Adelaide Guitar Festival review: Troy Cassar-Daley and Nancy Bates
Adelaide Guitar Festival welcomed Troy Cassar-Daley back to the stage for a night of Country at Her Majesty’s Theatre that echoes across our landscape
Adelaide Guitar Festival, which began in 2007, highlights how this one instrument, adored by many, can express all that we feel, spanning genres, generations and cultures.
On this evening, saltwater and freshwater man Jamie Goldsmith welcomes the audience to Kaurna Yarta in language and the vibration of the Yidaki – an instrument not from Kaurna Country, but a well-known and well-loved instrument from Arnhem Land belonging to the Yolngu people.
Barkindji song women Nancy Bates, no stranger to the stages of Adelaide Guitar Festival, opens this performance and it is larger than the other sets of hers I have had the pleasure of seeing. Collaborating with her band and special guests, Melody Pool and Ellie Lovegrove, Nancy soft launches her new release Share Your Love with her producer Ryan Martin John, an album which was seeded through her years on tour with the late Uncle Archie Roach.
If you have seen Nancy perform on stage you know she loves to chat – often losing track of set times, saying things she admits she might later regret. But really, we all love the humour she brings onstage.
This time Nancy used her voice and platform to share a message from Tabitha Lean, an activist for prison abolition. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls are the fastest growing prison population in the world, and Nancy tells the audience about Sisters Inside, an Aboriginal-led independent organisation that advocates for the collective human rights of women and girls in prison.
You might like
The Free Her campaign has been set up to raise funds that will be used to release people from prison and pay warrants to avoid imprisonment, breaking the systemic cycle with a donation as small as $5.
For Nancy Bates, it’s never just a performance: the guitar is her companion with a voice that carries once the show is over
After a 20-minute interval, the curtain raises for Troy Cassar-Daley, a proud Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung man who takes the stage in double denim and a white cowboy hat, joined by his tiny but loud three-piece band.
Subscribe for updates
With 12 studio albums, 33 chart-topping singles and multiple gold and platinum records, Cassar-Daley’s music is a soundtrack of his life, capturing the everyday people and the spirit and beauty of place. Over the years, Troy has collaborated with artists such as Paul Kelly, Briggs, Jimmy Barnes and Adam Harvey.
For every song there was a story – the common thread were memories of his late father, mother and grandparents, each song an honouring, from sharing new music written on his mother’s veranda to music of his grandparents returning to Country as a wedge-tail eagle, so they can look over “you little turds”.
His song ‘Some Days’ was inspired by a moment when he realised he was looking more like his father. The song shares a simple message, of how small moments like that can make you consciously notice the grief of missing a parent.
A song that has stuck with me since is titled ‘Windradyne’. Windradyne was a Northern Wiradjuri warrior who led the resistance of the ‘Bathurst Wars’. This song is a storytelling of Troy’s research into past histories, acknowledging Windradyne’s fight with Troy returning to the site of Windradyne’s death and singing this song at his burial place – an honouring of our past warriors.
To close the show, Troy performed the song ‘People Get Ready’ by The Impressions, the song him and his band would play on repeat when they first started out in his father’s shed. Troy shares shared that one night his father had come out to tell them if he hears that song one more time, he will pull the plug – so “maybe he will come down and pull the plug tonight”.
Both Nancy Bates and Troy Cassar-Daley honoured Country through their beloved guitars. Watching Troy, you can see he is a man grounded in community, connecting people to land and as someone who does not listen to country music, I have since included Windradyne in my daily playlist.
Jayda Wilson is Gugada and Wirangu artist and writer with Thai ancestry based on Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide, and the latest recipient of the Create SA and InReview First Nations Arts Writing Mentorship. Jayda is working with mentor K.A. Ren Wyld, an award-winning author and critic of Martu descent based on Kaurna Yerta, to write a series of articles for publication in InReview.