity. Written in 1985 by Neil Murray, the song originally described the situation of the lead singer of the predominantly Indigenous Warumpi Band, George Burarrwanga, who had moved from Elcho Island in Arnhem Land to Papunya, a community west of Alice Springs. The song was subse-quently popularized to a mainstream, settler Australian audience in two versions released by Christine Anu, who sang a revised version which identified Australia itself as the island home at the Sydney Olympics Closing Ceremony in 2000. This article tracks the history of versions of ‘My Island Home’ up to that by Tiddas which closes the film Radiance, released in 1998. The article argues that central to the growing popularity of ‘My Island Home’ among both Indigenous and settler Australians was the increasing recognition of land rights and, correspondingly, the anxi-eties this caused among the dominant population.

Keywords: Christine Anu; land rights; ‘My Island Home’; Neil Murray; Tiddas; Warumpi Band

‘My Island Home’ was written by Neil Murray in 1985 when he was the only ‘white’ member of the Warumpi Band, one of the first Indigenous rock groups to become known among non-Indigenous Australians. The song was played on the 1986 Blackfella-Whitefella tour of Indigenous communities in which the Warumpis and Midnight Oil performed across the Northern Territory.1 It subse-

1. Andrew McMillan (1988: 147) mentions the Warumpi Band playing the song in Strict Rules, his insightful account of the tour which sets it in the context of the developing concerns with land rights.

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quently appeared on the Warumpis’ second album, Go Bush, in 1987. Released as the first single off that album, ‘My Island Home’ failed to make the chart. Murray recounts that he wrote the song for George Rrurrumbu, known since his death in 2007 as George Burarrwanga. Burarrwanga was from Elcho Island, an island in the Arafura Sea off the Arnhem Land coast in the Northern Territory. He had married the Warumpis’ guitarist Sammy Butcher Tjapanangka’s sister and moved to the settlement of Papunya in the central desert. It was there that he met Murray and became the charismatic singer for the Warumpi Band.2

The most well-known version of ‘My Island Home’ was recorded by Christine

Anu. In fact, she recorded two versions. The first, released in 1995, reached 67 on

the singles chart. The same year, signalling the track’s popularity with a younger

listenership, it was number 47 on the national youth-oriented radio station Triple

J’s audience-voted Hot One Hundred. More importantly in terms of the growing

respect being accorded the song, also in 1995 Anu’s version won the Australian

Performing Rights Association (APRA) award for Song of the Year, with Murray

acknowledged as the composer. Stylin’ Up, Anu’s first album which was released in

May of the same year and which contained ‘My Island Home’, climbed to number

21 on the album chart. As well as giving the track a dance rhythm rather than

the Warumpis rock-based ballad style, Anu had altered the lyrics. Where the

Warumpis’ version purported to describe George Burarrwanga’s situation—his

move from his island home to the desert and, at least in Murray’s mind, his wish

to be back on the island—Anu’s version could be read as expressing her own cir-

cumstance as a Torres Strait Island woman who has moved to Sydney. I shall say

more about this change in the lyrics later.

Anu released her second version of the track in September 2000, coinciding

with her performance of it at the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. Now

with a further, added verse, and a less dance-based and more melodic backing,

the track reached number 58 on the singles chart and the album which included

it, Come My Way, got to number 18 on the album chart. Coinciding with the new

verse, which, as we shall see, generalized the lyrics, the personal pronoun had

been dropped from the track’s title and it was now called ‘Island Home’ suggesting

the availability of a more general experience of being at home on an island. Rec-

ognizing the song’s new status, in 2001 it was included in APRA’s list of the thirty

2. By all accounts, Burarrwanga was an extraordinary performer. Indeed, he was often com-pared to Mick Jagger in his ability to hold an audience. Lisa Slater (2007) describes Burarrwan-ga’s performance of ‘My Island Home’ with the Warumpi Band at the 2006 Dreaming Festival in Queensland. She suggests that: ‘In a sense, Burarrwanga’s performance demonstrates how to create something new from the complexity and heterogeneity of identity, place and belonging’ (2007: 579).

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Australian ‘best and most significant songs of the past 75 years’. One hundred

Australian music personalities had been asked to choose their personal Top Ten.

While the compilers identified the first ten in a ranked order, the following twenty

were simply listed. ‘My Island Home’ did not make the top ten. By this time, then,

‘My Island Home’ was being viewed as an Australian institution—though not as

accepted as the Easybeats’ ‘Friday On My Mind’ (number 1), Slim Dusty’s ‘A Pub

With No Beer’ (number 5) and Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’ (number 8). As we shall

see, much of the wariness about ‘My Island Home’ can be traced to the exclusivity

associated with that personal pronoun and the track’s subaltern connections with

Australia’s indigenous population, both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. This

history remained in spite of the lyrical reinvention for the Olympics’ Closing Cer-

emony on the ‘Island Home (Earthbeat)’ version.

‘My Island Home’ and land rightsThis article argues that underlying much of the emotional force of ‘My Island

Home’ is the transformation in settler Australians’ experience of the country

through the 1980s and 1990s brought about by the legal recognition of the Indig-

enous people as having a claim to the land. In June 1992 the long-running Mabo v

Queensland (no. 2) case was finally decided in the High Court, finding in favour of

the Mer islanders of the Torres Strait who had brought the action. This case estab-

lished the presence in Australia of Native Title, sometimes called Aboriginal Title.

This decision was followed a year later by the Labour government’s Native Title Act

1993, the purpose of which was to provide an apparatus for operationalizing the

consequences of the Mabo decision. The Wik decision, handed down by the High

Court in December 1996, provided further clarification on the Indigenous rights

to land established by Mabo, in particular to land claims made on pastoral leases.

