A collaboration with Jacqueline Cook from Australia. This is a song about the Australian artist Albert Namatjira. Click on 'lyrics/story' to read more about it.
Welcome to my page! I hope you like it here.
I’ve been writing songs on and off for the past 30 years. I tend to write country although I'm known to write songs that are more folk or rock. Sometimes when I sit down with a guitar I surprise myself with what comes out!
Story behind the song
In Jacqueline's words:
"The poem was written in memory of a very talented Australian, an Aboriginal landscape artist called Albert Namatjira. His ability to depict the Australian landscape on canvas was highly acclaimed, but his right to be a full citizen in the land of his birth wasn't (this was the Fifties). He wasn't permitted to drink in a pub or allowed to vote, although he had the great honour of paying income tax to the government. He was refused permission to buy a house in Alice Springs as Aborigines were not allowed in town after night fell. He died broken and understandably disillusioned in 1958.
When I read about him as a 19 year old, I was so outraged by his treatment and the injustice that I felt moved to write a poem."
Jacquline is a screenwriter, please visit her website at http://www.jacquelinecook.com/
Lyrics
Color our country ochre, Albert, copper landscape blaze
Taint your paintbrush amber in the burning desert haze
Take up your palette, paint for us, we claim you as our own
Let the canvas sing an auburn song of your irridescent home
So paint for us and bring us fame, our land of burnished gold
This place of opportunity, of equality untold
And can you paint our tarnished views, our human symmetry?
The justice and the brotherhood and flawless honesty?
Of course, my friend, you’re one of us, with skin of ebon ink
But don’t you raise a pen to vote or grace a pub to drink
So paint for us and bring us fame, our land of burnished gold
This place of opportunity, of equality untold
This is the land of white folk now, we really shouldn’t let you in
We’d kindly let you eat with us but for the colour of your skin
We don’t deny your talent friend, you have the gift, it’s true
But you’re an Aborigine, you understand, don’t you?
So paint for us and bring us fame, our land of burnished gold
This place of opportunity, of equality untold
