Shellie Morris is an Australian Aboriginal singer-songwriter born in Australia in 1965. She is known for earthy, honest songs, acoustic ballads and a soulful voice, and she is described in Australian press as an Aboriginal chanteuse of rare seriousness and grace.

Career

Morris performs across a wide range of settings, from rural outback Australia to venues such as London Festival Hall and the Sydney Opera House. She is a featured Aboriginal singer with Black Arm Band, a collaboration of Indigenous Australian artists and jazz musicians. She also works with Indigenous communities and youth across Australia, helping young Aboriginal people write songs about their experiences.

Her song Swept Away is orchestrated and performed with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2008, and she performs it with Black Arm Band at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010. She also co-writes and performs on Liberty Songs, a collaboration between refugees from Liberia and Indigenous Australian singers.

Recordings and recognition

A documentary film about her life as an Indigenous singer is commissioned and broadcast nationally in 2009, alongside a concert at the Sydney Opera House with Aboriginal musician Gurrumul Yunupingu. Her album Waiting Road is nominated for album of the year at the 2007 Deadly Awards. She is awarded Female Musician of the Year at the N.T. Indigenous Music Awards in 2004 and 2005.

Other work

Morris is an ambassador for the Fred Hollows Foundation, which works on blindness prevention in Aboriginal communities and in Asia, Africa and the Pacific, and for the Jimmy Little Foundation, which works to improve kidney health in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. She also appears alongside artists including Sinead O’Connor, John Cale, Meshell Ndegeocello, Rickie Lee Jones and Gurrumul Yunupingu on 7 Songs to Leave Behind.

Festivals and collaborations

She performs at WOMADelaide and WOMAD UK, and shares bills with artists including Yothu Yindi, Archie Roach, Grinspoon, Vika and Linda Bull, You Am I, Tiddas, Jimmy Little, Bluehouse, Rebecca’s Empire, Magic Dirt, Chris Bailey of The Saints, and Shane Howard of Goanna.