It is no exaggeration to say that these developments became deeply trauma-

tising to Australia’s settler community and much of this trauma and anxiety was

caused by the mining lobby and the pastoral lobby attempting to force reversals in

the law through scare campaigns aimed at the general population. Felicity Collins

and Therese Davis write that: ‘Home as the place of belonging of white settlers in

Australia was put to the torch by the shock reminder from the High Court in 1992

that terra nullius was achieved at the cost of dispossession of Indigenous people

from their land, language and culture after 40,000 years of continuous possession’

(2004: 112). In the wake of Mabo the large mining companies began striving to

depict the decision as creating uncertainty and being detrimental to the national

interest. This was followed up by suggesting that much of Australian land was

under threat. Ian McLachlan, the Shadow Minister for National Development and

Infrastructure, told an audience at the right-wing Harvey Nicholls society in 1993

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that the Mabo decision had ‘left great tracks of Australia in turmoil as to title and

therefore in those areas, risks the stability and future development of the nation’

(quoted in Short 2008: 75). This campaign flowed almost without interruption

into the campaign run by the National Farmers’ Federation after the Wik decision.

As Damien Short writes:

Following Wik the National Farmers’ Federation built on the post-Mabo mining industry tactics and set about constructing their own ‘national crisis of uncer-tainty’. A significant element of their campaign was a cross-network television advertisement, filmed in monochrome, which depicted the Australian land tenure system as a somewhat ugly version of the 1970s party game of Twister. It involved a battle between two children, one black (Aboriginal) one white, with the black child winning the contest (2008: 75).

This apparent threat was brought directly to the homes of city dwellers. As Collins

and Davis explain:

The purported threat to people’s backyards was just one of the more extreme responses to the High Court’s Wik decision in 1996. This unfounded fear trou-bled a nation of property owners (2004: 112).

Through the 1990s, as Australia’s Indigenous population was increasingly acknowl-

edged as having rights in the Australian land, settler Australians, in large part as a

consequence of the scare tactics of the mining and pastoral lobbies, began to feel

more and more uneasy.

The Mabo case began in 1982. However, it was not the first lands right case

based on a claim to Native Title. In 1971, the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land

took the mining company Nabalco to court. The federal government had granted

Nabalco a twelve-year mining lease for the extraction of bauxite on the Gove Pen-

insula. In Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd, Justice Blackburn found against the Yolngu

finding that Native Title did not apply in Australia and that, indeed, even if there

had been something that might be called Native Title this had been extinguished

by the establishment of British sovereignty. As we begin to think about home and

land in relation to ‘My Island Home’ we can remember that George Burarrwanga

was a Yolngu man and a member of the Gumatj clan. Born in 1957 he would

have grown up knowing the loss of the Milirrpum case and its consequence for

Yolngu identity in the Australian nation-state. In this regard it is worth noting that

the translator for the Yolngu claimants in that case was Galarrwuy Yunupingu,

whose father, Munggurrawuy Yunupingu, was a Gumatj elder and one of the

claimants. Galarrwuy has been a life-long fighter in the cause of Indigenous land

rights. His younger brother is Mandawuy Yunupingu, the co-founder of the Indig-

enous rock group, Yothu Yindi, in 1987. In 1991 their track ‘Treaty’, demanding a

treaty between black and white Australia in the wake of an assertion to this effect

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by then prime minister Bob Hawke, reached number one on the singles chart.

Mandawuy formed Yothi Yindi while teaching in Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island. The

island, home to Burarrwanga and inspiration for ‘My Island Home’, is also home

to a number of members of Yothu Yindi including Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu

who went on to have a high profile solo career.

Anu, as noted, is a Torres Strait Islander. Born in 1970, her mother is from Sabai

and her father from Mabuiag islands. Anu was born in Cairns and lived there until

she was ten. Then, after her father was injured, the family moved to Mabuiag. She

recalls that ‘it was bliss’ living on the island (quoted in Connell 1999: 206). She

then finished her high schooling in Southern Queensland and moved to Sydney

to study with the National Aboriginal/Islander Dance Theatre. In 2012 Anu vis-

ited Thursday Island for the Queensland Music Festival. Singing with the Ailan

Kores Choir, she performed a version of ‘My Island Home’ with lyrics translated

into Sabai and Mabuiag dialects (see ‘QMF Returns to Thursday Island’ 2012). In

a medium that depends on sound, the language used in the singing is an impor-

tant marker of identity. When the Tahitian duo Bobby & Angelo recorded the song,

they had, as I will discuss shortly, translated some of the lyrics into Tahitian (reo

tahiti). Singing in Tahitian is an important statement of indigenous presence in a

place of French colonialism where French remains the official language and Tahi-

tian has only been allowed to be used in schools since 1982. When George Bura-

rrwanga (as George Rrurrambu) recorded his solo album Nerbu Message, released

in 2000, he included a version of ‘My Island Home’ translated into Gamatj as ‘Ronu

Wanga’. He dedicated it to ‘the mothers on my island home’ expressing the inter-

twining of lineage, heritage and place in the formation of his identity through his

use of indigenous language (Rrurrambu 2004: liner notes). This Gamatj version of

the song might also be read as a critical commentary on the presence of Nabalco

on Yolngu land and Justice Blackburn’s ruling in Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd.

These direct geographical links between the two most important singers of

‘My Island Home’ and legal cases related to land rights and Native Title suggest the

power of ‘My Island Home’ as an Australian subaltern statement of identity. One

element in this statement is the link between the lyrics and the singers. More than

the case with most songs, singers of ‘My Island Home’ assert a connection through

these lyrics. In part this is a consequence of the use of the personal pronoun—

which, as I have mentioned, is dropped in Anu’s second version of the song. In

‘My Island Home’ the lyrics established the identification of the song with George

Burarrwanga and with Christine Anu. The islands are different; the statement of

belonging is the same.

