“We share ideas for music,” she says. “A lot of the time it’s young fellas, young people, and it’s an ongoing relationship that we’ve built over the years with different communities. We’ve been to Maningrida a few times now, even Gumbalanya, making sure that we were going to come back. Even if the same mob don’t come, at least we have some members of the band coming back to help.”
Indeed, rather than doing one off concerts or gigs, Donovan and her esteemed Black Arm Band cohorts often return to the same communities to provide ongoing support and gauge their progress.
“We’ve got a lot of friends through Black Arm Band who are already part the community – youth workers, school teachers and the like working together,” says Donovan. “There was one lot in Maningrida who were saying that there was a lot of suicide around the area, but in a whole year that they got funding and the youth centre, they stayed alive there. They were doing so much work getting a studio ready, getting bands up there just to work with the mob, even so that some of the suicide threats went down. Not only that, even in terms of going to school – kids wouldn’t be rocking up to school because they’d be running out to the bush or camping. After the Black Arm Band started up playing music with workshops in the schools, the kids would start rocking up again. A lot of these kids might have the rooms and the facilities, but not the teacher. They just need some musos that they can play with and hang with. It’s a thing that we just kind of do.
“The drummer and the percussionists are the most loved. All the young fellas love playing drums, they’re really brilliant natural drummers too. Just to have someone to share ideas with – they’ve already got the skills. The way that they write, they’re already working in their own community bands.”
While she spends a lot of time spreading goodwill and artistic know-how up north, Donovan also works with indigenous communities in NSW and Victoria, even in such urbanised areas as Geelong. Somewhat remarkably, her Black Arm Band commitments haven’t impeded on her original output. With Darebin Music Feast and AWME just around the corner, Donovan says she’s got some new music in the works, which will touch on her rich indigenous history.
“With me and The Putbacks, we’re in the middle of writing another album now. We’ve been looking up songs from up home in terms of language and getting stories from my mother’s and father’s country – getting some songs that’ll make the mob up there feel nice and warm. The other thing too is that we’ve been doing a really cool version of a song from Ruby Hunter’s political band in South Australia. We’re bringing and recording older tunes we grew up singing and listening to from Uncle Arch [Archie Roach] and Auntie Rube, as well as some old country songs that my grandfather wrote for me and my cousins.
“We’re looking forward to it. We did AWME a few years back but we didn’t have an album or anything out. We were doing covers and test-driving or things that were new at the time, so it’s going to be good to have a showcase this time around.”
BY THOMAS BRAND
