Murru

Murru is a unique compilation album featuring Shellie Morris, Archie Roach, Emma Donovan, The Last Kinection, John Bennett, Harry Hookey, Bill Chambers & Lucky Oceans.

Australia’s leading arts and social change company Big hART has brought together some of Australia’s most celebrated Indigenous artists and talented non-Indigenous blues, folk and alt-country stars to work with inmates and community members from the remote Pilbara town of Roebourne to create a memorial album to mark the 30th anniversary of the death of 16-year old John Pat who died in a police cell in Roebourne on the 28th September 1983.

The music collaboration – which includes the talents of John Bennett, Shellie Morris, Emma Donovan, Archie Roach, Lucky Oceans, Harry Hookey, Bill Chambers, the Last Kinection, Trevor Jamieson and David Hyams - is the result of over two and a half years of music workshops run by Big hART in the Roebourne Regional Prison and the community as part of the Yijala Yala Project - a long term, multi-platform and inter-generational arts project.

In 2013 professional musicians and singers/songwriters were invited to collaborate on song-writing with inmates and community members to write and record tracks for Murru.

‘The John Pat project has been an exceptional experience as I have had the opportunity to write and record with local countrymen from Roebourne. I would like to thank all involved in the project for a brilliant job and for allowing the story of John Pat to be told,’ said John Bennett. The song John performs – Our Ways, Our Stories, written by Tyson Mowarin of Roebourne – has already been nominated in WAM’s Song of the Year in the Indigenous category.

Shellie Morris was equally as positive about the album and the broader project: ‘Being able to create songs about strength, courage and fortitude was a really important part of the project for me. There is so much history, so much to be done, so much that has been done, that each song and each lyric has a whole lot of history behind it; many loved ones, many families, so many songlines are behind the words on this album, I am truly proud to have been part of it,’ said Shellie Morris.

The aim of the album is to raise funds for a memorial to John to be built in Roebourne and create discussion around the need for strategies to reduce Indigenous incarceration rates and eradicate preventable deaths in custody.