Archie Roach’s work, most famously Took the Children Away, was an indictment of Australian history

In 1992, Archie Roach gave an interview to a radio program looking into the recent death of a 19-year-old Indigenous man in Western Australia.

Louis St John Johnson was beaten and run over by a group of white men, who attacked him, they said, because he was black.

Archie’s family has given permission for his name, image and music to be used.

Paramedics arrived and, finding Louis on the ground, assumed he had been sniffing petrol. They took him back to his home, in suburban Perth, and told him to sleep it off.

Louis had a shattered pelvis, perforated bowel, broken ribs and a punctured lung. He died a few hours later.

Archie Roach performs Took the Children Away at the 2020 ARIAs.(Supplied: ARIAs)

“We’ve got to break down these stereotypes,” Archie said of Louis’s death.

“Nobody gave him assistance, nobody helped him, and the boy was dying. But because they just saw an Aboriginal boy laying on the road, to me, the thought of my people … is he’s sniffing petrol or whatever.

“All’s I ask is why? And why can’t we do something to stop anything like this ever happening again in our country?”

Archie ended up writing a song about Louis, called Lighthouse.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 6 minutes 41 seconds6m Archie Roach explains the story behind his song Took the Children Away(ABC Education)

But the parallels to Archie’s own life are clear. In that way, it’s instructive to think about what happened to Louis through the prism of another song, released two years before the young man’s death: Took the Children Away.

Like Louis, Archie was taken from his parents by the state and placed with a white family. (Louis was falsely told he had been abandoned; Archie was falsely told his family had died in a fire.)

Like Louis, Archie tried unsuccessfully to find his birth family. Louis’s birth mother died in 2006 and was buried next to her son.

Took the Children Away, Archie’s biggest mainstream hit, chronicled the experiences — rooted in Archie’s own story — of the Stolen Generation.

We’ll give them what you can’t give

Teach them how to really live

Teach them how to live they said

Humiliated them instead

Taught them that and taught them this

And others taught them prejudice

It won two ARIA awards and a Human Rights Achievement Award, and was later added to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Archie’s hit gave a platform to people like Louis, members of the community who were so wronged by the state but who did not have an opportunity to tell their story.

Archie tried to provide an avenue for healing, for looking at the destruction of young Indigenous lives and saying: this is not good enough.

As he said in that 1992 interview: “I don’t want to see my people destroyed anymore.”

“For [Archie], it’s his cultural responsibility to use the power of music and storytelling to communicate, connect and heal to create a stronger, more cohesive and culturally respectful national story,” arts executive Rhoda Roberts told an audience at the Sydney Opera House in May 2018.

Archie Roach and Paul Kelly performed at first Womadelaide in 1992.(Supplied)

She was presenting Archie with the Award for Excellence in the Community on behalf of Support Act, an organisation that works to help musicians struggling with health issues.

Archie did consider Took the Children Away a healing song, despite its brutal subject matter.

Late in the song there’s a reprieve.

The children — and, through the use of the first-person pronoun in the final line, Archie himself — come back, “back to their people, back to their land”.

“When I sing that song, it’s like I let a little bit of that go,” he told Radio National in 2016.

“Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be singing it and it’ll all go and I am going to be free.”

More than two decades since its release, Took the Children Away has lost none of its power or — hopefully — its capacity for healing.

“Songs outlive people,” Archie once said, in reference to the passing down through music of Indigenous legacies.

He will be proved right.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 2 minutes 55 seconds2m 55s Award-winning Indigenous musician Archie Roach dies aged 66.

Posted 1h ago1 hours agoSat 30 Jul 2022 at 10:26pm, updated 53m ago53 minutes agoSat 30 Jul 2022 at 10:38pm