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Took the Children Away

music and words by Archie Roach

This story’s right, this story’s true.

ONCE YOU KNOW THE SONG and how it continues, that opening line is always heartbreaking. ‘Took the Children Away’ is said to be the first song Archie Roach ever wrote, and it remains his best known.

The principal melody is quite basic. It spans the first five notes of G major – G to D, with just a couple of reinforcing dips down to the E below and a single, expressive step up to the E above (the sixth note of the scale). The chords are equally simple: G major, C major and D major – that’s I, IV and V. You could throw in a couple of D7s if you wanted to be fancy.

The song is like a child’s picture book, and that’s how it was meant to be. Roach was explaining, as simply and directly as possible, the forced removal of generations of Australian Aboriginal children from their parents and their placement with white foster families. If it sounds, at moments, as though he is addressing slow or reluctant learners, that’s because he was.

Roach (b. 1956) wrote the song in 1988 and sang it on community radio stations in Melbourne. It came to the attention of the singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, who asked Roach to open a concert for him the following year. He sang ‘Took the Children Away’ to considerable acclaim from the large audience. In 1990, the song was released as a single and featured on Roach’s first album, Charcoal Lane, which Kelly co-produced.

The simplicity of the song is reflected in its refusal to be dramatic – let alone melodramatic. The song’s emotional power is in the story’s slow unfolding, its occasional jump cuts and its moments of personal revelation. As we will learn in verse three, this is Roach’s own story.

In 1960, the four-year-old Roach and his sisters were stolen from their parents at Framlingham Aboriginal reserve in south-western Victoria by Australian government agencies who doubtless believed, as his song says, that it was ‘for the best’. He was eventually fostered by a Scottish couple in Melbourne. It was a musical household and Roach was introduced to the guitar. But at the age of fifteen, Roach was contacted by one of his natural sisters, who informed him that their birth mother had just died. Soon after, he left his foster family for a life on the street and more than a decade of alcohol abuse. During this period he met his future wife, Ruby Hunter, and with her help, got himself sober.

‘Took the Children Away’ opens with Roach’s voice underpinned by soft organ chords, the whole thing bathed in reverb. We’re in church. Roach sings that ‘they’ – authorities, missionaries – ‘Taught us to read, to write and pray, / Then they took the children away’. It’s the song’s first emotional jolt. He sings the word so sweetly, but that high E on the first syllable of ‘children’ is a prick of pain.

Now the reverb recedes, Roach’s voice comes into clearer focus, and the chorus repeats the words ‘Took the children away’ to just three notes – B, A, G, ‘Three Blind Mice’, the song more than ever now like a children’s story. A picked electric guitar joins the organ in verse two, adding momentum, and we begin to learn details of these official abductions, of the parents’ grief and of the humiliation and prejudice the children faced in their new white communities.

The organ and electric guitar continue in verse three, joined by bold, isolated twelve-string guitar chords. This is as dramatic as the song will get, and it draws our attention to a shift in the storytelling, because suddenly the song is about Roach himself: ‘One dark day on Framingham / Came and didn’t give a damn. / My mother cried: “Go, get their dad.” / He came running, fighting mad.’ And here is the first jump cut in the action. We’re told that Roach’s dad said, ‘You touch my kids and you fight me’, but the next line is ‘Then they took us from our family’. Perhaps we don’t need to hear what happened in between; perhaps it’s more powerful with that ellipsis in the narrative.

‘They took us away,’ the chorus continues, the words changed, the song now personalised. ‘They took us away.’ Then after a low, twangy guitar solo played by Steve Connolly (though it might almost be the work of the Shadows’ Hank Marvin), the story continues in the final verse. The children (‘we’, ‘us’) are fostered, feeling ‘alone’ as they grow up, ‘acting white / Yet feeling black’, until – this time it’s a giant jump cut – ‘One sweet day all the children came back’.

Is this the happy ending to the children’s story? In a way it is. Clearly it isn’t exactly true. The children were not, for the most part, reunited with their parents; Roach certainly wasn’t. But there were cultural returns, maybe spiritual returns. In many cases, the Stolen Generations at least learnt the truth and found their roots. So the song provides hope, and that’s what children need at the ends of their stories. Roach once explained that when he visited schools to perform, children often asked him to play his song ‘The Children Came Back’.

The hope is made palpable at the end of the song, which has an authentic coda: a whole new section, melodically unrelated to what has gone before. ‘Back to their mother,’ Roach sings, ‘Back to their father.’ And each time he hits that top E, he converts pain to triumph: ‘Back to their sister / Back to their brother.’ At ‘Back to their people / Back to their land’ he sails up higher to top G, completing the octave. That sense of completion is also in the words to the final chorus, where ‘The children came back’ becomes ‘Yes, I came back’.

The promise conveyed by Archie Roach’s song had two tangible outcomes. First, the song that had always seemed to be a children’s story was finally turned into a book, with illustrations by Ruby Hunter. And second, a new song, called ‘The Children Came Back’ appeared in 2014. Over the chorus of Roach’s classic, sung by Dewayne Everettsmith, the rapper Briggs shouts out a litany of the names of successful Aboriginal Australians from music, from sport, from life, all of them children who came back.