WORDS Beth Doherty

Like most musicians, Shellie Morris spends a lot of time on the road. But where others are travelling from club to club, many of Shellie’s journeys take her to schools across the Northern Territory, where she’s sharing her musical expertise with students in need of a bit of inspiration.

A Darwin-based indigenous song-writer, Shellie Morris has been dubbed the ‘Janis Joplin of Jingali’ by Australian newspaper journalist Nicholas Rothwell. She has a rich voice and acoustic style, and her music is about telling the stories and testimonies of indigenous people in Australia.

I caught her on the phone at a school in the Northern Territory, in between workshops. She shared her life story honestly, and with a touch of the deep spirit which characterises her songs.

‘I was adopted at birth and grew up in Sydney’, she says. ‘I have a beautiful adoptive family, a non-indigenous family, who encouraged me to be whatever I wanted to be. They recognised that I was very musical.’

Shellie tried a number of instruments before finally settling on guitar as her instrument of choice, and as she grew, music became part of her search for identity.

Eventually, she went to Darwin, although she says she had mixed feelings about the journey.

‘I went to Darwin to find the warmer weather. I was a bit frightened to find my family’, she says. Shellie has since traced back her ancestry to the Katherine area and made contact with members of her family.

She enrolled to study music at the Northern Territory University after being overwhelmed by positive comments when busking at the Darwin mall.

Interestingly, Shellie Morris was operatically trained during her teens in Sydney. The only indication of this now is the richness, control and incredible range. She has chosen a contemporary style which uses indigenous, folk, blues, and country influences and illustrates her passionate beliefs through song.

Unlike many musicians, Shellie was propelled to star status, at least in Darwin, when she was working in a high school. The indigenous students were in a choir and Shellie suggested that they write a song and helped them to do this. The children ended up winning a national competition.

Since then, Shellie has made it her passion to travel around to remote communities to help indigenous people, particularly young people, write songs about their experiences. She does this for around four to six months a year.

She says ‘my footsteps are definitely not my own’ and that it was certainly not a direction she saw herself going in while in her teens … ‘There was no way I was gonna go and hang out in the bush … I was a city chick!’

But now one of the things she loves most is hanging out with her sister in the bush catching goanna.

Shellie works with mostly indigenous kids, but also kids who are at risk or homeless. In the remote communities, her program in the schools is targeted at promoting literacy and numeracy, and she says that there have been plenty of results.

‘For lots of indigenous kids, English might be their second or third language’, says Shellie.

The challenge is to find ways of reaching them that inspire them to want to learn. In that, music can work magic.

‘Music is so much fun … they enjoy that learning’, she says. ‘A teacher in Tennant Creek told me that the kids asked her to tutor them after school so that they could improve their literacy so that they could read and sing their songs—their stories.’

Twice awarded Best Female Artist at the Northern Territory Indigenous Music Awards, Shellie’s songs are raw, truthful and real. Her style was described by the Adelaide Advertiser as ‘storytelling’. Her voice and her lyrics share a story, a life, a heart and a richness of soul. She has toured with Yothu Yindi, Magic Dirt, and Vika and Linda Bull among others. Her vocal stylings have been compared to Tori Amos, Janis Joplin, and Tracey Chapman. Not just singers, but songwriters who put their beliefs and values into what they do.

And speaking of belief—she is certainly a believer. ‘I am definitely meant to be where I am. There is so much joy and peace in what I do. I need a lot of strength to do what I do. Sometimes when I go into a community I need to learn the protocols fast, working with different language groups. So I need a lot of strength and prayer for that.’