It was a long and powerful performance with Hunter, wearing a colourful feathered flower headdress and a floating dress, sharing the stage with Roach, whose simple strength and humility was obvious.īateman says there was talk at the time of following up with more footage but a planned tour never happened and the project lapsed. She then filmed the concert in Hamer Hall which opened the Melbourne International Arts Festival and had been commissioned by its director, former South Australian artist Robyn Archer. “It was basically a conversation about what the songs meant so Patrick would know where they were coming from,” Bateman says. In 2004, her friend Patrick Nolan, now head of Opera Queensland, had invited her to film a concert given by Roach and Hunter, partners in music and life, working with pianist and producer Paul Grabowsky and the 22-piece Australian Art Orchestra.Īt the time, Bateman was working elsewhere, but she filmed three days of rehearsals with Roach and Hunter and a day when the couple sat with Nolan and talked about themselves and the meaning of their songs. It is not quite correct to say the movie was 17 years in the marking rather, it started 17 years ago and was resurrected in 2019 by Bateman, who kept concert footage and always planned to do something with it. He and partner Ruby Hunter went to her home in South Australia on the Murray River and within a couple of days he wrote the elegiac spiritual about the Coorong that ties together director Philippa Bateman’s film about the couple’s life and work. In conversation during Wash My Soul in the River’s Flow, First Nations singer Archie Roach remembers a time when the songs just wouldn’t come.
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