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Keeping Time: Dialogues on music and archives in Honour of Linda Barwick explores current issues in ethnomusicology and the archiving and repatriation of ethnographic field recordings.

The 19 chapters by 36 authors consider archiving practices as a site of interaction between researchers and cultural heritage communities; cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding song; and the role of musical transcription in non-Western music.

This volume is international in scope with case studies with Indigenous and minority peoples from Papua New Guinea, China, India, the Torres Strait and mainland Aboriginal Australia; the latter being the focus of the majority of chapters.

Topics include the revival of songs from early written sources, creation of new songs based in old genres, the concept of “sing” in other languages, spirits as the origin of song knowledge, and how to manage ethnographic records over time. Keeping Time approaches Indigenous practices from a range of disciplines, including linguistics, history and performing arts, as well as Indigenous Studies, cultural revitalisation (including reclamation of Indigenous languages), Indigenous knowledge and application to climate change.

Offered in honour of Emeritus Professor Linda Barwick, the founder of the Indigenous Music, Language and Performing Arts series, Keeping Time offers a diverse range of opinions on ethnographic research practices and their value to society.

There are 3 audio examples available to be listened to here: https://open.sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/keeping_time.html

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Yuupurnju: A Warlpiri song cycle documents a ceremonial song cycle situated within the traditional kurdiji “shield” ceremony, as sung by Warlpiri Elder Henry Cooke Anderson Jakamarra at Lajamanu, Northern Territory, in 2013.

The song cycle relates to a women’s Jukurrpa Dreaming narrative, and tells the story of a group of ancestral women on a journey across the country. Jakamarra performed the songs (recorded by Carmel O’Shannessy) to make them available to the Warlpiri community and the wider public.

Yuupurnju: A Warlpiri song cycle includes:

• the words of the songs in Warlpiri
• interpretation in English as given by the singer, Jakamarra, and Warlpiri Elders Jerry Patrick Jangala OAM, Wanta Steven Patrick Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu Jampijinpa and Steven Dixon Japanangka
• musical notation by musicologist Myfany Turpin
• photographs and illustrations for each song
• a foreword by two senior custodians, Jerry Patrick Jangala OAM and Wanta Jampijinpa.

There are 38 recordings available to be listened to here: https://open.sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/yuupurnju.html

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Warlpiri songs hold together the ceremonies that structure and bind social relationships, and encode detailed information about Warlpiri country, cosmology and kinship. Today, only a small group of the oldest generations has full knowledge of ceremonial songs and their associated meanings, and there is widespread concern about the transmission of these songs to future generations.

While musical and cultural change is normal, threats to attrition driven by large-scale external forces including sedentarisation and modernisation put strain on the systems of social relationships that have sustained Warlpiri cultures for millennia. Despite these concerns, songs remain key to Warlpiri identity and cultural heritage.

Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs draws together insights from senior Warlpiri singers and custodians of these song traditions, profiling a number of senior singers and their views of the changes that they have witnessed over their lifetimes. The chapters in this book are written by Warlpiri custodians in collaboration with researchers who have worked in Warlpiri communities over the last five decades.

Spanning interdisciplinary perspectives including musicology, linguistics, anthropology, cultural studies, dance ethnography and gender studies, chapters range from documentation of well-known and large-scale Warlpiri ceremonies, to detailed analysis of smaller-scale public rituals and the motivations behind newer innovative forms of ceremonial expression.

Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs ultimately uncovers the complexity entailed in maintaining the vital components of classical Warlpiri singing practices and the deep desires that Warlpiri people have to maintain this important element of their cultural identity into the future.

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It’s really great. It’s like they’re all here. I hear all of these voices and I sing with them, you know? — Yikliya Eustace Tipiloura, senior songman and Elder

Perhaps the most defining feature of Tiwi song is the importance placed on the creative innovation of the individual singer/composer. Tiwi songs are fundamentally new, unique and occasion specific, and yet sit within a continuum of an oral artistic tradition. Performed in ceremony, at public events, for art and for fun, songs form the core of the Tiwi knowledge system and historical archive. Held by song custodians and taught through sung and danced ritual, generations of embodied practice are still being created and accumulated as people continue to sing.

