Researchers are working with Warlpiri elders to record, transcribe and interpret disappearing dreaming songs that are the basis of Warlpiri culture.

As two Warlpiri elders sing a water song, it rains. Thomas Rice Jangala and Jeannie Egan Nungarrayi, Warlpiri people from Yuendumu, sit with anthropology PhD student Georgia Curran in a small office at ANU working on a project to record the fading song cycles of the Warlpiri.

They interpret and transcribe in Warlpiri and English a water song during a visit to Canberra, in tune with a rare day of rain that moistens the dust and hydrates the lawns of the Ngunawal lands.

As they stop to explain the songlines project, a CD recording of Jangala plays on a computer. It is a Warlpiri song to shorten the long, cold winter nights. “He sings about the Milky Way,” Nungarrayi says. “That it will go quickly across the sky to bring the dawn.”

The water song and night song are just two of the ancient songlines being recorded to preserve Warlpiri songs as part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project coordinated by the School of Anthropology and Archaeology at ANU and the University of Queensland, with partner funding from the Warlpiri Janganpa Association and the Central Land Council.

Warlpiri songlines link ancestral power with the landscape, emotions and aesthetics and are central to their religious life, but because the songs are known by fewer and fewer

Warlpiri people and the ceremonies are being performed less and less often, this spiritual core of Warlpiri culture is disappearing.

Curran spent 15 months from November 2005 in Yuendumu – 300 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs – working with Jangala, who remembers and still sings the ancient songs, and Nungarrayi, who helps to interpret the “old words” in the songs and assists Curran to transcribe and translate the songs into Warlpiri and English. They already have over 80 hours of songs transcribed and translated.

While in Canberra, they are transcribing more recordings, including some recorded on tape by anthropology professor Nicolas Peterson, at Yuendumu in 1972 (and since kept in a box in his office).

“Jangala tells me those I’ve recorded are men’s love songs,” Peterson says. “Like all of the old songs, the language is different. It’s old and some of the words are pronounced differently when sung or are contracted so it’s not always obvious what they mean.”
According to Nungarrayi, “The young people talk in modern talk, they don’t know the old language – it’s like there is old English and what there is now. What the old people use is changing, dying; the young people mix it with English.

“Sitting with the old people, I’m learning the old language. This project will bring it alive again, make it strong again. It’s important for us to write it down before it goes.”
Jangala says many of the young Yuendumu people know the tunes used in ceremonies, but because they don’t have the authority to sing, they don’t have the confidence to sing or they don’t know the words, many just hum.

Song cycles are intricately and integrally connected with dance and ceremony, such as the ceremony for boys’ initiation. These ceremonies are still conducted over summer, but in contrast to the past when a ceremony was held for just two or three boys together with several separate ceremonies being held if there were six or seven boys of the right age, today as many as seventeen boys may be initiated at one ceremony. This is because there are now only a handful of elders, including Jangala, who have the knowledge to follow the songline all night.

The Warlpiri ceremony takes much energy from the elders who have to sing from around 10pm to sunrise on two occasions for each ceremony.

“I spent 13 months at Yuendumu in 1972-1973, and at that time they were holding a wide range of ceremonies,” Peterson says. “It is different now, because there are less than half a dozen people who remember the songs for many of the ceremonies, and all the energy today goes into boys’ initiation and women’s yawulyu ceremonies, versions of which are seen at many art exhibition openings in southern Australia.
“To me, it seems we’re right on cusp of time where most of this knowledge will be gone.”

The songlines project is designed to maintain young people’s familiarity with the songs and their ongoing connection with ceremony and spirituality, as well as to write down and explain the esoteric language of the songs.

The academic project leaders, as the recorders of the songs, have signed over their copyright to the community via PAW (Pintubi, Anmatjere and Warlpiri) Media, the Warlpiri community broadcaster. This means that anyone wanting to use the recordings needs permission from PAW, as well as the elders. The royalties flow back to the community (with an archival copy of the songs eventually being placed with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies).

According to Peterson, although the project has “more than scratched the surface” of recording the full range of Warlpiri songlines, there is still much to be done in the latter half of the project.

The songs that have been recorded and transcribed are mainly women’s songs – related to health, attracting husbands, or providing strength to boys before initiation – as well as community songs, such as most of the initiation songs, that are performed publicly.
What is lacking are recordings of men’s songs, performed in secret in association with rituals at sacred sites. To remedy this gap, Stephen Wild of the School of Music, who wrote his PhD thesis on Warlpiri song and dance, will travel to the Northern Territory in September to work with Warlpiri men to record secret songs.

These recordings will go further towards not only preserving the songs, but also towards providing insights into a culture much of which has been handed down through songs, such as the initiation songs which tell about the journey of a group of ancestral women and boys to a initiation ceremony held in the dreamtime.

Today, as in the past, one of the boys to be initiated is often taken on a journey – Jilkaja - to inform other groups that the initiation is about to be held.

“Today, with cars and planes, these journeys can cover huge distances, sometimes of a thousand kilometres or more one way and involve large groups numbering five hundred or more people returning for the ceremony,” Peterson says.

The Warlpiri initiation ceremony is extraordinarily complex and of central importance to both Warlpiri culture and for both men and women. It does not just make boys into men, but it enhances the standing of the boys’ mothers, turns other women into mothers-in-law, their daughters into promised wives, and gives prominence to the boys’ sisters who have to dance for their brothers all night.

“It’s against this background that there’s a convergence of interest between ethnographers of Warlpiri life and senior Warlpiri people, both groups of whom are concerned by the impending loss of the songlines.

“For Warlpiri people the significance of the loss is deeply complex as it brings with it and reflects the transformations that are going on in their religion, in their society more generally and in the conflict between generations with its threats to Warlpiri identity,” Peterson says.

The visit of Jangala and Nungarrayi was made possible by a grant from the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at ANU.

^^

ANU Reporter 
Winter 2007