BY MIRANDA ILCHEF, LEAD WRITER
This NAIDOC Week, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will bring a unique live music event to Hamer Hall. MSO + Spinifex Gum is a distinctively Australian part-protest, part-genre-defying song cycle. It combines the forces of Marliya Choir – comprised of Indigenous girls and women from the Torres Strait and Far North Queensland – with Emma Donovan and Felix Riebl (formerly of The Cat Empire) among its remarkable talent.
The Marliya Choir is conducted by Lyn Williams AM, who has made working with young Indigenous people a central aspect of her career through the initiation and growth of the Gondwana Indigenous Children’s Choir. They’ve since become known for their rich, powerful sound, collaborations with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and performances at the G20 Summit and the Sydney Opera House.
From GICC emerged Marliya Choir when Lyn first collaborated with Felix back in 2016. Spinifex Gum’s self-titled inaugural album has since been followed by a second album (Sisters), and a third is underway. The entirely female makeup gives the choir a particularly strong, distinctive sound. As Lyn Williams points out, it also gives “young Indigenous women and girls a voice, a sense of power and some agency”.
“For them to be able to speak out together and be strong is really important: it’s not a voice that is necessarily heard often,” Lyn says.
Spinifex Gum is a collaboration across cultures, ages, and musical backgrounds. While Felix does not have Indigenous heritage, he has developed a strong relationship with the people of the Pilbara region and with Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation CEO Michael Woodley, who shared the stories and language of north-west Australia. (A lot of the project’s cultural guidance comes from Michael, who will attend the MSO performance.)
Lyn, whose career has focused on a lot of cross-cultural artistic collaboration, says Spinifex Gum is an experience she is grateful for.
“When I’m working with people of different cultures, I feel incredibly privileged because we can all bring something to each other. Collaboration is always more than the sum of its parts,” Lyn shares.
“We all feel so fortunate in Spinifex Gum: you can’t say it’s not challenging, but it is so rewarding. We always laugh about how we are such disparate artists – we all work in such different genres, and yet it just works incredibly well.
“I’ve never done anything like it. Every time we have performed this show, we’ve received standing ovations.”
The musical genre of Spinifex Gum is hard to describe: there’s a choral element to it, but you feel a close-up sound from each singer. There are catchy choruses and powerful lyrics (Something sticks like spinifex gum, like ants on honey, like money on scum). The singers are accompanied by heavy electronic beats created from Felix’s Pilbara field recordings. For this event, Felix has produced new music; it is showcased through Ross Irwin and Ollie McGill’s orchestration, and made live through Benjamin Northey’s conducting.
This MSO show features acclaimed Indigenous vocalist Emma Donovan for tracks like Make it Rain, and the combination of Emma’s powerful “Queen of Soul” style is lifted by the fresh, soaring sound of the choir. There’s accompanying footage of the stark Pilbara landscape, while coloured lighting illuminates the singers as they wear striking outfits to perform choreography from Deborah Brown.
With this combination of footage, lighting, song, story, and dance, Spinifex Gum feels more like an immersive experience than just a concert. Lyn herself finds it a challenge to sum up the Spinifex Gum genre, settling on “unique”.
“You’ve really got to experience it to understand it,” Lyn says.
“It doesn’t sound like [Felix and Ollie’s music of] The Cat Empire, but you hear echoes of their original style in the choruses. Some of the tracks are quite humorous, and a lot of it is really touching.
“There are a lot of tears, but there is a lot of joy.”
A lot of the lyrics speak to social justice issues regarding Indigenous inequality, particularly surrounding deaths in custody. While Lyn has ensured cultural consultation and discussions with families take place, the kids nevertheless handle these heavy topics with a maturity beyond their age.
Lyn reflects upon a particularly touching moment early in the project’s history when the theatre was “absolutely still and everyone was crying”. Families, whose stories were sung, stopped to embrace each other.
“Ever since then, there’s been this incredible sense of responsibility. They weren’t just songs anymore.”
This sense of responsibility has spread through the choir as the girls and women became increasingly involved. For the second Spinifex Gum album, three of the choristers helped Felix to write a song about Juukan Gorge – a sacred site in the Pilbara region that was destroyed in 2020 by mining company Rio Tinto.
The song cycle is partially in language, mostly Yindjibarndi, and Lyn says the process of learning the lyrics was important to everyone involved. The choristers and Lyn don’t speak Yindjibarndi, but feel they are nonetheless contributing to the continuation of an important language in a small way.
“The kids are completely committed to language and culture. With the Indigenous Children’s Choir [from which Marliya originates], we are trying to commission and perform works in language and make the videos on country,” Lyn says.
“They don’t ever see learning the lyrics as a barrier. We treat the learning process with a high degree of respect: we make sure we have a speaker of that language who tells us exactly how to pronounce it.”
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Spinifex Gum event will include songs from the original albums, as well as some new music from the unreleased third album. We can surely expect a spectacular and moving performance: even watching recordings of their 2019 Sydney Festival shows sent shivers down my spine.
Lyn puts it best when she says, “it’s confronting, but ultimately it’s very hopeful”.
Spinifex Gum’s music is clever and catchy – but more importantly, through song and story, it demands a better tomorrow.
Experience MSO + Spinifex Gum in Hamer Hall, 9 July during NAIDOC Week. You can also listen to the team discuss this collaboration in Introducing Spinifex Gum, 7 July.
Images supplied: Spinifex Gum at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
