You have to be in early for a place to view the spectacular New Year’s Eve pyrotechnics in Sydney. This year more than a quarter of the city’s residents converged on the area around the Harbour Bridge to see fireworks transform its vast steel arches into a multicoloured blizzard.

Near the Opera House, guests at the exclusive Lord Mayor’s party were entertained by dancers and musicians. Almost unnoticed amid the glitz, a short, shuffling figure clutching a guitar was led on stage and guided to his seat. But when he opened his mouth to sing in a high, soulful wail, the buzzing of networkers subsided, and ecstatic cheers followed his performance.

In the year since the local release of his debut solo album, Gurrumul, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu has quietly become Australia’s first Aboriginal superstar. He’s bagged awards (including from the Australian Record Industry Association, ARIA, and a nomination for the forthcoming Australian of the Year), opened for Elton John and sold more than 100,000 copies of his album.

The disc of folky, acoustic world music had a broad appeal, sitting in the Australian pop charts for several weeks alongside the likes of AC/DC and Pink. All this despite minimal promotion, and his seemingly eccentric refusal to engage directly with journalists. Gurrumul feels they are “hunting him like a kangaroo, trying to spear him”, according to his bass player and producer, Michael Hohnen, who largely speaks on his behalf in the rare interviews he grants.

“The whole Gurrumul phenomenon is really intriguing,” Hohnen observes as we sit backstage between sets, with the singer adding the occasional word of agreement or emphasis, at others wandering off for a drink or smoke with the second guitarist, Francis Diatschenko. “It’s taken over my life, but I’m trying to not let it take over his, so I’m almost trying to cushion him from a lot of it. Because I’ve seen how fame and being in rock tends to affect a lot of Aboriginal people. It’s just like they’re not built to live on the road and go the hard life . . . all that sort of stuff.”

But it’s not as if Gurrumul is an overnight sensation, or naive about the ways of the world. As his autobiographical song Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind) hints, the 38-year-old spent seven years with the Aboriginal rock/roots band Yothu Yindi, touring as far afield as London and LA, before leaving them in 1994. Although he sings in four indigenous languages, he also speaks and sings in English, so his way of keeping the music press at arm’s length might seem a little precious.

Even so, it has generated a great mystique around the shy, enigmatic artist. Hohnen denies that it’s a ploy, insisting that Gurrumul simply doesn’t play the media game. He seems to be from another time, with so little regard for the trappings of success that he used the first ARIA he won (with Yothu Yindi) to bash open clams on the beaches of his birthplace, Elcho Island, 500 km north of Darwin.

“He knows about the media, how everything works. He also has a huge preconception that what he says is going to be misquoted, or he’s going to say something that is not what you want to hear. ”

It was on Elcho Island 12 years ago that Gurrumul first met Hohnen, who was running a music course for Yolngu (the local Aboriginal clan) at the time. The two have since worked together on three albums with the contemporary traditional/reggae group Saltwater Band, and recorded Gurrumul’s debut in Melbourne.

Hohnen was determined that a voice as special as Gurrumul’s shouldn’t be swamped in rock guitar reverb, or the reggae stylings so prevalent in Aboriginal pop music. Nor did he want the didgeridoo-and-clapstick clichés that might make mainstream audiences switch off. Instead, the understated arrangements used double bass, acoustic guitar and occasional touches of a string quartet to showcase Gurrumul’s voice and songs. “I wanted people in their lounge rooms in Melbourne to be able to put it on and not think, ‘oh, this is Aboriginal music’,” Hohnen explains.

Cynics might say that Gurrumul is simply the right artist in the right place at the right time. His success came just after Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, made his apology to Australia’s “stolen generation” on February 13, 2008.

Yet Gurrumul’s evident love of mainstream soft rock gives his songs a broad accessibility, but his lyrics are full of tradition-based metaphors. Blind from birth, he spent his time sitting with Yolngu elders, soaking up their ancient stories and songs. Now, his own compositions draw on this legacy, updating it to contemporary life. This explains why his lyrics are full of startling imagery that he could never have witnessed — the colours of an afternoon sky, a rainbow or an orange-footed scrub fowl — and why Yolngu have embraced him as a representative of their culture.

“It’s how the emotion comes out in his voice,” Hohnen says. “I think we do live in a racist country and if he’d been singing about activist stuff or social commentary, I don’t think it would have been taken on. It’s about the music and the feeling you get when he sings. That’s why people have bought it.”

Gurrumul is released on Feb 11

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