Remembering Gurrumul: Child of the Rainbow
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, better known as Gurrumul or Dr G Yunupingu, was a Yolngu Aboriginal musician from Elcho Island, off the coast of Arnhem Land. Born blind, Gurrumul taught himself to play a guitar held upside down. He was said to be acutely shy and knew little English, but these things did not define his life nor his career. He took Australian music by storm and achieved international acclaim, garnering praise from the likes of Elton John, Sting, Quincy Jones, and Bjork. He featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, performed for President Obama during his 2011 Australia visit, and performed at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert in 2012. In less than a decade, Gurrumul became the highest-selling Indigenous musician in Australian history.
Gurrumul died on July 25, 2017, at only 46, due to organ failure relating to the Hepatitis B he’d contracted during childhood. His final album, Djarimirri (Child of the Rainbow), was released posthumously in 2018 after almost six years in the making. When I found the album, merely by coincidence, I knew that it was special. Djarimirri essentially features Yolngu chants set against an orchestral background, and is therefore situated somewhere in between an Indigenous and Western sound. There’s an incommunicable depth to it: the drone of the strings, the ringing horns, and through it all, the purity of Gurrumul’s voice.
According to Emily Nicol, who writes for IndigenousX, Yolngu people are bound by gurrutu, ‘a complex kinship system which then governs the basic aspects of life’, and she explains that Yolngu culture ‘is rich with song, dance, story and ceremony demonstrating beliefs and history, and the natural and spiritual worlds.’ Indeed, these are themes that are present throughout Djarimirri, with the 12 songs that comprise the album all relating to specific totems and aspects of Yolngu culture, such as Waak (Crow) and Gapu (Freshwater). As Miriam Dhurrkay Yirrininba, Gurrumul’s niece, told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2018 ‘[e]ven though he couldn’t see the nature, he was born to feel the nature.’ Her Uncle’s sight, says Miriam, emanated from somewhere else, from ‘a special place to see, which was his heart.’
Gurrumul’s death has been described as a true loss to the Aboriginal community, but according to Nicol, the legacy of his work lives on and is immortalised in Paul Williams’ 2018 documentary, Gurrumul (stream it for free here). Gurrumul’s Aunt, Susan Dhangal Gurruwiwi, who serves as a narrator in the documentary, remarks at one point that he was not simply a Djarimirri—Child of the Rainbow—he lived inside that rainbow. He shed light on and shaped the spaces of two separate but interacting worlds.
As a non-Indigenous person, I can’t speak to the impact of Gurrumul’s work on the Aboriginal community. I also cannot fully appreciate the poetry of his music, which, although beautiful to me, belongs to a culture and a history I am not personally familiar with. But listening to his music, his raw voice which radiates both a strength and a sensitivity, I am reminded that some sounds are so striking they can’t be expressed in words, or maybe they can, only in a language that isn’t yours. Your heart aches anyway, and you feel it in some part of you that lies dormant until the right sound comes along and reminds you it’s there, listening.