In 2009 Genevieve Campbell and eleven Tiwi colleagues travelled to Canberra to reclaim over 1300 recordings of Tiwi songs, made between 1912 and 1981, that are held in the archives at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). The Old Songs are Always New explores the return home of these recordings to the Tiwi Islands and describes the musical and vocal characteristics, performance context and cultural function of the twelve Tiwi song types, giving an overview of the linguistic and poetic devices used by Tiwi composers.

For the past 16 years Campbell has been working closely with Tiwi song custodians, studying contemporary Tiwi song culture in the context of the maintenance of traditions and the development of new music forms. Their musical collaboration has resulted in public performances, community projects and recordings featuring current senior singers and the voices of the repatriated recordings. For this publication, Elders have enabled the transcription of many song texts and melodies for the first time, shedding light on how generations of Tiwi singers have connected the past with the present in a continuum of knowledge transmission and arts practice.

There are 27 Tiwi recordings available to be listened to here: https://open.sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/old-songs.html

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It’s really great. It’s like they’re all here. I hear all of these voices and I sing with them, you know? — Yikliya Eustace Tipiloura, senior songman and Elder

Perhaps the most defining feature of Tiwi song is the importance placed on the creative innovation of the individual singer/composer. Tiwi songs are fundamentally new, unique and occasion specific, and yet sit within a continuum of an oral artistic tradition. Performed in ceremony, at public events, for art and for fun, songs form the core of the Tiwi knowledge system and historical archive. Held by song custodians and taught through sung and danced ritual, generations of embodied practice are still being created and accumulated as people continue to sing.

In 2009 Genevieve Campbell and eleven Tiwi colleagues travelled to Canberra to reclaim over 1300 recordings of Tiwi songs, made between 1912 and 1981, that are held in the archives at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). The Old Songs are Always New explores the return home of these recordings to the Tiwi Islands and describes the musical and vocal characteristics, performance context and cultural function of the twelve Tiwi song types, giving an overview of the linguistic and poetic devices used by Tiwi composers.

For the past 16 years Campbell has been working closely with Tiwi song custodians, studying contemporary Tiwi song culture in the context of the maintenance of traditions and the development of new music forms. Their musical collaboration has resulted in public performances, community projects and recordings featuring current senior singers and the voices of the repatriated recordings. For this publication, Elders have enabled the transcription of many song texts and melodies for the first time, shedding light on how generations of Tiwi singers have connected the past with the present in a continuum of knowledge transmission and arts practice.

There are 27 Tiwi recordings available to be listened to here: https://open.sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/old-songs.html

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WINNER OF THE CHIEF MINISTER’S NT HISTORY BOOK AWARD 2024 AND THE AUSTRALIAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION’S JOHN MULVANEY BOOK AWARD 2023

“…ngabaya painted all this, you know when we were kids we would come here and look and sometimes the paintings would change, they were always changing.” Annie a-Karrakayny

Fully illustrated, Jakarda Wuka (Too Many Stories) draws on a combined 70+ years of collaborative research involving Yanyuwa Elders, anthropologists, and an archaeologist to tell a unique story about the rock art from Yanyuwa Country in northern Australia’s southwest Gulf of Carpentaria.  

Australia’s rock art is recognised globally for its antiquity, abundance, distinctive motifs and the deep and abiding knowledge Indigenous people continue to hold for these powerful symbols. However, books about Australian rock art jointly written by Indigenous communities, anthropologists, and archaeologists are extremely rare.

Combining Yanyuwa and western knowledge, the authors embark on a journey to reveal the true meaning of Yanyuwa rock art. At the heart of this book is the understanding that a painting is not just a painting, nor is it an isolated phenomenon or a static representation. What underpins Yanyuwa perceptions of their rock art is kinship, because people are kin to everything and everywhere on Country.

Jakarda Wuka highlights the multidimensional nature of Yanyuwa rock art: it is an active social agent in the landscape, capable of changing according to different circumstances and events, connected to the epic travels and songs of Ancestral Beings (Dreamings), and related to various aspects of Yanyuwa life such as ceremony, health and wellbeing, identity, and narratives concerning past and present-day events.

