#archie roach

7/5/25.

Sometimes, I really...REALLY love the music snoop. Today's post is an example of the capitalized REALLY love. The other day, I found a cheap copy of Paul Kelly & the Messengers "Under the Sun". I've been a fan of Kelly's for years and while I'll always be partial to "Gossip" (listen to "The Execution"), I pretty much won't turn down a cheap copy of Paul Kelly.

Listening to "Under the Sun", I realized how amazing Paul Kelly (Adelaide, Australia) is and I wanted to "immortalize" this sentiment with a post. We'd mentioned Paul Kelly before (at least 13 times), but he'd never gotten his own post (similar to a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame - or at least that's how I think of it).

Turns out, Kelly doesn't have much of a presence on Bandcamp. But there is this wonderful song with Courtney Barnett on her MTV Unplugged session.

Here's where the REALLY love the snoop story begins. Kelly and Barnett sing "Charcoal Lane" which I assumed was a Kelly song. A little sleuthing brought me to Archie Roach, an Australian singer-songwriter whose album/song "Charcoal Lane" was produced by Kelly. Turns out Charcoal Lane "was a meeting place [in inner-city Melbourne] for Aboriginal people who had left missions, Aboriginal reserves, and other government institutions and drifted to the city in a bid to trace their families...A street behind a factory was a meeting and drinking place known to the community as Charcoal Lane." (source: Wikipedia)

But first I have to post about Archie Roach. I'm not big into music or anything but this guy was, and still is, a big deal.

If you know any of his songs it will be that one.

Archibalie was an Australian singer, songwriter and Aboriginal activist. Also known as "Uncle Archie", Roach was a Gunditjmara and Bundjalung elder who campaigned for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The song "took the children away" is about the stolen generation- when white people decided it would be best if aboriginal children where taken from their families to be raised the white way.

His songs are amazing and always give me goosebumps. All Aussies should know of him, and at least this one song of his, if not others. Archie himself was a stolen child and you can hear his real life experience in the song.

Paul Kelly, musician: "I first heard about Archie through my guitar player, Steve Connolly, who’d seen him on a TV show called Blackout and said, “You gotta hear this guy.” We wanted to do something special for our Hamer Hall show in 1990 so we tracked down Archie [to support]. He finished [his set] with Took the Children Away. There was this stunned silence; he thought he’d bombed. Then this wave of applause grew and grew; I’d never heard anything like it."

RIP Archie Roach

This song was about the experiences of a horrific event called the "Stolen Generation". Where the white Australian government and institutions took Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander children from their families to 'get rid of their indigenous-ness'.