Traditional Songs

For scores of millennia, the Yolŋu have sung of their deep and continuous connections to their homelands and the original waŋarr (ancestors) who bestowed these homelands in perpetuity upon the Yolŋu clans. Yolŋu society is an expansive network of some sixty clans whose membership passes from father to child in each generation. Spanning north-east Arnhem Land are myriad homelands that were named, shaped and populated by the original waŋarr for clans of their descent. Starting with the development of Miliŋinbi (Milingimbi) in 1923, today these homelands accommodate seven Yolŋu towns and hundreds of smaller isolated outstations occupied by Yolŋu families.

Traditional Yolŋu songs of the garma (public) ceremonial genre are known as manikay. These are classically performed in long series of short song items that are grouped into sequentially ordered sequences of thematic subjects and, within these subjects, rhythmic modes. Expert manikay singers, such as Gumbula-Garawirrtja, are highly trained to make executive decisions about which discrete thematic song sequences should be selected for performance from within their complete hereditary repertoires to suit the specific needs of different ceremonial occasions. Each discrete song series in the manikay tradition is inalienably tied to a specific Yolŋu homeland.⁴

The instrumentation of manikay is most typically a small group of male singers, who sing in heterophony and accompany themselves with bilma (paired sticks). They are further accompanied by a male playing yidaki (didjeridu) and male and female dancers who perform antiphonal male vocal parts. The most recognisable aural marker of clan identity in a manikay series is the melodic contour repeated throughout. Each clan effectively has its own distinct manikay pitch set and melodic structure.⁵

Manikay series and all their elements are considered to be hereditary clan properties that, along with thematically bound dances and designs, were given to Yolŋu people, along with their clan homelands, by their original waŋarr.⁶ People born with ancestral songs are therefore people with ancestral homelands. Waŋarr remain eternally present and sentient within the Yolŋu homelands, and the cherished Yolŋu ability to sing and dance in their traditions enables them to recognise and assist their living kin, while simultaneously repelling intruders.⁷

The manikay tradition is also maintained as a hereditary record of the ecological and social observations made by the original waŋarr as they founded the Yolŋu homelands. However, it is a living tradition that is also extensible. Some clan repertoires traditionally include yuta manikay (new song) items that emotively respond to recent life events and experience,⁸ while Yolŋu popular music since the 1980s, through bands such as Yothu Yindi, has been highly and deliberately derivative of the manikay tradition.⁹ The manikay tradition has therefore always been capable of recording and transmitting new understandings of the world, such as those brought via historical Makassan contact.

All Yolŋu clans are organised within two equal and interdependent constitutions of ancestral law called Yirritja and Dhuwa, as founded by two different sets of waŋarr. Sociopolitical balance between Dhuwa and Yirritja clans is maintained because they must always intermarry. This ensures that all Yolŋu children have both a Yirritja parent and a Dhuwa parent, to whom they are equally responsible.¹⁰ The influence of Makassan and associated contact histories is an iconic feature of ceremonial repertoires owned by Yirritja clans, including the Warramiri, Dhalwaŋu, Gumatj, Wangurri, Munyuku, Madarrpa, Maŋgalili and Gupapuyŋu clans.

Just as today’s Yolŋu languages retain hundreds of loanwords from the Makasar, Bugis and Malay languages, such as rrupiya (money), bandirra (flag), buthulu (bottle), lipalipa (canoe), dhamburru (drum) and baŋ’kulu (axe),¹¹ the manikay series for the Dhalwaŋu homeland of Gurrumuru, for example, foregrounds songs with overtly Makassan subjects, including yiki’ (knife), ŋarali’ (tobacco), manydjarrka (cloth), dhamburru (drum), djoliŋ (flute), dopulu (playing cards), ŋänitji (arak), barrundhu (drunken fighting), garrurru (flag), berratha (rice) and watjpalŋa (rooster).¹² It has further been noted that the Yolŋu manikay tradition is inflected with traces of classical Arabic religious music.¹³

Flags are also prominent subjects in manikay series and are commonly made by Yolŋu clans for public display as important ceremonial items. Originally made from imported Makassan cloth, they remain important symbols of identity and ancestral authority in homelands for Yolŋu clans who maintain ceremonial records of Makassan contact histories. They were used by these clans to mark beaches on their homelands where Makassan vessels were welcome to land. Overall, their usage demarcated a well-established system of Yolŋu ports that regulated Makassan trade and access to appropriate landing, living and work sites (Table 2.1).

Flags remain so iconic in Yolŋu culture today that their various basic colours often influence the choices of matching costumes worn by associated clans for ceremonies and other official events. They can also be emblazoned with Makassan imagery, such as crossed swords and an anchor on the red Dhalwaŋu flag, and an anchor fastened with a cable on the yellow Gumatj flag.¹⁴ So steeped is this iconography in deep histories of Yolŋu contact with near, foreign neighbours that it also retains a distinct flag for the long-departed Bäpayili, the Sama whale hunters with whom the Yolŋu shared a sense of sacred ancestral affinity and who are remembered to have camped at Motatj in the Wessel Islands chain.¹⁵

Exchange Histories

Yolŋu song traditions are not an isolated phenomenon. Long exchange histories have influenced Yolŋu song series and their performance. We will explain this extensive exchange history before then examining how Yolŋu ceremonial traditions elaborately integrate song, dance and design elements to recount exchanges with Makassan seafarers.

The first detailed description of the annual voyages of Makassan perahu fleets to north Australia was provided by the historian Campbell Macknight.¹⁶ These fleets sailed from the port of Makassar in the Sultanate of Gowa on the northwest monsoon each December and returned on the southeast trade winds, with hulls full of trepang, pearl shell, beeswax and ironwood for trade into China each March to April. In return for rights to harvest these resources, Yolŋu people received a variety of imported goods from the Makassan mariners, including rice, tamarinds, tobacco, alcohol, cloth, axes, knives and jewels.¹⁷

Macknight found that this industry had likely gained momentum between the 1750s and 1780s.¹⁸ He estimates that, during the first half of the nineteenth century, some thirty to sixty Makassan vessels sailed to the Northern Territory coast each year. Their combined crews of mostly Makasar and Bugis speakers numbered at least a thousand men annually.¹⁹

The impacts on Yolŋu culture of these sustained annual exchanges with Makassan seafarers were profound. The Yolŋu languages absorbed hundreds of loanwords from the Makasar and Bugis languages, and Yolŋu ceremonial songs, dances and designs integrated elaborate accounts of engagements with Makassan people and technologies.²⁰ Yolŋu communities retain enduring memories of Yolŋu individuals who voyaged into Southeast Asia as crew on Makassan vessels and, to this day, some families are known to have shared ancestry with Indonesian relatives in Sulawesi.²¹

Having been used in Chinese medicine and cooking since the seventeenth century, dried trepang was a particularly lucrative commodity coveted by buyers in Makassar and beyond.²² However, the South Australian government annexed the Northern Territory in 1863 and, in 1884, imposed new taxes and charges upon Makassan vessels entering Arnhem Land that contributed to a lull in this trade. Even steeper government tariffs were introduced in 1906. With trade crippled by this impost, one final vessel, the Bunga Ejaya, captained by Otching Daeng Rangka, sailed to Arnhem Land for the 1906/7 season, thereby ending a century-and-a-half of continuous international trade.²³

This sustained commercial trade with trepangers from Makassar was certainly not the only historical contact that Yolŋu people had with visiting Asian seafarers. Archaeological research has radiocarbon dated a pottery shard found on Groote Eylandt to 1107–1280.²⁴ Rock art of a perahu in Wellington Range has been dated to before 1664,²⁵ and human remains excavated at Anuru Bay were found to belong to a person of Southeast Asian origin who died before 1730.²⁶

These varied exchanges with different groups of visitors from across the Arafura Sea are also reflected in Yolŋu ceremonial repertoires of song, dance and design, and are traditionally considered by Yolŋu people to have unfolded through a sacred preordained continuum of foreign exchanges guided by the original Yolŋu ancestors. As recollected by the prolific Yolŋu leader David Burrumarra (1917–1994) of the Warramiri clan, the first foreign visitors were the whale-hunting Bäpayili, also known as the Wuymu and Gelurru. Though the antiquity of their visitation remains unknown, they were likely a seafaring people of the Sama (Bajau) diaspora and were readily accepted by the Yolŋu for sharing a sacred ancestral affiliation with whales.²⁷

After a hiatus of unknown length came the Bayini period of Makassan contact, when golden-skinned visitors came to Arnhem Land under the ancestral law of Birrinydji, a man iconically associated with swords, and a beautiful golden-skinned woman called Bayini.²⁸ These visitors are remembered by Yolŋu for building boats, making pottery, growing rice, digging wells, looming cloth and dancing in ceremonies with Yolŋu. However, they kept their manufacturing secrets to themselves. Burrumarra recounts how they eventually left owing to conflict, which was followed by a long hiatus of many generations before later Makassan visitors would return to harvest trepang commercially after 1750.²⁹

Yolŋu traditionally perceive this continuum of foreign exchanges to be linked under the law of Allah or rather, Walitha’walitha, which is a Yolŋu derivation of the Islamic Shahada or testimony that begins, لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا ٱللَّٰهُ LāʾilāhaʾIllā-llāh (There is no deity but God).³⁰ In Yolŋu belief, however, Walitha’walitha is not a foreign deity, but rather an ancestral mokuy (ghost) who ordains and orders the existence, behaviours and accoutrements of foreigners. In Yolŋu tradition, he is associated with Wurramu funeral ceremonies in which there is choral singing of ‘Wo, ga Allah’ in reference to God and expressions of ‘Serri makassi’, as derived from ‘Terima kasih’ (thank you) in Malay.³¹

Renewed Exchanges

While the prominence of Makassan trade themes has never faded from Yolŋu ceremonial practice, continuous Yolŋu trade with visiting Makassan seafarers came to a definitive end when the Bunga Ejaya, captained by Otching Daeng Rangka, departed Arnhem Land in 1907. It would not be until the mid-1980s that interest in retracing and renewing this long-held historical exchange resurfaced. The renewed series of exchanges that ensued would spark broader awareness about this history in both Australia and Indonesia and offered themes that would surface in the new style of Yolŋu popular music emerging at the time.

