‘My God, how courageous’: the British choirboys taking on an Indigenous family’s painful story

When Musica Viva approached the Indigenous artist and poet Judith Nangala Crispin with the idea of collaborating with Britain’s 583-year-old Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, she thought the proposal was ludicrous.

“I’m like, you’ve got to be joking, this is going to be a nightmare,” Crispin says. “I spent 20 years wandering around the desert looking for my ancestors because of people like this, because of this super English colonial thing. You’d have to get a group of snowmen together to get a whiter bunch.”

Her poem On Finding Charlotte in the Anthropological Record, which the choir will be singing in concerts around Australia in the coming days, tells the story of her search for her Indigenous roots that generations of her family sought to erase.

But with time, as Crispin mulled over the idea of a British all-boys choir singing her poetry, she changed her mind.

“I thought, my God, how courageous,” she says of the choir, from her cattle farm in the southern tablelands. “They have no obligation to engage with this history at all … and it will be coming out of the mouths of these angelic English children.”

The choir’s director of music, Daniel Hyde, concedes the commission took the boys out of their comfort zone; painful moments of colonial history, including the horror of Blackgin’s Leap, had to be explained.

• Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

“There are references to land, its sight and smell and sound, which is very visceral,” Hyde says from his home in Cambridge. “The music is gritty, Judith’s words are gripping … that’s not the sort of music that we usually sing. But it’s still notes on the page, right? … It just behaves differently, which is fun, interesting and exciting.”

On Finding Charlotte in the Anthropological Record, which won the 2020 Blake prize for poetry, has been set to a Musica Viva-commissioned score by the Sydney composer Damian Barbeler.

The poem traces Crispin’s long search for information about her Indigenous ancestry. Possessing only a photo of her great-great-grandmother Charlotte , she began searching for her mob when her grandson was born: “I had a grandson and my daughters, and I’m thinking, what do I tell them? I either pass on the things I know aren’t true, or I try to find out what’s true, because if I don’t do that, I’m complicit in this act of erasure.”

The poem touches on her 20-year hunt for information:

A geography of skin and land– maps for the returning, for those who speak only a murderers’ tongue, whose songlines are erased, who consulted departments of births, deaths and marriages, who stood beside rented Toyotas, clutching photographs, in a hundred remote communities, asking strangers “Do you know my family? Can you tell me who I am?

Eighteen boys aged between eight and 13 will sing Crispin’s words, in a choir steeped in white man’s history.

The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, was established by King Henry VI in 1441, recruiting “poor and needy boys, of sound condition and honest conversation”. Performing the full Catholic musical rituals of the day in the college’s chapel, the boys also worked in the kitchen and waited on the scholars.

“I think it would have been quite rough and tumble, in King Henry VI’s day,” Hyde says. “The choir probably didn’t sound anything like it does today.”

Over the centuries, the pure soprano voices of increasingly genteel lads have established the choir as one of the finest ensembles of its type in the world. They still sing daily in the college’s chapel, tour prolifically (the choir was last in Australia in 2019) and every Christmas Eve millions tune in to hear their Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on the BBC.

It took Crispin more than 20 years to determine she is a descendant of Bpangerang people of north-east Victoria. One line in her poem – “I remember them telling me: don’t worry, this blackness fades with each generation” – refers to a story handed down by family members who attributed their skin colour to Moors invading Scotland, or Spanish conquests.

“We fall between the cracks,” Crispin says of her heritage. “I don’t have enough culture behind me to ever consider myself to be a proper Indigenous person. But once you know, what are you supposed to do? What is your responsibility? … Is the burden you carry the onus to tell the truth?”

• The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, will perform Judith Nangala Crispin’s Charlotte in concerts at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall and Melbourne Recital Centre on 21 and 23 July, Brisbane’s QPAC on 25 July, Sydney’s City Recital Hall on 28 July, Sydney Opera House on 29 July, Adelaide’s town hall on 31 July and 1 August, in Canberra on 3 August, and Perth Concert Hall on 5 August