In a time where Indigenous communities, archaeologists, and anthropologists are seeking new ways to work together and better engage with Indigenous knowledges to interpret the “archaeological record”, Jakarda Wuka delivers a masterful and profound narrative of Yanyuwa Country and its rock art.

This project was supported by the Australian Research Council and the McArthur River Mine Community Benefits Trust.

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Tiwi Textiles: Design, Making, Process tells the story of the innovative Tiwi Design centre on Bathurst Island in northern Australia, dedicated to the production of hand-printed fabrics featuring Indigenous designs, from the 1970s to today. Written by early art coordinator Diana Wood Conroy with oral testimony from senior Tiwi artist Bede Tungutalum, who established Tiwi Design in 1969 with fellow designer Giovanni Tipungwuti, the book traces the beginnings of the centre, and its subsequent place in the Tiwi community and Australian Indigenous culture more broadly.

Bringing together many voices and images, especially those of little-known older artists of Paru and Wurrumiyanga (formerly Nguiu) on the Tiwi Islands and from the Indigenous literature, Tiwi Textiles features profiles of Tiwi artists, accounts of the development of new design processes, insights into Tiwi culture and language, and personal reflections on the significance of Tiwi Design, which is still proudly operating today.

'Tiwi Textiles is a unique historical document, a formidable vindication of the accomplishments of great Indigenous artists, and an account of a missing chapter in world art history. The book is a wonderful chronicle of a vital and fertile period for Tiwi practice in the emergence of contemporary Indigenous art. But it is also a charter for the future.'
— Nicholas Thomas FBA FAHA Director, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge

'Wood Conroy not only writes, intricately and sensitively, a vital history of Tiwi art: she also firms up the place of fibre and textiles practices in Indigenous art and leaves space for us to consider how art history can shift to become more responsive to the lived realities of Indigenous peoples and our non-Indigenous accomplices.' — Tristen Harwood, The Saturday Paper

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WINNER OF THE 2022 MANDER JONES AWARD

Music, Dance and the Archive reimagines records of performance cultures from the archive through collaborative and creative research. In this edited volume, Amanda Harris, Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy bring together performing artists, cultural leaders and interdisciplinary scholars to highlight the limits of archival records of music and dance. Through artistic methods drawn from Indigenous methodologies, dance studies and song practices, the contributors explore modes of re-embodying archival records, renewing song practices, countering colonial narratives and re-presenting performance traditions. The book’s nine chapters are written by song and dance practitioners, curators, music and dance historians, anthropologists, linguists and musicologists, who explore music and dance by Indigenous people from the West, far north and southeast of the Australian continent, and from Aotearoa New Zealand, Taiwan and Turtle Island (North America).

Music, Dance and the Archive interrogates historical practices of access to archives by showing how Indigenous performing artists and community members and academic researchers (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) are collaborating to bring life to objects that have been stored in archives. It not only examines colonial archiving practices but also creative and provocative efforts to redefine the role of archives and to bring them into dialogue with contemporary creative work. Through varied contributions the book seeks to destabilise the very definition of “archives” and to imagine the different forms in which cultural knowledge can be held for current and future Indigenous stakeholders. Music, Dance and the Archive highlights the necessity of relationships, Country and creativity in practising song and dance, and in revitalising practices that have gone out of use.

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Aboriginal people of New South Wales carved trees as a form of visual communication for thousands of years. These elaborate designs carved into the sapwood and heartwood of trees once a section of external bark was removed - were meant to last. Sadly, after European colonisation, the practice was abandoned and the original meanings lost.

First published in 1918, this 2011 facsimile edition has a new cover, half-title page and reduced size map. Published by լ�е��� in conjunction with the State Library of NSW.

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Longlisted for the 2021 NSW Premier’s History Awards for Australian History

“The patterns and designs were laid down on the country and in the minds of Yolŋu by the ancestral beings at the time of creation. They have been passed on through the generations from our great grandparents, to our grandparents, to our parents, to us. They are the reality of this country. They tell us all who we are.” — Djambawa Marawili AM

Djalkiri are “footprints" – ancestral imprints on the landscape that provide the Yolŋu people of eastern Arnhem Land with their philosophical foundations.

This book describes how Yolŋu artists and communities keep these foundations strong, and how they have worked with museums to develop a collaborative, community-led approach to the collection and display of their artwork. It includes contributions from Yolŋu elders and artists as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous historians and curators. Together they explore how the relationship between communities and museums has changed over time.