The construction and voyage of the Hati Marege’ to Arnhem Land as an Australian Bicentennial project in 1988, breaking an eighty-two-year hiatus in Makassan contact, was conceived and directed by Peter Spillet, a historian at the Northern Territory Museum. In 1986, Spillet had led an excursion of Aboriginal students from Batchelor College to Makassar, where they found an abundance of familiar words and imagery that had been retained in everyday speech and cultural practices in Arnhem Land.

When the Hati Marege’ landed at Galiwin’ku in 1988, it was captained by Mansjur Muhayang, son of Mangnellai Daeng Maro, the last known Makassan traveller from 1907, who had been a child at the time and had died only in 1978.³² His family was known to have shared ancestors with Yolŋu relatives in Galiwin’ku and the enthusiastic reception of his vessel’s arrival there in 1988 was immortalised by the early Yolŋu popular band, Soft Sands, in the song ‘Land, Our Mother’.³³

The next excursion from Arnhem Land to Makassar was led by the acclaimed Yolŋu visual artist, John Bulunbulun (1946–2010), whose paintings had often depicted historical Makassan visitors and public ceremonial song subjects such as luŋgurrma, the northerly trade wind that carried their inbound vessels.³⁴ In 1992, he led a group of ten performers from the town of Maningrida to the Galigo Museum in Makassar where, over three nights, they presented a traditional Yolŋu diplomacy ceremony, known as the Marayarr Murrukundja. Its iconic centrepiece was the construction and decoration of a ceremonial exchange pole representing the mast and rigging of a Makassan perahu.³⁵

In 1996, Muhayang and his family returned to Galiwin’ku to collaborate with their Yolŋu relatives in the production of Trepang: An Indigenous Opera, which premiered in Makassar in 1997 to mark the 667th anniversary of the Sultanate of Gowa, before being shown in Darwin in 1999 and Melbourne in 2001.³⁶ Based on the shared family history of its performers, it told a story of love and separation over generations by the distance between Arnhem Land and Makassar.³⁷

Trepang was initially developed through a series of workshops with Muhayang and his family, involving elders in Galiwin’ku and their families. Over the course of an entire month in Galiwin’ku in 1996, exchanges of historical knowledge, discussions of Makassan loanwords, the design of stage props and creation of a sculpture of a Makassan perahu informed the development of a joint Yolŋu–Makassan performance of song, dance and drama. Significantly, songs and knowledge which had been carefully retained by Yolŋu people were reaffirmed. The following year, sixteen Yolŋu performers travelled to Makassar for a month to further develop a collaborative performance with a coherent narrative.

This process of rediscovery had also been informed since the early 1980s by an emerging genre of Indigenous popular song in Arnhem Land that frequently drew on traditional influences from manikay to celebrate historical Makassan exchanges. Alongside ‘Land, Our Mother’ by Soft Sands, the Wirrinyga Band from Miliŋinbi celebrated the landing of the Hati Marege’ in Galiwin’ku by composing ‘My Sweet Takarrina’.³⁸ Its title references Takarrina as an exonym by which the Makassans of old knew Elcho Island. ‘Lembana Manimani’ by the Sunrize Band from Maningrida similarly evokes nostalgia for the Makassan fleets that departed at the end of each annual trepang season.³⁹ Meaning ‘Farewell Maningrida’, its title similarly references Manimani as an exonym for Maningrida.⁴⁰

‘Macassan Crew’ by Yothu Yindi directly quotes a Gumatj manikay item sung by the band’s late Gumatj lead singer, Mandawuy Yunupiŋu (1956–2014), and identifies Gurrumulŋa as the captain of a visiting Makassan vessel.⁴¹ The song’s repeated chorus of ‘Ä–e-ya!’, as drawn from Gumatj manikay, references the prayers to Allah of the visiting Makassan sailors of old. It also opens with a respectful homage to Yunupiŋu’s mother’s mother’s clan, the Dhalwaŋu. Its sung quotation from Dhalwaŋu manikay of ‘Yendharama Birrapirra’ records the names of Makassan vessels whose crews once visited the Dhalwaŋu homeland of Gurrumuru.⁴²

Gurrumulŋa is referenced again by Yothu Yindi alumnus Gurrumul Yunupiŋu (1971–2017) in his song with the Saltwater Band, ‘Gurrumul History’.⁴³ Its chorus references this to be a guiding pillar of his Gumatj and personal identity and uses a Gumatj manikay melody.⁴⁴

When the Makassan music-and-dance ensemble Takbing Siwaliya toured to Australia in 2005, Gumbula-Garawirrtja performed alongside other Yolŋu leaders to welcome them to the Garma Festival at Gulkula in Arnhem Land. They sang and danced traditional manikay items that recounted how Yolŋu leaders had historically conducted yurrukuyyirr (trade negotiations) with Makassan visitors, and how they were farewelled each year as they sailed away against the fading light of djäpana, the coral-coloured hues of sunset.⁴⁵

Subsequently, at the Darwin Festival, Gumbula-Garawirrtja led his family in a joint performance with Takbing Siwaliya of a Gupapuyŋu public manikay series of Makassan contact songs, dances and designs inherited through his own specific Birrkili lineage. The two parties sequenced their interactions to depict the commencement of annual trade at Yalakun, the designated port side of the main Birrkili Gupapuyŋu homeland, Luŋgutja. Upon entrance, the Yolŋu dancers planted the blue Gupapuyŋu flag on the stage to affirm this clan’s ownership of Luŋgutja and its readiness to receive Makassan visitors. In keeping with their own music and dance traditions, Takbing Siwaliya assumed the role of a Makassan perahu for which they had made a flag of their own with red cloth, on which a large gold circle was painted. They sounded a gong as they raised their flag, signalling their willingness to come ashore and trade. Deep and open sorrow was expressed by both parties when they parted company at the show’s end.⁴⁶

Affirming Autonomy through Song

Yolŋu songs, both traditional and contemporary, continue to carry and mediate continuous understandings of Arnhem Land’s important history of autonomous trade with Makassar. The steady supply of imported goods that Makassan traders brought to Arnhem Land following 1750 was recognised by Yolŋu to be highly lucrative. However, Yolŋu ceremonial records of these contacts also assert that Yolŋu clans should simultaneously retain autonomy from such foreign influences. While the old Yolŋu system of marking open ports with flags ensured that Makassan crews knew where they could safely land, Makassan vessels were not permitted to enter or drop anchor at most other places along the coast. Whenever Makassan crews trespassed or outwore their welcomes, they are typically remembered to have been fiercely expelled by the sentient waŋarr (ancestors) who remain ever present in the Yolŋu homelands.⁴⁷

In various Birrkili Gupapuyŋu manikay series sung by Gumbula-Garawirrtja for his clan’s coastal homelands, Makassan captains and their vessels are refused and repelled by a variety of waŋarr. A perahu captained by Djowuma sailed into the calm glassy waters of Nikawu and passed the traditional dugout canoe of the female dog ancestor, Djuranydjura. He tried to convince Djuranydjura to let him settle there and, even though her canoe was sinking, she denied his request. Her sunken canoe, called Badawan, now remains there as a coral reef. Its outlined image is still used as a sand sculpture in which public Gupapuyŋu water purification ceremonies are performed following funerals.⁴⁸

When the Makassan captain called Bäpa-djambaŋ dropped anchor in the prohibited shallow waters of Luŋgutja, just east of its port side, his vessel was held there and wholly devoured by the terrible lightning and thunder of the water python ancestor, Mundukul. It too now remains there as a coral reef. All souls were lost except Wurrathithi, a foreign girl who had been imprisoned in the vessel’s hold. She remains there as an eternal ancestral ghost watching over the coastal waters of Luŋgutja. The Gupapuyŋu manikay sequence for funeral ceremonies performed to this day recounts how she now tends to the recently deceased.⁴⁹

Manikay affirm the foundation of each clan’s ancestral homelands. The main forest homeland of the Gupapuyŋu clan is Djiliwirri, where Gupapuyŋu ceremonies record the unwelcome intrusion of the Makassan captain, Nuwa. Nuwa attempted to convince both Djuranydjura and the fierce honeybee ancestor, Niwuda, to build a town at Djiliwirri in return for matches, blankets and houses. Both refused him, and he was attacked by a swarm of bees, forcing him to leap into one of the boiling cauldrons of water commonly used by the Makassans to cook trepang.⁵⁰

