Top 50 Judith Durham Quotes

One of the reasons we had our reunion tours in the ’90s was the unexpectedness of how the music had gone, that these songs we’d recorded should have somehow become timeless classics.

In 1990 I had a nasty car accident and in 1994 my husband Ron Edgeworth died of motor neurone disease.

It’s a terrific responsibility trying to look right. There is so much to think about – clothes, makeup, hair. You have to look right for your fans.

It could potentially affect my singing if I wasn’t very disciplined about how I eat before I go on stage.

Health is a precious gift. You realise more and more as you get older just how precious a gift it is.

I’m moved by what I hear about the power of music.

I met musician Ken Farmer in Lorne and he lent me all of his Bessie Smith blues LPs. That’s when I started to sing.

I’m certainly never running away from the Seekers again.

If you join a choir, it’s a wonderful outlet.

My good fortune was that I was born into a home where Mum and Dad encouraged me to learn the piano.

The sound of the Seekers, that four-part harmony sound, three boys and a girl, is so unlikely, you would not choose those four voices to blend together.

We certainly weren’t expecting to become pop stars.

I remember being out in the street, singing ‘Forever And Ever’ at the top of my voice at five years old.

They don’t fund the arts enough and they so often take words and music for granted and performers for granted – particularly women.

Death is just a continuation of life.

Mum prayed to the Lord that when her children were born they wouldn’t be tone deaf. Mum says at two years old I was singing my own little songs, she didn’t know where I’d heard it so I must have made it up. I used to sing along with the radio.

The fact that I can go to a museum and I can see one of my dresses there I start to think, ‘Crikey!’

I suffer from bronchiectasis, an obstructive lung disease, and have a little osteoporosis, too.

Everything in life happens for a reason and it’s important to embrace it.

As it turns out, I can see I’m quite a business-minded person as I’ve developed.

It seems that singing is the only thing I’ve been able to do and fortunately it seems to be useful!

My role models came in my imagination, from what I’d heard on the radio or on record… Vera Lynn I loved, but I’d only ever heard her on the radio. Gospel singers, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson. So it was in my head that I visualised the emotion but no way to see how people do it.

We’ve led pretty wholesome lives. We haven’t lived life to excess like so many groups have done.

Once upon a time I did eat meat.

Everyone who reaches a milestone birthday in their lives has an opportunity to truly appreciate the fact that presumably we have acquired all the gifts that maturity and age can bring us.

Never did I dream that while I was feeling so self-conscious and inadequate in the ’60s, I was actually creating The Judith Durham Look!

I was shy. But when I sang I felt really empowered.

Music is nourishment.

I always felt I was going to be famous.

Music is a gift to all of us.

No longer do I have these terrible complexes I had when I was younger, and I am able to enjoy what life’s offering me.

Look, I do spray flies, but I have a really big conscience.

My object is to make people happy with our music.

You can’t under-estimate the power of uplifting melody and words.

I am quite healthy and very careful about my diet. I take a vitamin B complex, a vitamin C supplement, iron and hemp oil – which is a good source of omega 3 – every day. I don’t eat meat, fish or eggs, or anything that’s too starchy.

I do marvel at what life puts in your path. It’s always the unexpected. But I am lucky to be surrounded by very positive people and during my rehabilitation from the haemorrhage that helped very much.

We were just four unknown, aspiring Australian musicians singing happy, uplifting, melodic and inspiring songs, and being true to ourselves.

I’ve never used an app.

The Seekers have done most things that you’d want to do and when we broke up in the ’60s it was partly because we sort of felt we’d done all the things that you could do. There was nothing new.

When I left the Seekers it was because I was unhappy. I wouldn’t have left if I’d been happy.

Music has always taken me to another plane of existence.

I get quite a few proposals on my website. That’s very nice. I’m thrilled about that side of life.

I used to delight in eating the most exotic meat on the menu: I’d have the snails, camel, squid or anything else that was going.

A lot of my philosophies came from sheet music. ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come,’ or ‘Blue Skies Smiling at Me’ – they were very uplifting, wholesome lyrics, and I really believed those words when I sang them.

You sort of feel when you are given an award, you feel like, well then you have got to do something to deserve having been given the award. It worked differently with me cause I didn’t feel that I had done enough.

It’s just as well I can sing as I couldn’t do a factory job with all these physical limitations.

It’s important to keep music in your life in some way.

It doesn’t matter what it is you’re doing, my motto is: the joy is in the doing.

I lost the power to write and I had to sort of relearn how to read and write to a certain extent and speak fluently.

Everybody has adversity in their lives and we all have to find ways of overcoming them. You’ve got to soldier on, make the best of it, look for the positive in everything.