August 2024

2023 was a big year, mainly because the show we premiered at Queensland Theatre mid-2022 went on tour. Robyn Archer: an Australian Songbook played Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, Darwin, Sydney and Hobart. It was an all-round terrific tour with George Butrumlis, Enio Pozzebon and Cameron Goodall – magic musicians and great mates. And they were a few standouts. The Sydney season at Belvoir sold out 9 shows to incredibly enthusiastic audiences; what fun we had! And at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the Sunday show was my birthday with many friends and family in the audience. I hadn’t really ever expected still to be singing vocally and brain demanding two-hour and fifteen-minute shows at this stage. We managed to get a basic video of that one, and in Hobart, courtesy of the Theatre Royal’s relatively brand-spanking new sound studio, an excellent multi-track recording of both shows down there. So I’ll keep you posted as to when that might become available as a digital download. I have added below one of the many (all very positive) reviews we received. This one is by critic Murray Bramwell who has followed my work for many years.

During the show, as an intro to the penultimate first half closer I jokingly suggested that the Menstruation Blues should be included in the National Film and Sound Archives’ Sounds of Australia, given it was perhaps the earliest song anywhere on that subject, and an indication of what Australian women artists were expressing in public about women’s issues in the 1970s. Blow me down if I didn’t get a message a few weeks after the tour finished that that song of mine had indeed been included in the 2023 list. In the first half of 2025 The NFSA is going to host a special event in Canberra to celebrate its inclusion, and we’re getting a hint that this may sport a full screening of The Pack of Women, the ABC TV show that followed the theatrical success: it has a ripping version of The Menstruation Blues performed by me, Judi Connelli, Meryl Tankard, Tracy Harvey and Jo Kennedy, with Maree Steinway on piano, and Sandy Evans blowing a wild sax solo. I’ll let you know when the date for that event is confirmed.

In the meantime, accordionist George, pianist Michael Morley and I have been thinking about returning to some French repertoire, and working on a few more songs by Leo Ferre. We already do his very sweet Le Piano du Pauvre and very dark Monsieur William, but he wrote so many from the 1940s to the 1970s, we’re enjoying exploring that repertoire. His settings of French poet Charles Baudelaire are especially intriguing.

And I have spent much of this year working and reworking the words for a memoir of sort. With almost 220,000 words already written (I started accelerating this project during COVID lockdowns in Melbourne), the task is now more about editing, adding, getting rid, and deciding what kind of version of myself I might care to make public.