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Type: CD
Price: 100.00

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 (Õ¬Äе¼º½, 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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Type: CD
Price: 20.00

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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Type: CD
Price: 20.00

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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Type: CD
Price: 20.00

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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Type: CD
Price: 20.00

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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Type: CD
Price: 20.00

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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Type: CD
Price: 20.00

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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Type: Paperback
Price: 50.00

Wangga, originating in the Daly region of Australia’s Top End, is one of the most prominent Indigenous genres of public dance-songs. This book focuses on the songmen who created and performed the songs for their own communities and for the general public over the past 50 years. The book is organised around six repertories: four from the Belyuen-based songmen Barrtjap, Muluk, Mandji and Lambudju, and two from the Wadeye-based Walakandha and Ma-yawa wangga groups, the repertories being named after the ancestral song-giving ghosts of the Marri Tjavin and Marri Ammu people respectively.

Framing chapters include discussion of the genre’s social history, musical conventions and the five highly endangered languages in which the songs are composed. The core of the book is a compendium of recordings, transcriptions, translations and explanations of over 150 song items. Thanks to permissions from the composers’ families and a variety of archives and recordists, this corpus includes almost every wangga song ever recorded in the Daly region.

Representing the fruit of more than 20 years’ work by Marett, Barwick and Ford with the families of the songmen, and drawing on a rich archival record of photographs and recordings from the communities of Belyuen and Wadeye, this book is the first phase of a multimedia publication project.

There is a separate website associated with this title, , and the song repertories can be streamed at