Archie Roach

Australian singer, songwriter, and activist Archie Roach surfaced at the dawn of the 1990s by blending folk-rooted textures with elements drawn from his indigenous background. His first long-player, the ARIA-winning Charcoal Lane, earned a place among Rolling Stone Magazine’s 50 best albums of 1992. Built around the shattering single “Took the Child Away,” the record chronicled Roach’s own removal as part of the Stolen Generation, when Aboriginal children were forcibly separated from their families and raised in non-indigenous homes. The track stirred national attention, secured a Human Rights Achievement Award—the first ever given to a songwriter—and set the tone for the decades that followed. Across the next twenty years Roach and his enduring partner Ruby Hunter, both musically and personally, became defining figures in Australian folk and Aboriginal music. After Hunter’s sudden passing in 2010, followed by Roach’s own stroke and cancer diagnosis, he mounted a striking return with the widely praised Let Love Rule in 2016 and the soundtrack to his 2019 memoir Tell Me Why, before dying in July 2022.

He entered the world at Framlingham Aboriginal Mission near Warrnambool in southwestern Victoria. At three he and two sisters were taken from their parents and placed in a Salvation Army orphanage. Early foster placements proved unstable, yet he found stability with Scottish emigrants Alec and Dulcie Cox, who had settled in Melbourne. A step-sister named Mary and a woman’s performance of a Hank Williams song in church prompted Roach to take up the guitar and begin composing. When an older sister’s letter revealed the truth of his childhood, he left the Cox household carrying only his instrument and spent the next fourteen years searching for his birth family while living on Sydney’s streets. There he met Ruby Hunter, another Aboriginal guitarist removed from her parents; she became his lifelong companion and they later raised children together.

By the late 1980s Roach and Hunter had formed the Aboriginal group the Altogethers and moved from Sydney to Melbourne. Paul Kelly Band guitarist Steve Connolly caught Roach performing “Took the Children Away” on a local current-affairs program, leading to support slots on Kelly’s 1990 tour while Roach finished his debut album. After Charcoal Lane’s breakthrough he toured and recorded with Joan Armatrading, Bob Dylan, Billy Bragg, and Patti Smith. Subsequent releases Jamu Dreaming (1993) and Looking for Butter Boy (1997) strengthened his reputation. Time Magazine introduced him to international readers when a correspondent covering the 2000 Sydney Olympics filed a cover story on the Stolen Generation that featured the songwriter. In 2002 Roach issued both the album Sensual Being and the soundtrack for the film Tracker. Three years later he and Hunter joined the Australian Art Orchestra for Ruby, an album of new songs and reinterpretations of earlier material. The decade closed with Journey in 2007 and the archival collection 1988.

February 2010 brought devastating loss when Ruby Hunter suffered a fatal heart attack at fifty-four. Later that year, still grieving, Roach endured a stroke on the road and soon received a cancer diagnosis that required removal of half a lung. He recovered sufficiently to release the forceful Into the Bloodstream in 2012. Four years afterward came his tenth studio album, Let Love Rule, which climbed to number twenty-four on the ARIA chart. An earlier project with award-winning folk trio Tiddas, Dancing with My Spirit, finally appeared in 2018 after being set aside in the mid-nineties. Roach stayed prolific, issuing the live anthology The Concert Collection 2012–2018 and the memoir Tell Me Why; its 2019 companion album reached number seven on the ARIA chart, his highest placement to date. Both the book and record earned ARIA trophies, and he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. Marking the thirtieth anniversary of his debut, he re-recorded Charcoal Lane as The Songs of Charcoal Lane in 2020, securing another ARIA for Best Blues and Roots Album. In March 2022 the retrospective box set My Songs: 1989–2021 gathered highlights from more than three decades. Five months later, on 30 July, Archie Roach died at Victoria’s Warrnambool Base Hospital after a prolonged illness; he was sixty-six.