Dr G Yunupingu
Blind Aboriginal singer who won fans around the world
DR G YUNUPINGU, who has died aged 46, was an Australian Aboriginal singer who was born blind and brought up in poverty; but in 2008 he took Australia, and then the world, by storm, winning numerous awards.
When his debut album, Gurrumul, was released that year, the shy 38-year old from Elcho Island in Arnhem Land, northern Australia, was hailed as one of the brightest talents ever to emerge from the country’s indigenous population. The album went platinum in Australia and silver in Britain and sold more than half a million copies worldwide.
Yunupingu’s success was all the more remarkable because most of his songs were sung in his native Gumatj language of Yolngu, a dialect few people could understand. Yet he went on to make acclaimed appearances in the Netherlands, the US and China. He played at the Barbican and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and at the 2011 Latitude Festival in Suffolk. He collaborated with Quincy Jones, Elton John and Sting, and sang in front of audiences including the Queen and Barack Obama.
Largely self-taught, Yunupingu played drums, keyboards, guitar and didgeridoo, but it was the radiance and clarity of his high tenor voice that stunned listeners. As Adam Sweeting observed in The Daily Telegraph, it radiated “a yearning, plaintive quality, gentle but somehow dangerously feral. It seems to have blown in across oceans and deserts, over thousands of years.” This was because, Sweeting suggested, rather than sex, drugs and shopping, Yunupingu sang of clouds, wildlife and shared ancestral memories. “The longing and sadness in his voice,” wrote another critic, “give you an experience not unlike being Irish at a gorgeous rendition of Danny Boy.”
Yunupingu was born on January 22 1971 and imbibed the stories of origin of his Elcho Island clan, which had been transmitted verbally and in song, dance and ceremony for 5,000 years. Though born blind, he never learnt Braille and left school aged 12.
He grew particularly close to an aunt who accompanied him to church where gospel music proved a major influence. At four he was bought a small keyboard, which he taught himself to play. Later he was given a right-handed guitar, which, being left-handed, he taught himself to play upside down.
Yunupingu’s career began as a member of the Aboriginal band Yothu Yindi. In the mid 1990s he was introduced to Michael Hohnen, co-founder of the record label Skinnyfish, who worked on three albums for Yunupingu’s next outfit, the Saltwater Band, before convincing him to make a solo album. They worked together on two more successful albums, Rrakala and The Gospel Album, and as Yunupingu’s reputation grew, Hohnen served as his bass player, producer, translator, spokesman and tour manager.
Though Yunupingu’s songs carried no political message, their acceptance by the Australian cultural mainstream was seen as a milestone in the fraught relationship between white Australia and its indigenous peoples, and Yunupingu found himself becoming a symbol of that relationship.
The life expectancy for Indigenous Australians is 10 years less than for nonindigenous Australians, mainly due to chronic disease. Yunupingu had contracted Hepatitis B as a child, later requiring dialysis. When in 2016 he ended up at the Royal Darwin hospital after vomiting blood, he was allegedly denied adequate treatment for hours until he ended up in intensive care. Medical notes had attributed his condition to alcohol abuse, and the hospital’s staff were accused of making assumptions based on racial profiling – allegations hotly denied by the hospital.
To honour a cultural taboo among Aborigines, neither Yunupingu’s full name nor photographs of his face are being published in reports of his death.
Dr G Yunupingu, born January 22 1971, died July 25 2017