The strength of the song as a subaltern assertion of belonging can be exem-

plified by looking at another version of the song. In 1988 the Tahitian duo Bobby

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& Angelo recorded it.3 Bobby Holcomb, whose heritage was Hawai'ian and Afri-

can American, revised and translated some of the lyrics into Tahitian.4 Angélo

Neuffer, both with Bobby and on his own, has been one of the most popular sing-

ers in Tahiti for a generation. In the hands of Bobby & Angelo, ‘My Island Home’

could be read as a statement of Tahitian identity as against French sovereignty

over what is called Polynésie Française. Starting in 1974, and much to the anger

of the Tahitians and other islanders, the French conducted underground nuclear

tests on Mururoa atoll. There has been a long-standing movement for Tahitian

independence. In 1984, ‘French Polynesia’s organic law, approved by the French

Parliament, took effect, giving the overseas community, formerly known as a ter-

ritory, greater internal autonomy while remaining as part of the French Republic’

(see ‘Tahiti Observes Internal Autonomy Day’ n.d.). In 1992 President Mitterand

stopped the nuclear testing. When it was begun again three years later by Presi-

dent Chirac:

Peaceful protests continued over the next few months as did the testing. Songs, prayers, and silences were used to try to persuade the government to stop. In late September, Jacques Ihorai and Ralph Teinaore, the president and the secretary general of l’Église Évangélique de Polynésie Française, went to France to try to convince President Chirac to end the testing. In pleading with him, Ihorai referred to Tahitian understandings of land, explaining that Tahi-tians consider the land to be their mother who nourishes them and that the bomb is like a missile of death in ‘the nourishing womb of the motherland’ (Kahn 2011: 91).

With such an understanding of the role of the land in Tahitian life, we can appre-ciate the power of the yearning in this version of ‘My Island Home’, a longing for a home free of French imposed destruction. Bobby Holcomb always refused to take out French citizenship as a protest against the nuclear tests and French colonial-ism (see ‘Bobby Holcomb’ 2009). Angélo wrote a protest song in Tahitian after the restarting of nuclear testing titled ‘Taero atomi’ (Nuclear Poison). It concludes, in translation, ‘Atomic bomb/We don’t want you/On our land’ (Kahn 2011: 92). This land is the land that is identified as our island home.

Home is a complex term. In Home Territories, David Morley argues that home

has ‘its own internally coherent self-identity’ (2000: 6). It offers, perhaps, a feel-

ing of wholeness, then; of being at one with the world. In his discussion of ‘My

Island Home’, Phillip Mar suggests that home is a fantasy and ‘is the most funda-

mental of myths, the fantasy of origins’ (1997: 148). This home can never really

3. In 1995 the Hawai’ian group Brothers & Sisters released their interpretation of the Bobby & Angelo version on their first album, Dreams.

4. Somewhat surprisingly, the track’s composing credit is given as ‘Traditional adapted Bobby Holcomb and Angelo Neuffer’.

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exist but Mar’s description is, again, an assertion of a prelapsarian completeness,

a claim to know from where one comes. Home, it seems, includes ideas of cer-

tainty and unity. Seamus O’Hanlon argues that, in colonial Australia, home ‘was a

symbol of the freedoms and opportunities available, at least theoretically, to the

colonist’ (2002, quoted in Craven 2008). Here we find home in Australia limited

to the settler colonists. Perhaps this is because the Indigenous Australians have

been displaced from their home. When land rights became available for contesta-

tion after the Mabo ruling, the Native Title Act determined that ‘if land is unalien-

ated (i.e. no one else has taken legal ownership) it can be claimed by native title

claimants who can demonstrate continuity of rights and interests under tradi-

tional laws acknowledged and traditional customs observed and can demonstrate

maintenance of connection since colonization’ (‘Aboriginal Land Rights Q&A’

2009). So, only those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who have not been

displaced from their home can claim their home. Given the song’s emphasis on

longing for home we now have one reason why, as Tony Mitchell describes it, ‘My

Island Home’ is an ‘Aboriginal anthem’ (1996: 176).

It is only relatively recently that a distinction has been made between colo-

nialism and settler colonialism. Now, as Lorenzo Veracini noted in 2007: ‘There is

a growing historical literature dealing with settler colonialism as separate from

other colonial phenomena (i.e. a circumstance where outsiders come to stay and

establish territorialized sovereign political orders)’. Veracini goes on to explain

that: ‘Broadly speaking, one can detect three general experiences of settler decol-

onization: settler evacuation, the promotion of various processes of indigenous

reconciliation, and denial associated with an explicit rejection of the possibility of

reforming the settler body politic’ (2007). The process of decolonization, by defi-

nition, is related to an increasing realization of the indigenous population. To put

this differently. Sir William Blackstone, the celebrated eighteenth-century British

jurist, distinguished between two types of colony:

Plantations or colonies, in distant countries, are either such where the lands are claimed by right of occupancy only, by finding them desert and unculti-vated, and peopling them from the mother-country, or where, when already cultivated, they have been either gained by conquest, or ceded to us by treaties (1869: 106).

Settler colonies such as the United States and Australia fall into the former cat-

egory. While common use of the term may only go back to the early years of

the twentieth century (Fitzmaurice 2007), the idea informing terra nullius can be

found in Blackstone’s description of a land as ‘desert and uncultivated’. This was

how the colonists understood the land that became Australia and, as late as Black-

burn’s judgement in Millirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd, it formed the basis for legal

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judgement and the denial of the existence of Native Title (see Partington 2007).

