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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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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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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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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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Price: 35.00

Academic fieldwork data collections are often unique and unrepeatable records of highly significant events collected at considerable expense of researcher time, effort and resources. While fieldworkers have been quick to take advantage of digital technologies to enable them to collect and organise their data, standards and workflows are only now beginning to emerge to assist researchers to submit their data for archiving and access. This collection of refereed papers from the conference of the same name held at the University of լ�е��� in December 2006 provides a record of recent research practice by fieldworkers in linguistics, botany and anthropology, and by archive and repository managers.

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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 

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Price: 30.00

The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) has been on the cutting edge of digital archiving, building a significant historical collection and community of practice engaged in the preservation and accessibility of research materials.Over the ten years of PARADISEC's operation, the repository has grown to represent over 860 languages from across the world, including cultural materials from the Pacific region and South-East Asia, North America, Africa and Europe. With over 5000 hours of audio, the extent of the archival material, as well as the inclusion of a variety of styles such as songs, narratives and elicitation, has resulted in an invaluable resource for researchers and communities alike.

PARADISEC's innovation in archival practice allows communities to access original recordings of their own cultural heritage, and provides fieldworkers with a wealth of primary material. Research, Records and Responsibility explores developments in collaborative archiving practice between archives and the communities they serve and represent, incorporating case studies of historical recordings, visual data and material culture. It brings together the work of Australian and international scholars commemorating ten years of PARADISEC, and reflects on the development of research and language archiving.