Musician Judith Durham, who died in Melbourne on August 5 aged 79 from the chronic lung disease bronchiectasis, was always the last person to acknowledge the impact she had as a female pioneer in Australian music. Born Judith Mavis Cock in Essendon in 1943, she adopted her mother’s maiden name to perform as a jazz singer aged 18. However, it was a young Melbourne folk/pop band fronted by advertising agency partner Athol Guy that would change her life and the history of Australian music. Two years after she had joined The Seekers as a singer, Durham found herself on what was planned to be a 10-week trip to the UK by ship (they were the entertainment on board). The journey took several years. Their easygoing sound soon won over the Brits – drawn to Durham’s clean vocals and diction – and Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom offered to write them a song. This track, I’ll Never Find Another You, hit No.1 in the UK in 1964. It was No.1 back home and reached No.4 in the US. A steady stream of global hits followed – The Carnival Is Over, A World of Our Own and Georgie Girl – all written by Springfield, with the latter peaking at No.2 in the US. The Seekers at the Savoy Hotel in London, 1965. Left to right: Keith Potger, Athol Guy, Judith Durham and Bruce Woodley. Photo: Mirrorpix/Getty Images Journalist Lillian Roxon summed up the group in 1969 saying, “If the Seekers didn’t exist, some clever manager would have invented them. A cute girl next door and three sober cats who looked like bank tellers.” Their achievements were remarkable – playing with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in London and welcoming them home with a show at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl in 1967, which was attended by a record-breaking 200,000 fans. They were the first Australian band to sell over a million records. “When I started I don’t think it was even called the music business,” Durham said in 2019. “You just sang and played some songs.” However, four years after discovering the Seekers, Durham told her bandmates she was leaving for a solo career. This fierce determination to do things her way – as politely as possible – was a trademark of Judith Durham. She called the Seekers her brothers and knew how lucky she was to be protected and proud to remain friends – working together on the 1997 anthem I Am Australian. Time had washed away any bitterness – the band had replaced Durham several times, but the chemistry was never the same. He would return to tour with The Seekers several times, usually to mark career milestones. In 2013, shortly after walking off stage in Melbourne on a Seekers reunion tour, Durham suffered a brain haemorrhage. When it took her 15 minutes to write “soy milk” when ordering meals at the hospital immediately after the medical episode, she realized she was in trouble – facing it as another challenge in a life that survived a major car accident in 1990 and the death of her beloved wife of Ron Edgeworth in 1994; The Seekers in 2013 after Durham returned to performing after a brain haemorrhage. Photo: Julian Smith/AAP He had to learn to read and write again – including music – and how to play the keyboard again. That trademark voice was unscathed and a year after the brain haemorrhage she returned to the stage, fulfilling commitments in Australia and the UK – unfinished business motivating her recovery. Durham shared an expert – Professor John Olver – with Countdown host and Australian music icon Ian Molly Meldrum, who fell from his roof and suffered serious brain injuries in 2010. Durham had called Meldrum after he came out of the coma. after her hospital stay, the pair became phone buddies. “She was truly the most beautiful person you could ever meet,” Meldrum said. “There’s a reason you never heard a bad word about her. And her comeback after bleeding was truly remarkable. Songs become part of people’s lives Judith Durham “It really takes a lot of work and discipline to recover from a brain injury, but Judith was always very determined. And always so modest about her talent and success.” Jimmy Barnes once spotted Durham because he had met one of his heroes – Keith Moon of The Who. Olivia Newton-John saw The Seekers play at her school in the early days and was inspired by how she and Helen Reddy opened up the international market, noting “She was one of the first Australian girls to make it overseas”. Paul Kelly once asked Durham to come to his house to sing Seekers’ Morningtown Ride for his daughters in their bedroom – it was the tune they sang at bedtime as children. “Songs become a part of people’s lives,” Durham said of the request. She couldn’t believe that Elton John once compared her to Karen Carpenter as the ‘clearest voice in popular music’, saying: ‘It’s shocking. I am in awe of it all. It’s really, really hard for me to think that people are raising me to that level.” Durham’s solo career, along with that of The Seekers, has been superbly curated on CD and DVD – her long-time friend and manager Graham Simpson knowing the importance of protecting the legacy. “It’s great to have captured all these things. Otherwise, it’s all gone up in smoke,” he said. Sign up to receive the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning Durham closed after a final solo tour of New Zealand in May 2016, happy that her last time on stage was up to her high standards. He knew that further touring could risk another brain bleed. She had battled the lung condition bronchiectasis since she was a child and eventually curtailed her flights from Melbourne, including Brisbane in 2019, after being inducted into the Honor Roll at the Australian Women in Music Awards. In recent years, Durham has been composing music and considering writing her memoirs. She occasionally consulted a book about her life that Simpson wrote in 2004 to recall moments that had become hazy. Durham had made peace with her place in an industry, and when she talked about death in 2019, it was never morbid. “I see death very realistically. We all have to live our lives as if we don’t have much time. For me to live long enough to see how I have been a thread in people’s lives is wonderful.”
