Sammy Butcher is an elder now, but in 1980 he was a 19-year-old whippersnapper playing guitar in Warumpi Band.
The band members hailed from three far-flung points of Australia: Butcher (guitar and bass) and his brother Gordon (drums) are from the small central Australian community of Papunya; Sammy’s brother-in-law George Burarrwanga (lead vocals and didgeridoo) is from Elcho Island in the country’s far north; and Neil Murray (guitar and vocals) is from rural Victoria, although he’d been living in Papunya when the band formed.
Butcher recalls the band’s early days with fondness. “They were some of my favourite times,” he says. The young men would throw all their kit into the back of a ute, drive for hours, then pull up at one of the countless Aboriginal communities that dot the Northern Territory. “No mobile phones those days – we’d just turn up there and start playing.”
Warumpi Band’s unique offering of Indigenous country rock meets American R&B, with songs sung in Luritja, Gumatj and English, earned them fans throughout Indigenous Australia and then more broadly across the country.
A friendship with Midnight Oil would prove significant for both bands – the Oils helped cement Warumpi Band’s reputation in the pub rock scene in Australia’s capitals, while on a 1986 tour Warumpi opened the door for the Oils to remote, tightknit Aboriginal towns.
Clinton Walker, author of Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music, says for many coastal Australian audiences, a Warumpi Band gig was their first exposure to Indigenous culture.
“I grew up in Melbourne in the 1960s and I didn’t know any Aboriginal people,” says Walker, although he knew of boxer Lionel Rose and had seen musician Jimmy Little on Bandstand. “You wouldn’t see Aboriginal faces if you walked down Bourke Street.”
Walker’s appetite for Indigenous music was prefaced by a love of American R&B and soul artists like Chuck Berry, Bob Marley, Little Richard, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone. When introduced to Indigenous reggae rockers No Fixed Address and then Warumpi Band, Walker was instantly enamoured. “[Warumpi Band] were just so fresh, so vibrant, so energetic,” he says. Butcher was an “incredible” guitarist, Burarrwanga their charismatic frontman. “They blew us all away.”
A recent reissue of the band’s three albums and a handful of rare and unreleased tracks on a double disc called Warumpi Band 4 Ever, coincides with a reissue of Walker’s book and accompanying compilation album, which also features a new generation of Indigenous musicians like Dan Sultan, Troy Cassar-Daley and Thelma Plum. Butcher says while the music has changed these artists somehow sing the “same songs”.
When asked if he is a fan of hip-hop and Indigenous rapper Briggs, who he met at Barunga festival in the Northern Territory this year, Butcher says: “He’s really good. [But] I’m never going to like this young generation’s music. I grew up listening to music in the 60s.”
Raised in Papunya, 260km north-west of Alice Springs, Butcher says he didn’t know what racism was – almost everyone he knew was also Aboriginal. That changed as the band began to move in wider circles, and he describes the philosophy behind the band’s reconciliation anthem Blackfella/Whitefella as: “We come as one, and we come as brothers and sisters.”
Butcher rattles off a list of concerns that point at a country in turmoil: asylum seekers stashed away on remote islands, “radicalised” teens and Reclaim Australia protests.
Lyrics like “Blackfella, whitefella /Yellowfella, any fella / It doesn’t matter, what your colour / As long as you a true fella” have taken on a new resonance, and the song was recently covered by Indigenous soul singer Emma Donovan. She says of the song’s message of mutual respect: “They’re the lyrics we’ve been shouting out for years, them songs that came out in the 80s.” Proceeds from single sales were donated to a campaign against the closure of Australia’s remote communities, the threat of which continues to loom large in states like Western Australia.
Butcher still lives in Papunya, the birthplace of contemporary dot painting and home to just a few hundred residents. “Closing down the communities is not the answer. Let the people live on their own lands,” Butcher says. “I like my freedom, my space. I won’t be going to another place, to a city. Living on the land is the best.”
The Walpuri man challenges the government: “Why should we move to a town where there is no culture or story to be told?”
Warumpi Band officially retired in 2000, although have had a couple of reunion performances since and successful solo careers by its members. In 2007, Burarrwanga passed away, aged 50.
These days Butcher is busy teaching music to the young kids of Papunya. He provides a salve to the “drugs, drinking and suicide” that he says troubles them, and talks to the kids about “being with nature, being with culture, talking about stories and teaching them about good tucker”.
Elders take stock of their own life and draw on their accrued wisdom to lead kids to a better path, he says. “As an elder you say to yourself, ‘I’m responsible. I can see the mistakes that I’ve done, and from those mistakes you learn’.”
What regrets does Butcher have? “I missed out on supporting for Dire Straits in Brisbane.”
If it sounds like a wry answer, the guitarist is deadly serious. He can’t remember what prevented him and his brother from performing, forcing the band to cancel, but the lost opportunity still weighs heavily on him. He adds in a kind of lament: “Mark Knopfler is our generation’s best lead guitarist.”
-
Warumpi Band 4 Ever and Buried Country 1.5 are both out through Warner Music