This altercation remains the basis of the Gupapuyŋu manikay sequence for post-mortuary fire purification ceremonies and the ground sculpture on which they are performed. Nuwa’s trespass into Djiliwirri would eventually inspire a popular song named for this homeland by Soft Sands. Drawing heavily on direct quotations and other materials from traditional Gupapuyŋu song, the song ‘Djiliwirri’ affirms the ownership of this homeland by the Gupapuyŋu under the ancestral law of Niwuda.⁵¹ It then recounts how Nuwa attempted to breach the centre of Djiliwirri by prising it open with a crowbar. Though unable to enter, the force of Djiliwirri’s resistance was so fierce that sparks flew forth and ignited fires at a spring called Buŋu, where they remain embedded in the ground as termite mounds.⁵²

When Yolŋu people sing of such remembrances in either traditional or contemporary songs, they evoke enduring reminders of how their forbears made and enforced strategic choices about how they engaged with visiting Makassan seafarers, while simultaneously maintaining Yolŋu autonomy from foreign influence. In ‘Djiliwirri’, the right of its Gupapuyŋu owners to access this homeland is evidenced through mention of their ceremonial ganiny, an elongated double-ended wooden lance that was originally given to them for hunting forest honey by the mokuy ancestor, Murayana.⁵³ This is juxtaposed with the song’s later mention of the metal barrara (crowbar) carried by Nuwa, which is an alien tool that provides no access whatsoever, only Djiliwirri’s fierce resistance.

Balancing the potential benefit of trade with foreigners against suspicion of foreign motives is also a guiding theme of Yothu Yindi’s earliest song, ‘Djäpana: Sunset Dreaming’.⁵⁴ Drawing on manikay for the Gumatj homeland of Bawaka, it too references the sad fate of a beautiful Bayini woman, named Djotarra, who was imprisoned in the hold of Gurrumulŋa’s vessel, Mätjala. As Mätjala sailed away into djäpana, the coral sunset, through Bawaka’s shallow waters, it struck a rock and sank, drowning all aboard. Its wreckage now remains there as a rocky islet called Binhanhaŋay.⁵⁵

The chorus of ‘Djäpana: Sunset Dreaming’ quotes a Gumatj manikay item on the subject of djäpana that mourns the tragedy of Djotarra’s loss as the coral sunset fades across the horizon. Its second and third verses transpose attendant Yolŋu suspicions of foreign motives onto strained intercultural relationships between different peoples in Australia in the present day, warning that Indigenous people should not be fooled by the ways of newer Australians.⁵⁶ Gurrumul Yunupiŋu’s later popular song, ‘Bayini’, which he composed with Sarah Blasko, presents a more romanticised and optimistic treatment of this ancestral narrative to build new bridges between cultures.⁵⁷

Mätjala also returns in the title of a later popular song by Yothu Yindi that celebrates the matrilineal descent bond between the Gumatj clan and its waku (women’s children) in the Rirratjiŋu clan.⁵⁸ It too directly quotes a Gumatj manikay item on this subject. The term Mätjala is now commonly used to identify all children of Gumatj women in reference to the splintered shards of driftwood that broke away from the hull of Mätjala when it sank.⁵⁹

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have shown how Yolŋu music and culture retain profound influences from long contact histories with Makassan and other seafaring peoples who visited north-east Arnhem Land from beyond the Arafura Sea. This long history of contact has contributed immensely to forming traditional Yolŋu understandings of foreign exchanges that continue to inform Yolŋu engagements across cultures to this day.

Yolŋu ceremonial traditions retain many song, dance and design elements that recount historical exchanges with Makassan seafarers, the boats in which they sailed and the goods they carried. They have long incorporated recognisable themes and materials drawn from Yolŋu observations of their shared past with Makassans, while simultaneously asserting Yolŋu sovereignty over their homelands and their autonomy from foreign influences.

Since the 1980s, these ceremonial traditions and contact histories have further contributed to inspiring new forms of cultural expression, including innovations in Yolŋu popular music, that overtly reach out across cultures. The wide acceptance of Yolŋu popular music by Yolŋu people as a coherent extension of the manikay tradition is largely due to the latter’s underlying extensibility. The manikay tradition has always been capable of recording and transmitting new understandings of the world such as those brought by historical Makassan trade.

Today, this dynamic spectrum of musical expressions celebrates an autonomous history of Yolŋu exchanges with foreigners that predate the 1788 onset of British occupation in Australia. They convey Yolŋu assertions of sovereignty and autonomy that are an intrinsic trait of how Yolŋu people understand and negotiate the otherness of foreigners, and their contemporary engagements with them, as preordained by the original waŋarr.

Tradition

Regarding tradition, Islanders have benefitted because some music traditions were propitiously documented in the late-colonial era by the CAE. Consequently, those documentations are significant for contemporary Islanders. Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940) was a driving force behind early academic research about Islanders. Initially a biologist and zoologist and later an anthropologist and ethnologist, Haddon first came to Torres Strait in 1888 to study marine life but also became intrigued by Islander society and culture. He returned in 1898 as director of the CAE, which was unique for its time in the broad expertise and interests of the team of researchers; the resulting six Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits of its research (1901–1935)¹⁰ ‘represent the most detailed corpus of ethnographic information on a group of Indigenous Australians from the nineteenth century’.¹¹

Photography and film were used to record dances, music-making and re-staged ceremonies; wax cylinders were used to record traditional music and singing; and the records included notations of music descriptions of the instruments used and the social context of their use.¹² Even if the cultural activities documented are commonly now out of living memory for contemporary Islanders, the audio recordings, ethnographic films and photographs provide aural and visual glimpses of music at the end of the nineteenth century.

Musical traditions were key social and cultural practices figuring conspicuously in the CAE’s research agenda. Charles Myers observed:

In the Torres Strait region at the time, and on the mainland later, there most certainly was the ‘importation of foreign airs’, not only Anglo-Australian and European ‘airs’ but also Pacific Islander and Asian ‘airs’. For example, in 1881–1882, years before the CAE, the visitor Edward James Cairn diarised an impromptu Islander performance on a rainy night in the eastern islands: ‘They sang native words to tunes of Home Sweet Home, God Save the Queen & after a while one reached down a large tom [tom-tom/drum] and after drying by the fire the skin stretched over one end [to tighten it] commenced to beat it and then all adjourned outside the house and three of the natives commenced dancing.’¹⁵ Undoubtedly, Islanders had to adjust to the ‘audibility of strangers’ in their midst as the community soundscapes, both natural and human, changed.¹⁶ Some of the introduced music (and dance) and music-making practices were adopted, some adapted and some discarded, but all contributed to the eventual eclecticism of contemporary ‘Ailan style’ music (and dance) as truly multicultural.

So, what were some kinds of traditional music that were documented and preserved for future generations by the CAE? What ‘true echoes’ of historical soundscapes remain for Islanders to hear?¹⁷ What films and historical photographs remain for Islanders to see after over 120 years? Islander drums, known in broad linguistic terms as warup (in Meriam Mir) or buruburu (in Kala Lagaw Ya), are wooden, single-headed membranophones, with variations in style (e.g., size, shape) and decoration (e.g., painting, incising, carving). Most were sourced from what is now Papua New Guinea’s Western Province.¹⁸ Some of the other instruments surveyed by the CAE have disappeared from common use in the Torres Strait (e.g., jaws harps, flutes, pan pipes). However, a range of other sound-producing, mostly percussive instruments were described and are still used, including bamboo slit-drums (marap thram/lumut), bamboo clappers (marap) and rattles/shakers (kulap/gor).¹⁹ There was also what Haddon described as a trumpet or, more accurately, probably a bu-shell (Syrinx aruanus) used for signalling and to mark community events. Along with other marine shells, they had ceremonial significance as material expressions of spiritual belief. Islanders still use the bu-shell as an aural, visual and symbolic marker of Islander identity.

Haddon noted, ‘Songs may be accompanied by drum-beating on ceremonial or festive occasions, and may be sung, spoken in recitative in a humming tone, or even muttered. It is impossible to draw a hard and fast line between different classes of songs … Singing in one form or another enters nearly every ceremony.’²⁰ However, there were strict rules as to who could drum or sing in particular ceremonies or social situations. The linguistic aspects of songs and singing were fluid, as Haddon also noted:

Given some early London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries were from Polynesia, and many Islanders were and are still very linguistically and musically adept, it is not surprising they could readily learn the new Christian hymns’ melodies and imitate the pronunciation of words with little in-depth knowledge of the textual meaning. This was comparable to what had happened previously within ‘the great traffic of tunes’, which, as noted by Myers, were sung in various languages. It is also not surprising that dances changed with the prohibition of previous styles and the introduction of Polynesian-style sit-down dances. More exuberant dance styles such as those from the island of Rotuma allowed ‘approved’ dancing to continue, albeit driven musically by the centrality of Islander drums and other percussion and visually through the use of Islander adapted adornment and dance paraphernalia.²²

A fortuitous result of the 1898 documentation of music tradition is that there is not only a paper trail for Islanders to follow but also an aural and visual trail to help them celebrate, reclaim and sustain facets of their traditional music culture. That opportunity applies not only to those living in the Torres Strait region but also to the now clear majority of Islanders who have travelled to the mainland and remain there. As Islander community advocate Eddie Koiki Mabo, who was born on Mer but lived for decades on the mainland, has noted, ‘Songs that were recorded by Haddon in 1898 were still alive in 1960.’²³ Similarly, when anthropologist Jeremy Beckett recorded songs on Mer Island in the late 1950s, there were songs performed which had a pre-colonial provenance.²⁴

Travel

Historically, Islanders were long-distance traders from their home islands with their sailing canoes. They navigated the Torres Strait region, as trade goods moved between southern New Guinea coastal areas and Aboriginal areas on Cape York Peninsula in a chain of customary exchange networks.²⁵ Travel was crucial to a local economy where resources were traded between isolated islands with different kinds of marine and terrestrial environments and resources.

