Papers
Land, Song, Constitution: Exploring expressions of ancestral agency, intercultural diplomacy and family legacy in the music of Yothu Yindi with Mandawuy Yunupiŋu
Popular Music 29, 2010, accepted 11/2008
Abstract
Yothu Yindi stands as one of Australia’s most celebrated popular bands, and in the early 1990s, became renowned worldwide for its innovative blend of rock and Indigenous performance traditions. The band’s lead singer and composer, Mandawuy Yunupiŋu, was one of the first university-trained Yolŋu educators from remote Arnhem Land, and an influential exponent of bicultural education within local Indigenous schools. This article draws on my comprehensive interview with Yunupiŋu for an opening keynote address to the Music and Social Justice Conference in Sydney on 28 September 2005. It offers new insights into the traditional values and local history of intercultural relations on the Gove Peninsula that shaped his outlook as a Yolŋu educator, and simultaneously informed his work through Yothu Yindi as an ambassador for Indigenous cultural survival in Australia. It also demonstrates how Mandawuy’s personal history and his call for a constitutional Treaty with Indigenous Australians are further grounded in the intergenerational struggle for justice over the mining of their hereditary lands. The article’s ultimate goal is to identify traditional Yolŋu meanings in Yothu Yindi’s repertoire, and in doing so, generate new understanding of Yunupiŋu’s agency as an prominent intermediary of contemporary Yolŋu culture and intercultural politics.
Matjabala Mali’ Buku-Ruŋanmaram: Implications for archives and access in Arnhem Land
with Neparrŋa Gumbula & Julia Mant, Archival Science 9, 2009, accepted 10/2008
Abstract
This article traces the efforts of a research team led by the Yolŋu elder and scholar, Neparrŋa Gumbula, to investigate his people’s recorded history in the University of Sydney Archives. This research has identified some of the earliest photographic and written records of Yolŋu life in Arnhem Land, Australia. Though consultations with the source communities of Miliŋinbi (Milingimbi) and Galiwin’ku (Elcho Island), it has also determined appropriate ways of maintaining on-going local access to these rare archived materials. The article contextualises this research within broader international initiatives to locate and provide access to other early ethnographic from Arnhem Land. It considers the role of digital technologies in providing remote community access, and how various access protocols can be implemented to ensure appropriate use.
Our Future’s Past: Indigenous archival discovery as a catalyst for new recording initiatives in remote northeast Arnhem Land
IASA Journal No. 32, 2009: 56–63
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THERE IS IMMENSE INTEREST among Australia’s remote Indigenous communities in discovering their recorded history. The introduction of new digital media to these isolated regions this century has enabled copies of rare materials held in cultural heritage collections worldwide to be returned home with unprecedented ease and rapidity. The rediscovery of these materials after many decades of radical socio-economic change in remote Australia has stimulated new awareness of history among these Indigenous communities, and has prompted many local elders to consider the recorded legacy that they themselves will leave for future generations.
This article traces current endeavours among the Yolŋu communities of remote Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory to locate the earliest ethnographic records of local community life. It focusses on my research with the Yolŋu elder and academic, Joseph Neparrŋa Gumbula, whose own family history is vividly documented in the films of Cecil Holmes (dir. 1963, 1964), Alice Moyle’s sound recordings circa 1962, and various photographs, artifacts and notes dating from 1924 that were collected by AP Elkin, AM McArthur, Donald Thomson, WL Warner, TT Webb and GH Wilkins. I will also explain how this historical research has stimulated new community efforts to comprehensively record endangered Yolŋu performance traditions in alignment with the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia (Marett et al. 2006; Corn, ed. 2007).