From the early 20th century, anthropologists and other collectors acquired artworks and objects and took photographs in Arnhem Land that became part of collections at the University of լ�е���. Later generations of Yolŋu have sought out these materials and, with museum curators, proposed a new type of relationship, based on a deeper respect for Yolŋu intellectual frameworks and a commitment to their central role in curation. This book tells some of their stories.

Featuring over 300 colour images, Djalkiri is published in conjunction with a largescale exhibition of Yolŋu art and culture at the University of լ�е���’s new Chau Chak Wing Museum, opening in November 2020. Spanning almost 100 years of our shared history, these collections can expand our understanding of the past and help us to shape the future.

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Winner of the Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize 2021

‘This book will be equally as valuable for historians of anthropology and colonialism; scholars working in Melanesia; and the Islander descendants of Haddon's interlocutors' - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Recording Kastom brings readers into the heart of colonial Torres Strait and New Guinea through the personal journals of Cambridge zoologist and anthropologist Alfred Haddon, who visited the region in 1888 and 1898.

Haddon's published reports of these trips were hugely influential on the nascent discipline of anthropology, but his private journals and sketches have never been published in full. The journals record in vivid detail Haddon's observations and relationships. They highlight his preoccupation with documentation, and the central role played by the Islanders who worked with him to record kastom. This collaboration resulted in an enormous body of materials that remain of vital interest to Torres Strait Islanders and the communities where he worked. Haddon's Journals provide unique and intimate insights into the colonial history of the region will be an important resource for scholars in history, anthropology, linguistics and musicology.

This comprehensively annotated edition assembles a rich array of photographs, drawings, artefacts, film and sound recordings. An introductory essay provides historical and cultural context. The preface and epilogue provide Islander perspectives on the historical context of Haddon’s work and its significance for the future.

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Manikay are the ancestral songs of Arnhem Land, passed down over generations and shaping relationships between people and the country.

Singing Bones foregrounds the voices of manikay singers from Ngukurr in southeastern Arnhem Land and charts their critically acclaimed collaboration with jazz musicians from the Australian Art Orchestra, Crossing Roper Bar. It offers an overview of Wägilak manikay narratives and style, including their social, ceremonial and linguistic aspects, and explores the Crossing Roper Bar project as an example of creative intercultural collaboration and a living continuation of the manikay tradition.

“Through song, the ancestral past animates the present, moving yolŋu (people) to dance. In song, community is established. By song, the past enfolds the present. Today, the unique voices of Wägilak resound over the ancestral ground and water, carried by the songs of old.”

Audio examples are available at:

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Based on ten years of surveys and excavations in Nyiyaparli country in the eastern Chichester Ranges, north-west Australia, Crafting Country provides a unique synthesis of Holocene archaeology in the Pilbara region. The analysis of about 1000 sites, including surface artefact scatters and 19 excavated rock shelters, as well as thousands of isolated artefacts, takes a broad view of the landscape, examining the distribution of archaeological remains in time and space. Heritage compliance archaeology commonly focuses on individual sites, but this study reconsiders the evidence at different scales – at the level of artefact, site, locality, and region – to show how Aboriginal people interacted with the land and made their mark on it.

Crafting Country shows that the Nyiyaparli ‘crafted’ their country, building structures and supplying key sites with grindstones, raw material and flaked stone cores. In so doing, they created a taskscape of interwoven activities linked by paths of movement.

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Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond was co-published with the University of Hawai'i Press. It is also available in through the journal.

Place-based cultural knowledge – of ceremonies, songs, stories, language, kinship and ecology – binds Australian Indigenous societies together. Over the last 100 years or so, records of this knowledge in many different formats – audiocassettes, photographs, films, written texts, maps, and digital recordings – have been accumulating at an ever-increasing rate. Yet this extensive documentary heritage is dispersed. In many cases, the Indigenous people who participated in the creation of the records, or their descendants, have little idea of where to find the records or how to access them. Some records are held precariously in ad hoc collections, and their caretakers may be perplexed as to how to ensure that they are looked after.

Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond explores the strategies and practices by which cultural heritage materials can be returned to their communities of origin, and the issues this process raises for communities, as well as for museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions.

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This seven-CD compendium introduces the listener to six complete repertories of wangga, showcasing the beauty, depth and diversity of these didgeridoo-accompanied public dance-songs originating in the Daly region of northwest Australia. The most important singers/composers of the region share their haunting melodies, danceable rhythms and authoritative interpretations and translations of \songs originally composed in various languages, including Batjamalh, Emmi-Mendhe and Marri Tjavin/Marri Ammu – all of which are now severely endangered. Themes of the songs often concern interactions between the living and the dead, including dreams in which deceased ancestors appear to teach the composer new songs, which would later be performed in funerals and other ceremonies marking the human lifecycle as well as on various other public occasions such as corroborees for tourists. Together with the companion book, For the Sake of a Song: Wangga Songmen and their Repertories (լ�е���, 2013), the work represents the culmination of 30 years of collaborative research by the singers, their communities, musicologists Allan Marett and Linda Barwick, and linguist Lysbeth Ford.

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Joint winner of the traditional music award at the 2007 Northern Territory Indigenous Music Awards.

Kun-borrk is a genre of individually owned songs accompanied by didjeridu and clapsticks performed in the western Arnhem Land region of the Northern Territory. The songs on this CD represent the majority of a repertoire belonging to the song man Kevin Djimarr, a member of the Kurulk clan and the Kuninjku (Eastern Kunwinjku) language group. Djimarr has lived much of his life at Mumeka on the lower Mann River, a tributary of the Liverpool River about 50km south of Maningrida settlement. He is one of a number of celebrated Kun-borrksingers but in addition he is also renowned as a traditional healer or 'clever man' known as na-kordang in Kuninjku.

Kun-borrk song series are often named after vegetable foods or plants. The name of Djimarr's series is Wurrurrumi, which is the name of a climbing monsoon forest vine Tinospora smilacina. Some other song series by other singers are named after yams, other climbing vines with tubers, or spirit beings.

Unlike the totemic song genres of many other ceremonies in Arnhem Land, kun-borrk songs concentrate more on the episodic minutiae of human emotions, subtle physical movements of the body, conflicts, suspicions, and the gossip of interpersonal relationships. An examination of the song texts on this CD reveals an almost haiku-like poetic beauty. Small isolated incidents without any given context are presented in a few lines of a song. They might involve a wave, a gaze, the turning of the head or attention to a sound, an admonition or a complaint.

Kun-borrk song texts do not fit the stereotype of the popularised notion of 'song lines' with individual songs relating to tracts of land or sites along a route taken by ancestral creation heroes. The texts rarely say anything about individual places (although for an exception see track 32) and except for a small number of songs in a special unknown spirit or animal language (e.g. track 4), the song texts are otherwise in ordinary Kuninjku with the literal translatability being completely transparent (although the contextual meaning may appear allusive).

Kun-borrk songs are also often referred to as gossip songs or love songs because many of the topics of the songs are concerned with oblique references to romantic relationships and affairs. One way that kun-borrk song men make indirect references to risqué or even illicit behaviour by lovers is to place the characters of real life dramas into the guise of other beings such as the spirit beings known as wayarra. So whilst at the literal level the song man might say that the text is about the wayarra and their incorrigible behaviour, the songs are really about actual people in the camp and what they have been getting up to, including activities that others might find hilariously funny or 'naughty'. Thus the term 'gossip songs'.

Many of Djimarr's songs in the Wurrurrumi series are, however, strictly about the activities of wayarra spirits. This may be a result of his ability as a 'clever man' or traditional healer, as it is believed that the wayarra can endow humans with the power to heal. In Kuninjku cosmology wayarra live inside the hollow trunks of certain trees. They have a fascination with spear grass and they examine the stems of the grass to identify each and every growth node starting at the bottom and exclaiming when they reach the top kondanj kanganjboke 'here it is coming into seed'.