The construction of the land as ‘desert’ or terra nullius denied the existence of an

indigenous population or, at the least, of an indigenous population that was in any

sense ‘civilized’—cultivation of the soil being the key element.

What, then, happened to the people thus erased from colonial reality? Situated

as unreal, the indigenous population of Australia became narrativized in Gothic

terms. As Penny van Toorn writes:

By the process of projection, Australian frontier Gothic conscripts Aboriginal people into the role of white society’s ‘darker self’. The Aborigine is made to stand for all that lies outside, or stands against, or is suppressed within the civi-lized world: sexuality, violence, unreason, malevolent supernatural power, even the mythic figure of death itself (1992: 87–88).

The settlers are at home, and real—or have internally coherent self-identity, to the

extent that the indigenous population remains unreal, Other.

The process of decolonization in a settler colony entails, then, the realization of

the indigenous population. At the same time, it unsettles the settler population. In

Uncanny Australia, Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs consider the role of the Aborigi-

nal sacred. They explain that their book ‘is … concerned with another consequence

of Aboriginal claims for sacredness which we can note here: to turn what seems

like “home” into something else, something less familiar and less settled’ (1998:

xiv). This, they go on to write, ‘is one meaning of the term “uncanny”’. Following

Sigmund Freud in his essay on the uncanny, Gelder and Jacobs argue that:

An ‘uncanny’ experience may occur when one’s home is rendered, somehow and in some sense, unfamiliar; one has the experience, in other words, of being in place and ‘out of place’ simultaneously. This simultaneity is important to stress since, in Freud’s terms, it is not simply the unfamiliar in itself which gen-erates the anxiety of the uncanny; it is specifically the combination of the famil-iar and unfamiliar—the way they inhabit each other (1998: 23).

Freud argues that in cases of morbid anxiety ‘there must be one class in which

the frightening element can be shown to come from something repressed which

recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny’ (1953:

241; italics in original). He explains that, ‘this uncanny is in reality nothing new or

alien, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has become

alienated only through the process of repression’ (1953: 241). This is an excellent

way of describing the settler perception of the indigenous population in a country

like Australia where that population has been legally, and indeed culturally, disap-

peared but has continued to be present.

In such a situation one construction of the indigenous population is as ghosts.

Gelder and Jacobs write that:

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The Australian ghost story … works by dramatically extending the influence or reach of its haunted site. It produces a site-based impression which spirals out of itself to affect others elsewhere, perhaps even influencing a nation’s sense of its own well-being (1998: 31).

Writing about the United States in The National Uncanny, Renée Bergland asks:

‘Why must America write itself as haunted?’ (2000: 4). Her answer is that ‘the

interior logic of the modern nation requires that citizens be haunted, and that

American nationalism is sustained by writings that conjure forth spectral Native

Americans’ (2000: 4). Rather than any modern nation we can specify settler states.

Jodey Castricano comments that Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary, the central

theme of which is the return of the dead buried in a makeshift cemetery on a

native American burial ground, ‘demonstrates how the notion of the American

dream … is predicated upon the violence of colonial appropriation of indigenous

lands’ (2001: 61). In relation to another formation of the uncanny, Freud notes

that, in a certain situation, a person might think: ‘Then the dead do live on and

appear on the scene of their former activities’ (1953: 248; italics in original). This

describes well the settler colonial experience of the indigenous population. The

land rights cases from Millirrpum onwards, and especially since the watershed of

Mabo, have problematized home for settler Australians, making Australia uncanny.

My Island HomeNeil Murray has told the story of the writing of ‘My Island Home’ in a number of

places. Here is the version from his Preface to the illustrated children’s book of the

song:

I had to head south to Melbourne and Sydney to do some promotional work for [The Warumpi Band]. It was in the wee hours of Saturday 15 of June 1985, on a coach bound for Sydney: I was suffering an exceptional longing to be back on a boat on a tropical sea. In my head I could hear singing: ‘my island home, my island home, my island home is a waiting for me’ (2010: n.p.).

Murray had taken a break at the end of a Warumpi Band tour and spent four

days with George Burarrwanga and his family on Elcho Island. Murray tells how:

‘I knew I would write the song for George to sing’ (2010: n.p.). Conventionally

the song is described as being Murray putting himself in Burarrwanga’s place. In

the Foreword to My Island Home, Martin Flanagan writes: ‘The story behind “My

Island Home” is that it was written by a white man for a black man and the black

man sang it like it was his own’ (2010: n.p.). In this interpretation we would have

a straightforward displacement. The lyrics could be understood as Murray’s idea

of how Burarrwanga experienced his life in the desert and his wish to be home on

Elcho Island. However, immediately the lyrics complicate this reading. The song’s

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first line tells us that ‘I’ have been in desert for six years. Murray tells us that both

Burarrwanga and himself arrived in Papunya in 1980 so ‘I’ could be either of them.

And Murray is clear that the song also refers to his own longing for home:

The antecedents were clear. I had by that time been living in Central Austra-lia for almost six years. I was missing the region of my birth and upbringing; the freshwater country of inland western Victoria. There was something in ‘My Island Home’ that expressed my heartfelt connection to my homeland as well. It was an idea of a place where you truly belonged—it always knows you and waits for you to return (2010: n.p.).

However, Murray’s relationship with his birth place is more complicated than this.

Larry Schwartz writes that Murray’s ‘paternal great-great-grandfather came to

Australia from the north of Scotland in 1848. He was among the many driven out

by unscrupulous landlords in the notorious Highland Clearances of that period’

(2010). Murray was born and raised near Lake Bolac. He remembers:

As a small boy my grandfather had shown me axe heads and grindstones he’d picked up in the paddocks of his farm. He’d explained to me that they were stone tools that belonged to people who’d lived there before. I’d asked where those people were. He said they had all gone, but he thought they’d gone down Framlingham way (Murray, ‘A Healing Walk’ n.d.).

