I’m a proud Kalkadunga descendant of the Mount Isa area up in North-West Queensland, some 1,800 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. I grew up there with the inspiration of the land, travelling with Mum and Dad out to this particular cattle property called Calton Hills Station, which took in a lot of Kalkadunga land and cultural sites of significance for our people. So I had the very good fortune of having access to that canvas as a young child living in a modern day and still having the lineage there from some of the elders who have that special power of significant cultural Lore, the old Lore of the land and how that translates from the songlines of our mother Country. That’s something that I’ll always continue to be part of, and I want to pay tribute to that always, because I’m here in a position now, not just because of hard work but because of the hardships of those before me, leading the way to open up opportunity for Indigenous Australians.

My mum Aunty Delmae Barton used to listen to Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso and sing to the birds among the bush land of her Country, her mother Country around Springsure and Emerald in the Carnarvon Gorge area in Central Queensland. My Country, my Kalkadunga Country resonates in and through my works. Little signature tunes that I’ve been inspired by have come out of the earth. Now, we are becoming more in tune with our own interpretation of Australian classical music, along with Western instruments and the didjeridu (the yidaki), the clapsticks, boomerangs and other traditional instruments from the Torres Strait and the surrounding Islands, and with the language, the tonality of the way our ancestors and our elders sing the song of the landscape, and how it is captured on the canvas with the stroke of a brush or twig or hand and fingers.

My vision from over twenty years ago was always to take it to the next level where it didn’t seem tokenistic, not just ticking the government or organisational box for funding. I have been very clear that I let the music and the culture of the land speak through me. I have had that opportunity to listen to my elders and to gather those thoughts over the last ten to twenty years. I am very grateful for the learnings from my Uncle Arthur Petersen. Hearing my uncle play, I wanted to be a part of that mystery. I use that word mystery because it’s a feeling of something that’s greater than us, greater than humanity, than what music is to the Western ear. Uncle Arthur was a Lore man, so he was very special and very powerful. He knew several languages and was a healer, a part of that old school mob.

Making the didjeridu, I really remember the smell of the beeswax – after you’ve cut it down, you get the sandpaper, and you can smooth off the mouthpiece. The beeswax smell makes me think of my dad, Uncle Alf Barton, who would explain to the tourists about a pack saddle, how you can thread the sinew of the kangaroo through leather. You would put beeswax through the sinew because that would help make it watertight. The Aboriginal people of that land taught a lot of the white settlers techniques about how to read the land around there. I was born in that era where there were still elders who had strong cultural ties, and I was given the gift of the didjeridu through my uncle to pass on those stories through. Having that cultural centre gave me and gave the community something to be proud of.

Performance has always been a way of communicating across cultures, it’s expanding the vocabulary of the musical landscape, your mix of paints, your mix of ochres. I can add a bit of this colour and now that colour, and musically speaking, playing across different genres opens up your language gateway. My dad worked in the Postmaster General, and in his later life after his retirement, he also wanted to make sure that the cultural sites of significance small or large were looked after by the mining companies as much as possible. So, Mum and Dad worked with other elders and members of the community to establish site clearance workers – Indigenous walkers to walk ahead of the mining rigs and clear the area to make sure there weren’t any stone axes or fireplaces in the path. And if there were cultural artefacts, appropriate action would be taken. If there were, they had to halt the operation and go around. Through that work, we had a connection with Mick Roach from BHP Cannington, and that connection led to my first performance of Philip Bracanin’s Dance Gundah for didjeridu and orchestra with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra (QSO) in 1998.¹ After Dad died, Mick Roach called up to say there was an opportunity to perform with the QSO. The reason Mick called this one particular day out on the Cannington site (which is 300 kilometres or so out from Mount Isa, where they make the silver) was that there was this engineer there, who asked Mick Roach if he happened to know a didjeridu player, because his son was a conductor.² As a fourteen-year-old, I had actually played at the mine site’s opening.