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For the last 40 years or so, the Walakandha wangga, a repertory composed collaboratively by a number of Marri Tjavin singers, has been the most prominent wangga repertory performed in Wadeye. Initiated in the mid-1960s by Stan Mullumbuk (1937–1980), the Walakandha wangga repertory came to function as one arm of a tripartite ceremonial system organising ceremonial life at Wadeye, in complementary relationship with sister repertories djanba and lirrga. The dominant themes of the Walakandha wangga are related to the activities of the Marri Tjavin ancestral dead—the Walakandha—as givers of wangga songs and protectors of their living descendants. Longing for return to Marri Tjavin ancestral country is another common theme. Many specific places are named. Foremost among these is the important hill, Yendili – one of the places where Walakandha ancestors reside.

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The Ma-yawa wangga repertory was given to songmen by the Marri Ammu ancestral ghosts known as Ma-yawa. Before the late 1960s, it seems that this repertory was frequently performed at Wadeye, but nowadays Marri Ammu people join their Marri Tjavin neighbours in performing the Walakandha wangga repertory (CD6) for ceremony. All but one of the Ma-yawa wangga songs were composed by the senior Marri Ammu lawman and artist Charlie Niwilhi Brinken (c. 1910–1993), but so far as we know, no recording was ever made of him singing. Maurice Tjakurl Ngulkur (Nyilco) (1940–2001), the Marri Ammu songman, inherited the repertory and added one of his own songs to it. Since his passing in 2001, the songs have rarely been performed. With its strong focus on the Dreamings (ngirrwat) and Dreaming sites (kigatiya) of the owning group, the Ma-yawa wangga repertory holds a unique place within the corpus.

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Jimmy Muluk (born c. 1925, died sometime before 1986) was one of the great wangga songmen whose musical virtuosity and love of diversity and variation are exceeded by no other singer. A Mendheyangal man, he held traditional country around the Cape Ford area south of the Daly River mouth, but he lived most of his life in and around Belyuen on the Cox Peninsula. For many years he led a dance troupe presenting performances for tourists at Mica Beach, and later at Mandorah. He also mentored younger generations of singers to perform with him in public at tourist corroborees and the Darwin Eisteddfod. The success of his strategy for intergenerational transmission of knowledge was evident when Marett and Barwick recorded the same singers as mature men in the 1990s. Muluk’s mentee, Colin Worumbu Ferguson, leads the Kenbi dancers today.

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From the 1950s to the 1980s, Barrtjap (Tommy Burrenjuck, c. 1925–1992) was a ritual leader and one of the most prominent singers/composers in Belyuen (Delissaville), one of the heartlands of the wangga tradition. The community’s proximity to Darwin in the Northern Territory meant that Barrtjap and his songs were heard and recorded by many visitors and tourists. Characterised by great musical inventiveness and precision of form, Barrtjap’s songs mixed his ancestral language, Batjamalh, with the utterances of the song-giving ghosts who visited him in a dream. The CD includes recordings made by Alice Moyle and other visitors to Belyuen as well as Marett’s own recordings. Barrtjap’s wife, the late Esther Burrenjuck, collaborated closely in the documentation work on Barrtjap’s repertoire, and his sons Kenny Burrenjuck (d. 2010) and Timothy Burrenjuck have carried on his songs and his legacy into the present day.

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Bobby Lane Lambudju (1941–1993) was a leading Wadjiginy songman at Belyuen in the late 1980s and early 1990s whose songs display a rich variety of forms, diverse melodies and even mixes of languages (his own language, Batjamalh, as well as Emmi-Mendhe, the language of his adoptive family). Three of Lambudju’s father’s brothers were prominent Wadjiginy songmen who died before he was old enough to learn from them. Their songs were held in trust for him by the Emmiyangal singer Nym Mun.gi, who passed them on to Lambudju when he was old enough. Many of Lambudju’s songs concern his country to the north of the Daly River and in particular Rak Badjalarr (North Peron Island), the place to which people from Belyuen return after their death.