Framlingham, Murray explains, was an Aboriginal reserve. It would seem that

there was a disturbing repetition: where Murray’s ancestors were cleared off the

highlands to make way for sheep, so Aborigines had been moved off the land

which his grandfather farmed. No matter how much Murray asserts an identi-

fication with the area around Lake Bolac, he knows that settling there displaced

Aborigines.

Murray’s links with Burarrwanga becomes more complicated. It would seem

that he is identifying his home with Burarrwanga’s home. In 1863 Dr De Witt C.

Peters defined nostalgia as ‘a species of melancholia, or a mild type of insanity,

caused by disappointment and a continuous longing for home’ (quoted in Wilson

2005: 21). We should be reminded of the exceptional longing that Murray felt

which precipitated the writing of ‘My Island Home’. Bearing in mind what I have

said about Aborigines and ghosts, we can note that Svetlana Boym tells us that:

‘One of the early symptoms of nostalgia was an ability to hear voices or see ghosts’

(2001: 3). She also writes that:

Nostalgia … is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy (2001: xiii).

We can wonder about Murray’s displacement of his desire for his own home,

which is increasingly unsettled as the land rights claims make Aborigines real,

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onto the increasing certainty of Burarrwanga’s home and what Murray sees as

Burarrwanga’s connection with it.

‘My Island Home’ is written more like a type of folk song than a rock song.5

By this I mean that the lyrics include an amount of detail unusual in traditional

pop and rock songs. It is this detail that leads other singers to change the lyrics

to reflect their own situations. In Murray’s original version, in addition to telling

us that the singer has been six years in the desert, we are also told that the singer

comes from the saltwater people who have always lived by the sea. The basic divi-

sion here is between two different Indigenous groups. Andrew McMillan writes

about this distinction:

To the Top Enders, the desert is a wild, tough place that breeds wild, tough people. The tribesmen of Arnhem Land have a certain fear of the men from the desert… To the desert people, the Top Enders are merely ‘fish eaters’, an inher-ently different, softer mob (1988: 188).

However, it is easy to understand how this division might be a displacement for

the division between settler Australians and the Indigenous people. Murray’s lyrics

here can be read as a meditation on his own circumstances—a white man coming

from urban Victoria to work at the Indigenous community of Papunya. As the

lyrics ask: ‘Will this place ever satisfy me?’ A key detail here is Murray’s mentioning

of Alice Springs, the nearest town to Papunya. The reference to the Alice would,

one would think, mark the song as indubitably Australian; even internationally

Alice Springs is known as the gateway for Uluru. Yet, in Bobby & Angelo’s version,

Alice Springs remains in the English lyrics while being replaced in the Tahitian

lyrics with the idea of living on a mountain. What seems to make Bobby & Ange-

lo’s version work is the sense of overwhelming longing that pervades all versions

of the song to a greater or lesser degree.

The biggest change in the Bobby & Angelo version is the removal of a verse,

central to the nostalgic effect of Murray’s original, which tells of remember-

ing standing in a boat holding a spear used for killing turtles. Interestingly, Anu

retains the image in her version of the song; the cultural dislocation caused by her

description of herself as wielding a turtle spear is mostly lost on settler Australians

while the nostalgic impact remains. I understand from Professor Jane Freeman

5. Murray has never recorded a studio version of ‘My Island Home’ outside of the Warumpi Band. However, there is a live version by Murray and Shane Howard, founding member of Goanna and composer of ‘Solid Rock’ (released October 1981; number 2 on the singles chart), a song that recognizes the prior presence of Aborigines on the land and their displacement by force. This ver-sion of ‘My Island Home’ is best described as electric folk. It can be found on Murray and Howard’s 2 Songmen; Shane Howard and Neil Murray Live in Concert (ABC, 2006), recorded at the Darwin Fes-tival, August 22, 2006 and also on Neil Murray’s Sing the Song: The Essential Neil Murray.

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Moulin that hunting turtles is not part of Tahitian life. Bobby & Angelo replace this

with the image of taking up the omore, the traditional Tahitian lance or pike. Pro-

fessor Moulin has suggested to me that this has the effect of invoking the idea of

traditional Tahitian culture.6 In this way, the new image retains the sense of a con-

nection with the local culture while also emphasizing its strength and persistence.

Indeed, as the final verse of the Bobby & Angelo version and sung in Tahitian, the

image could be read as a statement of opposition to French cultural imperialism.

When the Warumpi Band went into a lengthy hiatus after releasing their

second album, Murray formed Neil Murray and the Rainmakers. During tours in

1989 and 1992–1993, Christine Anu was employed as a backing singer. One of the

songs she sang on was ‘My Island Home’. In her words:

I was quite happy as a backing singer but Neil would always say, ‘C’mon, you’re the only chick in the band, we've gotta get your face out front. Surely you can sing a couple of songs to give me a break.’ I started singing one line of My Island Home, then a verse, then it ended up becoming the song that I sang (quoted in ‘My Island Home’ 2013).

‘My Island Home’ became Anu’s third single. As I have remarked, Anu made the

song her own in the most literal sense by revising the lyrics to reflect her personal

situation as an islander living in Sydney.7 The lines referring to the desert and to

Alice Springs have been rewritten to refer to living in the city. John Connell com-

ments that, for Anu, ‘ “My Island Home” captured a sense of loss: nostalgia and

desire for an island she had barely known’ (2003: 554). With Anu singing it, the

song became an expression of longing for Torres Strait islanders many of whom

had moved from the islands to cities down the east coast of Australia.