This would lead to opportunities to play at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, where I performed Peter Sculthorpe’s music for the first time, and then to again perform with the QSO, this time in Sculthorpe’s orchestral work Earth Cry.³ Playing with the Goldner String Quartet was a stepping stone, in terms of musicality level, but also because high-art music and a high-art crowd was blending with a sophisticated sort of Indigenous landscape music. If the two are equal in terms of the space given, that’s when true meaning, true honesty and musicality collide in a good way. And that’s when people go ‘Wow!’; that’s the moment! And performing Sculthorpe’s orchestral music with the QSO was the next stepping stone, the big footprint of this chapter in life.

I still remember the day I met Sculthorpe, when Dale, the stage manager from the QSO told me, ‘Sculthorpe is coming.’ Sculthorpe said, ‘I hear you’re a good didjeridu player, we’ll soon see about that!’ That night was the magic of thousands of years of my Indigenous culture and me as a teenager expanding my musicality – just trusting those moments growing up in Mount Isa, and in working with Mum as an improviser – all coming to that one moment. So that night we did Earth Cry, and the raw energy, it was pretty special.⁴ In those moments the trust of my musical landscape or my cultural side, which is already within me, that took over. I visualise the landscape and that helps me memorise the pieces. I go in with the pure innocence of equality and strength of the landscape you know, and so I go in with a vision, I’ve got this weight on my shoulders of a significant cultural landscape behind me and all the turbulence and wonderful things that go with it as well, and I will listen to others in that space. I think none of us knew how impactful that was at the time. We are a part of a greater legacy; it wasn’t tokenistic; it wasn’t fake; it was me as an artist, as a part of this legacy.

It was extraordinary doing the Sculthorpe – that was a very special moment in history. Straight away that night, the Queensland Teachers Health Union put up their hands to fund me to be the QSO’s first didjeridu artist in residence. And then of course the friendship with Sculthorpe developed. As I played more of his works, Sculthorpe could understand that I had a musical sense of the landscape and that I was a good improviser, because I’m not just improvising, it’s constructed improvisation. Improvisation is actually methodical; if you’re doing it right, it should be done naturally. Two performances ten years apart demonstrate how I construct my improvisation – Michael Christie conducting the Queensland Symphony in 2002 and a recording with the Australian Youth Orchestra in 2012.⁵ Listening to my build-up on the A didjeridu in the middle section, they’re almost identical, they’re the same sort of vibe.

I knew I had a voice, but I knew it would still take time to get through to the engine room of orchestras so that it wasn’t just tokenistic or a tacky thing to have Indigenous music in the way that it has been sometimes in the past. It comes back to me wanting to be a part of the mystery of the Uncles. That culture was always my grounding. And so, if people say, ‘You’re going to get a lot out of this,’ really, it’s about not what am I going to get out of it, but can I give to it from my uncles? That voice, in this world. It took time for people to realise that was a serious position, that I was someone who had this instrument that could speak in a virtuosic sense. It turned into a collaboration where Sculthorpe felt that I could speak for him through the music. I felt that from the initial work with the Goldner Quartet. That this is what Australian music is – the chaos colliding, an ancient history of Australian culture, the sophistication of Indigenous culture and music and sophisticated Western European classical instruments. When you find the right leaders of the two, they can come together.

Sculthorpe’s Requiem is the first piece that Sculthorpe wrote for me, from beginning to end with me in mind.⁶ He jokes in a couple of interviews that he would have had it finished months or weeks earlier if it hadn’t been for me, because he had to work out different keys and stuff. So we premiered it at Adelaide Festival of Arts in 2004, which was quite special because it was the first time that the old Aboriginal ladies from the choir were allowed onto the festival programme, because the last time they were on tour there, they weren’t included in the festival – so very powerful.⁷ They sang the ‘Maranoa Lullaby’ in the Requiem.⁸

