Sir George Telek is not an easy man to get hold of. For a start, the celebrated Papua New Guinean singer lives in a remote village outside Kokopo, on the island of New Britain. It’s on the eastern edge of the Bismarck archipelago, near Rabaul. Phone lines are often down. I can’t call him; repeated attempts to catch him via WhatsApp fail.
“Welcome to my world,” chuckles his old friend, David Bridie, who eventually helps connect us the morning after Telek has played a show celebrating the 50th anniversary of his country’s independence from Australia in Port Moresby. On Saturday, the pair will reunite to celebrate Tabaran, the album they released in 1990 with Bridie’s band Not Drowning, Waving.
Tabaran was like no other record ever produced by an Australian group. Credited equally to “Not Drowning, Waving and the Musicians of Rabaul, Papua New Guinea featuring Telek” – quite a mouthful to fit on an album cover – it was a remarkably successful act of artistic and cultural engagement that changed the lives of everyone involved.
At the time, it was called World Music, a generic catch-all for anything made outside the Anglosphere. It helped, Bridie said, in terms of Not Drowning, Waving’s music being found in record stores, but he doesn’t get hung up on the label. “It’s better than being called Americana,” he says. “If people are listening to Telek’s music, then good.”
Today, a sequel of sorts is released: Malira, an unplanned but happy accident that spun off from rehearsals for an earlier performance of Tabaran at the Sydney festival in January. The band were rehearsing old songs and jamming on new grooves until “a certain point where we went, hey, this is actually really good,” Bridie says.
The difference, he says, is the decades of friendship in between. Everyone involved was in their 20s when Tabaran was made, in 1988. “The first time we hardly knew each other,” Bridie says. “This time we’ve known each other for half our lives, so there was this real comfort just being with each other, musically and culturally.”
Not Drowning, Waving had begun as a duo between Bridie and his friend John Phillips in the early 1980s, when both were at university in Melbourne. They, too, came from opposite sides of the tracks, or at least of the Yarra River: “He was in Northcote brown, I was wearing St Kilda black,” Phillips says. They took their name from a Stevie Smith poem.
Initially inspired by the sonic experiments of Talking Heads, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, they applied those lessons in ambient music, drones and collage to Australian post-punk, creating music full of wide-open spaces, found sounds, unusual percussion and lyrics that always maintained their sense of place (a 1993 compilation was titled Follow the Geography).
Tabaran, their major-label debut, earned them fans including David Byrne and Peter Gabriel. Made at Pacific Gold studios in Rabaul, it fused Bridie’s classic, piano-led songwriting with Telek’s haunting voice, log drumming, choral and Papuan stringband music. A few years later, the studio was buried by the volcanic eruption that destroyed Rabaul.
“We were just following our nose,” says Bridie. He and percussionist James Southall (now retired) had travelled to PNG on holiday in 1986; it was Bridie’s first trip overseas. Bridie bonded with Telek, a PNG star who sang with Painim Wok and the Moab Stringband. Over a few beers, they decided to make an album together.
The rest of Not Drowning, Waving – Phillips, bassist Rowan McKinnon, drummer Russell Bradley and cellist Helen Mountfort – were happy to go along with the big adventure. Their label was not so thrilled. “They didn’t want to release it in America because they said no one knew where Papua New Guinea was,” Bridie says.
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Too often, it feels like Australians don’t know much more about our nearest neighbour and former colony. Tabaran was an expression of what a closer relationship might look and sound like between the two countries. “We were learning off them – their story, how they approach music – and it was fascinating for us,” says Bridie. “And the same in reverse; it was a two-way thing.”
For Bridie, making Tabaran was the jumping-off point for a life immersed in Melanesian and Indigenous music. He later founded Wantok Musik, a not-for-profit label releasing music from First Nations artists from Australia and throughout Oceania. Much of the music is sung in languages in danger of being lost.
“For David, it was almost like he was more comfortable in New Guinea than he was in Australia,” says Phillips. “I was in my St Kilda blacks, going out to nightclubs and seeing very little daylight, then all of a sudden, I was in the jungles in PNG, working with these amazing people and immersed in their world. We were never quite the same again.”
Telek – when we finally connect – remembers working with Bridie as “totally unique, totally different ideas put together, but we come up with something new. It was really special.” (Their friendship was the subject of a 2023 film, Abebe: Butterfly Song, which is being rereleased around the band’s performance and PNG’s 50th anniversary celebrations.)
His entire career has coincided with Papuan independence. “I’ve been in the music industry for 50 years now, and it means a lot to me that we came up with this album on the 50th anniversary of Papua New Guinea,” he says. “We did something different, and I’m really proud to work with them again.”