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Billy Mandji was a prolific and popular Belyuen songman. Active from the 1960s to the 1980s, he travelled widely and was recorded in Kununurra, Timber Creek, Oenpelli and Beswick Creek as well as his home community of Belyuen (Delissaville). He was a prominent participant in the tourist corroborees presented by people from Belyuen in various locations around Darwin and the Cox Peninsula. In addition to composing songs of his own, Billy Mandji inherited songs in Emmi-Mendhe from the Emmiyangal people with whom he lived at Belyuen, and he also sang the Emmi-Mendhe songs of Jimmy Muluk (see CD3 in this series), often in the role of backup singer. His own language, Marri Tjavin, appeared rarely in his songs, perhaps because the language was little spoken in Belyuen. Perhaps for the same reason, many of Mandji’s songs are composed in untranslatable ‘spirit language’. Although Marett recorded Mandji in 1988, he was never able to work with him on documenting his songs, so the translations and interpretations are the result of working with other speakers, especially his extremely knowledgeable ‘daughter’, Marjorie Knuckey Bilbil.

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A wave of life stories and autobiographical narratives by Aboriginal women began in the late 1970s and gained momentum a decade later with the publication of Sally Morgan's My Place (1987), which became a bestseller. While some of the books of the first wave focused mainly (if not exclusively) on the author, Aboriginal women's life stories widened over time to include transgenerational histories of the family.

Reading Aboriginal Women's Life Stories is an important discussion of books that have shaped our understanding of contemporary Indigenous Australian literature. Anne Brewster provides an in-depth textual analysis of three key titles and situates them in relation to concepts of history, race, gender, family, storytelling and Aboriginality in modern Australia.

‘Looking back, we can recognise now what an extraordinary phenomenon these life stories are, and how they have changed understandings of Aboriginality and writing ... The return of this classic book in a new edition is a welcome reminder that Anne Brewster's careful, deeply respectful and informed approach to these writings is as necessary now as it ever was.’
Professor Gillian Whitlock FAHA

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The Gurindji people of the Northern Territory are best known for their walk-off of Wave Hill Station in 1966, protesting against mistreatment by the station managers. The strike would become the first major victory of the Indigenous land rights movement. Many discussions of station life are focused on the harsh treatment of Aboriginal workers.

Songs from the Stations describes another side of life on Wave Hill Station. Among the harsh conditions and decades of mistreatment, an eclectic ceremonial life flourished during the first half of the 20th century. Constant travel between cattle stations by Aboriginal workers across north-western and central Australia meant that Wave Hill Station became a crossroad of desert and Top End musical styles. As a result, the Gurindji people learnt songs from the Mudburra who came further east, the Bilinarra from the north, Western Desert speakers from the west, and the Warlpiri from the south.

This book is the first detailed documentation of wajarra, public songs performed by the Gurindji people. Featuring five song sets known as Laka, Mintiwarra, Kamul, Juntara, and Freedom Day, it is an exploration of the cultural exchange between Indigenous communities that was fostered by their involvement in the pastoral industry.

Songs from the Stations presents musical and textual analysis of the five sets of wajarra songs below. 

These five song sets were recorded at Kalkaringi in 1998, 2007, 2015 and 2016, and can be streamed by visiting

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Type: Paperback
Price: 49.95

In the early 1990s, the Australian band Yothu Yindi rose to national prominence with hit songs like 'Treaty' and 'Djäpana' that would become part of Australia's cultural fabric. With its distinctive blend of global popular styles and rare Indigenous traditions from remote Arnhem Land, international acclaim soon followed, as did a swathe of industry awards and the naming of band's main singer and songwriter, Mandawuy Yunupingu, as Australian of the Year for 1992. Yothu Yindi stood as an icon of the Aboriginal Reconciliation movement at a time when Australia's legal and political institutions were starting to recognise their past injustices against Indigenous Australians and the continuing native title over the lands they inhabited. But how well do we know Yothu Yindi and its songs? Or the culture, history and politics of the remote tropical region in Australia's Northern Territory that shaped its musicians and their music?

In Reflections & Voices, Aaron Corn takes readers on a captivating journey with Mandawuy Yunupingu through the ideas and events behind some of Yothu Yindi's best known songs. Together they locate the band within a continuum of traditional practice that records the beauty of Arnhem Land as experienced by Mandawuy's ancestors, and has guided local engagements with visitors from across the Arafura Sea for countless centuries. They reveal how Mandawuy's work as an educator and musician championed the continuing importance of traditional Indigenous thought and practice to contemporary life in Australia. Through Yothu Yindi, he inspired an entire generation to rethink Australia's relationship with its First Peoples and to dream of a brighter day when a Treaty with Indigenous Australians will make all the waters one.