The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia: Safeguarding cultural survival in remote Australia
Copyright Reporter 26, 2009: 112–15
Extract
From a copyright perspective, some regional traditions, such as Kunborrk, Wangga and Junba from across the northwest, have identifiable individual composers. These are traditional genres in that they predate European colonisation, yet the composition of new repertoire is a common tradition within each. The only sticking point from a copyright perspective is that these genres are not traditionally notated. So with no manuscripts, the collectors who recorded them were, until recently, able to hold all mechanical rights virtually unchallenged. In the absence of a manuscript, what is it that copyright is attached to? New compositions in these genres primarily exist in their composers’ heads. They are very much intangible intellectual properties that have only recently been captured in written or recorded formats, and it is deeply problematic that copyright is not geared to protect such oral traditions.
The song tradition that I work on, Manikay, comes from northeast Arnhem Land, and it is served even worse by copyright. Manikay repertories are sacred, canonical and hereditary. They are passed generation to generation from father to child along with land and other hereditary property in perpetuity. Their ‘composers’ are the metaphysical original ancestors who are attributed with having named, shaped and populated the Yolngu homelands of northeast Arnhem Land as time began.
Ancestral, Corporeal, Corporate: Traditional Yolŋu understandings of the body explored
Borderlands 7.2, 2008
Abstract
This article explores the various ways in which the Yolŋu of northeast Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory traditionally perceive of bodies, whether corporeal or corporate. It establishes how Yolŋu understand the human body, its environments and its behaviours as phenomena that are modeled on archetypal ancestral designs for life, and shows how Yolŋu nomenclature for human anatomy is used as a meta-language to describe the significances of features on country and in traditional modes of performance. It further explains how the Yolŋu concept of the body corporate is related to an ethos of recognition and sharing between different peoples under a common constitution and law, and demonstrates how the music of the Australian band, Yothu Yindi, uses this traditional symbolism to express ideals of sharing and common humanity among different peoples from around the world.
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Budutthun Ratja Wiyinymirri: Formal flexibility in the Yolŋu Manikay tradition and the challenge of recording a complete repertoire
with Neparrŋa Gumbula, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2007 No. 2: 116–27
Abstract
Among the Yolŋu 'People' of northeastern Arnhem Land, manikay 'song' series serve as records of sacred relationships between humans, country and ancestors. Their formal structures constitute the overarching order of all ceremo-nial actions, and their lyrics comprise sacred esoteric lexicons held nowhere else in the Yolŋu languages. A consummate knowledge of manikay and its interpenetrability with ancestors, country, and parallel canons of sacred yäku 'names', buŋgul 'dances' and miny’tji 'designs' is an essential prerequisite to traditional leadership in Yolŋu society. Drawing on our recordings of the Baripuy manikay series from 2004 and 2005, we explore the aesthetics and functions of formal flexibility in the manikay tradition. We examine the individuation of lyrical realisations among singers, and the role of rhythmic modes in articulating between luku 'root' and buŋgul’mirri 'ceremonial' components of repertoire. Our findings will contribute significantly to intercultural understandings of manikay theory and aesthetics, and the centrality of manikay to Yolŋu intellectual traditions.
To See Their Fathers’ Eyes: Expressions of ancestry, fraternity and masculinity in the music of popular bands from Arnhem Land, Australia
in Freya Jarman-Ivens (ed.), Oh Boy! Masculinities and popular music, Routledge, 2007, pp. 77–99
Abstract
This chapter demonstrates how the original repertoires of popular bands from Arnhem Land frequently incorporate traditional expressions of patrilineal ancestry, and explores how their development has paralleled the changing social and ceremonial roles of local men within the past half century. Their endeavours have precipitated a unique convergence of adopted masculine tropes introduced through the imagery of rock, country, reggae and rap with the venerated prowess of traditional male hunters, performers, artists, thinkers, theologians and leaders. The chapter’s primary focus is the creativity of Yolŋu musicians in the bands Soft Sands and Yothu Yindi from northeast Arnhem Land whose parallel work in broadcasting, education, philanthropy and film has stimulated broad public dialogues about contemporary tensions between traditional maintenance and inexorable social change in Australia’s remote Indigenous communities. Their musically-developed discourses about inter-culturalism have fostered new sensibilities about race relations, legal pluralism and Indigenous sovereignty within Australia and beyond, and provide us with fresh insights to the personal development of young men living in the remote Indigenous communities of contemporary Australia.
