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Explore powerful stories at the intersection of history, culture, and music—from Aboriginal cricket pioneers and war heroes to legendary albums by Hendrix, Miles Davis, and Gurrumul. This blog dives deep into First Nations resilience, iconic protest music, and untold truths that shaped Australia and the world. Engaging, thoughtful, and unapologetically real—where powerful voices from the past meet today's social conversation.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this page contains images and names of deceased persons.
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Blak History Month: Warumpi Band; The Sound of a New Australia.
Before Indigenous music was regularly heard on mainstream radio, four young men from the remote community of Papunya were quietly changing Australian music forever. Formed in 1980, Warumpi Band became one of the country's first Aboriginal rock bands to achieve national recognition. Their music blended infectious rock rhythms with stories of Country, family and identity, creating a sound that was unmistakably Australian. What made Warumpi Band truly groundbreaking was their fe
Groote Broadcasting
Jul 42 min read
Blak History Month: The hidden history of Aboriginal stockmen and stockwomen.
This is a story that doesn't get told nearly enough — the hidden history of Aboriginal stockmen and stockwomen, and the back-breaking, brilliant, largely unacknowledged role they played in shaping rural Australia as we know it. From the earliest days of European pastoral expansion, Aboriginal people didn't just work the land — they made the industry possible. Station owners conceded they could not survive without Aboriginal knowledge and labour — pastoralists were even willin
Groote Broadcasting
Jul 33 min read
Blak History Month 2026.
This July 2026, we celebrate Blak History Month — a powerful time to honour the strength, survival, and sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It’s more than a look back — it’s a spotlight on the truth, brilliance, and resistance that continues to shape this country. Blak History Month is about truth-telling — unfiltered, unapologetic, and proud. This is a time to remember our warriors, our artists, our trailblazers. A time to reflect on injustices, cel
Groote Broadcasting
Jul 11 min read
NAIDOC Week is almost here — and this year is a big one. The 50th.
Most people know NAIDOC Week as a time of celebration. Flags flying, art, dancing, community events, kids learning culture at school. And it absolutely is all of that. But the story of how it began? That's something every Australian should know. Because NAIDOC didn't start as a party. It started as a protest. Back in 1938, on the 150th anniversary of British colonisation, Aboriginal leaders organised what they called the Day of Mourning. While the rest of the country celebrat
Groote Broadcasting
Jun 262 min read
Music Spotlight | Frank Yamma
Central Australia has a sound. It's in the heat that radiates off red rock at dusk, in the dry creek beds, in the silence that stretches further than most people are comfortable with. Frank Yamma somehow put all of that into a guitar and a voice — and the result is some of the most honest music this country has ever produced. Frank was born at a waterhole in Kaltukatjara in Australia's Northern Territory and grew up in Alice Springs. His father, Isaac Yamma, was a pioneer — o
Groote Broadcasting
Jun 132 min read
Barunga Festival: What It Is, Why It Matters, and Why You Should Know About It
If you've never heard of Barunga Festival, you're not alone — but you probably should have. Every King's Birthday long weekend in June, something quietly extraordinary happens in a small Aboriginal community 80 kilometres southeast of Katherine in the Northern Territory. Thousands of people roll in from across Australia — and beyond — set up tents in the red dust, and spend three days immersed in one of the most authentic Indigenous cultural experiences this country has to of
Groote Broadcasting
Jun 84 min read
Music Spotlight | BRIGGS.
Some artists make music. Briggs makes history. And he's been doing it so consistently, so fearlessly, for so long, that it's easy to forget just how much ground this bloke has covered. Adam Briggs — born and raised in Shepparton, Victoria — is a proud Yorta Yorta man, and he wears that identity literally: the name of his people is tattooed on both forearms. "So every time I rock the mic," he's said, "people know that I am representing." That says everything about where he's c
Groote Broadcasting
May 303 min read
National Reconciliation Week.
National Reconciliation Week starts today. And this year, the message is simple: All In. Not some of us. Not when it's convenient. Not just during the one week a year when it appears on the calendar and organisations put up a poster in the lunchroom. All of us. Every day. All in. National Reconciliation Week runs from 27 May to 3 June every year — and those two dates aren't chosen randomly. They mark two of the most significant moments in this country's history. On 27 May 196
Groote Broadcasting
May 272 min read
We are now LIVE at 5.00am!
New broadcasting times are now in effect and don't forget the sensational sista's Amathea and Jaslyn will be starting their new Daily Show soon! Stay tuned.
Groote Broadcasting
May 41 min read
'The Loner' by Vic Simms.
Some albums are polished in studios. Others are forged under pressure — and 'The Loner' is about as raw and real as it gets. Recorded in just one hour inside Bathurst Gaol in 1973, with a mobile studio rolled in by RCA, this wasn’t meant to be a landmark moment in Australian music. It was supposed to be a public relations exercise for the prison system. Instead, it became something else entirely. Vic Simms — a Bidjigal man and inmate at the time — turned that brief window int
Groote Broadcasting
May 22 min read
Anzac Day 2026.
