Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. You can just about see the moment Christine Anu remembers her purpose. It sneaks up by degrees in a 15-year-old episode of SBS’s Who Do You Think You Are? , beginning with a family tree sketched on Saibai Island, south of Papua New Guinea, by famed British anthropologist Alfred Haddon.
As her voyage of discovery proceeds, a tangle of missionaries, warriors and seafarers parts to focus on one man, her maternal grandfather Nadi Anu: World War II hero, Torres Strait adventurer, songwriter. Watch when she hears him singing from a wax cylinder recording. That’s the moment.
“I wonder if my grandfather from the heavens was always looking down, keeping me on track,” she says. “If I’m going to romanticise it, I think of him as the skipper of a trochus lugger, sailing down the Barrier Reef, collecting these ornamental shells..
.” Her eyes are alight as her hands trace an imagined horizon inside her Rockhampton kitchen. “I was singing Island Home long before it was recorded for my first album, before I knew it was going to be the song it would become,” she says.
“I was growing a relationship with the song, seeing how its meaning changes over time; like a child growing, watching who that child is becoming.” Anu performing at the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony in 2000. Credit: Dallas Kilponen Written by her Rainmakers bandmate Neil Murray, the song would spearhead that classic album of ’95, Stylin’ .