A Legacy of Hope: Mandawuy Yunupiŋu on meaning and Yolŋu agency in the music of Yothu Yindi
Context 31, 2007: 123–36
Abstract
This article shows the many classical expressions of Yolŋu culture found in Yothu Yindi's repertoire, and the Yolŋu models for social balance found in its music, and Mandawuy Yunupiŋu's personal history in the struggle over Yolŋu sovereignty on the Gove Peninsula. Mandawuy's words have offered new insights to his creative intentions, the influence of his work as an educator, and his political outlook in his composition of original music for Yothu Yindi. It demonstrates how, through this music, Yothu Yindi has deployed traditional materials to affirm Yolŋu sovereignty under ancestral law, and Mandawuy has extended traditional models for social balance to posit better cooperation between Indigenous Australians and others. Finally, this article explains how Yothu Yindi's music has immortalised the struggle for Yolŋu sovereignty in northeast Arnhem Land to honour the memories of the Yolŋu leaders it consumed, and to remind us all of the unmet need for a Treaty between Indigenous Australians and the Commonwealth.
To Sing Their Voices Eternal: Why we need a National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia
Music Forum 13.2, 2007
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THE CREEK-SIDE GLADE in which we sit is humid yet cooled by a light breeze. It shelters us from the early afternoon sun as the pure glassy water of the creek flows peacefully behind the musicians before me and the towering sacred mayku 'paperbark tree' behind them. Their ensemble is clear, deliberate and beautifully nuanced as it reverberates through my headphones. Seconds stretch into hours on the display of my digital audio recorder. My own awareness of time stretches with them and I lose myself in the delicately-intertwined voices of the singers. Their melismatic lines gracefully permute around the ideal of a singular melody above the anchoring rhythms of their unison bilma 'paired sticks' and yidaki 'didjeridu' accompanist.
The performance that reaches me through microphone, recorder and headphones resonates with the environment surrounding us. The birds, the wind, the insects and the water are as much a part of the living ensemble I hear as the musicians themselves. The songs they perform are not just songs from any place or time. They are manikay 'songs' from this place: from the glade in which we sit, from the creek that runs by it, and from the forest, hills, lagoons and wetlands that surround it.
Review of Allan Marett, Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia, Wesleyan University Press, 2005
Ethnomusicology Forum 16.1, 2007: 169–71
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SONGS, DREAMINGS, AND GHOSTS by Allan Marett is a triumph of musicological achievement and engagement with the endangered intellectual traditions of Indigenous Australia. Based on 20 years of work with remote Indigenous communities across northern Australia, Marett’s book makes a timely contribution to understandings of Australian musics and Indigenous cultures. Its significance and integrity as a work of exemplary scholarship was recently recognized by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) with the Stanner Award for 2006. This award was founded in 1985 in memory of the anthropologist WEH Stanner who once described the general lack of public awareness about Indigenous Australians as the 'Great Australian Silence'.
In Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts, Marett explores the inner logic of a discrete tradition of song and dance called wangga. Concentrated in the Daly Region of Australia’s Northern Territory among the neighbouring Marri-tjevin, Marri-ammu and Wadjiginy peoples, this tradition was one of many that once flourished in Australia before British colonization, but is now one of the few that remain current in isolated pockets across the continent’s north, west and centre.
Rom and the Academy Repositioned: Binary models in Yolŋu intellectual traditions and their application to wider inter-cultural dialogues
with Neparrŋa Gumbula, in Lynette Russell (ed.), Boundary Writing: An exploration of race, culture and gender binaries in contemporary Australia, University of Hawai’i Press, 2006, pp. 170–97
Opening
ONE COULD BE FORGIVEN for assuming that intellectual institutions were formally introduced to Australia when the University of Sydney, Australia’s oldest university, was established in 1850 to promote the benefits of a liberal education among the growing populace of what was then the British Colony of New South Wales. Most likely, it would not have occurred to the vast majority of colonial Sydney’s residents of that time that the indigenous peoples who had originally populated the lands on which Sydney was built might have intellectual traditions of their own as well as people among them with advanced training in canonical knowledge and responsibilities for its appropriate transmission to others.