On Intellectual Property and Improvisation versus Composition

The concept of intellectual property twigged for me around the age of fifteen. In Mount Isa, I called up the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) to get Kalkadunga language on a tape. They sent me a quote via post, stating that for a tape of my own language the cost would be hundreds of dollars. Entering the classical realm, I had to navigate the intellectual property aspects of what I felt was right in my heart and the legacy of cultural appropriation in a Western system. In those early days BHP agreed to fund a second and a third movement of Dance Gundah in my first ever orchestral experience as soloist. I walked in to that first rehearsal and performance with the legacy of thousands of years with me in the spirit of the didjeridu/yidaki. I recorded a tape and sent that to Philip Bracanin and put my copyright on it. He went ahead with developing the new movements, and the full work is recognised as his composition, with a later performance with Matthew Doyle as didjeridu soloist.⁹ This was the beginning of finding my voice as a composer in the classical world, creating the musical element on my instrument that made Dance Gundah what it was. Western intellectual property deems that I have to pay for a recording of language that belongs to our people, but a composer can use the music I create with no acknowledgement, let alone payment.

In the programme for the 2002 QSO gig, I did a didjeridu solo first and then Sculthorpe’s Earth Cry. And alongside ‘didjeridu solo’, it said ‘traditional’ instead of ‘William Barton’. As my friendship with Sculthorpe grew, the prospect of doing more and more concerts around the world also grew; with Earth Cry, as well as with the possibility of adding didjeridu to his other works, there was a point where it was clear to me that I should get, not the royalties, but at least an acknowledgement in the score, though I didn’t necessarily talk to anyone about it at that point. That’s all changed, because I’m well known (because of my portfolio of twenty works) now, and so it just happens automatically with the assistance of my management team and publishers. It’s not always about the royalties; sometimes it’s just about acknowledgement, that’s all.

I wanted to earn my stripes as a composer in the classical world, not a songwriter in the pop world; I felt I had more power and respect to do things in the right way and amplify my vision, from being a young kid doing things with Mum and Dad on cultural site-clearance work with the mines. My first official commission was from Lyndon Terracini. When Lyndon was artistic director for Queensland Music Festival around 2002, he commissioned me to write a new work for the community of Mackay. Because there are three mobs there: Aboriginal mob, Torres Strait Islander mob and Australian South Sea Islander mob. I went up there and met with community and said, ‘I’m from Mount Isa, Kalkadunga Country’; I paid my respects to the elders there, and they welcomed me in, the members across the three communities, this sort of committee, and some of them knew my uncle, mum, dad, so it was my DNA passport that gave me an entry point. That was quite special, the songlines of the mother Country, and for that performance we had the Mornington Island dancers come down.

It’s very important to collaborate, it keeps on expanding your level of musicianship and humanity and the way you find a middle ground. Important collaborations for me have been across so many genres, from Uncle Peter Sculthorpe and Uncle Ross Edwards to more contemporary avant-garde composers like Liza Lim, Matthew Hindson; collaborations with the Doonooch Dancers, my mum Aunty Delmae Barton and Veronique Serret, with Iva Davies and Shane Howard, Uncle Roger Knox, with Herbie Hancock, James Morrison and Yo Yo Ma. An important collaboration was on the Liza Lim piece The Compass, performed here with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) and toured to Europe on a Sydney Symphony tour.¹⁰ Another was with Matthew Hindson, that was my first co-commission for the SSO – we worked out who was going to do what, we came up with the theme which was the main thing, the important thing, so I said let’s write about Kalkadunga Country, about battle mountain, and I’ll sing my signature song, which is Kalkadunga Yurdu.¹¹ Kalkadungu Yurdu kalkadunug marabi is something I wrote when Dad was still alive, when I was about fifteen years old, and I think I first performed it in front of Mum and Dad and some others out at the mining site Mount Monument, just outside of Mount Isa as a young teenager. And so even though there’s an orchestral version with Matthew Hindson, it’s a language song, and I get up on stage with the orchestra and I sing for my people, and you know, I don’t bring the didjeridu in until the last few powerful, or monumental, moments after the big battle, and that’s to give joy. In other collaborations with various mixed ensembles in Australia, I have been always looking beyond where I was standing, the expansiveness of what musicality should be, going back to my uncle, that magic – how can I walk out on stage and connect with people.

