03/12/2025
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In 1955, on the banks of a billabong near Renmark, South Australia, Ruby Hunter was born.
In 1956, at Framlingham Mission in Victoria, Archie Roach was born.
Neither would know their families for long.
When Archie was two years old, government officials came to Framlingham. They took him from his parents. They placed him in foster care. They told him he was an orphan.
He wasn't.
When Ruby was eight, men in a car arrived at her home on the Aboriginal reserve at Point McLeay. They told Ruby and her four siblings they were taking them to the circus.
They didn't.
Instead, they took the children to Seaforth Children's Home in Adelaide, where Ruby was separated from her brothers and sister. After that came a series of institutions and foster homes.
By sixteen, Ruby had been released to make her own way. With no family, no home, and nowhere to go, she lived on Adelaide's streets.
That's where she met Archie.
He'd learned the truth about his family when he was fifteen—discovered through a letter from his sister that his mother had just died. She hadn't abandoned him. She'd never stopped looking for him.
The revelation destroyed him.
He started drinking heavily. Got in trouble. Was incarcerated. Attempted su***de. By the time he drifted to Adelaide, he was homeless, alcoholic, and seventeen years old.
At the Salvation Army People's Palace on Pirie Street, Archie Roach met Ruby Hunter.
Two stolen children. Two homeless teenagers. Two people who'd lost everything.
They fell in love.
"We looked at each other and saw our pain," Archie would later say. "But we also saw hope."
They formed a bond that would last thirty-five years—through addiction, recovery, poverty, success, two sons, three foster children, and roughly fifteen to twenty more kids they unofficially mentored in their home over the years.
Ruby said her proudest achievement was keeping her family together as a stable unit.
She knew what it felt like when families were torn apart.
For years, Archie and Ruby survived on the streets, moving between Adelaide and Melbourne. They drank. They hustled. They sang for money on street corners.
Music was always there.
In the late 1980s, they formed a band called the Altogethers with several other Indigenous Australians and moved to Melbourne. They played community festivals. Small gigs. Anything to survive.
Then, in 1988, at the urging of elder Henry "Uncle Banjo" Clark, Archie wrote his first song.
It was called "Took the Children Away."
He performed it on community radio in Melbourne. Then on an Indigenous current affairs program.
Australian musician Paul Kelly heard it. In early 1989, Kelly invited Archie to open his concert.
Archie performed "Took the Children Away" to a packed audience.
The song told the story of the Stolen Generations—Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families by government policy. It told Archie's story. Ruby's story. Thousands of stories.
"Took the children away, the children away
Breaking their mother's heart, tearing us all apart
Took the children away"
The audience was silent. Then they erupted.
In 1990, Archie released his debut album, "Charcoal Lane," named after a drinking spot in Fitzroy where Aboriginal people met, shared stories, and reunited with family members separated by forced removal.
The album included "Took the Children Away." It also included "Down City Streets," a haunting song about homelessness written by Ruby.
The album won two ARIA Awards. "Took the Children Away" won the Human Rights Achievement Award—the first time that award had ever been given to a songwriter.
Suddenly, the world was listening.
Archie toured with Bob Dylan, Joan Armatrading, Billy Bragg, Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, and Patti Smith. He played stages across Australia and around the globe.
But he never forgot where he came from.
"I look back now and see the darkness that would have touched every moment unless we numbed it with beer and port and sherry," he wrote. His honesty about homelessness, alcoholism, and recovery helped many. He worked as a drug and alcohol counselor through the 1980s and early 1990s, using his own story to guide others.
Ruby, meanwhile, was finding her own voice.
She'd been writing songs in secret for years—putting her experiences on paper, capturing the pain of being homeless, of being stolen, of surviving.
When Archie discovered "Down City Streets," he insisted on recording it for "Charcoal Lane."
On the strength of that one song, Ruby was offered her own recording contract.
In 1994, she became the first Indigenous Australian woman to record a solo rock album when she released "Thoughts Within." She was the first Aboriginal woman signed to a major record label.
Her second album, "Feeling Good," came in 2000 and earned her Best Female Performer of the Year at the Deadly Awards.
She toured with Archie constantly—across Australia, overseas, bringing their message of resilience and healing everywhere they went.
In 2004, they collaborated with Paul Grabowsky and the Australian Art Orchestra to create "Ruby's Story"—a concert that told Ruby's life through music and spoken word, from her birth near a billabong to the Stolen Generations to discovering hope through love.
The production won the Deadly Award for Excellence in Film & Theatrical Score and toured nationally and internationally until 2009.
Together, Archie and Ruby told stories that many Australians had never heard. Stories that made people uncomfortable. Stories that needed to be told.
"Uncle Archie and Aunty Ruby believed in the power of music to heal, to tell truths and to connect people from all walks of life," one government minister would later say.
Their songs educated a nation on the Stolen Generations. Their performances brought Aboriginal voices to stages that had too long excluded them.
But their greatest work might have been at home.
While touring the world and recording albums, they fostered children. They opened their home to homeless teenagers. They mentored young Indigenous musicians. They showed, by living example, that broken families could be made whole again.
Then, on February 17, 2010, Ruby died suddenly of a heart attack.
She was fifty-four.
Archie was devastated. He established Ruby's Foundation to continue her legacy—creating opportunities for Aboriginal people through the promotion and support of Aboriginal arts and culture.
He continued performing, even after suffering a stroke in 2010 and surviving lung cancer in 2011.
In 2020, he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.
In 2023, he was posthumously appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia for his services to performing arts, Indigenous rights, and reconciliation.
Archie died on July 30, 2022, at Warrnambool Base Hospital.
He was sixty-six.
On Saturday, November 30, 2024, around one hundred people braved pouring rain in Fitzroy to witness the unveiling of a bronze statue honoring Archie and Ruby.
The statue stands in Atherton Gardens—the park where Archie and Ruby lived with their two sons in the housing estate towers. The place where Archie was reunited with his biological family after decades of separation. The place where Aboriginal people from across Australia came to find family and community.
"Atherton Gardens will always be a place for me and my family," said Archie's sister, Aunty Myrtle Roach. "It's only fitting my brother's statue and dear Ruby find its permanent place there for all my people and the community to share."
The statues stand at street level—casual, approachable, as if in conversation with the community. An accessible path leading to the site is etched with the footprints of their totem animals: the pelican, black swan, wedge-tailed eagle, and red-bellied black snake.
The rain that fell that day seemed fitting.
Two stolen children who'd found each other on Adelaide's streets. Who'd survived addiction, homelessness, and unimaginable loss. Who'd built a family when the government had destroyed theirs. Who'd given voice to thousands of other stolen children through their music.
Now they stand together in Fitzroy, watching over their community, permanent reminders that love can triumph over trauma, that families can heal, and that the power of truth-telling can change a nation.
"We as a family feel both a sense of sadness and excitement as we celebrate two legends," Aunty Myrtle said at the unveiling.
Two legends who proved that even when everything is taken from you, you can still sing. You can still love. You can still build something beautiful.
And the world will listen.
