Traditional Aboriginal songs: from digital files to living culture’ (original) (raw)
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Building a National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia: Five years on
The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia (NRP) was conceived in 2002 and launched at the Garma Festival in north-east Arnhem Land in August 2004. The primary motivations behind the NRP were as much philosophical as they were pragmatic. First, those of us who envisioned the potential usefulness of such an initiative were dissatisfied at the way that Indigenous communities were rarely able to access, within their own localities, the decades of recorded materials held in collections worldwide that documented their cultural heritage. So to encourage collectors to make their recordings immediately available to their source communities, rather than stockpiling them in shoeboxes under their desks as in many instances in decades past, we have since fostered a national network of interested people from academic, technical and Indigenous community backgrounds through the NRP, which is working collaboratively towards this end. Fundamentally, the NRP aims to develop a national digital repository through which all Indigenous communities in Australia will be able to store and access any existing and future recordings of their music and dance heritage from within their own home towns. Second, we seek to achieve this aim by sustaining a collegial network through which leading Indigenous cultural exponents can share information and shape new strategies for content delivery with recognised world leaders in the field of digital archiving and sustainable repositories.
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.
Collecting in context: reissuing forgotten sounds from Australia and beyond
2017
This paper focuses on how I collect and curate sound recordings, particularly the 78rpm shellac format. It deals with the motivating forces behind why I collect sound recordings and how I situate them in their appropriate historical context - through curated exhibitions, blog writing and reissue projects. I touch upon curating methodology involving sound and how the reissue "package" can function as a physical site in a similar way to an exhibition space. I also draw attention to the importance of sound recordings as an active, living history in an Australian context, and why we should do more to share and disseminate them.
Cultural precedents for the repatriation of legacy song records to communities of origin
Repatriation of song recordings from archives and private collections to communities of origin is both a common research method and the subject of critical discourse. In Australia it is a priority of many individual researchers and collecting institutions to enable families and cultural heritage communities to access recorded collections. Anecdotal and documented accounts describe benefits of this access. However, digital heritage items and the metadata that guide their discovery and use circulate in complex milieus of use and guardianship that evolve over time in relation to social, personal, economic and technological contexts. Ethnomusicologists, digital humanists and anthropologists have asked, what is the potential for digital items, and the content management systems through which they are often disseminated, to complicate the benefits of repatriation? How do the 'returns' from archives address or further complicate colonial assumptions about the value of research? This paper lays the groundwork for consideration of these questions in terms of cultural precedents for repatriation of song records in the Kimberley. Drawing primarily on dialogues between ethnomusicologist Sally Treloyn and senior Ngarinyin and Wunambal elder and singer Matthew Dembal Martin, the interplay of archival discovery, repatriation and dissemination, on the one hand, and song conception, song transmission, and the Law and ethos of Wurnan sharing , on the other, is examined. The paper provides a case for support for repatriation initiatives and for consideration of the critical perspectives of cultural heritage stakeholders on research transactions of the past and in the present.
Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organisations in Australia for over thirty years, representing a distributed national collection of high cultural, linguistic and national significance. However, technical obsolescence of analogue materials, harsh environmental conditions and limited access to technological and financial resources in many remote communities present serious risk of information and knowledge being lost forever. This report outlines a collaborative project undertaken by the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Indigenous Studies Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using innovative digital technologies.
Relational Returns: Relationships and the Repatriation of Legacy Song Recordings in Australia
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In this article we focus on how repatriation is perceived, enacted and understood by custodians of living performance traditions in the north and north-west of Australia. We observe a relational turn in intercultural research collaborations around Aboriginal Australian song: one that enfolds our personal relationships with Indigenous collaborators, those of past researchers and singers, and past and present archivists and archives. In imagining a future in which recordings are recirculated among a new generation of performers and used to support the vitality of these Indigenous Australian song traditions, we suggest that, alongside technical considerations concerning new systems for archiving and dissemination, a consideration for the relationships and exchanges that brought recordings into being will also be necessary.