The institutionalized suppression of indigenous knowledge systems was a key strategy of the colonial project within Australia. The dispersal of indigenous peoples from their lands, discouraging them from speaking their own languages, prohibiting them from practicing their own religions, and the separation of individuals from their families were favored tactics among government and missionary authorities for the greater part of nineteenth and twentieth centuries in most parts of Australia precisely because they had the effect of distancing indigenous peoples from their hereditary properties and preexisting lifestyles, both physically and conceptually.
The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia: Year one in review
with Allan Marett, Mandawuy Yunupiŋu, Marcia Langton, Neparrŋa Gumbula & Linda Barwick, first published in Neryl Jeanneret & Gillian Gardiner (eds), Backing Our Creativity: The National Education and the Arts Symposium 2005, Australia Council for the Arts, 2006, pp. 84–90
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THE NATIONAL RECORDING PROJECT for Indigenous Performance in Australia was conceived at Gunyaŋara in Arnhem Land during the inaugural Indigenous Performance Symposium in August 2002. The symposium was funded by the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and hosted by the Yothu Yindi Foundation (YYF) as part of the fourth Garma Festival of Traditional Culture. Convened by Mandawuy Yunupiŋu, Allan Marett, Marcia Langton and Aaron Corn, it was attended by Indigenous performers from Gunyaŋara, Yirrkala, Galiwin’ku, Maningrida, Ngukurr, Borroloola and Belyuen, and scholars with interests in Indigenous performance from Australia and Papua New Guinea.
The Symposium explored a broad range of possibilities for understanding, recording and circulating Indigenous performance traditions. These included (1) performing and analysing traditional songs; (2) transcribing and translating song lyrics; re-setting traditional materials in new media; (3) performing and learning traditional dances; (4) and exploring the role of Indigenous archives in gathering and caring for local collections.
The Symposium determined that a National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia should be established to (1) ensure that the performance traditions of as many Indigenous performers as possible are held for future generations; (2) support the establishment of community archives with storage and retrieval systems that will facilitate the repatriation of digital materials to Indigenous communities; (3) publish well-documented and readily-accessible recordings of Indigenous performance repertoires; (4) and create new education and employment opportunities for Indigenous Australians.
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When the Waters Will Be One: Hereditary performance traditions and the Yolŋu re-invention of post-Barunga intercultural discourses
Journal of Australian Studies No. 84, 2005: 15–30
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ON 12 JUNE 1988, amid a year of state-sponsored celebrations to mark the bicentenary of the establishment of the British Colony of New South Wales, Prime Minister Bob Hawke attended a festival of sport and culture hosted by the small Indigenous community of Barunga. There, he was presented with a joint statement by Wenten Rubuntja, as chair of the Central Land Council, and Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu, as chair of the Northern Land Council. Known as The Barunga Statement, this document called on the Australian Government to negotiate with ‘the indigenous owners and occupiers of Australia’ to make a treaty recognising their prior ownership, continued occupation and sovereignty, and affirming their human rights and freedom.
Hawke’s initial response to The Barunga Statement was a promise to facilitate the completion of these negotiations within the life of his Parliament. However, once it became apparent that this undertaking had failed to garner broader parliamentary support, Yolŋu sought recourse not through another statement but, rather, through the release of a popular song. This song would capture the imaginations of an entire generation of Australians and bring international acclaim to a little-known band named Yothu Yindi from the remote former mission town of Yirrkala in northeast Arnhem Land. This song, ‘Treaty’, was the first by any Indigenous band, and certainly any band from Arnhem Land, to top the Australian charts, and remains a well-known reminder of this as-yet unresolved episode in Australian politics.