So, what traditions of music travelled to the Australian mainland?²⁶ An early cohort of economic sojourners travelling to the mainland was from the Murray Islands, an important site for the CAE’s music research. The personal experiences of one member, Reverend Elimo Tapim, originally from the island of Mer, highlight the importance of music in maintaining and sustaining connections with the traditions of home islands, as well as adapting to changes in Islander sociality and culture over time, place and situation.

Reverend Tapim was born on Mer in 1942 and is a member of the Dauareb clan. He first came to the mainland in 1960 and has lived in Townsville for decades. Townsville, Cairns and Mackay are some of the Queensland coastal towns now with large Islander populations. As well as being an Anglican priest, he also worked within the education sector and is active in Islander community music events in both sacred and secular contexts. He has clear memories of his immersion in traditional Islander music and dance as a child on Mer: ‘My first memory of warup was because of my dad. He was a dancer. And there was always a drum beating when people [were] singing. And every time when you heard the noise, it woke your spirit up … We don’t teach one another [the drum beats or dance steps] like today’s style [on the mainland] – like you have to [be] trained. It was just [an] automatic thing.’²⁷ He is also connected through marriage to the iconic Islander ceremonial drum Wasikor, which was mentioned and photographed by the CAE.²⁸

When Reverend Tapim left his home island almost empty-handed, a main reason was economic. The pearling industry had rebounded momentarily post-war but then the widespread introduction of plastic for buttons, changing fashions and the emerging perliculture industry (pearl farming) led to its irrevocable decline: ‘The price on pearl and trochus [shell] was going down and most of the men-folk they left their home seeking for a better job to support their families … I worked on the railway because a lot of family [did too]. My cousin was a leading hand on the railway gang, so I got a job much easier that way … [I] arrived with no wallet, no nothing, just a suitcase.’²⁹ Railway work suited employers and Islanders because the fettler gang members were strong and healthy, had a good work ethic and spoke some English. They were also often related or from the same island and thus had an internal hierarchy based on kinship, family and age-grade seniority.

One activity helping to keep spirits up during many months away from family and friends in an unforgiving new climate was music. In railway mess halls and canteens, it was common for Islander men to sing. Reverend Tapim recalls:

Music also helped coordinate some work duties, particularly when a large group of Islander men working with crowbars moved and adjusted heavy railway tracks.³¹

Reverend Tapim also remembers how during his first years in western Queensland, entertainment had to be self-made: ‘You know there was nothing there. We just a bunch of guys working together. And pay day we will be just meeting at the pub there. You know, just drink, singing and dancing.’ They had to improvise to put an Islander touch on the music, because although there were a few guitars or ukuleles available, there were no drums or percussion – two key components of Islander music. Islander drums (warup/buruburu) were too bulky, the snake-skin tympanum too fragile and personal possessions too limited for them to be readily transported. To approximate Islander percussion, the best they could initially do was to fashion kulap/gor rattles/shakers using the one material readily available at a canteen pub: metal beer bottle tops. However, for the Islander railway workers, music was a double-edged sword. Although it might temporarily help with homesickness, it also reminded them of their families and home islands. The mainland was not only far away, foreign and freezing in winter but also overwhelmingly non-Indigenous.

Notwithstanding the equivocal emotional aspect of music for Islander railway workers, Reverend Tapim recalled how he was finally able to get a drum on the mainland: ‘My first warup was when [we railway workers were] camped at Proserpine and we used to go out every payday to Airlie Beach [on the Coral Sea coast of Queensland] and there was a [tourist] shop there that was selling drums.’ If a skin burst or ripped due to the extreme dry heat or cold, he could get a replacement skin from friends on Saibai Island, which is only a few kilometres away from the villages on the Papua New Guinea coast in Western Province where traditional trading networks were still maintained.³²

Islanders in the early post-World War II diaspora, such as railway workers, had to improvise to keep a connection to music, be it via singing or dancing. As the diaspora increased and Islanders stayed on the mainland, family and personal networks meant more instruments could be sourced and, with steady work, afforded. Islanders also learned about useable mainland materials such as goanna skin (Varanidae/monitor lizard) for drum skins, lawyer cane (Calamus australis) for binding and local beeswax to tighten up drum heads. Over several generations, keeping the connections between those who had travelled to the mainland, their families and communities in the Torres Strait region was a challenge, but it remained a focus for Reverend Tapim and other concerned community members and educators. A crucial activity for youth was using music and dance to sustain their cultural ‘Islander-ness’. Another cross-generational activity was encouraging the use of ‘language hymns’ in worship, where traditional language use is allowed by some Christian denominations.³³ In Reverend Tapim’s opinion, the cultural activities in schools such as music and dance were very important for non-Indigenous students also; in the mainstream media they are frequently presented with negative depictions of Indigenous peoples.

The factors of isolation and the relative lack of the mainland’s wider opportunities meant there was a persistent ‘pull’ to relocate ‘down south’ – even with the establishment of representative local government in the Torres Strait region, Native Title decisions and improvements in access to education, health and other governmental services.³⁴ Music provided one avenue of – and forum for – general agreement and sustained shared cultural practices between diasporic mainland populations of Islanders and those who remained on their home islands.

Change

Changes in Islanders’ music as a cultural practice have seen some forms being adapted or revived, while some have cohered after the diaspora.

Some cultural practices documented by the CAE at the end of the nineteenth century have survived, perhaps altered but still intact in their essence. In particular, dance and its attendant music, music-making and often feasting remain vital social and cultural practices. Family and community-based music and dance for personalised cultural events such as tombstone unveilings, marriages and non-invasive male initiation ceremonies such as first shave retain their importance in the Torres Strait region and on the mainland.³⁵ Similarly, there are also key religious events such as the commemoration of the arrival of Christianity on 1 July 1871 at Erub (Darnley Island) by the LMS on the boat Surprise. That event, The Coming of the Light, is celebrated by many Islanders, regardless of Christian denominational affiliation. Another widely recognised pan-Islander community event is Mabo Day (3 June), in honour of Eddie Koiki Mabo (and the other Mer Island claimants David Passi, Sam Passi, James Rice, Celuia Mapo Salee) in the High Court’s Native Title decision (3 June 1992).

In all such cultural events the use of warup/buruburu drums and other Islander percussion is common; they have become part of what can be appreciated as key components of Islanders’ ‘aural ethnicity’:³⁶ presenting sounds and images which have come to symbolise the culture, similar to how they did when the CAE researched and recorded their traditional use.³⁷ One major contemporary difference is how events and performances can be easily documented via digital film and audio recordings and disseminated on social media. Consequently, the physical distance between home islands and diasporic communities is no longer a detriment to reinforcing or revitalising cultural practices.

Nonetheless, diaspora to the mainland has had profound effects on Islander culture there, such as the use, viability and maintenance of traditional music and languages, similar to developments in the Torres Strait region. However, one cultural practice where some traditional language use has been retained is in sacred music.³⁸ This is important to sustain the two endangered traditional languages and their dialects. But how long languages can be sustained is unknown if Torres Strait Creole/Yumpla Tok continues to predominate in both locations.³⁹

Just as Islanders are a demographic minority within an Indigenous minority, their music has had a less expansive and different commercial trajectory than the music of Aboriginal peoples in Australia. Commercially recorded Islander music emerged fully in the Torres Strait region in the late 1980s and early 1990s with albums by the Mills Sisters: Cessa Nakata (b. 1927), Ina Titasey (1927–2014) and Rita Fell-Tyrrell (1934–2004).⁴⁰ They were connected to Islander communities at Naghir Island and Thursday Island. The siblings played guitar, ukulele and percussion and sang harmony to Islander songs in several traditional languages, along with popular songs in English.⁴¹ They did not start their career at local pubs until they were in their fifties. Some people referred to them as the ‘Singing Grandmas’. They eventually toured nationally and internationally as entertainers in the ‘world music scene’. They performed in an unadorned and straightforward style as was apt for their generation’s rendering of Islander music as ‘roots’, albeit very eclectic, folk music.

Another recording artist of an older generation who emerged in the early 2000s was Henry ‘Seaman’ Dan (1929–2020). A former deep-water pearl-shell diver, pearling lugger skipper and mineral prospector, he was born on Thursday Island in 1929 and also started his recording career late in life at the age of seventy. He learnt his early music from Islander and Aboriginal musicians (folk and country-western) and also from African American military (jazz) musicians stationed in Cairns, Queensland, during World War II. He was of mixed cultural heritage and not from a traditional-language-speaking community. Therefore, he was not confined to a home island reserve under government policies of island-based or linguistically based forced displacements. He was allowed to live on Thursday Island, where he absorbed the multicultural and multilingual music being celebrated at private ‘house parties’, where his mother played accordion or visitors danced to 78 rpm records.

