Gibbs, M. 2003 Nebinyan’s Song – the Aboriginal whalers of South-Western Australia. Aboriginal History 27:11-20. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nebinyan's songs: an Aboriginal whaler of south-west Western Australia
Aboriginal history
Nebinyan was in his seventies when he met the ethnographer Daisy Bates in 1908. A renowned Nyungar songman of the Mineng people, whose country included the shores of Two Peoples Bay on the south coast of Western Australia, he had been moved in old age to the Government Settlement at Katanning, where their meeting took place. Their conversations ranged over the various details of traditional life in which Bates was most interested, but as night fell Nebinyan chose to recall his youth and perform for Bates a song cycle based on his work as a whaler on the south coast of Western Australia, in the 1860s.
Te Aitanga a Hauiti and Paikea: Whale People in the Modern Whaling Era
Transformations in Environment and Society NEW HISTORIES OF PACIFIC WHALING, 2019
In Aotearoa New Zealand, whales are revered by Māori in whakapapa (ties of kinship and affinity) and through carvings, songs, and oratory. Māori relationships with whales span deep ancestral time to the present, and the commercial whaling era is a mere blip in thislongue durée. Here, we introduce a whale-riding ancestor called Paikea and his instantiation as a late nineteenth-century tekoteko (gable figure) now in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. We describe the relation-ship between Paikea and a gift made to him by his descendants from the tribal group Te Aitanga a Hauiti, of Ūawa on the east coast of the North Island, as an example of what it means to be whale people in the “modern whaling” period.
The primary aim of this thesis is to reconstruct the history of Aboriginal cultural associations with whales and whaling in southwest Victoria in the nineteenth century. Despite there being a considerable corpus of information about Aboriginal peoples and whaling in southeast South Australia and southern New South Wales, there is a relative poverty of information on southwest Victoria. One of the primary objectives of this thesis is to offer explanations for this absence of information. Through an analysis of the Convincing Ground massacre that is believed to have taken place in the early period of whaling at Portland Bay, it will be argued that the violence characterised by this event fundamentally transformed race relations at Portland to such an extent that Aboriginal people avoided interaction with whalers. The rationale for this research is twofold: first to contribute to the history of frontier relations in Victoria; second, to reconstruct from archival sources the cultural and economic associations between Victorian Aboriginal people and whalers.
Wanji-wanji: The Past and Future of an Aboriginal Travelling Song
Musicology Australia, 2022
Classical Aboriginal culture in Australia consists of many different kinds of ceremonies, including travelling ceremonies that are often shared across linguistic and geographical boundaries. Each of these ceremonies is made up of dozens of different verses. Perhaps the most widely known travelling ceremony is one referred to in some areas as 'Wanji-wanji'. This was known over half the country and dates back at least 170 years, as evidenced in eleven legacy recordings and fieldwork interviewing more than 100 people across the western half of Australia. Like any oral tradition, the names of such ceremonies vary from place to place and from individual to individual. The extent to which a ceremony was known can thus only be seen through analysis of the music itself, rather than through reference to its names. This study analyses the most widely known verse in this ceremony, which we refer to as the Wanji-wanji verse. We identify the similarities and differences of the Wanji-wanji verse across legacy recordings spanning fifty years across three states. The most significant variation can be seen in the northern and southern peripheries of its 'broadcast' footprint. Our fieldwork has involved repatriating audio recordings to their communities of origin and sharing knowledge about the extent to which the ceremony was known. By implication, this activity has equipped custodians with the knowledge and confidence to potentially revive this once immensely popular ceremony.
Oceania, 2015
This paper contains a discussion of an unpublished essay by TGH Strehlow concerning the historic wax cylinder recordings of songs from Central Australia made by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in 1901. The manuscript, written by Strehlow in 1968, begins with an explanation of the historical context of the song recordings, and the distribution of song and dance traditions across the Australian inland. Strehlow elucidates the content via information imparted to him by a number of Arrernte and Luritja men, who first heard these recordings over 50 years after they were made, in 1960. Their explanation of these songs reveals further information on the diffusion of song verses across vast regions in Central Australia (including Warumungu, Anmatyerr, Arrernte, and Warlpiri country), and the incorporation of European words and themes within altharte (public) songs in which men sing and dance. I have expanded Strehlow’s information on Spencer’s recordings further with additional information from other ethno-historical sources and my own contemporary fieldwork. Combined, this research deepens the anthropological understanding of some of the earliest ethnographic sound recordings ever made in Australia.
Song was one of the principal methods of transmitting knowledge in the fundamentally oral societies of Indigenous Australia. As the breadth of song traditions has greatly diminished over the past 200 years, archival recordings of song now form a significant resource of intangible cultural heritage for Australia's Indigenous people. The song performances recorded in the past are now being rediscovered, remembered and in some cases revived. This paper presents findings from a recent project involving the return of a set of poorly documented recordings of songs to Kaytetye people in central Australia. These newly discovered recordings, the earliest ever made of Kaytetye singing, are shown to be an important heritage resource for these communities. Working collaboratively with senior song experts in order to gain a better understanding of the meaning and cultural significance of various songs, I document the how this discussion of audio material generated important social-histories and memories, reinforced local understandings of rights in cultural heritage, and revealed both continuities and changes in Kaytetye ceremonial and song practice.