This year, we want to make sure we remember some of the people who have too often been left out of that promise. When Australia answered the call in 1914, thousands of young men signed up to serve a country they believed in. Among them were an estimated 1,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who served with the Australian Imperial Force in the First World War. The precise figure will never be known — because a number of those who served changed their names and bir
Groote Broadcasting
Apr 252 min read
The Stolen Generations: The effects did not end when the policies did.
In the quiet spaces between official records and family memory lies one of the most confronting truths of Australia’s modern history. Between 1910 and the 1970s, it is estimated that as many as one in three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly removed from their families under formal government policies of assimilation. These children would later become known as the Stolen Generations — though the term itself barely captures the scale, duration, and hu
Groote Broadcasting
Feb 112 min read
On This Day, 4 February 1939: The Cummeragunja Walk-Off.
On 4 February 1939, a quiet but revolutionary act unfolded on the banks of the Murray River. About 200 Aboriginal men, women and children walked off Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station, near Moama in southern New South Wales, in what became one of the first mass Indigenous strikes in Australian history. This was no spontaneous protest. It was a carefully considered act of resistance against years of neglect, abuse and control imposed by the NSW Aborigines Protection Board, the go
Groote Broadcasting
Feb 42 min read
January 26: A Date That Still Divides a Nation.
Each year, January 26 arrives carrying two very different meanings. For some Australians, it marks the foundation of the modern nation — the day the First Fleet raised the British flag at Sydney Cove in 1788. For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, however, it represents the beginning of dispossession, violence, and the systematic disruption of cultures that had thrived on this continent for tens of thousands of years. This is why the date is widely referred t
Groote Broadcasting
Jan 261 min read
Colonisation: A Global Story of Displacement and Survival.
Colonisation is often taught as a chapter of expansion and exploration. For Indigenous peoples, it is remembered as a profound rupture — one that reshaped lands, laws, cultures, and lives across continents. In Australia, British colonisation from 1788 was built on the false premise of terra nullius, the claim that the land belonged to no one. This legal fiction ignored the existence of hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, each with their own laws, langua
Groote Broadcasting
Jan 212 min read
Ruby Hunter - Thoughts Within (1994)
Ruby Hunter’s Thoughts Within (1994) is one of the quiet masterpieces of Australian music — an album that speaks softly but carries enormous weight. Long overshadowed by the towering presence of her partner Archie Roach, this debut record stands today as a work of profound emotional honesty and cultural importance, a collection of songs that gave voice to stories Australian music had rarely been willing to hear, let alone centre. From the opening moments, Thoughts Within esta
Groote Broadcasting
Dec 20, 20252 min read
![Georgia Lee Sings the Blues Down Under [1962]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4c5356_cd1791d8301e4a9cbd39bfdeef272ad1~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_1331,h_1000,fp_0.50_0.50,q_35,blur_30,enc_avif,quality_auto/4c5356_cd1791d8301e4a9cbd39bfdeef272ad1~mv2.png)
![Georgia Lee Sings the Blues Down Under [1962]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4c5356_cd1791d8301e4a9cbd39bfdeef272ad1~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_1350,h_1014,fp_0.50_0.50,q_95,enc_avif,quality_auto/4c5356_cd1791d8301e4a9cbd39bfdeef272ad1~mv2.png)
Georgia Lee Sings the Blues Down Under [1962]
Georgia Lee — born Ramer Lyra “Dulcie” Pitt in Cairns in 1921 — occupies a singular place in Australian music history: a trailblazer whose artistry broke barriers long before the industry was ready to acknowledge them. A proud woman of Torres Strait Islander, Jamaican and Scottish heritage, Lee grew up in a musical family and began her career in the dance halls, clubs, and hotel circuits of North Queensland, singing jazz and blues with a voice that could shift from velvety wa
Groote Broadcasting
Dec 6, 20252 min read
Oral tradition sits at the heart of First Nations cultures in Australia.
Oral tradition sits at the heart of First Nations cultures in Australia—an intellectual, spiritual, and cultural archive maintained not on paper, but in memory, voice, and lived practice. For tens of thousands of years, long before written language was introduced to the continent, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples preserved vast bodies of knowledge through spoken word, song, dance, story, ceremony, art, and Country itself. These traditions are not simply stories;
Groote Broadcasting
Nov 26, 20252 min read
Gary Foley: The Firebrand of Aboriginal Activism.
Dr. Gary Foley (born 1950) is one of the most influential and outspoken figures in the history of Aboriginal activism in Australia — a man whose life’s work has challenged the nation to confront its deepest injustices. Born in Grafton, New South Wales, and a proud Gumbaynggirr man, Foley came of age during an era of immense social upheaval. His voice would soon become one of the defining ones in the modern Aboriginal rights movement. Foley moved to Sydney in the late 1960s, w
Groote Broadcasting
Oct 13, 20252 min read
Australian Aboriginal Art: 60,000 year old living archive.
Australian Aboriginal art is the oldest continuous artistic tradition in the world, with roots stretching back at least 60,000 years. It...
Groote Broadcasting
Oct 6, 20252 min read
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