Though a late starter, ‘Seaman’ Dan recorded eight albums and won several prestigious national music awards, as well as the noteworthy national civic award, Member of the Order of Australia (AM) (2020).⁴² He sang, wrote and adapted songs in a range of eclectic styles, including blues, hula, folk, comedy, jazz and ‘slow-drag’ fox trots. He recorded his last album at eighty-seven years of age and actively performed locally until then.

In an early pre-World War II diaspora of Islanders or part-Islanders to the mainland, the descendants of West Indian colonial-era sailor Douglas Pitt Senior were noted as fine singers and dancers.⁴³ Three of the Cairns-based Pitt sisters, Dulcie, Heather and Sophie, and their brother Walter were all-round entertainers; they could sing, dance and play instruments. They entertained in the broader community and during World War II performed for troops stationed in north Queensland. They eventually entertained ‘down south’ and Dulcie (1921–2010) branched out as a soloist, performing as Georgia Lee.⁴⁴ She became a fixture on the jazz ‘scenes’ in Sydney and Melbourne before going to the United Kingdom and working as a vocalist with the top society band, Geraldo. When she eventually returned to Australia, she continued to perform and toured with Nat King Cole in 1957, but also acted in movies. The next generation of the Pitt family also maintained their links to Islander musicality; for example, Wilma Reading performed internationally with top jazz orchestras, such as those of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and on television.

Christine Anu (b. 1970), a well-known Islander singer, dancer and actress, is based on the mainland. Her connection is to Saibai Island, and she trained in dance at the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA).⁴⁵ As well as recording numerous albums and songs – including the Torres Strait Islander song and sit-down dance ‘Taba Naba’ with the children’s group The Wiggles – she has also appeared in big-budget films such as Moulin Rouge, stage musicals such as Little House of Horrors and Rent, and numerous television shows.⁴⁶ She sang the iconic ‘My Island Home’ at the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics to a global audience. She has traversed various contemporary styles of music but has consistently maintained links to Islander musical culture in the Torres Strait in her live performances.

Another mainland-raised Islander is Will Kepa. His connections are to Iama (Yam Island) and he has worked as an audio engineer, producer and multi-skilled instrumentalist and arranger.⁴⁷ As a composer and songwriter, his soundtracks have been used for documentaries and television series. He is currently studying in the School of Music and also managing the Indigenous recording studio Yil Lull at the Australian National University in Canberra.⁴⁸ His musical background includes working as a musician and audio engineer for numerous projects in Torres Strait and Far North Queensland communities, as well as performances with Henry ‘Seaman’ Dan, the multicultural group Austranesia, a project celebrating Islander contributions as fettlers on Australia’s northern railway networks (Straight from the Strait Songlines) and diverse commercial and cultural artists and bands. Other contemporary Islander recording artists and performers focus on sacred and secular music.⁴⁹

Many Islander songwriters in both the Torres Strait and on the mainland draw upon some aspects of traditional music.⁵⁰ One common style is to use traditional chants in songs, often as a repetitive chorus or bridge/middle eight.⁵¹ However, the verses may well be in English, and Islander percussion is used as a marker of ‘aural ethnicity’.

Conclusion

Islander music practices may now be pan-regional, but Islander cultural protocols still have their roots in the home islands and communities. For many Islanders, managing and interweaving culture and music are paramount concerns, especially when they contain traditional elements and practices, such as those documented by the CAE and noted in other accounts. As exhibited by contemporary music in the Torres Strait region and on the mainland, there remain ‘true echoes’ reverberating in Islander music. They broadcast, literally and figuratively, how sustainability is ongoing and how the components of historical cultural soundscapes remain relevant to keeping vital those connections between home islands, communities and diasporic Islanders – even if they are generations removed from them.

Song and Language Revitalisation

Music is at the core of the most successful examples of Indigenous language revitalisation worldwide in Hawaii and New Zealand. However, a ‘language cannot be saved by singing a few songs’, and public performance is not necessarily an instant remedy for issues of language endangerment and intergenerational trauma.²⁰ Notwithstanding the diverse histories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and challenges to their vitality, communities continue to value their languages highly. In some communities, endangered Indigenous languages may be so venerated that some individuals may not feel confident enough to engage in language revitalisation programmes for fear of making mistakes.²¹ Jagera and Dulingbara linguist Jeanie Bell discusses how many Aboriginal people in Australia feel ‘sadness, regret and sometimes anger that we did not have a chance to speak the “languages of the land”, our heritage languages’.²² Trauma associated with the suppression or absence of language can inhibit language revitalisation and Indigenous communities can be understandably wary of sharing their languages and songs with non-Indigenous people.²³

In a relatively short space of time since the early 1970s, the public and institutional denigration of Aboriginal languages and culture in the land now known as Australia has given way to interest and even celebration. Suddenly, Indigenous songs have become important as evidence for Native Title and emerging opportunities associated with tourism, land development, academia and the arts.²⁴ However, Arrernte writer Celeste Liddle observes that in these domains ‘[w]hen language is used or gifted, it is either maimed through thoughtlessness and mispronunciation, or it is downright rejected’.²⁵ Describing this lingering disregard for Aboriginal languages among non-Indigenous Australians, Liddle states:

In the face of continued struggle, singing in your own endangered Indigenous language can be empowering and healing.²⁷ However, in institutional and public contexts across the land now known as Australia, this can be a tricky thing to do.

Senior Aboriginal people have long used music to teach languages in clandestine ways that would keep the younger generations safe. In her 1951 book Music Has Roots, Anna Vroland reported ten songs from Aboriginal groups, one of them being ‘Bura Fera’, the Yorta Yorta version of the hymn ‘Turn Back Pharaoh’s Army’. Translated by elder Mrs Therese Middleton and written down by Lou’s great-great-grandfather Thomas Shadrach James, ‘Bura Fera’ was popularised in the 2012 movie The Sapphires. Here was a ground-breaking moment for Yorta Yorta language to infiltrate major cinemas, reaching global audiences who had never heard an Aboriginal language before. Exceeding all expectations, ‘Bura Fera’ became a YouTube sensation, reaching far and wide across the globe, with soloists, duets and trios, family groups, school and community choirs, students and musicians alike singing their own versions. Within its original pretext of encouraging church attendance, ‘Bura Fera’ provided a rare opportunity to sing Yorta Yorta language in safety, without fear of violence or punishment from the mission manager.

Singing is meaningful in the context of Country but also as an act of resilience and resistance to settler-colonialism. Aboriginal music is always political and singing in an Indigenous language can ‘unsettle white Australia’s sense of belonging’.²⁸ In response, institutions and audiences in the land now known as Australia still tend to position its original languages as ‘exotic and somewhere else’,²⁹ as evidenced by Yolŋu artist Gurrumul Yunupiŋu being pigeonholed in the Australian Recording Industry Awards’ category for world music despite his output being aesthetically consistent with the ‘adult contemporary’ genre. His musical collaborator Michael Hohnen stated, ‘[i]t’s a shame when you sing in an Australian language that you get labelled “ethnic”’.³⁰ Despite publicly stated desires to embrace Indigenous music, desperately few opportunities are afforded to Indigenous communities to nourish and sustain song traditions at their core.³¹ Recent opportunities to showcase Aboriginal languages in music, including the performance of translated anthems at sporting events, do not necessarily engage with the original song traditions of the land now known as Australia on their own terms.

In the context of Indigenous language revitalisation, song has proven to be a popular and reasonably effective language-learning tool for children and adults, increasing awareness of appropriate sounds, rhythms and intonations.³² For example, a Kaurna songbook was crucial to language revitalisation around Adelaide, South Australia, throughout the 1990s.³³ School-based learning often involves Aboriginal-language translations of English tunes, although some teachers also advocate the use of more ‘traditional’ Aboriginal songs in language-learning settings.³⁴ The dynamic relationship between song and language can complicate both approaches.

There is frequently more to be considered in translation activities than the simple substitution of isolated Aboriginal terms into an English-language framework. Teachers adapting English-language musical staples like ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ must avoid presenting the human body as a dissected and isolated entity rather than an integral part of Country. Our ‘body’ and the bodies of all beings frequently share language with the landscape. For example, in the Noongar language kaat is mountain and head, and bonitj is island and knee. In Dja Dja Wurrung, kalk is a term for bone, stick and certain trees. Arbitrary translation of English songs into Aboriginal languages risks undermining the foundational values and connections to Country and kin embedded in our languages.