Kalkadungu has been performed on a tour of the US in Royce Hall in Los Angeles and Carnegie Hall in New York, and I’m proud because I’m resonating my language on the stage and I’m thinking about my people. In 2019, I composed a piece for solo didjeridu and called it the Spirit of Kalkadungu – at Westminster Abbey, all the Royal Family was present. I called it that because I wanted the presenter on the BBC to say, ‘William Barton is playing the Spirit of Kalkadungu.’ It keeps on creating the space, slowly, bit by bit those ripples in the sand just keep on getting bigger. Every time someone says a language word, or learns language, it just keeps on rippling out, slowly, slowly. In that moment of playing for the Queen of England and the Royal Family, I tilted my didjeridu up towards the sky represented by the ceiling of Westminster and paid homage to the four winds of language and cultural identity. That’s the meaningful spirit of the performance that I do.

In my recent work Apii Thatini Mu Murtu Kalkadungu, I want members of the orchestra to sing in language.¹² So, at the end of Apii, I’ve got the orchestra singing ‘Apii Thatini Mu Murtu Kalkadungu’, and that’s just so simple but simultaneously really powerful, to sing to Country together. My most recent commission is for Simone Young, she’s conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’, which is one of her flagship pieces because she feels the in-tuneness of the land. I asked the SSO for some floorboards from the old Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, which I made into clapsticks.¹³ That’s part of that resurrection.

In this chapter of my career, I’m moving into roles as an adviser and creative consultant, such as with Australia Day Live, and now joining the Board of Directors of both the SSO and the Australian Music Centre.¹⁴ I’m a part of that engine room of change. And it’s my intention in these roles to bring my experience to enhance cultural awareness and create more opportunity for outreach programmes and making music accessible, and for opportunities within the art music community. At the same time, I want to create a platform for a high standard of musicality to come through, making sure across all levels of the musical landscape that people have the appropriate platform to express themselves at whatever level they’re at in their career, to amplify their learning process. If non-Indigenous composers are invited to write a work with an Indigenous theme, there are protocols that should be in place. For example, I always get permission from the elders in the areas I’m entering into, so these things are in the contract, and I’m engaged at that level. In earlier times, the whole journey with Sculthorpe and other composers, you can look at that and say, well that was then, and this is now, and we’ve got the chance to make things right now. We’ve got the chance to credit that person right or give them 10 per cent royalties, and it keeps on getting better and ‘righter’ every time.

When I think about our legacy and what Australia’s national music is, I think about what can bring us together as one multicultural humanity in this modern day and age, in 2024 and beyond. What are the significant elements that are important? The foundational wisdom of our ancestors, of our elders, who are still here with us and those who have passed. What does that leave us exactly to take to the next generation of story tellers and Indigenous leaders as well as non-Indigenous leaders who can walk hand in hand and create a better future through understanding and awareness? What’s culturally right and what’s wrong? But how can we also be on the edge to explore the voided space? Because, you know, if we don’t do that, we won’t know what’s there. In a photo of the Australian bush land, there’s nothing there but there’s so much there. Sometimes it is a feeling and a sense of weariness, you know, because that’s a place of solitude, the bush, even if you’re with a group of people; and when you take that with you to the city or to a larger group or community, you feel like you’re part of something because you’re sharing that knowledge, and that history, and that space, and that memory, and that landscape.

If we think about something, we start to create that universe. The more expansiveness of the landscape and the mind through turmoil, sadness, anger, happiness. I think we do what’s right in that moment, and if it’s wrong down the track, we rectify it. We have enough resources now and commitment from enough people in positions, in academic positions, people who are in power, politically, and as long as the acknowledgement is there, where it’s all come from and where it’s going to go, that’s what makes it interesting. That’s what makes the opportunity for a kid from Mount Isa, to be playing the didjeridu with local community, to be playing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages like Carnegie Hall, and then to come back again to our own beautiful sacred lands, our own amphitheatres in our own backyards.