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Ancestral Precedent as Creative Inspiration: The influence of Soft Sands on popular song composition in Arnhem Land
with Neparrŋa Gumbula, in Graeme Ward & Adrian Muckle (eds), The Power of Knowledge, The Resonance of Tradition: Electronic publication of papers from the AIATSIS Conference September 2001, AIATSIS, 2005, pp. 31–68
Abstract
In 1970, Soft Sands from Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island (Northern Territory, Australia) was one of the first popular bands to form in Arnhem Land. This article addresses the wide influence of Soft Sands on popular song composition in this region, and culminates in a discussion of original repertoire recorded in 1997 by one of its longstanding members, Neparrŋa Gumbula, for his debut solo album, Djiliwirri, and its companion music-video. Yolŋu musicians from Northeast Arnhem Land draw themes and musical materials from their durable canons of hereditary names, songs, dances and designs in the composition of their original repertoires for popular band, and, through them, project their profound religious and legal ties to family, ancestors and country. Both the naming and repertoires of popular bands from Northeast Arnhem Land can deliberately express the following of ancestral precedent by contemporary Yolŋu, and hold significant philosophical implications and creative possibilities for Yolŋu cultural intermediaries seeking to engage with new media and technologies.
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Now Balanda Say We Lost Our Land in 1788: Challenges to the recognition of Yolŋu law in contemporary Australia
with Neparrŋa Gumbula, first published in Marcia Langton et al. (eds), Honour among Nations? Treaties and agreements with Indigenous peoples, Melbourne University Publishing, 2004, pp. 101–14
Extract
In 1989, a largely unknown band from a community named Yirrkala in remote northeast Arnhem Land had its debut album released by Mushroom Records. The name of this band was Yothu Yindi, and the album was called Homeland Movement (1989). At the time, Mushroom Records was noted for its brave philanthropy in supporting a previously unsigned trio of Yolŋu musicians from the Northern Territory, whose first album was unprecedented in its juxtaposition of fairly conventional rock songs against traditional songs of the manikay genre. Homeland Movement had been all but forgotten by the time that Yothu Yindi found eventual chart success with an unsolicited, yet extremely popular, remix of the track ‘Treaty’ from its second album, Tribal Voice. However, among the numerous hidden treas-ures of Homeland Movement was the album’s closing song, ‘Luku-Wäŋawuy Manikay "Sovereignty Song" (1788)’.
‘Luku-Wäŋawuy Manikay (1788)’ was composed in 1988 to mark the bicentenary of Australia’s occupation by Balanda (Anglo-Australian) governments. It was composed by Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu, the eldest brother of Yothu Yindi’s lead singer, Mandawuy, and current Chair of the Northern Land Council, and drew on his long experience of lobbying Australian governments for the recognition of his people’s pre-existing legal jurisdiction and property rights over their hereditary estates. The first three couplets of this song parody a sitting of Parliament in which a Yolŋu leader explains to his peers that their hereditary land rights are being contested by Balanda interlopers who claim that they took possession of the entire Australian continent when their British forebears planted a Union Jack in the name of King George III at Sydney Cove in 1788.
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Djiliwirri Ganha Dhärranhana, Wäŋa Limurruŋgu: The creative foundations of a Yolŋu popular song
with Neparrŋa Gumbula, Australasian Music Research 7, 2003: 55–66
Abstract
The article explores compositional practice among Yolŋu bands in northeast Arnhem Land through discussion of a popular song by Neparrŋa Gumbula entitled 'Djiliwirri'. Neparrŋa is a member of Soft Sands which was among the earliest popular bands from in Arnhem Land when it was established at Galiwin'ku in 1970. Discussion of this sing demonstrates how, through popular band repertoires, Yolŋu musicians employ traditional themes and musical materials to project their profound religious ties to ancestors and hereditary estates.