Aboriginal songs embody these connections, but in many long-standing singing practices, sung language can be pronounced and structured differently from spoken language.³⁵ The polysemy and poetic design of Aboriginal songs can also embed them with multiple layers of meaning and allow for various interpretations by people across time and space.³⁶ Deep understanding of the poetics of song and the ability to create new songs in old styles is usually one of the first casualties of language loss.³⁷ Aboriginal songs may be challenging for people in the early stages of language learning to understand, but they can certainly be inspiring.³⁸ For example, new Noongar songs created in the old style invigorated language learning for the cast of Hecate, the Noongar adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and among high-school students in the south of Western Australia.³⁹

Original Languages in Popular Music

Although not necessarily constituting a musical genre, the many varieties of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musical expression are unified by their potential to share local Indigenous perspectives with broad national and global audiences, and increasingly, by their inclusion of Indigenous language content.⁴⁰ In ‘a major work by one of Australia’s most important cultural ensembles’, Black Arm Band Company’s 2009 production Dirtsong was performed in eleven Aboriginal languages, some of which had not been spoken or heard for over 150 years.⁴¹ Today, more than seventy examples of music videos for commercially released singles featuring Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander languages are currently available online via YouTube, most of which have been produced over the past decade. The year 2022 marked the beginning of the United Nations Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032), and musical activity involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages continues to ramp up across Australia. While the present moment is marked by a burgeoning interest and excitement, there is a long history of Indigenous-led public advocacy for Indigenous languages and musical traditions in the domain of popular music.

Back in 1945, long before the internet era, Wulli Wulli tenor Harold Blair was one of the first Aboriginal singers on the radio in the land now known as Australia. So broad was his impact that ‘Aboriginal inmates of faraway Fremantle Gaol [Western Australia] celebrated as they “listened in”’ to his performance broadcast from Brisbane’s Lyric Theatre in Queensland.⁴² In 1956 Blair recorded his only commercial release, a 7-inch EP of Australian Aboriginal Songs,⁴³ mostly derived from a 1937 manuscript collection of songs from southern Queensland transcribed and translated by H. O. Lethbridge.⁴⁴ Again demonstrating Blair’s cross-continental impact, in 1958 Noongar soprano Nancy Ellis from Katanning, Western Australia, performed the ‘Hunting Song’ from Australian Aboriginal Songs on national television.⁴⁵

Despite its relative lack of commercial success, the EP is a significant milestone as a work in Aboriginal languages presented by an Aboriginal recording artist. In the 1950s, non-Indigenous Australians rarely understood or appreciated the cultural and linguistic diversity of Aboriginal peoples. As a result, the material on Australian Aboriginal Songs was presented and performed publicly as ‘Aboriginal’ music, decontextualised from the regional origins of the songs themselves and the language content within. Almost a century after the release of Australian Aboriginal Songs, senior Gunggari woman Ethel Munn began singing songs from the Lethbridge collection with her local community as an act of language reclamation, stating, ‘I’ve always believed it’s easier to sing in languages than it is to talk in it … Because the language has been lost for so long it’s very difficult to pick up where we left off.’⁴⁶ Blair’s EP sits precariously between two eras, the early twentieth century, when these songs were transcribed, and the early twenty-first century, as they are being sung anew in their communities of origin.

Harold Blair and Nancy Ellis broke barriers in terms of the inclusion of Aboriginal song in broadcasting in the 1950s, but in 1983 Warumpi Band’s song ‘Jailanguru Pakarnu’ (Out from Jail) was acknowledged as the first single in an Indigenous language to be commercially released and appear on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s music television programme Countdown (1974–1987). ‘Jailanguru Pakarnu’ is sung completely in Luritja, a language from Papunya, Northern Territory. Kalaw Kawaw Ya and Kala Lagaw Ya singer from the Torres Strait Christine Anu explains that as creators of ‘the first rock song in an Aboriginal language to achieve widespread airplay and recognition’, Warumpi Band ‘set the precedent for future Indigenous composers to write in their own mother tongue and celebrate Aboriginal culture and values’.⁴⁷ Around the time ‘Jailanguru Pakarnu’ hit the airwaves, artists from many corners of the land now known as Australia, including Soft Sands, Isaac Yamma, Josie Boyle, Jimmy Chi and Kuckles, and Bapu Mamoos, were also incorporating Indigenous languages into a diverse array of popular music genres.

The surge in Indigenous musical expression throughout the 1980s led to another seminal moment in popular music history. Yothu Yindi’s ‘Treaty’ (The Filthy Lucre Remix) reached number eleven on the ARIA singles charts in 1992, being the first single performed almost completely in an Indigenous language (Gumatj of Arnhem Land, Northern Territory) to do so. It also charted overseas. Yothu Yindi’s leader Mandawuy Yunupiŋu explained how an archival audio recording of his great-great-grandmother’s brother’s son performing was returned to his community and triggered the composition of the Gumatj sections in ‘Treaty’.⁴⁸ The Filthy Lucre Remix version of the track remains a staple of DJ sets and is still heard in clubs around the world.⁴⁹ The commercial success of the remix over the original version of the song has been attributed to its de-politicisation on account of excising most of the English-language lyrics, which describe the Australian federal government’s failure to negotiate a treaty with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.⁵⁰ However, the English lyrics had been written collaboratively with non-Indigenous songwriters Paul Kelly and Peter Garrett, and Yunupiŋu explicitly instructed Melbourne production team Filthy Lucre to retain the ‘Yolŋu side, the Aboriginal side … so that it doesn’t lose the magic that we’ve got’.⁵¹ While most of the lyrics in the remixed version are unintelligible to non-speakers of Gumatj, they serve a powerful symbolic function, reminding listeners of the presence and persistence of languages and songs of Country over which sovereignty was never ceded.⁵²

The United Nations Assembly has declared the next ten years the decade of Indigenous languages, and so it is important too to highlight some of the current work that many Indigenous artists, musicians and performers are doing and have done for the past twenty to thirty years to sustain song traditions into the future. Much of this work is inspired by oral traditions of song, sometimes augmented by engagement with audio recordings and written records, and always focused on Country. Artists releasing popular music in otherwise underrepresented Aboriginal languages include Deline Briscoe and Troy Brady (Yalanji),⁵³ Emma Donovan (Gumbayngirr),⁵⁴ Gina Williams (Noongar), Theona Councillor (Naaguja) and Ripple Effect Band (Ndjébbana, Na-Kara, Burarra, Kune, Kunwinjku).⁵⁵

Sharing Songs

While commercial popular music is a dynamic new domain for sustaining Indigenous languages, songs have always been shared across the land now known as Australia.⁵⁶ This was even clear to early ethnographers including William Howitt, reporting in his nineteenth-century notes on Kulin ‘song-makers’:

Howitt continues to report that one song travelled exceptionally far from what seemed to be its place of origin, stating ‘[t]he distance between these extreme points is about five hundred miles in a direct line, but it by no means gives the length of the course followed by the song in its travels’.⁵⁸ Similar colonial observations about the respect for song-makers and the ways in which songs travelled through communities were recorded across the land now known as Australia.⁵⁹

Indigenous song contributes to the maintenance of knowledge and social harmony.⁶⁰ While some songs are necessarily restricted to special people, places and purposes, Aboriginal travelling songs were once the continent’s most popular and widespread music. One such song, known by various names including ‘Wanji-wanji’, was known and performed ‘from Esperance in the south-west to the Victoria River District in the north, and from Broome to Wilcannia in New South Wales’ and is still sung is certain places today.⁶¹ It is regarded as a ‘song with no boss’, as no one knows its exact language or place of origin. The enduring popularity of ‘Wanji-wanji’ demonstrates appreciation for Aboriginal song as not just poetic oral literature, but music. Amongst Indigenous performers and song-makers today, it also is evident that the sharing and trading of songs with neighbouring groups, and other practices of song custodianship, continue.

Many recent research projects on Aboriginal song involve working with archival audio recordings and the descendants of recorded singers to develop ways to reconnect with songs that may not have been heard in a very long time.⁶² Many singers have spent countless hours with archival audio to reclaim and share their regional song traditions, including Ngarluma man Patrick Churnside focusing on taabi songs of the Pilbara, Western Australia;⁶³ Jesse Hodgetts learning to sing old songs in support of the continued revival of Ngiyampaa and Wiradjuri dance of New South Wales;⁶⁴ a collective including Rona Charles and Johnny Divilli reviving Junba in the Kimberley, Western Australia;⁶⁵ and Clint workshopping old songs among Noongar community groups and artists ahead of creating new ones.⁶⁶ Factors including cultural suppression, the global exploitation of Indigenous music,⁶⁷ plus various local dynamics associated with the politics of identity and belonging can make families and communities wary of sharing old songs, even if such songs may have been widely known and sung in the past. The Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property Rights, born out of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), reflects the need for Indigenous ways of being, knowing and living to be considered, acknowledged and embedded within Australian legislation, protecting the rights of community-owned cultural heritage material such as songs.

Lou’s programme titled Sovereign Language Rematriation through Song Pedagogy (SLR), specialises in Indigenous community engagement rematriating Indigenous languages with outcomes such as the establishment of song repertoires, choirs, performances and audio and visual recordings. In addition, the SLR programme content includes ethics protocols and practices, Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property Rights (ICIPR), copyright law in Australasia, arts business management and Indigenous arts business production models. Lou continues to write songs in her languages of Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Wurrung. Drawing on over thirty years of experience in the arts, Lou builds capacity in communities, leaving an everlasting legacy of cultural ontological practices.

