Take Me to the River is not Emma Donovan’s song, but it is her story. They are her girls giggling in the back of the vintage Holden wagon she drives in the video. The bush unfurling outside is her mother’s Gumbaynggirr Country, where the Nambucca River meets the Pacific.
That country will loom large in the NAIDOC week show of the same name Donovan will perform with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra this week, courtesy of photography by video director Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore.
“When we were kids, we grew up on that river,” the singer says of her recently adopted home on the mid-north coast of NSW. “Nan used to take us up the river, fishing. All the family fishing. We’d do it together in big groups.
“There’d be this big prep, we’d be digging up worms in the yards, kids with buckets, getting lots of worms, cricket bait. Nan would be making burley [bait]. And then we had these old rods, made from bamboo. Just a drop one with a cork. Nan, I don’t know why, but she called them Ned Kelly rods.”
It sounds like a good song title. “Oh, I’m definitely gonna go there,” Donovan says with a laugh. “See, this is why I’ve gone back home, because I can find out some more stuff. Like where’d them bamboo rods come from?”
As a musical playground, “Melbourne still does it for me,” Donovan says on one of her frequent returns to the city where she made her name. Twenty years ago, joining the Black Arm Band gave her a different sense of belonging: “mob that I made my family”. Three albums fronting soul-funk band the Putbacks followed.
‘How can we imitate something like the whistle trees or the she-oak in a song?’
Emma Donovan, musician
But recent years have found her building a bridge to more solid ground. Her 2024 album, Til My Song Is Done, was a return to country, gospel and family. Take Me to the River weaves another thread into the picture: the classic soul repertoire that helped shape her voice, now expanded to orchestral scale with the MSO.
The songs for the NAIDOC week show come mainly from Sam Cooke, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Etta James and other soul legends Donovan heard in her father’s record collection. But inside Alex Turley’s bespoke arrangements, the singer is determined to personalise sound and story.
“These are such big, iconic songs,” she says, “but I don’t want anybody to think this is just a bunch of covers.” She’s been sending ideas to Turley on her ukulele; bringing in seeds and shells and clapsticks. “How can I make it feel like I’m singing down at the island in Nambucca? How can we imitate something like the whistle trees or the she-oak in a song?
“A lot of it’s based on me spinning a little yarn,” she says, an idea that draws on her theatrical experience with the Black Arm Band.
“There’s stuff about relationships, stuff about breaking up, and where I go to after them times. I share a lot of that, and it’s very personal and deep, but it’s also about where I’m at now. I went home and I planted my feet back there.”
Nine years after her mother’s death, her joy about home is bittersweet. Her daughters Kwilena and Jirriga are learning their late grandmother’s language. They go to the school their great-grandfather attended back when it was part of Bowraville Mission. Even the old Holden in that video was chosen because “Poppy used to drive that car.”
Donovan’s idea of home took a while to settle. She was born in Sydney’s west. As a girl she lived in Redfern, close enough to Koori Radio to deliver requests in person. In recent years she made inroads to resettling with her father, a Naaguja and Yamatji man from Western Australia. “I drove the Nullarbor two, three times now … but it was just too much for me, gigging the east coast all the time.”
At last, those Ned Kelly rods found their mark. “I was raised mostly by mum, so all these stories and all the yarns and the songs and the connections, it goes back to me always going up to Nambucca and going, ‘I need to switch off, I need to reset. I need to reconnect. I’m going back there.’
“I take my cues from Mum, always,” she says, “and the way that she did things for me and my brothers. I hope that I’m on the right path with the girls. I think the best thing about being back in Nambucca is all them aunties are there … my mum’s little sisterhood.
“It takes such a long time, that grief, but I felt like I’d got through. And now that I’m home, I walk down the street and all the aunties want to yarn and talk to me about it. It’s cool, because I’m in a better place now. I love sharing all of that. It’s important to me.”
Emma Donovan and the MSO present Take Me to The River, a NAIDOC week celebration, at Hamer Hall on July 10.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
