Auriel Andrew, Australian singer/songwriter/activist
Auriel Andrew (about 70) (1947 – January 2, 2017) was an Indigenous Australian country musician of the Arrernte people of Central Australia. Andrew was born in Darwin, and grew up in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, leaving for Adelaide, South Australia aged 21 to pursue her music career.
Auriel came from the Arrernte people in Alice Springs. Her skin name was Mbitjana and her totem was the hairy caterpillar (Ayepe-arenye). The youngest of seven children, she started singing at the age of four, and began her professional career in the late 1960s working with Chad Morgan in the Adelaide and Port Lincoln areas, and appeared on live TV music broadcasts, including shows hosted by Roger Cardwell, Johnny Mack and Ernie Sigley, and then becoming a regular on Channel Nine’s Heather McKean & Reg Lindsey Show. In 1973, she moved to Sydney, and toured with Jimmy Little, performing at popular clubs and pubs around New South Wales.
She performed at the Sydney Opera House for the venue’s grand opening, and sang “Amazing Grace” in Pitjantjitjara for Pope John Paul II during his Australian tour. At the 2008 Deadlys, Auriel was presented a Lifetime Achievement Award for contribution to Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander music. Auriel’s well-known recordings include the country classic “Truck Drivin’ Woman” and Bob Randell’s “Brown Skin Baby”. She performed at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Woodford Dreaming Festival, and regularly performed at various clubs around the Newcastle area. In 2011, she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for her work as an entertainer and contribution to her communities through charity events.
She appeared in the SBS documentary Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music (2000) about Aboriginal country music (associated with the book by Clinton Walker), singing “Truck Driving Woman”, and in the 1970s was a regular guest on the Johnny Mac Show, Channel Nine’s Reg Lindsay’s Country and Western Hour and The Ernie Sigley Show.
She appeared in 2007 in the show Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word, written and performed by English artist Christopher Green in the guise of Tina C. at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
Her 2013 album Return To Alice was produced by Gareth Hudson, and included new original songs about her life and childhood.
She has taught Aboriginal culture in classrooms for 20 years, passing on her knowledge in schools in Queensland, the Northern Territory and New South Wales, and in 2016 joined the cast of the stage adaptation of Clinton Walker’s Buried Country, which made its premiere in her hometown of Newcastle on 20 August.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auriel_Andrew
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Passings: Australian Music Legend Auriel Andrew, 69 (1947 – 2017)
by Paul Cashmere, Noise11
Auriel grew up in Alice Springs and moved to Adelaide to start her music career. Auriel Andrew performed on the Buried Country tour in Australia in 2016. Buried Country producer Mary Mihelakos has provided the following obituary:
“It is with great sadness we have to announce that Auriel Andrew has passed away. Auriel had had some health problems for a while but, typical of her, she brushed them aside in order to be part of the the first few Buried Country shows late last year. She died peacefully, surrounded by loving family and friends, on January 2 in hospital in Newcastle, where she was admitted in mid-December with advanced cancers spreading throughout her body. She was 69, and is survived by her husband Barry Francis, her children Sarina and Reuben, 13 grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren and her sister Ronda, plus the sprawling extended family that is a characteristic of Aboriginal life in this country.
She is survived also by her legacy: by the wonderful music she made all through her life, and the courage and dedication it took to make that music starting at a time in the late 1960s when Aboriginal people were barely seen or heard in broader Australia; she will be remembered and celebrated for that, by the great number of people who were touched by her and her music, and she will be remembered for her selfless generosity and the inspiration that that provided too; and she will never be forgotten for her cheeky sense of humour that even as I sadly squeeze out these words, can still bring a smile to my face!
Auriel was an Arrernte woman, born the youngest of seven children in Darwin in 1947. She grew up in Alice Springs and it was as if ordained that she would go into show business. As a singer, she had all the inveterate assets – and gags! – of a classic old vaudeville hoofer, and knowing her as I was privileged to do, she would be chuffed at that tag.
Raised in the bush by her mother and her ‘Dad Simmo’, as she related in the songs she belatedly started writing only recently, she only narrowly averted being taken away because her step-father refused to leave her in town, where the authorities could easily have stolen her as they did so many other children.
After making her stage debut at the Italian Club in Coober Pedy in 1968, she set out on her own, a slip of a girl at only 21, to go Adelaide to try and launch herself on a professional singing career. And this she did, sustaining a successful career for the next five decades; yet though Auriel won numerous garlands through her lifetime – including an OA – her achievements, given their degree of difficulty, still warrant greater recognition.”
http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2017/01/passings-australian-music-legend-auriel.html