The remarkable second act of Jimmy Little’s career commenced with the release of Messenger in 1999. The album was a selection of atmospheric renditions of classic Australian rock songs. In stark contrast to the reassuring homeliness of his earlier recordings, Little’s reading of them evoked an Australia of vast empty spaces, melancholy, and solitude. Those lucky enough to attend the concerts that followed were struck by his goodwill and by the assured mastery of his performance and the fineness of his voice, which hadn’t deteriorated with age.

The truth was that many of us had forgotten about Little, imagining that his politics were of another era, and his commitment to an unfashionable Christianity out of date. Though Little was intensely private, his performances and the album unsettled this condescension. His interpretation of Messenger’s selection of songs, many of which were literary and some esoteric, relied for its force on precise enunciation and considered phrasing. Although he remained an enigma, one felt that something personal was being shared, in an oblique way, with his audience. His delivery of the Go-Betweens’ ‘Cattle and Cane’, for instance, seemed to reveal something of the isolation he must have experienced as an Aboriginal public figure and performer at a time when assimilation was the most enlightened policy in Aboriginal affairs:

I recall a bigger brighter world
A world of books and silent times in thought
And then the railroad, the railroad takes him home
Through fields of cattle, through fields of cane