How Aboriginal-Filipino rapper DOBBY found his voice, seeing his teenage dreams come true

Australia Broadcast Center

05-07-2025

The first thing Murrawarri Filipino rapper DOBBY does when he arrives on his Country is greet the river.
For DOBBY, Wahwangu (the Barwon River) is an ancestor and taking time for this greeting does more than reconnect him to the river, it centres him.
"I take in a deep breath and I just say, 'Alright I'm here.' It gives me that peace, that tradition," DOBBY tells Compass.
His passion for Murrawarri Country runs deep. In fact, it was seeing this river and the nearby community of Brewarrina, in north-west New South Wales, in extreme drought that inspired DOBBY's ARIA award-winning album, Warrangu: River Story.
"[It's] been a creative process that's taken over seven years to put together. It was a lot of investigation at first just understanding as someone who didn't grow up in [Brewarrina], what's important to the mob here," he says.
By weaving together soundscapes, the voices of cultural knowledge holders, haunting melodies and his own idiosyncratic lyrics, the album has become an urgent call to action to protect the environmental and cultural value of these rivers.
"I'm really, really proud of how it's resonated with people," he says.
DOBBY grew up as Rhyan Clapham in Warilla on Dharawal Country, south of Wollongong in New South Wales.
His mum still lives in the house where he was raised, and walking into DOBBY's teenage bedroom is like stepping out of a time machine programmed for the mid-2000s.
The walls are plastered with his heroes; Eminem, Busta Rhymes, Bliss n Eso jostle for space among ticket stubs, and high-school certificates voting him "Most likely to be famous" and "Most likely to become a musician".
DOBBY still has the first CD he made at the age of 12. The carefully hand-drawn cover art is a nod to the metamorphosis he was going through, but the text is where his dreams really took shape.
"Get this right, it says, 'Rhyan Clapham … 2006 ARIA winner,'" he says.
While it would take almost 20 years for his ARIA award moment, DOBBY started to get a taste for success just two years after making his first CD.
At 14, he wrote a song called 2528 about Warilla, rapping about the poverty and violence in his neighbourhood.
It became a local hit, getting as many as 12,000 plays and was even picked up by local radio.
But DOBBY soon started to realise his words had power.
Not only did a local radio announcers chastise him on-air for "glorifying gang violence", but DOBBY also suffered a coward punch by some local boys who took exception to his lyrics.
"And in that moment, I realised truthfully the responsibility of what music can do, because here I am trying to find a voice and realising that things that I say there is always going to be consequence," he says.
This sense of responsibility has stayed with DOBBY over the years and while he's built a reputation as a rapper with something to say, finding his place in music took some time.
He's a rapper, a drummer, a composer, and producer. He was the composer for the documentary WINHANGANHA (2023), created soundscapes for PARRTJIMA in Alice Springs and scored the 500-strong drone show, Elevate Sydney.
It makes it difficult to put DOBBY neatly in a box.
"I'm too this, or not enough this. [But] hip hop, it never judged me … I could kind of bring to it who I was. No matter how geeky, no matter how Aboriginal, no matter how white, no matter how Filipino, whatever I am, it was just my story," he says.
And that story is as unique as his music style.
DOBBY's mother Luz Clapham emigrated from the Philippines in 1985, and his father Ted Clapham is a proud Murrawarri man.
His parents split when he was just five-years-old, but they've each had a profound impact on both his music and cultural identity.
When he was just seven-years-old, DOBBY's mother bought a piano on lay-buy in the hope he would learn to play.
"Even if we don't have money for groceries, I would have to pay [for] the piano," she explains.
"My father was a member of [a] band in the Philippines. That was my ambition — to play the piano. But then I did not make it, so I asked Rhyan [DOBBY] to finish the ambition."
Meanwhile, DOBBY's father is a retired carpentry teacher, and the link to DOBBY's Murrawarri identity.
"I had a different identity, and it applied to me being Filipino and it applied to me being Aboriginal. I was trying to navigate where all of those different puzzle pieces of me sit," DOBBY says.
"Knowing your Aboriginality is an important obligation if you choose to identify — understanding the real implications of that lineage, that ancestry."
And for him, that lineage and ancestry run straight to Wahwangu and Brewarrina, which is home to Baiame's Ngunnhu.
It translates to 'the Creator's fish traps' and refers to sacred structures that stretch across the Wahwangu, which are estimated to be over 40,000 years old.
Brewarrina is also where DOBBY's grandmother was born and raised, while his great-grandfather father, George Shearer had been born in Weilmoringle under the birthing tree on the Culgoa River.
"Each time the station was sold, [George] went along with it as part of the property," DOBBY says.
"There's so much that needs to be done, and so much power that needs to be given back to our mob and I feel like to me music is the key," DOBBY says.
It's one of the reasons that DOBBY is now an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF) and has taken part in the foundation's 2025 Busking for Change initiative.
DOBBY co-wrote the song Country Tells Us When with entertainer Justine Clarke (Playschool), and singer-songwriter Josh Pyke.
Now in its third year, Busking for Change invites schools around the country to learn the song and raise funds to help kids in remote communities.
"It's a universal thing. We all love to sing, especially kids and then if we're able to sing and learn language then we're understanding our country better," DOBBY says.
"I think about what a song like this does not just for the rest of these schools in Australia to learn Yawuru language (from Broome and the surrounding area), but what it means for Yawuru kids to then go back to their community to sing this proudly."
Looking ahead, DOBBY is now working on a new album.
"This album is very inward, and it's me speaking to my younger self, exploring my boundaries, I'm exploring my self-doubt. I'm exploring my anxieties," he explains.
It means the new album is taking him in a very different direction from Warrangu: River Story. He's also exploring his Filipino roots musically.
It's something he's been wanting to do for a while.
"I'm talking to my mum a lot more about bringing Tagalog into my raps … Sometimes I'll write a rap and then she'll say, no, that's not correct. And I got to work on my pronunciation," he says.
"So, there's a lot of work to be done but it's really exciting."
Watch DOBBY — Finding My Voice on Compass tonight at 6:30pm on ABC TV, or stream now on iview.