Christine Anu
Christine Anu is a Torres Strait Islander singer, songwriter and actress whose 1995 recording of My Island Home, a song originally written for the Warumpi Band, became one of the most recognisable Australian records of its decade and has functioned ever since as something close to a national standard. The music is the main body of the work: many ARIA Award nominations and several wins, five Deadly Awards, and a 2024 album, Waku: Minaral a Minalay, that returned to language and origin as its subject.
Acting has been the sideline, but it produced one genuinely visible role. She appears as Arabia, one of the dancers, in Moulin Rouge!, a film that needed performers who could sing and move inside a cut so fast that conventional screen acting would have been invisible in it. The rest of her screen presence is as herself, on a genealogy documentary series and behind a costume on a singing competition, which is where established Australian musicians end up when a network wants a voice the audience will recognise before it sees the face.
Movies (1)
TV (2)
Where to start with Christine Anu
There is one dramatic credit here and it is worth the ticket: Moulin Rouge!, where Anu is Arabia among the Diamond Dogs, and the sequences she moves through are the ones that made Baz Luhrmann's editing style famous. Watch the dance floor rather than the leads and you can pick her out.
The other two are documents rather than performances, and both are enjoyable if you already care about her. Who Do You Think You Are? traces her family history and is much the more substantial, especially set against the Torres Strait material in her music. The Masked Singer Australia is exactly what it looks like, and the whole interest there is the voice, which is identifiable the moment she opens her mouth.