The short story

An old Aboriginal fellow in Kakadu first introduced me to the didj in 1980. Then, for the next eighteen years I messed around with different didjis, making a few, playing a few but never really seriously. Then, in 1997, because a lot of my friends were playing the didji, I decided to get more serious about it.

My thinking then was, and is still, that if I ever was going to be a good didj player, I needed a really good didj.

Well, I started looking around for a didji that not only sounded good, but looked good too. In my travels around the Top End and down the East Coast of Australia I could not find a didji that was what I considered 'instrument quality'. So, after years experimenting and a lot of 'back to the drawing board', I am now able to offer instrument quality didjeridus - the kind of didjeridu that I couldn't once buy for love or money.

Bob Druett Didjeridus came into being by fate, chance, accident, circumstance, then choice. Back in 1979 I had a lot of spare time and a lot less spare money.I met a fellow from Northern Territory, who was down in Melbourne partying and generally filling in time waiting for the end of the wet season up in the Northern Territory where he made a living catching wild buffalo. We got to yarning over a few games of pool, and a not very quiet drink or two. The statement he made that day, was. That in Northern Territory where he was catching buffalo, the country was wild and beautiful, the people were the same and the fishing was great. He was right on all counts. This is a story that started back in 1979 and to tell it properly would make a book so I best just try and keep to the relevant bits.

After a lot of fishing and an equal amount of partying (I was a lot younger then), I chanced a job in the environmental section of a big mine that they were building in the area at that time. They built a town for 6000 people (Jabiru East) to build a mine (Ranger). Then they dismantled that town and built another town (Jabiru) a few miles away (white man logic). Anyway if they hadn't done that, there probably would not have been a business called Bob Druett Didjeridus today.

My job was to rehabilitate the site where the first town used to be. The team consisted of about six Aboriginal men and eight balandas (white skin peoples). The Aboriginal men found it very funny that the balanda built a gammon (not real) town then pulled it down and built another one up the road.

I hadn't been working there long when I came to work one morning and a tractor that was being used as a stationery power plant had a lean on it like it was bogged. A couple of Aboriginal fellows were sitting under a shady tree not far away trying to look serious but with little smiles on their faces because they knew that if the tractor wasn't working, they wouldn't have to either. I said to the older fellow of the two, "What happened to the tractor tire?" He looked at me for a second or two, looked away towards the escarpment, then couldn't contain himself any longer and started laughing. He looked back at me and said, "I dink dat bite ant been get im - might be" (which roughly translated means ..............Bob, I believe that the termites have eaten a hole right through the tractor tire ...). "Yeah sure I thought - how could white ants eat a hole through a tractor tire? "

I had never heard of such kind of rubbish. Because they were both laughing, I thought they were just having a joke with me, they weren't, the termites had eaten a hole right through the tractor tire. That was my first serious contact with the real didj maker ... the termite.

He has come in and out of my life a few times since then. The last time starting just over seven years ago, I didn't realize that he would be a large part of my life from then on. I guess I am happy with the arrangement that we have between us. If he keeps doing the sort of job on the inside of my didjis that he has been doing, and I keep doing the sort of job that I have been doing on the outside I can see this partnership lasting for a long time to come.

Bob D.

The real didj makers

These termites are on the outside (not their normal place) of a Woolybutt log that has just been cut

The one on the left is a soldier, who gards the two on the right who are workers