Queenstown NAIDOC Week Film Showcase

Reconciliation Tasmania are proud to present Wash My Soul in the River's Flow, a cinematic reinvention of a legendary concert that premiered in 2004. Kura Tungar-Songs from the River was a collaboration between two of Australia’s greatest artists—singer-songwriters Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter—working with Paul Grabowsky and the 22-piece Australian Art Orchestra.

For National NAIDOC Week 2022 the theme is Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up! This is something Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter certainly did, as activists and musicians throughout their lives.

Ruby and Archie have performed with the best – Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Paul Simon, Sting and Joan Armatrading, among others. In 2021, Roach was on the cover of Rolling Stone as one of the 50 most influential Australian artists of all time with AC/DC, Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Michael Hutchence and Sia, among others. Ruby signed with a major record label in 1993, the first Indigenous woman to do so. She is a trailblazer and hero to a new generation of First Nations women in music including: Jess Mauboy, Alice Skye, Casey Donovan, Emily Wurramara, Barkaa and executive producer of Wash My Soul In The River’s Flow, soul singer Emma Donovan.

Using footage combining conversations, rehearsals, and the opening night, with breathtaking images of Hunter’s Ngarrindjeri country in South Australia, the film is a portrait of artists at the peak of their powers and a profoundly moving story of loss, love and what it means to truly come ‘home’. It was 17 years in the making. This film was made on unceded Aboriginal Lands.

This year the NAIDOC Week Committee stated: From the frontier wars and our earliest resistance fighters to our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities fighting for change today—we continue to show up.

Now is our time. We cannot afford to lose momentum for change. It’s also time to celebrate the many who have driven and led change in our communities over generations—they have been the heroes and champions of change, of equal rights and even basic human rights. 

Ruby and Archie are exemplary examples of this and it's another reason we wanted to show this powerful and moving film.

Reconciliation Tasmania would like to acknowledge and pay respects to Elders past, present and emerging and to the Traditional Owners of lutruwita/Tasmania.