The shift from the desert to the city had another consequence. It became easier

for urban, settler Australians to identify with the song. The city is unnamed and

though they might not come from an island where turtle are hunted, settler Aus-

tralians could identify with the terrible yearning for home. As I have remarked,

through the 1990s settler Australians were feeling increasingly unsettled. The

Mabo decision came three years before Anu’s version of ‘My Island Home’ and it

is very likely that the mainstream popularity of Anu’s version was aided by settler

Australians’ longing for a home that was not uncanny. At the same time, David

Bridie produced the track in a dance rhythm. This increase in tempo made the

song appear less elegiac and more celebratory of the island home. In his 1997

6. I am very grateful to Dr Jane Freeman Moulin, Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Uni-versity of Hawai‘i, for her translation of the Tahitian lyrics and for her insights into the song’s con-text in Tahiti. Professor Moulin may not agree with my reading.

7. Anu’s ‘My Island Home’ could fit into the genre discussed by Karl Neuenfeldt in ‘Torres Strait Maritime Songs of Longing and Belonging’ (2002).

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discussion of the song Phillip Mar writes that, on being in the audience at differ-

ent gigs in 1995 when the Warumpis and Anu played their versions of the song,

the closest word he could find for the feeling the song gave him was ‘longing—a

longing for home. In this case, however, I long for a home I have never known and

cannot know’ (1997: 145). He is right, not only because the two islands referenced

in the two versions are home to Aborigines and islanders respectively but because,

as a settler Australian, regardless of his ethnicity, Mar could never, and certainly

can never after Mabo at least until there is consensual reconciliation, feel that he

has a home which, in Morley’s term, has an internally coherent self-identity, that

is, a home that is not uncanny.

Anu performed the song at the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in

2000. Now, as I have remarked, the song had a new verse and a new title. Aided by

the television coverage, this version of the song has become the one most settler

Australians recognize. The presentation, as Liz Reed explained:

involved an appropriation of imagery and performances, whereby a ‘new’ rec-onciled national identity was presented to ourselves and to the world. As she performed ‘My Island Home’ [sic], the stage became Anu’s island home, and the thirty-one Torres Strait Islander dancers—white turtles painted on the bare backs of the men—were presumably intended to signify her identity (2000).

Katelyn Barney expands on this idea. Quoting Tony Mitchell, Barney argues that,

Anu’s performance at the closing ceremony celebrated what has become an ‘increasingly hyphenated and hybridized Australian national identity’, yet at the same time worked to conceal the complex history of race relations and contem-porary political debates about social justice and human rights for Indigenous Australians (2005: 141).

Barney’s point here is that it could be possible to acknowledge this new, hybrid-

ized national identity and also recognize the injustices that have been imposed on

Australia’s indigenous population over 200 years of dispossession. Rather, Anu’s

performance only emphasized diversity and harmony. The events that led to Mabo

and had shaped relations between settler and Indigenous Australians in the eight

years since the High Court’s decision were elided.

Suvendrini Perera writes that in the spectacle of the Olympics: ‘Sportspeople,

musicians, artists, and dancers together enacted an allegory of nation that coun-

tered the souring of the official reconciliation process and the collapse of hopes

for a republic’ (2009: 15). She notes that Anu’s performance offered reassurance

after Midnight Oil had sung ‘Beds Are Burning’, their statement about land rights

in which the Oils sing that the time has come to pay the rent. ‘Beds Are Burning’

is the first track off the Oils’ Diesel and Dust album, released in 1987 which was

inspired by the group’s experiences on the Blackfella-Whitefella tour across the

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Northern Territory with the Warumpis mentioned earlier. Its political assertion of

rights for Indigenous Australians counterpoints Murray’s aching personal state-

ment about wanting a return to an island home, in the first place an individual

desire but, also, an avowal that can be read in terms of the removal of Indigenous

peoples from their lands. Perera suggests that the appeal of ‘My Island Home’

‘is [its] ability to contain contradictory meanings and absorb tensions between

them, even as it provides space for hidden stories of displacement and upheaval to

emerge’ (2009: 16). ‘My Island Home’ is not an overtly political song like ‘Beds Are

Burning’ and its theme of yearning for an island home overlays any specific politics

that can be read into the lyrics but, for similar reasons, as Perera writes, stories of

displacement and upheaval can also be found there though, by the time of Anu’s

Olympics version, these were well-hidden.

Nevertheless, the trace of settler anxiety appears in the song’s new, final verse.

In this we are told that: ‘My home is Australia’ and then ‘We are a land bound by

sea’. The second line rewrites the fourth line of the national anthem, ‘Advance

Australia Fair’, in which ‘Our home is girt by sea’. The displacement of ‘home’ in

the new verse is occasioned by its assertive juxtaposition in the first line where

‘Australia’ with the variety of meanings associated with the term, most espe-

cially land mass and people, are morphed together. It is this conflation of signi-

fieds which produces the odd locution in the second line where ‘we are a land’:

we, the members of the nation, are equated with the geographic extensiveness of

the Australian state. The third and fourth lines of the verse, ‘Though I may travel

across the ocean/It will never forget me’, echo the sentiments of Peter Allen’s

‘I Still Call Australia Home’. Allen composed his song in 1980. The lyrics tell of

the singer, and other expatriates, who travel the world yet ‘my heart lies wait-

ing over the foam’ and, ‘no matter how far or wide I roam/I still call Australia

home’. Here, as in Murray’s lyrics, there is a yearning for home but it is not so pro-

nounced. Allen enjoys his travelling, it is just that nowhere gives him such a feel-

ing of homeliness, of being at ease, perhaps of not feeling unsettled, as Australia.

