Uncle Kutcha Edwards often begins his concerts walking through the crowd, playing clapsticks while singing in Mutti Mutti, hoping his words and his proximity create a spiritual ripple effect among his audience – like throwing “an imaginary pebble in an imaginary pond”.
“You’re not really at a gig,” the Kamilaroi blues artist Sue Ray tells those attending Edwards’ shows before he takes the stage. “You’re more at a transformative performance piece.”
One of a legion of First Nations artists Edwards has nurtured, and part of an all-star Indigenous bill he has assembled for a concert at Melbourne’s Rising festival called Waripa (ceremony), Ray says she cried the first time she shared a stage with him three years ago: hearing him sing about being removed from his mother, Mary, when he was 18 months old; and of being placed in a Methodist children’s home in Melbourne alongside his siblings Reg, Mick, Wally, Alice and Maria as state wards.
“He keeps his composure,” Ray says. “I ask, ‘Uncle, how do you do that?’ And he says, ‘It’s because I go to the in-between place where I’m supported by my ancestors. They’re there with me.’”
Seated in the foyer of a Melbourne hotel, 14 years to the day since his mother’s death, Edwards is wearing a lightly striped collared shirt and braces holding up his shorts. His father, who died in 1996, wore braces; in wearing them too, the 57-year-old wants to remind people he is Nugget Edwards’ son.
On Mrs Edwards, a track on his 2021 album Circling Time, he sings of seeing his mother for the first time alongside his siblings after they were forcibly removed. He is six years old and does not recognise her. That day, the six siblings are summoned from their school to meet her. The song’s most wrenching lyric is in the voice of an authority figure, who informs Mary that she has a train to catch and “it’s time for you to go” – alone.
“That six-year-old boy is cowering behind an older brother, holding on to his leg,” Edwards quietly recalls now, initially accessing the memory in the third person. “You whisper, ‘Who’s that?’ You’re told, ‘Stop being silly. That’s Mum.’ For these words to come out of my mouth now, it’s not easy – but I was scared of my mum.”
His fear of an Aboriginal adult was deliberately instilled by authorities, he believes. “That was the purpose of why we were removed,” he says. “To pull the iron out of the socket. Disconnect the knowledge, disconnect the truth.”
It took seven more years for Edwards to be reunited with his mother, when he went to live with her. “In the legal terminology of the documents of the commonwealth, she was my guardian, not my mum,” he says.
He remembers the welfare knocks on the door, once a fortnight, to check if she was keeping enough food for them. That first year with her, aged 13, he told his mother he was abandoning his birth name, Glenn – that he didn’t want to cause offence, but it was a European name. He wanted an Aboriginal name, having begun the long, slow process of regaining his sense of himself in her company.
He chose Kutcha, a name that came from a “higher plane” – just like his lyrics and his melodies, which he composes upon an electronic autoharp.
The Yanyua/Wardaman performer Shellie Morris, who will also play at Waripa and was likewise forcibly removed from her family and culture, recalls meeting Edwards when they were part of the Black Arm Band, travelling alongside the late Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter, among others.
That day Edwards sang his song Is This What We Deserve?: “We are but caretakers on this ancient land / But you still don’t understand.”
“I remember just melting,” Morris says. “Just crying and crying and crying. One of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard in my life. It just cut to the core, because of the struggles that just go on and on.”
Edwards has a tenor that, despite being untrained, could carry off a Puccini aria. He would sing Nessun dorma in Collingwood parkland, beneath high-rise public housing, as a balm for pain when he used to “hide from the past”.
In the late 80s through early 90s, when he was part of the band Blackfire, he wore dreadlocks down to his backside. Today, the big, bald father of three adult children – his son, Kutcha Jr, and his stepchildren, Nina and Jasper – is relishing being a grandparent with his wife, Fiona, a non-Indigenous woman and his partner of 27 years.
“If anybody was to ever say to me, ‘How are your grandchildren Aboriginal when they look as white as snow?’, I’ll say to them, ‘Don’t point the finger. They’re Aboriginal children,’” he says.
Edwards is also an elder to First Nations artists. The Wergaia/Wemba Wemba singer-songwriter Alice Skye recalls meeting him at Songlines in Preston. “He was so immediately supportive, before I was even performing. He’s a big emotional support for a lot of people.”