Outside the Hollow Log: The didjeridu, globalisation and socioeconomic contestation in Arnhem Land
Rural Society 13, 2003: 244–57
Abstract
Enthusiasm for the didjeridu is a global phenomenon that attracts interest from players and collectors worldwide despite the many popular fallacies that circulate about this instrument and the indigenous peoples of North Australia from whose cultures it originates. In this article, I address emerging initiatives among the Yolηu 'People' of northeast Arnhem Land that respond to the rapid globalisation and commercialisation of the didjeridu in recent decades, and draw on my own ethnographic observations and participation in festivals at Barunga (1996) and Gulkula (1999, 2001–03). Ultimately, I will demonstrate how Yolηu imperatives for these initiatives stem from hereditary beliefs and values that contemporary Yolηu strive to uphold in the face of radical socio-cultural change.
Burr-Gi Wargugu ngu-Ninya Rrawa: The Letterstick Band and hereditary ties to estate through song
Musicology Australia 25, 2002: 76–101
Abstract
This article documents the musical creativity of the Letterstick Band from Maningrida on Arnhem Land’s north-central coast and in particular focuses on the musical and socio-contextual analysis of two prominent songs in their repertoire: ‘Bartpa’ and ‘An-Barra Clan’. Although as musicians the band’s members have availed themselves of new media and technologies that have been introduced to Arnhem Land since the mid 1960s, through such analyses it is demonstrated how songs in the band’s repertoire are informed by the aesthetics, formal elements and themes of local manakay and borrk song traditions. Drawing upon observations first made by the Hiatts in the late 1950s, it will be established how two key members of the Letterstick Band, David Anjawartunga Maxwell and his younger brother Colin Jiliburr, have extended the musical legacy of their father, Harry Mulumbuk, by balancing continuity of local musical traditions against creative engagement with new musical media and technologies.
Nurturing the Sacred through Yolŋu Popular Song
with Neparrŋa Gumbula, Cultural Survival Quarterly 26.2, 2002: 40–2
Extract
When is a popular song not a popular song? When is an anthemic rock ballad not an anthemic rock ballad? How can a musical format so familiar to majority consumer audiences worldwide be reinvented through its synthesis with sacred themes and materials; themes drawn from hereditary bodies of esoteric knowledge and ceremonial practice held in perpetuity by the Yolŋu owners of northeast Arnhem Land?
The answers to these questions speak to the ability of local peoples to enlist commercial styles, instruments, and technologies in the expression of traditional concepts, values, and identities. They also reveal the skill and commitment of Yolŋu commentators who have fostered musical creativity as a medium through which traditional conceptualisations of the sacred can be maintained and extended for the immediate enjoyment of audiences in their own remote communities.
The Didjeridu as a Site of Economic Contestation in Arnhem Land
first published in Newsletter: The Centre for Studies in Australian Music No. 10, 1999: 1–4
Extract
There are obvious advantages to be gained by Yolŋu from the international sale of yidaki not least of which are financial. Since the 1960s, the owners of clan estates on the Gove Peninsula in particular have endured the social and environmental effects of an unwelcome bauxite-mining operation based in Nhulunbuy, and the musical activities of Yothu Yindi as well as international sales of yidaki have been instrumental in raising a wider awareness of their plight. If there is going to be a trade in didjeridus at all, it only stands to reason that those north Australian peoples from whose cultures the instrument originates should benefit from such enterprise.
However, Yolŋu and other peoples of northern Australia with long-standing traditions of didjeridu use already compete with an array of other Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal makers in the free market for instrument sales. This not only limits their access to a broader consumer base, but also compromises their ability to affect wider-spread knowledge and recognition of their histories and cultures. Although the didjeridu's sound and image has come to symbolise the solidarity of Aboriginal peoples throughout Australia, it could be argued that the distinct localised identities of north Australian peoples have, to an extent, been subsumed by recent appropriations of the instrument by other Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups seeking to promote their own specific cultural, political and commercial agendas. There is already concern amongst local elders such as Djalu that the didjeridu's growing use by self-taught enthusiasts, a significant number of whom sell commercial recordings of their own music, threatens to debase the instrument's role in accompanying liturgical songs.
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