In just a few short years, Baker Boy has brought indigenous language into mainstream music, and won awards for it. Now the Young Australian of the Year, the 22-year-old is bridging the gaps between all people, as STEVE VIVIAN reports

LOOKING like he just wanted to dance, Baker Boy, smiling from ear to ear, shook the prime minister’s hand, and collected his award for Young Australian of the Year.

And then he did a little dance. And in Yolgnu Matha, he addressed the nation. And in that moment, Charlie King saw the future.

“When the announcers read out his name and he walked up on stage, just the way he carried himself, he danced, he was confident, it said a lot about him,” King says, the Northern Territory’s Senior Australian of the Year, who shared the room with Baker Boy on the night of the Australia Day awards last weekend.

“I just looked at him and thought,’ wow’.

“I thought: that’s the future. Young, confident aboriginal people who understand their responsibilities.”

ENCHANTING audiences with international tours, primo slots at major Australian festivals like Laneway, Woodford, Groovin the Moo and Splendour in the Grass and tour supports for global stars like 50 Cent and Dizzee Rascal, perhaps no up-andcoming Australian artist has risen further in the last 18 months than Baker Boy.

In that time, he has accrued a creaking cabinet of awards that includes an Australian Independent Records (AIR) award for Breakthrough Talent of the Year, a National Indigenous Music Award (NIMA) for Film Clip of the Year for Marryuna and another for Best New Talent, and three top-prizes in the NT Song of the Year Awards.

Last year Marryuna became the first track featuring an Indigenous language to reach the Triple J’s Hottest 100 top 20, coming in at number 17 in 2017. His 2018 release Mr La Di Da Di would go on to hit number 51 in last weekend’s Hottest 100 countdown.

It was last Saturday, the day before the countdown, that Baker Boy’s rise reached a surreal peak. Standing in a Canberra auditorium, flanked by Michael Long, Charlie King and an assemblage of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary individuals, Baker Boy as- cended the dais to receive the award for Young Australian of the Year.

DANZAL Baker’s breakthrough career is still, in its conception, a tradition and an ethic.

The original Baker Boys were Danzal’s father and uncle, who are remembered as kickstarting the hip-hop craze in Arnhem Land back in the 80s.

Dancing was in Danzal’s blood: he would watch his father and uncle dance to Fred Astaire, renovating the moves to create a fusion between hip-hop and something traditional and modern.

In this environment of adaption and invention, the