In the early nineties the group Tiddas recorded two Indigenous language songs: ‘Inanay’ and ‘No Goon No Pah’. Both songs were taught to Lou by family and in turn were taught to the other members of the band, Sally Dastey and Amy Saunders. Teaching and later recording the songs, Tiddas acknowledged that they were accountable to the songs, protecting and carrying the songs for their lifetime. This meant several responsibilities would occur. Copyright of the song and the royalties made by the performances of the songs would go back to the community. All requests for the songs’ use that came to Tiddas were vetted and researched to make sure the songs would not be abused or used in a disrespectful manner. All attribution would be attributed to Tiddas’ arrangement of the songs and not to an ‘ownership’ or ‘composer’. This was a work-around so that the songs’ royalties would come directly to the band, and any moneys earned distributed to community organisations instead of the funds sitting in an unretrievable account labelled ‘traditional’ and not being dispersed to community.

Conclusion

As performers and scholars invested in sustaining the original sounds of the land now known as Australia, the authors of this chapter recognise the multilayered complexity of the endeavour, honour the legacy of those who came before us and acknowledge our peers and comrades in song. Despite the problematic history of how some recordings of songs were originally collected, archival recordings have proved valuable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in revitalising and sustaining their local traditions and developing new creative practices.⁶⁸ Regardless of what was recorded in the past, it is up to the people of today and tomorrow to speak and sing the languages of Country, and the responsibility to Ancestors, community and Country that comes with singing in an Indigenous language cannot be overstated. As we are custodians of knowledge and Country, we are custodians of song, art and dance. As song-makers we are conduits, receiving songs from kin, Ancestors, and Country itself. Song passes through us, not as a possession, rather as relational accountability and responsibility.

Early Reports and Performances

The minstrel troupe Lewis’ Original Georgia Jubilee Singers presented a programme in the Hobart Town Hall on Good Friday 1879 – perhaps the earliest African American concert performance in the colonies dedicated entirely to spirituals. Of the programme – ‘[w]hat may truthfully be termed a religious service’,¹⁰ especially given the occasion – it was reported that ‘“Swing low, sweet chariot,” was perhaps the most beautiful of all the numbers; “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” and the “Sweet By and By” being very attractive. Some of the songs, such as “Go down Moses” and others had a quaint simplicity that was almost ludicrous, though their fervour would silence a mocker.’¹¹ Some companies, such as Lewis’, combined minstrelsy and spiritual singing, that is, secular and sacred entertainment. Others, such as the Fisks, concentrated solely on the latter. When the Fisk Jubilee Singers arrived in Melbourne in 1886, colonial Christians and others had been prepared by the earlier arrivals to receive this new form of religious folk song that had circulated among enslaved populations in the southern United States, now reimagined through Western-style arrangements.¹²

The story of the Singers’ Australasian tour is now well known and has been researched and discussed from several perspectives.¹³ According to Patrick Rasico, over their time in Australia, the Fisks ‘gave eighty public concerts in Melbourne, sixty in Sydney, forty in Adelaide, thirty in Brisbane, and countless others in smaller towns’.¹⁴

After singing for Aboriginal and Māori groups in Australia and New Zealand, the Fisk director, Loudin, wrote:

The idea of organising an Aboriginal choir and taking it on tour predated the Fisk visit although it had possibly been initiated in response to news in Evangelical circles of the success of the Singers’ 1870s tours in Britain. It is likely, too, that establishing such a choir was prompted by the great emphasis placed on singing and social improvement in Victorian Britain. Singing was believed to instil moral virtues and hence was a ‘force for good’.¹⁶

As early as 1879 a group of Aboriginal singers from the Anglican Church Missionary Society mission at Lake Condah in southwest Victoria had visited Ballarat to perform ‘a selection of anthems and hymns’.¹⁷ It was declared that ‘their voices possessed a very large share of sweetness and pathos, and that the time and precision shown were quite surprising’.¹⁸ By the mid 1880s news was circulating that the ‘latest novelty in church music is an aboriginal [sic] choir, which is singing in some of the churches. The company consists of four young men and five “lubras” [women].’¹⁹ One listener who heard the choir at Lake Condah believed it ‘would be a credit even to a metropolitan church’.²⁰ The choir toured townships in Victoria to raise funds to build a stone church at the mission.

Aboriginal and South Sea Islander Encounters

It is well known that the Fisk Singers ‘created a profound sensation’²¹ among white audiences in Australia and New Zealand during their nearly three-and-a-half-year stay in the region,²² but the impact of the tour on local and regional Indigenous musical cultures has been less fully explored. A key moment that defined how some Aboriginal peoples came to value spirituals came on Friday 27 August 1886, when, at the invitation of the missionary Daniel Matthews, the Fisks sang for over one hundred Aboriginal residents at Maloga mission station on the New South Wales side of the Murray River. Bain Attwood writes, ‘It appears that the pain and suffering expressed by these songs allowed or enabled the Maloga people to express their pain and suffering.’²³ Attwood quotes from a letter Loudin wrote to an African American newspaper in Detroit: ‘Many of them wept as they listened to the weird plaintive melodies … more touched in fact by it than it has ever been our privilege in any other people.’²⁴ One account indicates that the meeting became a cultural exchange: the Singers ‘sang to the blacks, who reciprocated by displaying their vocal ability’²⁵ – singing the hymn, ‘Blest be the tie that binds’, according to Matthews.²⁶

Attwood notes that the Fisk visit in turn brought ‘another dimension’ to the Maloga people’s singing of gospel hymns.²⁷ A mere six weeks after the Singers visit, a Maloga vocal group was rendering jubilee songs including ‘Steal Away to Jesus’ and ‘Oh, Brothers Are You Getting Ready?’, ‘with a precision of time seldom equalled by European choirs’.²⁸ This observation suggests the writer was aware that the music was governed by ‘its own rules and conventions’, and had some notion of the songs’ aesthetic distinctiveness.²⁹ Attwood suggests that no spiritual was more important to the Maloga people than ‘Burra Phara’ [Bura Fera], a Yorta Yorta translation of ‘Turn Back Pharaoh’s Army’.³⁰

Nicole Anae chronicles what happened next, as Aboriginal performers and others associated with Maloga Mission became bearers of the spirituals to audiences ‘in churches and assembly halls in provincial towns throughout Victoria and New South Wales’, up to the late 1890s.³¹ Loudin departed Australia in 1889, and although Orpheus McAdoo, a member of the Fisks during its Australasian tour, continued to tour the country with his singers over the next decade, McAdoo never resumed the dialogue the Fisks began with the Maloga people. Indeed, from 1900 until the 1930s, apart from occasional performances of spirituals in various parts of the country, mission-organised Aboriginal singing groups largely dropped from sight.

From the 1860s to the early 1900s, South Sea Islanders, as they were known, were brought from Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and other Melanesian islands to Queensland and northern New South Wales to labour on farms and plantations. In the 1890s, the singing of one group of these Islanders was deemed to be of a standard that would allow them to successfully follow in the footsteps of the Fisk Singers as musician-fundraisers:

Here, at an early stage, the Black fundraising jubilee choir – as a commodity – provided the South Sea Island singers with a model to emulate.

The songs aside, Christians motivated by colonial concerns for the welfare of the South Sea Island labourers both saw and heard a racial affinity between these men and women and the touring African Americans. One observer in the late nineteenth century, who attempted to accompany Queensland plantation worker converts on a pump organ, recalled the experience in some detail:

Paul Anderson writes of the ‘romantic racialism’ that informed many friendly reactions to performances of the various Fisk touring singing groups over the decades, and how they ‘raised troubling questions about the ideological markers of racial difference and the shifting aesthetic borders between presumably natural and artistic expression’.³⁴

Uplift and Assimilation

In the 1930s and the 1940s, the Christian missionaries W. B. Payne at Cummeragunja, New South Wales, and Rodolphe Schenk near Laverton, Western Australia, expended considerable energy in developing and mobilising fundraising Aboriginal performance troupes that were redolent of jubilee and minstrel culture. Following a period of dissension between Maloga residents and the head missionary Matthews in the late 1880s, Maloga Mission was closed, and the residents relocated to Cummeragunja, six kilometres away. Payne arrived in Echuca in 1924 and became active as a Church of Christ lay preacher. In 1932 he formed a choir at Cummeragunja Mission, which eventually ‘toured some thousands of miles under his direct supervision, giving concerts at various centres’.³⁵ The spiritual ‘Turn Back Pharaoh’s Army’ was a constant in the choir’s repertoire, being sung ‘in Aboriginal’.³⁶ Given its subject about the Israelites’ flight from Egyptian bondage, it appears that the song had become a kind of emancipation anthem for Maloga and Cummeragunja residents, a dozen of whom, the year after the Fisk visit, had signed a petition to the New South Wales governor calling for the return of portions of their land.

Of Schenk’s group it was recorded, ‘They are a minstrel show, whose faces were blackened by nature rather than the smudge of a burnt cork.’³⁷ Spirituals featured prominently in the repertoire of each ensemble. It was Payne’s hope that the tours he organised would cause whites to ‘realise the capabilities of aborigines’³⁸ – that seeing and hearing the people perform would ‘bring home to white people the duty they owe to the colored folk’.³⁹ Schenk’s work of touring with the Mt Margaret Native Minstrels was interpreted at the time as an assimilationist effort towards ‘solving the native problem’ in Western Australia.⁴⁰ It is worth noting that neither Payne nor Schenk promoted Fisk-like entrepreneurialism among the Aboriginal musicians they supported.

