Emily Wurramara on surviving a house fire: ‘When I had nothing, I had everything’

Emily Wurramara had the world at her feet. The Indigenous singer-songwriter, then based in Brisbane, had recently released her debut album Milyakburra, named after her community on Bickerton Island in the Northern Territory. It had been received with warm reviews and escalating interest. Then, one night in 2019, her life came crashing down around her.

She remembers she went to bed early, as she felt unwell. She was shaken awake by her brother, who was screaming. She opened her eyes and saw a painting made by her grandmother on the wall was burning. The unit was on fire.

Wurramara grabbed her laptop and her daughter’s dummy. (Luckily, her daughter was staying elsewhere with her grandmother.) And they ran.

The blaze had started under her bedroom. It took 11 fire-fighting crews several hours to bring it under control . Wurramara and her family escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Later, Wurramara says, she had an epiphany: “I had the people that loved me, my sister gave me the roof over her head, my daughter was safe, everyone was safe.”

Wurramara’s new album is called Nara. In her native tongue of Anindilyakwa , the word means “nothing”. Her mother tattooed the word on her right forearm; she rolls up her sleeve to show me. “It was when I realised that I had nothing, that I had everything.”

We’re talking via Zoom. After the fire, Wurramara relocated to Dodges Ferry, 40 kilometres from Hobart in lutrawita/Tasmania. She’s rugged up in a Nasa hoodie, as far from Milyakburra and the heat of the Gulf as she can get, but her heart is full. “I’m physically cold, but spiritually and emotionally I’m feeling warm,” she says.

Part of the satisfaction is romantic. “Well, I fell in love,” she says with a giggle, when asked for the reason behind the shift, but there was more to it than that. After the fire, Wurramara felt the need to start afresh. “I realised that in Meanjin [Brisbane], I couldn’t heal in a place that made me sick.”

In Dodges Ferry, she is isolated and cold: “My first winter absolutely broke me.” It is, in every sense, a counterintuitive move for Wurramara, who is the definition of a people person: gregarious, enthusiastic, with a permanent, infectious smile. “I love yarnin’ and connecting with people, I’m very much a bubbly person.”

She says she needed to move in order to grow, both as a musician and person: “I was way too comfortable with myself.” The proof is in Nara. Despite her self-imposed isolation, Nara is a confident and outgoing second album, this time written and sung almost entirely in English. Previously, Wurramara had often sung in Anindilyakwa.

That, too, was a deliberate change. It wasn’t for commercial gain (Wurramara’s streaming numbers are already healthy enough), but to resist pigeonholing: “I wake up every day as a blak woman and nothing is going to change that, but that’s not my artistry; that’s me as a person. I should be able to explore my artistry without fitting into any boxes.”

Wurramara was born in Darwin. Her family relocated to Brisbane when she was six. From her early childhood, she remembers going back and forth to Bickerton, west of Groote Eylandt in the western Gulf of Carpentaria. “The Dreaming stories, the moments I’d had on Bickerton had a pretty core role in my songwriting.”

She remembers one in particular. “We were on a boat, and the waves were higher than the boat, but I just remember my pop and my nan being so calm. There was no stress, they knew the ocean wouldn’t hurt them, because it was their passage home and they were following the stars.”

A few days before our Zoom, she had bumped into Neil Murray, the songwriter behind My Island Home . “It’s an anthem to me. Whenever I hear it, I think about my grandparents, my aunties, all my families and my lineages. But I also think about mob and community, because home can be represented in different perspectives. Home, for me, is where my heart feels happy.”

Related: ‘I felt my tongue coming alive’: learning a critically endangered Indigenous language is a small triumph

She is a saltwater woman; her most-streamed song (17m and counting) is Lady Blue , from Milyakburra. “I wrote it in literally a concrete jungle about missing home, and missing the ocean, and now all these people around the world … I got a video sent to me a couple of days ago of Lady Blue being played in this Japanese toy shop. I just think it’s so cool.”

Why does she think it’s struck such a chord? “Everyone loves the ocean. She can be so beautifully chaotic sometimes, but it is a sacred place, and I think a lot of people connect with that and find her healing and special. Lady Blue takes you on a visual journey, you can picture it, you can smell it, you can feel the sand in your feet, flicking it up between your toes.”

• Nara is out now (ABC Music).

Emily Wurramara’s songs to live by

Each month, we ask our headline act to share the songs that have accompanied them through love, life, lust and death.

What was the best year for music, and what five songs prove it?

1996 baby! Brandy’s Sittin’ Up In My Room, The Fugees’ Killing Me Softly, Tracy Chapman’s Give Me One Reason, 2Pac’s How Do U Want It, and Donna Lewis’s I Love You Always Forever.

If your life was a movie, what would the opening credits song be?

Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac.

What is your go-to karaoke song?

Waiting in Vain by Bob Marley.

What’s a song you can never listen to again?

Baby Boy by Beyoncé.

What classic song should be stripped of its title?

I’m On Fire by Bruce Springsteen.

What is a song you loved as a teenager?

I’ll Be Seeing You by Billie Holiday. Fuck you, The Notebook.

What is the first song/album you bought?

I literally had to ask my mum – it was Hannah Montana in 2006!

What is the best song to have sex to?

Doin’ It by LL Cool J.