Celebrated performer whose songs, including Took the Children Away, revealed the suffering of Australia’s stolen generations
Framlingham mission near Warrnambool, in south-west Victoria, he was taken from his parents, Nellie Austin and Archie Roach Sr, at the age of “three or four”, along with his two sisters, and raised in Melbourne by a white family, Alex and Dulcie Cox, who had moved to Australia from Scotland.
They were told that his parents had died in a house fire and were, he said, “blameless, as far as I’m concerned. They were used.” Growing up as a member of the Cox family, Roach listened to his foster father’s record collection, which included albums by the Ink Spots, Nat King Cole and Mahalia Jackson. He went to church, and here he heard a woman playing a Hank Williams song on the guitar. Roach decided that he too would become a guitarist.His life changed dramatically when he was 15, when he received a letter from a blood sister, Myrtle, then living in Sydney, whom he had never heard of until then. She told him that his real mother, Nellie, had just died, and that he was one of seven siblings. A few months later he left home in a quest to track them down, taking his guitar with him. He was lucky to survive. It took time for him to find his sister, and as he explained in his memoir, he spent years as an alcoholic, drinking in the parks and “empties” of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. He suffered from epilepsy, spent time in hospital and in prison, charged with vagrancy, and attempted suicide, after a failed bid to dry out. But at 17, at a Salvation Army centre in Adelaide, he met another homeless Indigenous Australian teenager with a similar history to his own, who would change his life., but, as the mother of his two children, Hunter threatened to leave unless he stopped drinking. “It turned my life around,” he said. Roach began working in a homeless shelter while also concentrating on music and songwriting. He wrote after being encouraged by an uncle to write about his own experiences. He sang it on a community radio station, then in pubs and on TV, and came to the notice of one of Australia’s best-known singer-songwriters, Paul Kelly.Photograph: Scott Oates/The Guardian. It was at first greeted by silence, said Roach, “and then the clapping started. It sounded like rain that starts with a pitter-patter and builds up and becomes a downpour. It was the most amazing experience I had ever had.” Soon afterwards, Roach was offered a recording contract. His first solo album, Charcoal Lane , was produced by Kelly and Steve Connelly, and won Aria awards for best new talent and best Indigenous album. It included Took the Children Away and a powerful song written by Hunter,, which described her time as a homeless alcoholic. This brought her to national attention, and four years later she recorded her own solo album. Roach went on to record a series of solo albums, including Jamu Dreaming and Looking for Butter Boy , and provided the soundtrack for the film The Tracker in 2002. In 2008 he sang Took the Children Away, with Hunter joining him on backing vocals, when the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, gave a public apology to the stolen generationsRoach and Hunter also performed with the Black Arm Band, a political multimedia project involving white and Indigenous performers, who made a powerful appearance at the British
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