‘Us’ and ‘them’ is far from my spirit: Why Kutcha Edwards is building bridges

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Mutti Mutti, Yorta Yorta and Nari Nari singer-songwriter Uncle Kutcha Edwards is in mourning for his late older brother Dave, who recently passed away.

The 59-year-old tenor is thinking now about the times the brothers appeared on stage together, in the months before and after prime minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the stolen generations.

Kutcha Edwards will make his Sydney Symphony Orchestra debut next week.

As a toddler, Kutcha, born in Balranald in south-western New South Wales in 1965, had been ripped from their mother Mary alongside siblings Reg, Mick, Wally, Alice and Maria and placed in a Methodist children’s home in suburban Melbourne.

Dave escaped the same authorities who “came a-knockin” that day because he was in Swan Hill Hospital in north-west Victoria, explains Edwards.

Their father, Nugget Edwards, who wore trouser braces like Kutcha does today in his concerts, had been away working the shearing circuit, giving the false impression Mary was raising her children alone.

“Dave came home and took off the [eye] bandages and asked, ‘Where’s my brothers and sisters, mum?’. Mum said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. They’re gone.’“

Forty years later, Dave appeared with Kutcha in their autobiographical play Songlines of a Mutti Mutti Man, set up with a kitchen on stage, talking about the ripple effect of that day in 1967.

“Dave would walk out to the centre of the stage, and my darling wife Fiona remembers he was like Othello delivering his lines.”

Edwards himself finally returned to live with their mother at age 13, a short time after which his new high school humanities teacher asked all students to write a poem that explained their individual selves. Edwards, feeling a misfit “like a ballet dancer walking into a boxing ring”, penned the eloquent poem he titled My Favourite Drop:

Trickling down the waterfall, freely one by one /

Forming into clouds of spray glistening in the sun /

Crashing to disaster, my water drop is done /

Left the short life of loneliness and gathered back as one.

Waterways would inspire Edwards’s ethos and prolific subsequent songwriting, from the Murrumbidgee river at his birthplace of Balranald, to the ancient bed of Lake Mungo, due west of Sydney and of spiritual significance to the Mutti Mutti, to the Traralgon creek in Gippsland, Victoria, over the back fence during those teenage years.

“The river is metaphoric for family itself,” he explains.

Edwards’ names at birth were Glenn Gordon James. “No disrespect,” he told his mother later, “they’re not Aboriginal names”. The name Kutcha was his idea that “came from a higher plain”.

Now, Edwards, after a long career that has included Paul Kelly producing his first solo album, Cooinda, in 2002, and tours with Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter and Emma Donovan as part of the Black Arm Band, is about to make his debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

The concert, Ngarli-Wangu (Our Song) takes Edwards’s poem My Favourite Drop as inspiration, featuring river-themed landscapes and soundscapes, and a variety of First Nations vocalists including Shellie Morris, Emily Wurramara, Kankawa Nagarra and Ray Dimakarri Dixon.

Morris, who met Edwards performing with the Black Arm Band, was likewise forcibly removed from family and culture and has spent the subsequent years “rediscovering family lines and languages”, she says.

She points to how Edwards often nurtures Indigenous artists but also generously pursues connections with non-Indigenous people, despite everything he has been through.

“He knows if we start walking alongside each other, that’s when we’re going to change the face of the nation,” she says. “You’re not walking on top of us; you’re walking alongside us, but also we’re learning from each other.”

Edwards once collaborated with the late Seekers singer Judith Durham on a new version of the national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, with new lyrics that include: “Our land abounds in nature’s gifts to love, respect and share / And honouring the Dreaming, Advance Australia Fair.”

Kutcha Edwards at the state funeral service for Uncle Jack Charles in 2022.

The new version was played at the 2022 state funeral of stage and screen actor Uncle Jack Charles, who was also a member of the stolen generations sent to live in a children’s home. After 30 years of friendship, Edwards and Charles discovered they were “cousin brothers”: Charles’s mother, Blanche, and his mother, Mary, were sisters. The pair regularly rode the streets of inner-Melbourne together in Edwards’s NITV series Kutcha’s Koorioke.

“We’re all interrelated, it depends how far back you go in your genealogy,” says Edwards. “The attitude of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is far from my spirit.”

His thoughts return to Dave, who more recently passed.

“My brother, in his final two days, his face softened, his spirit softened, and I think he met his makers,” says Edwards. “If he could go to that place of contentment and no longer be bitter, can’t we all?”