Background
Seaman Dan was born on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait Islands Region of far-north Queensland, Australia in 1929.
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Seaman Dan
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In 2014 at the age of 85 he released A Caribbean Songbook, his tribute to the music of the West Indies. Another grandfather came from the island of Niue in Polynesia. In the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Seaman Dan worked as a boat captain and pearl diver - gathering pearl and trochus shells across the north of Australia.
He also did jobs such as mineral prospecting and taxi driving.
Achievements
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His album Perfect Pearl won him an ARIA award for Best World Music Album in 2004 and in 2009 won again with Sailing Home. In its citation on awarding Dan the Australia Council for the Arts Red Ochre Award in 2005 for his outstanding contribution to the development and recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and culture, the Council claimed he was a charismatic and consummate performer who blended traditional Torres Strait Islander and pearling songs with jazz, hula and blues. In 2013, he received a Hall of Fame Award at the National Indigenous Music Awards in Darwin.
