Archie Roach AM

Singer/songwriter Archie Roach AM (b. 1956) lived at Framlingham Mission before being removed from his parents at the age of four. After two unsuccessful foster placements he settled with a family at Lilydale. At eleven he asked the couple he believed to be his parents why he was black and they were white; they told him his parents had died in a house fire. His foster sister introduced him to the guitar and keyboards, and he began to play American country songs. At the age of fifteen, he was contacted by his natural sister, who told him their mother had just died. Bitterly, he spent the next fourteen years on the streets. He met his lifelong partner, the late Ruby Hunter, at a Salvation Army drop-in centre when she was sixteen. Having had children with her, and having beaten his alcohol dependency, he wrote his first song, 'Took the Children Away', which he first performed during the protest movements at the bicentenary celebrations in 1988; his performance was met with stunned silence. He was invited to open a Paul Kelly concert in early 1989. Kelly produced Roach's first album, Charcoal Lane (1990), which was on US Rolling Stone's list of Top 50 albums for 1992, achieved gold sales in Australia, and earned Roach two ARIAs and a human rights award. Six more albums followed before Into the Bloodstream, released in 2012. Both solo and with Ruby Hunter, Roach has recorded and performed with many top Australian and international acts. Roach's memoir Tell me why (2019) won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing. His album of the same name went on to win two ARIAs in 2020, when he was also inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.