Returning Recordings of Songs That Persist: The Anmatyerr Traditions of Anmanty and Akiw
Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond, 2019
Digitisation has made the return of recordings made by researchers in the past far more achievable than ever before. This technological advance, combined with the ethical and political imperative towards decolonising methodologies in Indigenous research, has resulted in considerable interest in ensuring that recordings of cultural value be returned to Indigenous communities. In this chapter, I reflect upon the fieldwork experience of returning archival song recordings concerning public aspects of male initiation ceremonies, known as akiw and anmanty, to Anmatyerr-speaking communities in the Northern Territory of Australia. Despite attenuation of song knowledge across the region, these songs continue to be sung at annual ritual events. Once these recordings were returned to these communities, Anmatyerr people quickly received them as important reiterations of their present-day socio-cultural expression. Evidently imbricated in a complex, ritually based form of complementary filiation and knowledge dissemination, these songs are shared and taught in a fragile and changing context of ceremonial practice. The account provided here offers insights into songs associated with arguably the most persistent and significant form of ceremonial practice in Central Australia, although sparsely documented in the Anmatyerr region. I also highlight the relational properties of song via their connections to place, Anengkerr 'Dreaming' and people and provide important insights into how these communities perceive the archiving and preservation of this material.
Returning recordings of songs that persist: The Anmatyerr traditions of akiw and anmanty
2019
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Abstract Digitisation has made the return of recordings made by researchers in the past far more achievable than ever before. This technological advance, combined with the ethical and political imperative towards decolonising methodologies in Indigenous research, has resulted in considerable interest in ensuring that recordings of cultural value be returned to Indigenous communities. In this chapter, I reflect upon the fieldwork experience of returning archival song recordings concerning public aspects of male initiation ceremonies, known as akiw and anmanty, to Anmatyerr-speaking communities in the Northern Territory of Australia. Despite attenuation of song knowledge across the region, these songs continue to be sung at annual ritual events. Once these recordings were returned to these communities, Anmatyerr people quickly received them as important reiterations of their present-day socio-cultural expression. Evidently imbricated in a co...
Recirculating songs: revitalising the singing practices of Indigenous Australia
2017
Although song has been recognised as the 'central repository of Aboriginal knowledge', this is the first volume to be devoted specifically to the revitalisation of ancestral Indigenous singing practices. These traditions are at severe risk of attrition or loss in many parts of Australia, and the 17 chapters of the present work provide broad coverage-geographically, theoretically and methodologically-of the various strategies that are currently being implemented or proposed to reverse this damage to the Indigenous knowledge base. In some communities the ancestral musical culture is still being transmitted across generations; in others it is partially remembered, and being revitalised with the assistance of heritage recordings and written documentation; but in many parts of Australia, intergenerational transmission has been interrupted, and in these cases, revitalisation depends on research and restoration. This book provides insights that may be helpful for Indigenous people and communities, and the researchers and educators who work with them, across this range of contexts. Cover photograph ulpare-ulpare (Arrernte) 'Perennial Yellowtop' (Senecio magnificus) © Lisa Stefanoff Cover song by M. K. Turner. Transcriptions (text and music) by Myfany Turpin. Kwarre-arle ayenge antyeye-le atyenge-ange tne-me girl-REL 1SG.NOM alongside-LOC 1sg.ACC-CNTR stand-PRS 'The girl who I am is standing with me.' Front cover: an Arrernte women's song received, sung and translated by M. K. Turner ('MK') in 2017. The song conveys two images for MK: a group of girls standing in a line proudly adorned for ceremony; and a girl walking through the grass where ankerte-ankerte 'yellow daisies' and arlatyeye 'white pencil yam flowers' bloom. MK describes this as a song of antethe 'blossom, or small soft feathers' which are used as ceremonial adornment.