Australia Music • Free

Big hART

MURRU

10 Songs of Freedom for John Pat

Part of Big hART Events series.

PRESENTED BY Melbourne Festival and Big Hart in association with The Bardas Foundation

In an uplifting opening concert for this year’s Melbourne Festival, Big hART joins forces with a luminous range of talents – including Archie Roach, Lucky Oceans, Emma Donovan, John Bennett and many more – for a towering evening of song. MURRU is a musical tribute to John Pat, a young Yindjibarndi man who died in custody thirty years ago, sparking a royal commission and shining a spotlight on the increasing rates of Indigenous incarceration in our country.

Combining breathtaking imagery from the Pilbara region with beautiful harmonies and arrangements, co-written by inmates from the Roebourne prison, MURRU is an exuberant and heartbreaking celebration of our country – a hymn to the land and its people, a remembrance of those we’ve lost and a paean of hope for the future.

Performers include Angus Smith, Archie Roach, Bryan Retter, Cho Cleary David Hyams, Dudley Billing, Emma Donovan, Harry Hookey, Jae Laffer (The Panics), John Bennett, Josie Alec, Kevin Murphy, Lucky Oceans, Mel Robinson, Nate Gilkes, Roy Evans, Trevor Jamieson, Tyson Mowarin, Patrick Churnside and Wendy Matthews.

BEFORE the cONCERT
Directly before the MURRU concert to mark the beginning of the 2014 Melbourne Festival, Federation Square hosts TANDERRUM for a second year – a powerful event and celebration of the ground we stand on and of the people whose ancestors walked it before our time. 

MURRU is part of the Yijala Yala Project, a long term, multi-platform, intergenerational cultural heritage project also represented in this year’s program by Big hART’s production of Hipbone Sticking Out.