A journey into the heart of Aboriginal protest music featuring the Black Arm Band

Saturday 28 May at 10.05pm, SBS ONE

“It’s a film for all Australians and judging from the response to the London concert, it reaches way beyond our shores. If you get a chance to see it, grab it. I’m giving it 4 and half stars.” – Margaret Pomeranz, At The Movies

murundak – songs of freedom is a two hour, musical documentary film that follows the award-winning Black Arm Band, a gathering of some of Australia’s finest Indigenous musicians, as they take to the road with their songs of resistance and freedom.

From the concert halls of the Sydney Opera House to remote Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory, murundak – meaning ‘alive’ in Woirurrung language – brings together pioneering singers such as Archie Roach, Bart Willoughby, Jimmy Little, Kutcha Edwards and the late great Ruby Hunter, as well as a stellar line up of emerging Indigenous talent including Dan Sultan, Shellie Morris and Emma Donovan.

For generations, song has formed a vital part of Aboriginal cultural life in which stories are kept alive through the song lines of older generations. Like the protest singers of the American civil rights movement and South Africa under Apartheid, Aboriginal people have drawn on the power of protest song to call for freedom and demand change in a country that is still struggling to reconcile its troubled past.

The first idea for the Black Arm Band was planted by Ruby Hunter in a back street in South Melbourne in 2004 when she suggested to her partner Archie Roach “we need an Aboriginal orchestra”. Following this idea, an ensemble of the original creative pioneers of Aboriginal contemporary music with some of the finest instrumentalists in the country was brought together under the cheeky moniker ‘The Black Arm Band’, referring to then Prime Minister John Howard’s use of the phrase the “black arm band view of history”. The inaugural show murundak was created soon after that.

murundak explores the need for Indigenous peoples to re-engage with their own culture and history. It delves into the personal stories of each member of The Black Arm Band with deeply personal profile interviews of the artists. It also includes rare archival news footage and songs from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the protest movement was first ignited, before moving onto the reign of John Howard’s government and ending with Kevin Rudd’s Apology and its effect on the Indigenous psyche.

“The Black Arm Band reminds me of the long struggle and the long journey we’ve been on. 30 years ago we were marching for justice down the city streets, but now we’re telling our stories in the concert halls”. – Archie Roach, The Black Arm Band

Filmed against the backdrop of Australia’s changing political landscape, murundak charts the most significant events in Australian music history as the Black Arm Band sing up the country’s troubled past through their stories of sorrow, anger and hope.