Muddy Flats performing at the Golden Oldies 2001

Muddy Flats Band formed in the 1980s and is named after a place at Cherbourg where the five male members remember playing as children while their mothers washed clothes in the creek. They often perform at events in Cherbourg and their song “Cherbourg that’s my home” is well known to Aboriginal audiences.

Musicians Robert (Rocko) Langton and Harold Chapman wrote the song in response to the numerous negative media reports about Cherbourg in the 1980s. The song celebrates a pride in being born at Cherbourg and emphasises the importance of teaching children the history of the Aboriginal settlement. Performed with guitar, bass, drums and vocal, the lyrics begin:

They ask me where I come from
They ask me ‘what’s the name’
I tell them I come from Cherbourg that’s my home
I’ve been to a lot of places and
I’ve seen so many faces
But I always return back to the place of my birth

Good old Cherbourg, that’s my home
A place where we have so much fun
A place that we call our home
A place where we laugh and cry

The song expresses the pleasure and pain experienced by Aboriginal people in Cherbourg, a place where people were forced to live, and indicates that while Aboriginal people now have the freedom to leave Cherbourg many still maintain a connection to the place they now call ‘home’. — Katelyn Barney, 2011