You can just about see the moment Christine Anu remembers her purpose. It sneaks up by degrees in a 15-year-old episode of SBS’s Who Do You Think You Are?, beginning with a family tree sketched on Saibai Island, south of Papua New Guinea, by famed British anthropologist Alfred Haddon.
As her voyage of discovery proceeds, a tangle of missionaries, warriors and seafarers parts to focus on one man, her maternal grandfather Nadi Anu: World War II hero, Torres Strait adventurer, songwriter. Watch when she hears him singing from a wax cylinder recording. That’s the moment.
“I wonder if my grandfather from the heavens was always looking down, keeping me on track,” she says. “If I’m going to romanticise it, I think of him as the skipper of a trochus lugger, sailing down the Barrier Reef, collecting these ornamental shells…” Her eyes are alight as her hands trace an imagined horizon inside her Rockhampton kitchen.
“I was singing Island Home long before it was recorded for my first album, before I knew it was going to be the song it would become,” she says. “I was growing a relationship with the song, seeing how its meaning changes over time; like a child growing, watching who that child is becoming.”
Anu performing at the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony in 2000.Credit: Dallas Kilponen
Written by her Rainmakers bandmate Neil Murray, the song would spearhead that classic album of ’95, Stylin’ Up, alongside the creole fable Monkey & the Turtle and others drenched in the language and atmosphere of a part of Australia previously unheard in our pop charts, never mind the platinum-selling, ARIA-winning end.
To the world, the song was fully grown when Anu sang at the Sydney Olympics’ closing ceremony: no longer a song about a tiny island most of us couldn’t find on a map, but one about all of us on a larger island; a country big enough to own it with pride. For the singer though, the song and its spirit of belonging would continue to unfold.
“Waku is essentially my second album, because it is the follow-up,” she says of her latest — despite the mixed half-dozen she’s released in the intervening decades. “If we tightened the timeline, it would make complete sense.
“But life needed to happen. Conversations needed to happen. The music landscape needed to evolve. Other artists needed to come to the forefront. We needed the younger mob finding their own music identity, putting themselves out there, and for Australia to hear how our music is so unique and different from the rest of the world.
“That was always my point, from the first record. It just needed to have time to develop. We needed to mature our ears. And when I say ‘our’, I’m using that as an Australian collective. We are not the country we were way back when my first album came out.”
Anu with her daughter Zipporah last year.Credit: Getty
Waku: Minaral a Minalay reunites Anu with the co-architect of Stylin’ Up, Melbourne songwriter-producer David Bridie. Together, they weave songs by her grandfather Nadi in Kala Lagaw Ya/ Kalau Kawau Ya languages with new ones in English, and with sounds and voices found across Melanesia and beyond. The result is a joyfully transporting experience.
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO CHRISTINE ANU
- Worst habit? Procrastination. But it makes me feel better to know I share that with half the planet.
- Greatest fear? Losing people. You wonder what you’ll look like at the other side of grief.
- The line that has stayed with you? ”One shot to your heart without breaking your skin/ No one has the power to hurt you like your kin” — India Arie.
- Biggest regret? I’m of the opinion that no one should live with regret. But OK, it was getting married.
- Favourite book? Myths and Legends of Torres Strait by Margaret Lawrie (Queensland University Press, 1970).
- The song you wish was yours? Island Home [by Neil Murray]. When people look at you and they just want you to sing that song that resonates with them, you have a great privilege to be that vessel.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? The [1952] migration of the Saibai Island people to Mutti Heads and the consecration of the now Bamaga community. We have what we have because they did what they did.
“I’d rung David many years ago and he said ‘no’ to a project and I understand absolutely why. This time, when we reconnected, it was the right time,” she says. “It was about me being ready, first and foremost. I’ve become a mum [son Kuiam is 28, daughter Zipporah 22]; I’m becoming an older woman. I just really had to wait… for the old skin to shed, so to speak.”
Make that skins plural. Anu was a teenager when she left far north Queensland in the late ’80s to study dance at Sydney’s Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre. The years flew through three albums with Mushroom, an award-winning stage role in Rent, film parts from Moulin Rouge to The Matrix series and a stint on Play School.
Since 2015, Anu has been a weekend evenings presenter on ABC Radio National, a gig she admits first scared her senseless, but which she now treasures. “It’s sharpened my craft of being able to engage with people and tell my story; sing the song and have it land in exactly the way I want it to.”
Anu as a goldfish on season 2 of The Masked Singer.Credit: Network Ten
There were inevitable misfires too. The ABC’s gay sci-fi comedy series Outland was a niche event. And if her brief role as a judge on the Seven Network’s Popstars Live talent show taught her anything, it was “never to do anything like that again,” she says with a laugh.
Musically, “I did the Aretha covers album. I did the 20 years [anniversary] of Stylin’ Up, Re-Stylin’ Up, where every song was reimagined. I did a children’s album, I did an autobiographical stage show called Intimate and Deadly, and another album, Acoustically…
“They were important projects for what they were. But has there been the consistency?” Her twisted lips answer the question. “That’s one through-line I wish I could tighten up to be a beautiful straight line. But that’s not life, is it? Life ebbs and flows and has ups and downs and that’s my music journey.”
Around the time she heard her grandfather’s voice on that SBS show in 2009, she went so far as to confess to feeling “uninspired [and] dried up as an artist”. She bristles a little to have that unguarded moment thrown back at her, but she owns it with hindsight, like any other shed skin.
“There’s a danger in doing too many things. It’s just the way that I take myself: as somebody who’s up for a challenge. I love to do everything and anything, and then you go, ‘hang on, where’s my direction again?’ My internal compass has its needle waving, waving, always, trying to find the magnetic north of my soul.”
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There’s no doubt Waku is it. Like the woven reed mat that gives the album its title, it’s an act of unifying threads into something whole and undeniable. The songs of her grandfather. The big book of Torres Strait myths and legends she adored as a girl. The jaw-dropping choral voices of an extended family spanning Oceania, her mother and daughter included.
“The two Zipporahs,” she beams. “They’re the bookends. Being with mum, at home, and having my daughter on stage, it just feels like I’m being held, you know? I’m steadfast, I’m solid. My daughter sings, she does my makeup, she does any social [media] stuff for me that I can’t understand…
“The only thing I’m not willing to do is she wants me to do these TikTok challenges, which I’m not really up for yet. Just because I look at people on TikTok and they dance so well! I gave up dancing a long time ago…
“When I was eight years old, I said to my parents, ‘I want to be a teacher’, and I wonder if that’s exactly my role now,” Anu says. “I might not be doing it in front of a chalkboard but I feel that in essence, it’s always been a part of me.”
Waku: Minaral A Minalay (ABC Music) is available now.
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