My Island Home

Neil Murray, 1987

Due at least in part to the fact that Wikipedia has it wrong, describing it as co-written, it comes as a surprise to many that ‘My Island Home’, made famous by Christine Anu in 1994 then more famous by her at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, was written by a white man.

In 1985, tired on a southbound interstate bus, Neil Murray, a founding and only white member of The Warumpi Band, couldn’t get the words ‘my island home is waiting for me’ out of his head and a tune soon followed. He’d just spent a week with his band’s singer, the late George Rrurrambu Burarrwanga, on George’s home of Galiwinku (Elcho Island) in Arnhem Land. They’d fished and camped out and, when Murray was on the bus, he was overwhelmed with the desire to be back on a boat in the tropical ocean:

I close my eyes and I'm standin' in a boat on the sea again

And I'm holding that long turtle spear

And I feel I'm close now to where it must be

And my island home is a waitin' for me

That lyric from the eventual song, which appeared on The Warumpi Band’s 1987 album Go Bush, speaks to Murray’s own moment of longing, but he wrote ‘My Island Home’ for George to sing. As the song goes, George had been at the time six years in the desert, “out here west of Alice Springs, with a wife and a family”, far from the Galiwinku for which he was often homesick. On one level, the song is Murray entering into George’s experience and describing it for him to sing, but on another it represents Murray’s own experience.

“I had by that time been living in Central Australia for almost six years,” Murray told The Big Issue magazine in 2010. “I was missing the region of my birth and upbringing; the freshwater country of inland western Victoria,” he said, adding that the song “expressed my heartfelt connection to my homeland as well. It was an idea of a place where you truly belonged.”

‘My Island Home’, due to the popularity of Christine Anu’s 1994 version, won Murray the 1995 APRA Song of the Year Award. The same organisation in 2001 voted it one of the 30 most significant Australian songs of the past 75 years. It might be viewed as reconciliation embodied in a work of art – white and blackfellas combining for a song about mutual longing for home in Australia, though the specific geographic and socio-political meanings of home for them are different.

The song also demonstrates the old adage that in art the particular can often have general appeal. Speaking clearly and intimately about George Burarrwanga’s experience of longing for his home on one small island, the melancholic ballad of the song’s first incarnation could be viewed, as some critics have, as an Aboriginal anthem of longing for homelands. But later versions widened that appeal.

Born in Cairns, Christine Anu’s parents were Torres Strait Islanders. The family moved back there, to Mabuiag Island, when she was 10, before she later settled in Sydney as an adult. Anu was in Neil Murray’s backing band post-The Warumpi Band and she started singing ‘My Island Home’ at his gigs. When she recorded a more upbeat version of the song for her debut album, Murray helped changed the lyrics to reflect Anu’s longing for her own island home.

Then, when Anu performed the song at the 2000 Olympics, the lyrics referring to her island heritage remained, but Murray universalised other verses so that any Australian could feel they belonged to the land on which they live:

Six years I lived in the desert

Every night, I dreamt of the sea

Now I'm down here living in the city

With all of my family

And my island home

My island home

My island home is waiting for me

My home is Australia

We are a land

Bound by sea.

And though I may travel far across the ocean

It will never, forget me

My island home

My island home is surrounded by sea

My island home

My island home in a cosmic sea

Some might argue Murray, in this version of the song, the one so many Australians know, is robbing it of its original intention: to speak to one Aboriginal man’s experience of alienation. It could even be argued it strips Anu’s second version of the song of its longing for her island. But the original had built into its very construction the hope for belonging in this country that Aboriginal Australians and every other Australian can share.

Given who wrote it, there’s obviously no getting away from the fact that ‘My Island Home’, which identifies strongly with Aboriginal experience and is seen by many as an Aboriginal anthem, has its roots in another culture. But the culture of its writer, who has deeply connected with Aboriginal people and culture over a lifetime as a musician, itself has parallels with Aboriginal experience.

As Jon Stratton points out in his essay on the song, ‘Whose home; which island?’, Neil Murray’s family arrived in Lake Bolac because they were booted off their homelands in Scotland during the Highland Clearances of the 1840s. When Murray was a boy, his grandfather showed him Aboriginal stone tools he’d found in the paddocks. Young Murray asked where the people were who’d used them and his grandfather said they were at Framlingham – which clearly wasn’t the paddocks where his grandfather had found the tools. Young Murray joined the dots between his family’s and Aboriginal people’s experience of dispossession. It led him to leave his home and live amongst Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, form the Warumpi Band, and later write ‘My Island Home’.

In the song’s initial construction and its evolution, ‘My Island Home’s has been shared across races, even a version that, in Tahitian language, protests against social and economic injustices on Tahiti. Neil Murray’s original ‘My Island Home’ spoke of his own and one Aboriginal man’s longing for home. It now speaks to millions of Australians about the desire to belong together on the big island home we share.