Qantas started using the song in its advertisements in 1997, interestingly at the

time when settler Australians were feeling unsettled. The new verse for ‘My Island

Home’ performs a reversal. Where, in Murray’s original, the island that is home

is elsewhere in Australia, now my home that is an island is Australia. The rever-

sal works by, as in Allen’s song, having Australians travel away from the coun-

try/land mass/nation-state. In Murray’s version, and in Anu’s previous version,

it was Indigenous Australians who yearned for their island home. Now, the sing-

er’s ‘My home’ is counterpointed by the more general ‘We are a land’. The song

becomes more accessible to non-Indigenous Australians. Indeed, what was an

Indigenous anthem is now an anthem for all Australians asserting, against the evi-

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dence, that Australia is, indeed, home to Indigenous and settler Australians alike.

It is this assertion in particular that performs the function of concealment about

which Barney writes. Australia, these new lyrics tell us, ‘will never forget me’. The

irony here is that forgetting is precisely what settler Australians have had to do

to feel at home in Australia—forget, and indeed deny, the existence of the indig-

enous people. Repressed in this lyric about not forgetting is a plea for Australia to

remember ‘us’ who live here so that ‘we all’, both Indigenous and settler, can feel

at home.

At the heart of Murray’s lyric is a small word, ‘it’. As the verse about imagining

being in a boat and holding a turtle spear progresses there is kind of commentary:

‘And I feel I’m close now/To where it must be/My island home is waiting for me’.

Mar writes that:

On paper these look like weaker lines … But in the performance of the song this is a climax—‘Where it must be…’. The ‘it’ which cannot be named. You can come close but you can never actually locate ‘it’ (1997: 146).

At the same time, this ‘it’ is a foreshadowing of my island home identified in

the next line. Mar references Slavoj Žižek at this point and suggests that the ‘it’

refers to what Žižek calls ‘the national thing’, in Mar’s description, ‘that something

unique to “our” way of life, the elusive core of “our” authenticity’ (1997: 146). The

‘it’ in this interpretation refers to the fantastic desire for home, and especially for

a national home. Much of Žižek’s analyses is built on his reading of the psychoana-

lyst Jacques Lacan’s work and there is a more foundational idea, the objet petit a.

David C. L. Lim explains that:

[T]he Lacanian subject is by definition an empty nothing with an infinite crav-ing for something. The subject believes that by possessing the lost object of his desire, his emptiness will be filled and a state of ontological plenitude will be attained. What he fails to see is that no positive object is ever ‘it’, which is the same as saying that desire is inherently inextinguishable. ‘It’ which does not exist in materiality is designated as the objet petit a in Lacan: that is, the non-symbolizable surplus that sets the subject’s desire in motion (2005: 67).

Žižek calls the objet petit a, ‘the chimerical object of fantasy’ (1989: 69). In the case

of Neil Murray, settler Australian, we can see how his exceptional longing can be

thought of in relation to the desire for the objet petit a which, in this case, would be

what would make him feel at home—or, perhaps, for the home that would make

him feel complete, settled, self-identical.

For Murray, the objet petit a is identified with Elcho Island. For Murray, when

he spent those few days with Burarrwanga there: ‘It seemed like paradise at the

time’ (Murray, ‘My Island Home’ n.d.). Andrew McMillan has a similar relation-

ship with Elcho Island. He describes it as ‘delightful; a chunk of paradise adrift in

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the Arafura Sea’ (1988: 196). This identification of Elcho Island with paradise is an

overdetermination that signals the freight of fantasy it carries. John Connell has

written at length about the European construction of the Pacific islands, mostly

Polynesian but including Melanesian, as utopian. ‘Utopia’, he explains, ‘along-

side Eden and paradise, has had an extraordinary pervasiveness through time’

(2003: 554). When the Comte de Bougainville visited Tahiti in 1768 he claimed

it for France and called it Nouvelle Cythera (New Cythera). In Greek mythology

Cythera was the paradisiacal island on which Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was

reputedly born. Connell writes of European notions of ‘an Arcadian and pacific

Pacific, young, feminine, desirable and vulnerable, an ocean of desire’ (2003: 556).

Over two hundred years later this imagery continues to pervade Western think-

ing about pacific islands. We can remember the song ‘Bali Ha‘i’ in the Rodgers

and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (first performed 1949). The island of Bali

Ha‘i is celebrated as a paradise off limits to all except officers. The song, sung by

the islander trader Bloody Mary, describes the desire and longing that the troops

feel for the island.8 We have noted Connell’s comment about Anu’s version of

‘My Island Home’. The paradisiacal connotations of the pacific islands extend to

those of the Torres Strait, and also, it would seem, further west to Elcho Island.

For Murray, the paradisiacal qualities that signal the fantastical realization of the

objet petit a reside in his desire not for sexual pleasure but for home. In the lyrics,

Murray is close to ‘it’, his island home, but, as an object informed by, and inform-

ing, his desire it will remain unreachable. We can now understand the yearning

that informs ‘My Island Home’. For the settler Australian it is for a place that they

can never know, a place with which they have a relationship undifferentiated by

prior occupancy; for the Indigenous people it is a yearning for a holistic return to

their lands from which they have been dispossessed by the settlers.

Conclusion: Tiddas—still longing for that island homeRadiance began as a play written by Louis Nowra and was first performed in 1993,

the year after the Mabo decision and the year the Native Title Act was passed.

Rachel Perkins, the daughter of Charles Perkins the Indigenous activist and Perma-

nent Secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs between 1981 and 1988,

directed the film of the same title and based on the play. The film was released

in 1998. Radiance centres on three Indigenous women, apparently sisters, who

gather, after their mother’s death, in the Queensland house where she had lived

and in which each had been born. The action is character-driven and is punctu-

8. The feeling of overwhelming longing for an island which drives ‘Bali Ha‘i’ makes it an interesting song to compare with ‘My Island Home’.