The Wiradjuri singer-songwriter Mo’Ju describes being in Edwards’ presence as “healing and medicinal”: “He has a way of making you think you’re the only one in the room; the only one in the universe in that moment in time.”
For Edwards, time is not linear but circular: past, present and future are all happening at once. As we speak, he imagines himself as a little boy who had never spoken language or danced in a corroboree, tapping himself on the shoulder. Behind that little boy, he says, are his grandparents, Ted and Theresa, with whom he never sat or spoke, existing on a spiritual plane where age is irrelevant, and everyone has equality, from babies to elders.
His spirituality helps him believe he will circle back to lost family members, such as his siblings. He has “no doubt” that the early deaths of his siblings Reg, Alice and Wally were due to being stolen. “It’s a prolonged suicide: you’re told by doctors, stop drinking, stop doing what you’re doing, or you’re going to die. And you’re told by the family: please stop.”
Edwards himself is long sober. “Come July I’ll be in my 28th year of sobriety,” he says. “I’m into my fifth year of abstinence from gambling. I used to spend so much money to chase [drink and gambling]. Ludicrous.
“Now, when somebody calls me up – ‘Uncle Kutcha, I got nothing in the fridge’ – I can help them. Money comes and goes, I’d rather have the love of my family than money. Money is superfluous to me.”
After 30 years of friendship, Edwards discovered that his close friend Uncle Jack Charles, the late actor and his semi-regular sidekick in his series Kutcha’s Koorioke, was his “cousin brother”.
“I’ll show you something,” he says, pulling out his phone. During a visit to his aunt while she was in palliative care, he saw a collage of portraits of women in a frame in her room. He shows me a photograph of a photograph: in the centre is his mother, Mary, and in the bottom left-hand corner is Charles’s mother, Blanche. They were sisters.
“Now you know,” said the dying aunt, pointing back at Edwards. It was an extraordinary discovery – perhaps explaining tall, solid and bald Edwards and small, wiry and hirsute Charles’s joy in each another’s company – and all the better for having been made while Charles was alive.
At Charles’s state funeral last October, Edwards sang a revised version of Advance Australia Fair. He and others collaborated with the late Seekers singer Judith Durham, who also died last year, on the lyrics, which include: “Our land abounds in nature’s gifts to love, respect and share / And honouring the Dreaming, Advance Australia Fair.”
The day one of Edwards’ sons told him Durham was on the phone, he told his son it was a hoax and to hang up. Fortunately, Durham saw the funny side and called back: she wanted Edwards to sing the national anthem with her at a concert. Edwards explained that he objected to the words, such as the proclamation that Australia is “young”. Durham mulled this over for 18 months then called him back to ask if he would rewrite the anthem with her, which they did over email.
A few years later, in 2021, an ailing Durham sang lyrics to Edwards’ song We Sing – “We long for freedom / We dream of peace” – down a telephone line. Her recorded voice was added to the all-star chorus including Archie Roach, Emma Donovan, Paul Kelly, Sue Ray, Shellie Morris and David Bridie on his album Circling Time.
All of the First Nations musicians I spoke to spoke of the love, charisma and generosity Edwards had shown them. I put that to him, and ask him about his principles for putting on concerts as he does. He is silent; he needs the question to bypass his intellect and enter his “whole being”, he says.
“It’s about creating an opportunity for people to have a conversation, and not be frightened,” he says eventually. “All those people, they use those words to explain me, and it’s not that it’s not appreciated, but I’ve got to do the work. Music is the foot in the door. Music creates this conversation …
“My role is not to try and persuade or convince the listener to come over this side of the river. You have to decide for yourself.”
Uncle Kutcha Edwards plays Tumbalong Park, Sydney, with Julian Belbachir on 8 June; at the Archie Roach tribute A Bend in the River at Sydney town hall on 9 June; at Waripa at the Forum, Melbourne on 11 June; with the Melbourne Youth Orchestra at Melbourne Recital Centre on 18 June; and in Circling Time at Sydney Opera House on 7 July.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. International helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Steve Dow travelled to Melbourne as a guest of Rising festival
