"Reggae Became the Main Transporter of Our Struggle … and Our Love"

Willie Brim: Cultural Custodian, Bush Doctor and Songman of the Buluwai People of North Queensland

This article is based on two interviews with Willie Brim on 26 April 2017 and November 2017 as well as an interview by Peter McCabe with Willie Brim in 2014 on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_M-rmdY7v0 accessed on 27 November 2017.

This is a story about the life and works of an Aboriginal man of the Buluwai, the Rainforest Bama. The Buluwai, a people of noticeably small stature, live in the tablelands north of Cairns, North Queensland, Australia. This environment, with its rare pockets of Australian rainforest, sets them apart from other Aboriginal Australians.

The man's name is Willie Brim. Willie, born in 1960, is a cultural elder and leader of the Buluwai people. He likes to say he's lived three lives. The first of these was a highly regimented "Christian" life, imposed upon him by the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Then came Willie's life among a cluster of hippie settlements near his home from the 1970s and 1980s. He has now reached a new stage as a traditional owner, a musician responsible for the cultural heritage of his people, the revival of their music and dance. He has combined Buluwai cultural traditions with the reggae guitar he has played since he was a young man. This is the story of Willie and the preservation of Buluwai culture by means of music—specifically reggae. With his band, Mantaka, Willie has delivered an Aboriginal message to the world.

Willie Brim in front of the house in Mantaka at the age of 18 years. Image courtesy of Willie Brim.

Willie lives on his own country, "out in the scrub" about fifteen kilometres from the town of Kuranda which, in turn, lies thirty kilometres north of Cairns, the main city in North Queensland. Willie lives on his own lands in what is considered a remote Aboriginal community, isolated from the urban centre of Cairns.

"we hardly listen to anything else"

In the 1970s, people known as "hippies" moved from the southern states of Australia to the Kuranda region to live "alternative" lifestyles. Willie was a young man then, growing up among the six Aboriginal families in Mantaka, an area on the Barron River near Kuranda. Among other things, the hippies brought with them the reggae of Peter Tosh and Bob Marley. Tosh and Marley, with their spiritually conscious lyrics, immediately spoke to Willie, who had grown up "in a strong Christian era and Bible talk was the main talk that people spoke." He found that Peter Tosh talked in a way compatible with his life experiences, and Willie "fell in love with the lyrics." With reggae, Willie could relax. It was full of ease and joy. In contrast, the church music and solemn hymns of his youth were highly disciplined and even punitive. Besides those Christian sounds, the only genre Willie knew as a youth was country and western, the popular music of the time. He fondly remembers "the sweet voices of those girls" Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline on the radio.

But with Bob Marley on cassette, everything changed for Willie. In "Get Up, Stand Up" Marley sang, "most people think great God will come from the sky." Willie thought, "he is singing about us and the black people of the world!" Listening to Marley's lyrics closely, Willie understood his message boiled down to two things: love and truth. Many people viewed reggae as radical and anti-white, but Willie understood that the music stood for something else: it was a means by which black people could express their worldview. He was blown away.

For Willie, the Peter Tosh album Bush Doctor was a particular revelation. Because of his own dreadlocks, Willie said, "I could see myself sitting there on the album cover!" At the same time, Willie kept a distance from the culture of reggae. The Buluwai have their own spirituality and belief system, so Willie did not subscribe...