For more than four decades, Barbara Stuart followed her husband Morris around the world, working beside him and raising their four children. With a flair for painting, she had visited the outback before to paint the stunning landscapes, but she craved more.

One day, she told Morris there was something she wanted to do.

"I'd like to go to the desert to paint," Barbara told Morris in 2005. When she revealed her long-time dream, Her husband didn't take long to respond.

"We can do that now, but what am I going to do?'," he asked.

What Morris Stuart did next would become the stuff of legend in Central Australia and the subject of both a new documentary, The Song Keepers, and an episode of Australian Story.

Morris and Barbara Stuart spend up to four months a year in Central Australia. ( Australian Story )

In 2006, Morris and Barbara pulled into Alice Springs in their four-wheel drive. Barbara started to disappear each day with her easel and her paints. Morris, a former pastor with a community church in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, started to walk the town's streets. He was recruiting, but not for a church.

Morris wanted to create a choir. In Alice Springs' Todd Mall, Morris went from one person to another asking if they'd like to join a choir. "G'day," he'd say. "Hey, would you like to join a choir? I'll teach some African freedom songs."

Some people looked at him as if he was crazy; others were drawn in by his warmth and humour, and by the possibility that they could find their voice. "There's something about music, especially singing, choral singing, which is powerful, transformative, therapeutic, brings people together," Morris says.

By the end of 2006, Morris was leading a choir of 50 people. Someone described the choir as "like a virus". "It spread through the community and found some hosts," he says.

As they'd planned to do, Morris and Barbara went back to Melbourne. "People pleaded with us to come back and come back and keep coming back, so we did," Barbara says.

Love of music spreads through the desert

The choir grew and by the third year, it had 100 members. Morris's singing tentacles started to spread. He started to do sessions at Batchelor Institute, an indigenous tertiary college. He worked with a group of Western Arrarnta and Warlpiri women. "I went to help them with their singing and they were stunning," he says.

The Titjikala community, about 120 kilometres south of Alice Springs, heard what he was doing and invited him to visit them. Other communities and their choirs asked him to help them too — Areyonga, the Hermannsburg Ladies Choir (Ntaria), Mutitjulu, Docker River (Kaltukatjara) and Alice Springs' own Mission Block choir.

In 2010, after a few years working with the six remote community choirs, Morris suggested that they combine into one large vocal ensemble. At the women's request, the choir's musical focus would come to rest on the tradition of hymns that German missionaries brought to the Western Arrarnta-speaking community of Ntaria in the late 19th Century.

In the years since, the Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir, with Morris at its helm as artistic director and conductor, has been gathering both confidence and accolades.

Morris Stuart says it's been the greatest gift to develop the Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir. ( Supplied: Desert Song Festival )

From the outback to German cathedrals

Barbara remembers how, in the early days, the women in the choir were so shy that they would hold up their printed lyrics to conceal their faces. Now when they sing, wearing dresses and headscarves printed with designs in the bold and vibrant ochres, reds and browns typical of the region's art, they are luminous.

And with good reason: The choir, which sings in a number of languages including Western Arrernte and Pitjantjatjara languages, has a CV that includes appearances with the Soweto Gospel Choir and an Australian national tour.

Later this year, the choir will travel to India where they will perform in Delhi and at a music festival in Pushkar in Rajasthan.

But the choir's greatest achievement so far has been a 12,000km trip to Germany to share some of the 53 hymns that German missionaries translated into local languages in the 19th century.

The songs had all but vanished from use in Germany, but had been preserved in the Central Australian desert for 140 years.

Morris says the preserved German hymns are like an "outback secret".

Marion Swift was one of 30 choir members who toured Germany for three weeks. ( Supplied: Desert Song Festival )

The German trip was a challenge not just for the choir members, most of whom had never been overseas, but also for logistical reasons — it took 18 months for their passports to be organised.

"With the German audiences, we weren't too sure how they'd take us," says choir member Marion Swift. "A lot of the more younger generation didn't know about the history. But when we sang they were wonderful.

"The way he [Morris] taught us it's been amazing what he's done for the choir."

Some thought the German tour was a "fool's errand". But Morris Stuart has never paid much attention when people have said that things couldn't or shouldn't be done.

After all, he married Barbara.

Going against the norm for love

Barbara and Morris met in London in the early 1960s. They were both leaders at a youth group — she was a young Australian woman with an interest in painting and Africa, he was a young activist whose African forebears had been taken as slaves to the then-British colony of Guyana on the northern coast of South America.

Barbara and Morris Stuart pictured in London in the 1960s. ( Supplied: Morris Stuart )

But in the 1960s, it was an almost impossible concept that a black man would marry a white woman. Morris' father, a progressive thinker, said he would not attend the wedding. "Not because the guy was a racist, but because he just didn't want his son to end up, as he said, being a martyr," says Morris.

While most of Barbara's family in Australia was supportive, Morris recalls one comment that was made. "She had a great aunt who actually said to her that she was committing the greatest crime that a white woman could commit by getting married to one of these black men who was just like 'our Aborigines'."

But Morris and Barbara stood fast and, in 1967, the couple were married. His father changed his mind and attended the wedding. "I didn't get married to Barb to prove a point. We got married because we were two human beings who had the most wonderful experience, which is the experience of falling and being in love. That's old as humanity."

It was difficult for Morris and Barbara's families to accept their relationship when it first started. ( Supplied: Morris Stuart )

Music has been essential to Morris' world. He is largely self taught but has always been surrounded by music. He started to sing in a choir when he was 17. "I loved the whole idea of a whole bunch of voices creating something that no single voice could create on its own. So I just had the fascination."

He and Barbara now spend up to four months a year — over the Melbourne winter — in Central Australia. "This has been the most amazing gift to my life. I confess, I'm 72 years old and Barb and I are in one of the best seasons of our lives ever and we've got a lot of good seasons to be thankful for," Morris says.

There is a sense of symmetry in the fact that, through song, a descendant of slaves has made a profound connection with a group of women from the Central Desert. But Morris rejects the idea that he has connected with the women so well because he is black.

"Being black alone isn't going to cut it. Now sure, I understand the black experience. It is my lived experience. That means I come into this relationship with certain attitudes, histories, and values, and certain insights, of course," he says.

"But what matters is the human connection. I didn't go to Central Australia with a program to fix anything. The most valuable thing in my experience is making friends, and I count it a privilege to have those women and all the people I connect with in Central Australia as my friends."

Watch Australian Story's The Choirmaster on Youtube.