Artist Spotlight: Alan Dargin.

He started at age five, with a hundred-year-old instrument and a grandfather's hands guiding his own.

Born in Wee Waa, New South Wales in 1967, Dargin began learning the didgeridoo at age five from his grandfather, who passed down the instrument as a treasured family heirloom — cut from a variety of bloodwood tree that has since gone extinct. Those early lessons weren't just music lessons. They were a transmission of culture, story, and identity across generations.

The didgeridoo had originally been used in tribal ceremonies to induce Dreamtime, and though Dargin still played ceremonial music throughout his life, he never performed it publicly — forbidden by custom.

Dargin channelled rock and roll, jazz, and hip-hop into a uniquely visceral approach to the instrument that nobody had quite heard before. He started out busking the streets of Sydney, and from those footpaths he somehow found his way to some of the most prestigious stages on earth — performing with the Vienna Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, and touring the United States, Japan, and Europe.

Along the way, he also turned up on screen. In 1983 he appeared in the ABC miniseries Chase Through the Night alongside a then-unknown Nicole Kidman, then played the role of Bruce in Bruce Beresford's acclaimed 1986 film The Fringe Dwellers. And for fans of Australian cinema, you might spot him in one of the great cult classics — he had a memorable cameo in The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert in 1994, as an Aboriginal man who joins the drag artists in their performance. Iconic.

His musical collaborations read like a who's who of world music. He contributed to albums by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, Jimmy Barnes, Tommy Emmanuel, Yothu Yindi, and Don Burrows, and even filmed a documentary about Cape York alongside the legendary Jacques Cousteau.

Dargin's final album, MRD, was released in April 2008 — featuring collaborations with Tommy Emmanuel, James Morrison, and other musicians across guitar, trumpet, Chinese flute, steel drums, and more. It was released just weeks after his death, following a cerebral haemorrhage on 24 February 2008, at just 40 years old.

His memorial service was held at Circular Quay, beginning with a traditional Aboriginal smoking ceremony that moved slowly along the quay to First Fleet Park. It was a farewell as ancient and dignified as the music he gave his life to.

Alan Dargin took one of the oldest instruments on earth and made it speak to the whole world. Not bad for a kid from Wee Waa.