Circulating Cultures Exchanges of Australian Indigenous Music, Dance and Media Circulating Cultures Exchanges of Australian Indigenous Music, Dance and Media Edited by Amanda Harris Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at http://press.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Circulating cultures : exchanges of Australian Indigenous music, dance and media / edited by Amanda Harris. ISBN: 9781925022193 (paperback) 9781925022216 (ebook) Subjects: Social change--Australia--Cross-cultural studies. Culture diffusion--Australia. Intercultural communication in art. Music in intercultural communication. Aboriginal Australians--Music--21st century--Cross-cultural studies. Art, Aboriginal Australian--21st century--Cross-cultural studies. Other Creators/Contributors: Harris, Amanda, 1976- editor. Dewey Number: 306.4840994 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Front cover image: Johnny Divilli and Joanne Nulgit perform Dudu Mardudu (the ‘circling’ plane dance) at the Mowanjum Festival, 11 July 2013. Photo by Matt Scurfield. Copyright Mowanjum Art and Culture Centre. Used with permission. Dudu Marduda (the ‘circling’ plane) is a balga/junba dance-song created by Worrorra composer Wati Ngerdu following the extensive search for a Royal Flying Doctor Service aeroplane that disappeared and crashed after leaving Tablelands Station in the Kimberley in 1956. The dance was revived in 2013 by the performers and the Mowanjum Art and Culture Centre for the annual Mowanjum Festival, after their recovery and circulation of an archival photo of the dance taken in the Mowanjum Community in the late 1950s. Thanks to Sally Treloyn for sourcing and describing the image. Back cover image: Recording session at Oenpelli (now Gunbalanya). Larry Marawana, Tommy Madjalkaidj, Colin Simpson, Raymond Giles and three unidentified individuals around the Pyrox Wire Recorder, 1948. Photograph by Howell Walker. By permission of the National Library of Australia. NLA MS5253, Box 99, Bag B. Cover design and layout by ANU Press Printed by Griffin Press This edition © 2014 ANU Press Contents Contributors . vii 1 . Archival Objects and the Circulation of Culture . 1 Amanda Harris Part 1: C. P. Mountford and the Circulation of Music, Dance and Film 2 . Beth Dean and the Transnational Circulation of Aboriginal Dance Culture: Gender, Authority and C . P . Mountford . 19 Victoria Haskins 3 . The Circle of Songs: Traditional Song and the Musical Score to C . P . Mountford’s Documentary Films . 45 Anthony Linden Jones 4 . Hearing Aboriginal Music Making in Non-Indigenous Accounts of the Bush from the Mid-Twentieth Century . 73 Amanda Harris Part 2: Transformation and Repatriation 5 . Song as Artefact: The Reclaiming of Song Recordings Empowering Indigenous Stakeholders—and the Recordings Themselves . 101 Genevieve Campbell 6 . Turning Subjects into Objects and Objects into Subjects: Collecting Human Remains on the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition . 129 Martin Thomas v Part 3: Cultural Journeys in the Top End 7 . The Role of Songs in Connecting the Living and the Dead: A Funeral Ceremony for Nakodjok in Western Arnhem Land . 169 Reuben Brown 8 . Cross and Square: Variegation in the Transmission of Songs and Musical Styles Between the Kimberley and Daly Regions of Northern Australia . 203 Sally Treloyn 9 . Listening to Heavy Metal in Wadeye . 239 John Mansfield Index . 263 vi Contributors Reuben Brown is completing his doctoral thesis at the University of Sydney. He spent two years carrying out fieldwork in the communities of Gunbalanya and Warruwi in western Arnhem Land of the Northern Territory. He is enthusiastic about documenting and sustaining the tradition of kun-borrk in this region, and has worked with a number of singers and dancers to record and promote their music at festivals, academic conferences, funeral ceremonies and other community events. Reuben has a background in musicology and experience as an actor and singer. Genevieve Campbell has worked for twenty years as a professional French Horn player. In 2007 she instigated Ngarukuruwala: We sing songs, a collaborative music project between a group of Tiwi strong women and jazz musicians from Sydney. Her professional interest in Tiwi music in the context of contemporary performance and the desire to be part of the rediscovery and preservation of old Tiwi songs led her to complete a PhD at the University of Sydney in 2014. Amanda Harris is Research Associate on the ARC Discovery Project Intercultural Inquiry in a Trans-National Context: Exploring the legacy of the 1948 American- Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, headed by The Australian National University’s Martin Thomas and University of Sydney’s Linda Barwick and Allan Marett. In 2011, she organised a research forum at the University of Sydney which brought together the researchers whose work appears in this book. She obtained a PhD from the University of NSW in 2009 with a historical thesis on women composers and feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her publications have appeared in Women & Music, Life Writing, Women’s History Review, History and Anthropology, and Lilith: A feminist history journal as well as several book volumes. Victoria Haskins is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia. She publishes widely on gender and Indigenous cross-cultural history, and is the author of two books, One Bright Spot (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson, 1914–1934 (University of Arizona Press, 2012). As a curator at the National Museum of Australia in 1999, Victoria first encountered the choreography of Beth Dean’s Aboriginal-inspired ballet. In 2006 she held a Council of Australian State Libraries Fellowship to research Dean’s archives, held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney. She has published several articles and book chapters on Aboriginal cultural appropriation, including two focusing on Beth Dean’s Corroboree (‘Dancing in the Dust,’ in Allen and Dhawan, Intersections, 2005; and ‘To Touch the Infinity of a Far Horizon,’Australasian Drama Studies, 2011). vii Circulating Cultures: Exchanges of Australian Indigenous Music, Dance and Media Anthony Linden Jones is a candidate for a PhD in Musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. His research area is the representation of Aboriginality in Australian Film Music. He holds a B.Mus (Hons) in Composition from Sydney Conservatorium, as well as a B.Eng (Elec.) from the University of New South Wales. In past lives he has performed in a wide range of musical genres, on violin and electric bass. He is active as a composer of concert and film music, a performer on violin, and directs Chorella—an a cappella community choir based in Richmond, NSW. He also teaches music in TAFE, and regularly contributes reviews and articles for Music Forum, the journal of the Music Council of Australia. John Mansfield researches language and culture at Wadeye in Northern Australia. He recently completed his PhD at The Australian National University, focusing on youth subculture and language change. He is now working on the Language Acquisition of Murrinhpatha Project at the University of Melbourne. Martin Thomas teaches in the School of History at The Australian National University. He has held research fellowships at the University of Technology, Sydney, and at the University of Sydney, where he now holds an adjunct position in the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures. His current work is in the field of Australian and trans-national cultural history, as revealed through perceptions of place, representations of landscape and narratives of cross-cultural encounter. A book-in-progress takes up the story of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, led by Charles Mountford. His recent publications include The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In search of an Australian anthropologist (Allen & Unwin, 2011) and, as editor, Expedition into Empire: Exploratory journeys and the making of the modern world (Routledge, 2014). Sally Treloyn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne, having received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Sydney in 2007. Her current research is focused on developing strategies to support Indigenous stakeholders and organisations in their efforts to sustain musical practices and associated knowledge systems into the future. She currently leads two Linkage projects funded by the Australian Research Council in partnership with peak Aboriginal organisations in the Kimberley. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sydney (PARADISEC: the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) and is Secretary to the Steering Committee of the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia: http:// www.aboriginalartists.com.au/NRP.htm. viii 1. Archival Objects and the Circulation of Culture Amanda Harris Exchanges of cultural capital facilitated cross-cultural communication in a variety of Australian contexts, both before and after the arrival of Europeans