Few music documentaries achieve a cinema release for a simple reason: few are worthy of it. Most are designed, and executed, for television broadcast and DVD release, and as a self-fulfilling outcome they appear happy to stay within the tidy parameters – both visually and thematically – that that entails. The norm now is a linear narrative that picks over the years, with archival footages interspersed with the observation of participants and the hosannas of famous and/or qualified observers. Popular music, an artform that can literally level reality and start again in just three minutes, sadly inspires so little in so many filmmakers.
Murundak: Songs of Freedom, which tells the stories and circumstances of the artists who’ve combined to become the Indigenous musical collective The Black Arm Band, is a thankful exception to that staid status quo, although it’s hard to imagine, given the particulars of what’s involved, that anyone could think, let alone try to execute, a conventional telling of these lives. It demands something more and, generally, co-directors Natasha Gadd and Rhys Graham deliver, creating a shared narrative where the telling of history, in both song and interview, slowly combines to make it.
Named for John Howard’s infamous speech about the nature of white Australia’s establishment – 'This black arm band view of our past reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story"¦ I take a very different view." – the extended group formed in 2006, initially put together for two gigs as part of the Melbourne International Art Festival. The shows, and their impact, has grown in scope, and the husband and wife filmmaker Natasha Gadd and Rhys Graham (whose previous documentaries include the 2007 hip-hop primer Words From the City) have been present for much of the journey, having initially assembled the archival footage that screens behind the musicians during their performances and then just kept rolling.
Their presence has made them part of an extended family where younger performers literally call their elders 'uncle" and 'aunty". The filmmakers are witness to powerful moments, such as the imposing singer-songwriter Kutcha Edwards walking off stage and breaking down into tears after singing about being part of the Stolen Generation. Instead of telling the story of a tour, Murundak focuses on the various feature vocalists, letting them talk about their lives and music and then cutting to the group making that personal burden public onstage at the Sydney Opera House.
The documentary connects The Black Arm Band to the Indigenous protest movement of the 1970s and also makes clear the changing times the group is a part of. Several members are outside Parliament House in Canberra for Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generation, but they’re also on a bus that’s stopped by police prior to entering an outback community that had been declared dry as part of the previous government’s Northern Territory Intervention.
You don’t need outside talking heads to shape such a clash of the private and public, but by the same token the filmmakers don’t show you Stephen Richardson, the group’s artistic director and crucial instigator. And while they delineate the generational change that’s slowly occurring, as younger performers such as Melbourne’s Dan Sultan and Darwin’s Leah Flanagan, come to the fore, they don’t investigate the group’s sonic reliance on the established genres of folk and country-rock.
But, ultimately, it gets more than it misses. When you hear a song such as Bart Willoughby’s 'We Have Survived' first heard as a tinny, larrikin response 35 years ago from his band No Fixed Address, and then hear it today as a defiant anthem where dozens of voices swell together, Murundak: Songs of Freedom comes through loud and clear.
