‘A song is not just a song’ a keynote from Professor Deborah Cheetham AO

Thank you. It is a great honour to be here with you this morning in this beautiful venue to celebrate International Women’s Day. In 2020 the call to action is to use every ounce of our influence and ability, our talent and commitment to champion equality, to celebrate the many and varied achievements of women, to raise awareness against bias and to take action for equality. I speak to you today as someone who has fought the battle for equality on many fronts. As I stand on this country this morning I know I have the ancestors and elders of the Boonwurrung and their close neighbours the Wurundjeri to thank for the strength that I draw on every day. For 70 thousand years or more the Kulin nations have sung and danced and painted their culture on this land and this land has a long memory.

In all the world, Australia alone can lay claim to the longest continuing cultures. We live each day drawing energy from a land which has been nurtured by the traditional owners for more than 2000 generations. Although we celebrate this more today than in any other time since our shared history began, there is little doubt that there is still a great deal of progress to be made.

A decade ago I spoke about the lack of opportunity for Indigenous opera singers, the need for new lyrics for our national anthem and of the luxury of failure — an experience at the time not often afforded to Aboriginal people. Sadly, if you failed personally you failed on behalf of everyone. This equation, however did not operate in the reverse. A success made you some how out-of- the-ordinary and perhaps that was so on occasion. However, most of the time I’ve found myself exercising a kind of life practice that was not merely the result of education or nurturing but part of my DNA and extends me to this day well beyond the hybrid of humanity you see before you.

Not surprisingly a common theme has remained throughout the last 30 years and that is the power and necessity of music and the role it plays in shaping and sustaining communities. Music is my earliest memory and has always been for me a way of knowing the world and making sense of everything in it.

For what purpose do we strive in this life if not to gain the deepest possible knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the longest practice of knowing is through the arts. Music, dance, art and the spoken narrative, this is how human kind has traditionally made sense of its existence. It is our way of knowing. For Indigenous Australians the arts were the means of acquiring and passing on knowledge. A song is not just a song. It can be a map to your identity. It can provide you with a path that will lead you home.

One of my least favourite tasks throughout my career is the updating of my bio and these days I’m even less in favour of updating the bio image. Last year I finally arrived at a point where all I wanted to be was succinct. I am a 21st century urban woman — Yorta Yorta by birth, stolen generation by policy, soprano by diligence, composer by necessity and lesbian by practice. It has taken me a long time to arrive at this point of awareness and acceptance.

As most of you would know I did not begin my public life as a composer. For most of my career I have been best known for my work as a soprano although as a student of music I began my formal training as an instrumentalist, majoring in piano and flute. My role as a composer developed relatively late in life and basically through necessity. I had experienced, during the first 20 years of my career, a classical music industry where Indigenous voices were kept either silent or were reinterpreted by only non-Indigenous composers. As years passed and I continued to be overlooked by major companies as a performer, I realised that things would not change for the next generation of Indigenous singers unless I created a space in which they could safely develop their skills. A decade ago this led to the creation of Short Black Opera Company.

I have spent the last 20 years developing my compositional voice and during that time I have had the privilege of specialising in coupling the beauty and diversity of our Indigenous languages with the power and intensity of classical music. I made Melbourne my home 16 years ago and very early on I had the great fortune of meeting Senior Boonwurrung elder Aunty Carolyn Briggs. She asked me what projects I had underway and I told her I wanted to write an opera and that I already had the title — Pecan Summer. “That’s great Deb, you’ve got a title. Have you got a story?” “Well no, actually, I don’t. I’m still searching for that story. I’m still searching for what the meaning of Pecan Summer will be.” Aunty Carolyn looked at me for a moment and said “You need to get up to Shepparton, Deb. You need to go and find your family. You need to get up to Cummeragunja and learn about where you come from. You need to know about the walk-off from Cummeragunja Mission Station.” Now I’m just going to say those words one more time — the walk-off from Cummeragunja Mission Station. If you’re hearing those words for the first time, can you please raise your hand? (80% of the women in the room raise their hands) OK, so it was definitely worth getting up at 6.30 this morning to be here.

You are why I’m here today, so that I can tell you about this vital part of our nation’s history. About the people of the Yorta Yorta nation, who in 1939 stood up and said “enough”. Enough of the brutal oppression. It is our time to rise up. We will walk-off this mission station where you’ve forced us to live, we’re going to take back our rights, our self-determination. So on the 4th of February, 1939, one of the hottest days recorded since colonisation began, 200 men, women and children of the Yorta Yorta Nation, crossed the Dhungala (Murray River) into Victoria, out of reach of the NSW Aboriginal Protection Board. It was the first mass strike of Aboriginal people. The walk-off from Cummeragunja Mission Station became a march which eventually led to the 1967 referendum. I am sure this must sound like ancient history to the younger members of our gathering today, but I need you to know that I was 3 years old before I was counted as a human being in this country. It is vital that you understand the Australia we live in today is built on this history.

I took Aunty Carolyn’s advice and I made that trip to Cummeragunja. I learnt so much about myself along the way. I learnt that my own grandparents James and Frances Little had taken part in the walk-off. I wrote Pecan Summer and 10 years ago we premiered it on Yorta Yorta country in Mooroopna, less than a kilometre from where those who walked off Cummeragunja made their stand. Pecan Summer was Australia’s first Aboriginal opera. It’s still Australia’s only Aboriginal opera and to celebrate those 10 years, we’re bringing it to the Melbourne Recital Centre on October 30 and 31 this year. I hope you will come and help us celebrate because now you know about this milestone in our shared history, but there is one more critical step beyond knowing and that is understanding.

I am particularly passionate about our duty of care to our young artists who are working hard to develop their identity in a country which still struggles to rise above its long running identity crisis. As artists every time we step in front of an audience, whether they are seated in a legendary venue such as this or in the local community hall, we are in the business of building and at times breaking down the society we live in. Music has the power to convey a truth like no other method I know. A song is not just a song.

Right now our nation is in desperate need of what we those of us assembled here today are able to do. We are women and we are the life givers. We are musicians and we are the keepers of knowledge. At a time when so many Australians still do not realise how far they are from understanding the true value and beauty of the longest continuing cultures in the world, the arts and in particular music, must play its role in conveying the truth of our shared belonging on this land. And in this quest — undiluted equality is paramount.

But what is to be the benchmark? Equal to what? To whom? Is it possible for the Australia we live in to be equal to the societies that cared for this land for more than 2000 generations? Just like Australia, when I started out in life I didn’t really know who I was at all. There was so much of my identity yet to be uncovered, to be known and eventually understood. Music has afforded me the opportunity to develop an understanding of who I am and how I fit into this world.

I would see our Australia shaped and nurtured by an emotionally mature, respectful arts community who have the courage and determination to remain faithful in the service of the music, dance, art and narrative that called to them in the first place.

This year, as we focus on the road to equality I charge you to set your aim high. Embrace your arts practice in the same way Indigenous Australians have longer here than anywhere else on the planet — as an essential way of knowing the world and giving meaning to everything in it. Thank you and happy International Women’s Day.