Ted Albert Award – Bart Willoughby

By Daniel James

The Australian Music Vault is proud to honour Bart Willoughby as the 2024 recipient of the Ted Albert Award for Outstanding Services to Australian Music. The prestigious Ted Albert Award is awarded annually by the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) in memory of pioneering independent record producer Ted Albert, whose company, Albert Productions, was home to music icons The Easybeats, AC/DC, The Angels, Rose Tattoo and John Paul Young. Previous winners of the award include Molly Meldrum, Jimmy Little, The Seekers, Archie Roach, Helen Reddy and The Wiggles.

Innovation is a term often thrown around when it comes to the music industry. Innovation in distribution, recording techniques and technology. But rarely can it be genuinely applied to innovation in the artform itself. Bart Willoughby is an innovator. His contribution to his art has broken down barriers and created new landscapes in the world of music. He is an artist in the truest sense.

A Kokatha/Mirning man, he is a member of the Stolen Generations, that defiant yet gentle group of survivors whose insights go beyond the understanding of those who will never know what it was like to be them. Bart was removed from his family at the age of two-and-a-half, and sent to a children’s home in Adelaide. Away from family, away from culture, away from the nurturing love a child of any age should expect.

By some miracle of time and chance, the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide, was the break from the tedium of his day-to-day existence the young Bart needed. It was there he would take to any instrument he could either pick up or sit at. It was during this time he met Ricky Harrison, Leslie Lovegrove Freeman and John John Miller – No Fixed Address was born.

It was the late 70s and the band’s music was unlike anything else. A combination of reggae and afro beats through a desert perspective with a social justice message - different yet accessible, speaking truth that was somehow digestible. The music characterised by powerful lyrics which addressed the struggles and discrimination faced by Aboriginal Australians across the continent. Their music spoke to the truth of what had happened, while at the same time keeping both eyes steadfastly on the horizon, looking forward for better days ahead.

The band soon garnered national attention, one of the first Aboriginal rock bands to do so. Their second album From My Eyes, the follow up to film soundtrack Wrong Side of the Road, released together with Us Mob, is still considered a classic in Australian rock history.

The Australian pub rock scene of the early 80s was no place for the timid. Enthusiastic, yet judgemental audiences fuelled by alcohol and the promise of their expanding worlds, were no easy place for a black band to make a mark. But the impression left from their intense and energetic sets didn’t just impact audiences, they also impressed fellow artists. Fellow travellers that could recognise the real deal when they saw it. Bands like Goanna, Midnight Oil and Cold Chisel all quickly attuned themselves to the new sounds of Willoughby and co and immediately treated the band as contemporaries.

Willoughby’s arrival on the music scene, through No Fixed Address, coincided with the resurgence in the Aboriginal rights movement with all of its colour, heat and uncomfortable truths. After generations of First Nations activists toiled their lives away, trying to find a pathway through the colonial maze transplanted upon them and their land, a new generation of activists came along, and wanted to tear it all down as a direct path to justice. Bart’s music would serve as their inspiration and Australia’s reminder that the First Inhabitants of the land are still here and can’t be ignored.

In 1982, Goanna front man and songwriter Shane Howard, asked Bart to join his band as drummer. Their friendship spawned a collaboration spanning over forty years, one that is easily picked up by both men, whenever the inclination arises.

Many years later, in 2005, their creative partnership reached one of its fullest expressions as two of the elder statesmen in the collaborative project known as Black Arm Band. An undertaking developed in direct defiance to the white washing of Australian history at the behest of then prime minister John Howard. Bart, once again holding the mirror, asking Australians to take a long hard look.

It’s hard to tell whether he’s taken his music across the globe, or his music has taken him. Regardless of sequence, he has been all over. With No Fixed Address and stints in Yothu Yindi he has travelled the roads of America, Europe, Asia and behind the Iron Curtain just as it was about to fall, with plenty of scrapes in between including a near death experience when the plane in which he was travelling unknowingly flew through a cloud of ash from an Indonesian volcano.

Through it all, Bart has been his authentic self, there’s no one else like him, and there never will be. As journalist Martin Flanagan once observed, “Bart Willoughby is like no one else. To begin with, he speaks differently, a sort of street poetry that is remarkable for the fact that it may stumble but it never stops. He says things you've never heard before and are left wondering at. Before you can nail them down, he's said another and so the process continues.”

It provides insight into Bart’s art. To listen to his music is to be connected into a world unto itself. A world only Bart could have experienced and expressed. A place that only he and a select few are dutybound to reveal. A natural multi-instrumentalist with a knack of getting each instrument, whether it’s drums, bass, guitar or piano, to do exactly what the song’s task requires. As someone that doesn’t think about genre, Bart is not someone who is confined by it. “I deal in energy, that’s what I respond to”. That energy is prevalent in everything he touches musically.

Willoughby's legacy is marked by his unwavering commitment to using music as a means of storytelling and advocacy. His powerful messages of social justice, cultural pride, and the fight against discrimination continue to resonate. As an artist, he has bridged the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures, fostering a greater appreciation for the richness and diversity of Australia's Aboriginal heritage.

He has not only laid down musical tracks for recording devices, he has also kept the songlines of his people - black, strong and strident. Rejuvenating an ancient pathway in which a plethora of First Nations musicians and artists now flourish.

This member of the Stolen Generations, Bart Willoughby has a legacy that is assured.

To make it in a world not made for him, one in which he would have to crash or crash through, can in some ways have only been achieved by a member of that generation. It required an ability and a nous beyond street smarts. In Bart’s words it required, “Stolen Generations smarts.” It is typical of the man and the artist. Like everything else about Bart Willoughby and his contribution to the cultural life on this country, it has been next level.

About the author
Award-winning Yorta Yorta writer and broadcaster Daniel James has over 20 years’ experience in community and government sectors with developed skills in policy, program management, social media policy and advocacy for better outcomes for Aboriginal people. He is a contributor to IndigenousX, The Age, SMH, The Saturday Paper, SBS, ABC Radio and Crikey. Daniel currently presents The Mission on RRR, exploring the issues that impact the lives of Aboriginal people and those at the wrong end of social justice in this country.