A newspaper article acknowledging Payne’s work upon his departure for Victoria in 1941 explained that ‘by giving scope to the natural desire of these simple folk to express their emotions in song, he has been instrumental in bringing sunshine into their lives and raising them both mentally and spiritually to a higher plane’.⁴¹ For his part, despite ‘pressure from the mission constituency to focus purely on evangelism, from the beginning of his work in 1921, Schenk realised that a ministry to body and soul was needed to uplift the Wongutha’ Aboriginal people at Mt Margaret.⁴² It can be seen that the language and notion of uplift was applied to Aboriginal Australians from early in the twentieth century and retained currency even to the mid 1960s.⁴³ Importantly, settler driven notions of ‘uplift’ overlapped in rhetoric but differed substantially in conception from the African American driven and directed musical uplift movement of the early twentieth century. In the African American context, self-determination and cultural uplift were theoretically bound – that is, cultural uplift was conceptualised by African American intellectual leaders as a commitment to and reinvestment in African American culture. In the Australian context, the notion of uplift was discussed largely in non-Indigenous circles and essentially functioned as code for assimilation.⁴⁴

The Cummeragunja choir developed ‘an excellent reputation, having toured extensively in Victoria’, and in 1936 it was favourably compared with the Waiata Māori Choir, which had visited Australia the previous year.⁴⁵ This was an interesting comparison. Better known in New Zealand as the Methodist Home Mission Party, the Waiata ‘choir’ was a ‘pan-tribal’ Māori group that was established by the Methodist Arthur Seamer.⁴⁶ Through music and performance, Seamer aimed to portray ‘a vibrant choral picture of cooperation, which aimed to bridge the gap between Māori and Pākehā congregations apparent within Methodist communities’.⁴⁷ This was Payne’s aim too, and he was critical of white congregations’ apathy towards Aboriginal communities and churches.⁴⁸ It is quite possible he was influenced by Seamer’s vision, since following the Waiata Choir’s 1935 and 1937 tours of Australia, the Cummeragunja group began to be referred to as a ‘choir and concert party’,⁴⁹ diversified its repertoire, and its performances culminated in ‘a demonstration of the Native Corroboree dance’.⁵⁰

A regular item in Schenk’s Mt Margaret Native Minstrels’ mid-1940s performances was the presentation of a series of dramatic scenes ‘that portrayed the actual living incidents at Mt. Margaret from the early days of corroborees and spear fights to the present-day industrial and spiritual development’.⁵¹ The Mt Margaret group’s concerts featured ‘beautiful singing and negro spirituals’⁵² including ‘Jerusalem Morning’, ‘He Rose’, ‘Hear Dem Bells’, ‘I Want to Be There’, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, and ‘Sweet Is the Story’, the ‘outstanding feature’ of which singing was the ‘gift … for harmonising’.⁵³ The party also boasted a ‘percussion band’ that included ‘four mandolins, tambourines, gumleaves, accordions and drums’.⁵⁴

Payne and Schenk were drawing on old models of African American entertainment, forms that had peaked in popularity just after the turn of the twentieth century. To recall, the ‘idea to send a group of students on a tour to raise funds for an industrial school dated from the world tours in the 1870s of the Fisk Jubilee Singers from Tennessee’, as Veit Erlmann explains.⁵⁵ In 1947, Schenk’s Minstrels undertook a tour overland by three-ton truck across South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales that involved almost 7,000 miles of driving.⁵⁶ Responses to these performances continued to be characterized in romantic racialist terms. For example, a review of a Mt Margaret Minstrels concert in Albury, New South Wales, stated: ‘There is a charm about the singing of Australian natives which grips; its very artlessness is captivating and arouses enthusiasm. Wherever they have gone, they have created a sensation.’⁵⁷ As Laura Chrisman points out, ‘[a]bout the ability of the [original Fisk] Singers to “charm” their audience, white and black writers were unanimous’.⁵⁸

Australian and African American Perspectives in Conflict

The discourse sparked by Aboriginal engagement with Western art music surveyed above is charged with the logic of assimilation that underpinned mid-century discussions of Australian national music culture. Amanda Harris’ work is particularly useful in illuminating this web of thought. On one hand, non-Indigenous Australians ‘increasingly saw themselves as Australian rather than British citizens’ in the lead up to and aftermath of World War II and increasingly ‘turn[ed] towards Australia’s actual Indigenous people’ in their search ‘for a sense of distinctiveness and points of differentiation from Britain’.⁷⁷ On the other, non-Indigenous judgements of musical progress continued to be anchored in the aesthetics of European art music.⁷⁸ This can be seen in something as basic as the art music terminology used to categorise the voices of the singers mentioned above who were heard over radio. Regarding one of the singers, Betty Fisher, who was viewed as a potential ‘real native soprano’, an influential women’s committee from Western Australia expressed concern that if everything possible was not undertaken ‘to further her training and prevent [her] incarceration in a native settlement’, then ‘her voice may be lost to civilisation’.⁷⁹

The Western aesthetic frame through which the Fisk singers and other early twentieth-century spiritual artists delivered their work situated the mastery of spirituals in a similar arena of cultural work. Yet tensions would noticeably arise in Australia during the twentieth century between those who championed spiritual singing as a pathway to assimilation and African American singers who viewed the cultural value of spirituals in starkly different terms. Consider for instance the two different stories of Paul Robeson’s artistic work that circulated in Australia during the 1930s. In a celebration of Robeson’s accomplishments printed in the Northern Star, Daily Examiner, Advocate and Freeman’s Journal, Robeson is depicted as ‘a highly-educated man’, a singer with a ‘perfectly trained’ voice, whose ‘interpretations at all times, are full of musical intelligence’.⁸⁰ His popularisation of spirituals through recordings for the label His Master’s Voice is in turn framed as a watershed moment for concert artists worldwide interested in listening to and taking inspiration from a new kind of art music. The article brings this point home in its closing sentence: ‘A notable instance of this is the late Dame Nellie Melba, who has recorded “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”’⁸¹

Robeson’s view on the value embedded within – and the promise articulated through – the performance of spirituals broke sharply from this depiction. Throughout the 1930s Robeson called into question the efforts of African American artists who worked, in his view, to turn ‘themselves into imperfect imitations of white gentlemen’.⁸² The stakes of such assimilation, for Robeson, were both economic and cultural. In an article for the London-based Daily Herald, subsequently published in Hobart’s The Voice, Robeson lamented the fact that while African American artists were ‘laboring with Beethoven and Brahms … Stravinsky has been borrowing from Negro melodies’ and that ‘in a popular form [i.e., jazz], Negro music, launched by white men – not Negroes – has swept the world’.⁸³ Robeson’s artistic vision did not prohibit utilising the ‘technology of the West’ – that is, Western artistic devices and practices – as a meditative ingredient in the development of African American cultural works, but it did assert that the goal of African American cultural practice should be a ‘graceful, natural growth from within’.⁸⁴ As Robeson proclaimed, ‘It is not as imitation Europeans, but as Africans, that we have value.’⁸⁵

In an exceptional instance the African American concert soprano Dorothy Maynor attempted to foster similar thinking in Australia, when in 1952 she advised Nancy Ellis, an Aboriginal soprano from Katanning, Western Australia: ‘By training this girl’, Maynor said, ‘I hope she will produce a type of music of her race – aboriginal [sic] music.’⁸⁶ Perth’s Daily News reported that Maynor wrote a letter to the city’s Lord Mayor in which she outlined a vision for Australian music, noting:

Subsequently, Ellis was sent to the Sydney Conservatorium to study opera and lieder. When she returned to Western Australia to give recitals to raise funds for further training, one of these was advertised as follows: ‘Miss Ellis’s repertoire covers a wide range, and the programme presented at Northam [WA] will include excerpts from Handel’s “Largo”, Goldini’s “Caro Mio Bien”, Bizet’s “Carmen”, and songs from Brahms, Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Sibelius, and others. She will conclude with a bracket of negro spirituals.’⁸⁸ Nevertheless, Ellis did work on Maynor’s idea of producing Aboriginal art music, since in a 1958 interview she performed, bel canto style, an ‘Aboriginal hunting song’.⁸⁹

Conclusion

The Fisk Jubilee Singers’ nineteenth-century tour of Australia set into play both performance practices and discourses about the power of Westernising non-European music that fit easily within Australian assimilationist social ideology. Yet there is plainly more to this historical story waiting to be revealed in the thoughts and aims of those who performed spirituals in Australia for Australian audiences. The divide between how non-Indigenous Australian audiences located the cultural importance of spirituals in the way they appeared to mirror or at least seemed capable of housing Western art music expressions, and how Robeson valued these musical works as articulations of African American cultural resilience speaks to a key point of difference between African American music makers and cultural critics in the Australian press. Digging deeper, the adoption of spirituals as anthems of emancipation for Maloga and Cummeragunja residents, the use of spirituals as a way of securing space on Australian concert stages and over the radio for Aboriginal singers seeking to express a broad range of talent, and the use of spirituals to call out the Australian government’s racist policies (as in the example of Harold Blair with which we began the chapter), one begins to see the story of the spiritual in Australia as one of considerable complexity. Its spectrum of uses does not belong to a singular cultural project, and its social impact, from its earliest days in Australia, has never followed a singular line. The web of meanings mapped out in this chapter charts the broad contours of this story and provides a starting point for critical analysis of the dissonances and tensions that arise between different kinds of engagement with and celebrations of this globally resonant musical practice.