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ated by revelations about the actual status of the house and the true relationship

between the women.9 Music is central to both the play and the film. One of the

women, Cressy, has become an opera singer and is famous for her performance

in Madame Butterfly. In the film, more than the play, Madame Butterfly becomes a

site of commentary on the impact of colonialism on the lives of the three women.

As Sue Gillett remarks in her important article on the role of music in the film of

Radiance:

[Madame Butterfly’s] romantic and colonialist story of a young geisha’s sexual and emotional betrayal by her American ‘husband’ and her subsequent suicide provides a strong historical reference point for Radiance’s tale of sexual exploi-tation, violence and family breakdown in the Australian inter-racial context (2008: 87; see also Brown 2006).

The central importance of this opera aside, where the play has a strong Irish influ-

ence reflected in the use of the folk song ‘I’ll Tell Me Ma’, which, we are told, the

mother used to sing when she was happy, the film makes increased use of Indig-

enous music, including a version of ‘My Island Home’ sung by Tiddas. Tiddas was

a group composed of two Indigenous women and one ‘white’ woman.10

In the first use of ‘My Island Home’, Nona, the youngest of the three women

and who now lives in Sydney, stands on the beach with Cressy and suggests that

they both have inherited their mother’s voice, exemplifying this by singing a

couple of lines from Anu’s lyrics to ‘My Island Home’. Singing here is suggested

as an expression of heritage, what Cressy and Nona—who it turns out is Cressy’s

daughter from her rape by one of the mother’s lovers—have inherited from the

mother. The content of the singing, as we know, is about the longing for an island

home. The mother comes from Nora Island, an island which sits off the shore and

which can be seen from the house. We are told that her ancestors were moved off

the island but we are never told, in either play or film, why. It stands as an exam-

ple of the Indigenous experience of settler colonialism. What we are told is that

the mother used to sit in a chair and look out over the island and that, when she

became senile, Mae, the sister who looked after her in her final months, had had

to strap her into that chair. When she died she had been gazing, longingly it must

be assumed, at Nora Island. And, folding into the political complexity of displace-

ment, that longing, as Lacan and Boym indicate, would be coloured and qualified

by fantasy.

9. One significant discussion of the film is Craven (2008). The film is also discussed in Collins and Davis (2004) and by Benjamin Miller (2008).

10. In both the play and the film the mother is portrayed as having Irish links and as being a Catholic. In the film the mother is named as Mary McKenna. I have discussed the historical con-nections between the Irish and Aborigines in Stratton (2004).

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The film ends differently to the play. In the play the two sisters burning down

the house which was never really a home for them, or for that matter for their

mother, ends an excoriating analysis of colonial relations and the destruction of

Indigenous family life. But Nowra commented:

When Rachel and I got together, she said ‘you imagine there is something miss-ing from the play that you always wanted to see?’ I said, ‘I always imagined that part two would be all the girls together heading on down the road’. And that became the end of the film (Turcotte 2003: 38).

Tiddas singing Anu’s first version of ‘My Island Home’ underscores the three

women driving off into the distance through the cane fields. Gillett suggests that

the use of ‘My Island Home’, which she argues functions as Nona’s song in the

film, ‘underlies and amplifies the triumphant and harmonious resolution: the

homecoming and the resolution between the sisters’ (2008: 91). However, as we

have seen, there is nothing resolving about ‘My Island Home’, let alone anything

triumphant. In another reading I would argue that ‘My Island Home’ is the song

of the displaced and unhomed mother; even the house she lived in, and which

she thought she had been given by her lover, Harry Wells, was taken back by him

immediately after she died; this, indeed, is the immediate motive for the sisters

burning it down.

While the film seemingly ends as a road movie with the women driving in care-

free manner off ‘into the sunset’, as Perkins puts it (Turcotte 2003: 38), the use of

‘My Island Home’ sung by a predominantly Indigenous group suggests otherwise.

The women leave behind the incinerated house, the only ‘home’ they have ever

shared—and underneath which Cressy had been raped. Nona has spread the moth-

er’s ashes on Nora Island but this island, their ancestral home, the site of a fantasy

of return and of identity, we are told now has a Japanese-run tourist resort. There

is now no home for the women there and any hypothetical land claim would fail

because of a lack of ongoing connection. Far from setting out from home on a road

trip, the film’s ending offers us three displaced Indigenous women driving into an

unhomed future while ‘My Island Home’ suggests the loss and the yearning which

continues to shape their lives—in spite, we might add, of the Mabo decision.

Across the thirteen years that spans the time between Neil Murray writing the

song and it being performed by the Warumpi Band to Tiddas recording it for Radi-

ance, ‘My Island Home’ has become intimately imbricated with both settler and

Indigenous experiences of land rights and home.11 During this time the song’s

11. Tiddas’s version of ‘My Island Home’ is unavailable on CD and can only be found as part of the film. What makes this particularly unfortunate is that Tiddas, along with Radiance’s musical director Alistair Jones, won a Deadly award in 1999 for Excellence in Film or Theatrical Score for

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theme of nostalgic longing became as applicable to settler Australians feeling

increasingly displaced and uncanny while Indigenous Australians became more

real, acquiring land rights and the right to negotiate in limited circumstances for

access to land they had lived on for countless generations, as the song’s theme had

been to Indigenous Australians displaced either voluntarily or by force from their

homes. At the same time, that nostalgic longing also signals the fantasy of home

that informs the experience of displacement for both Indigenous Australians and

settler Australians.

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