Field of Research: Indigenous Music and Law in Australia

Before the British First Fleet founded the Colony of New South Wales at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788, Indigenous societies, and the ceremonies that formally codified their legal systems, were the only governmental structures to have existed in Australia. Their reach was largely demarcated by various intersecting traits, including distinct regional natural environments, systems of social organisation, and styles of ceremonial song, dance and design. While generally known in English as ‘songlines’ today, Australia retains many distinct regional styles of public ceremonial song and dance that are rarely known by name outside their home communities. These include kab kar from East Torres Strait, na from West Torres Strait, apalech from West Cape York, manikay from Northeast Arnhem Land, kun-borrk from West Arnhem Land, yoi from the Tiwi Islands, purlapa from the Tanami Desert and inma from the central deserts.

Since 1788, most distinct regional song-and-dance styles have become critically endangered. Discriminatory policies, the geographical expansion of commercial agriculture and mining, bloody massacres, and forced displacement of Indigenous people have threatened or disrupted the continuity of these distinct regional traditions. Assimilationist education and administrative systems aimed at erasing Indigenous law and governance structures gravely worsened this situation, particularly in the 20th century, as has ongoing political inaction in response to repeated calls for a treaty between Indigenous peoples and the Australian Government.

Despite these ongoing challenges, many ethnomusicologists in Australia have played vital roles in working constructively with Indigenous communities to support the retention of their song-and-dance traditions since the founding of the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide in 1972. While occasionally performed for commercial audiences, public awareness of the distinctiveness and value of these traditions nonetheless remains poor. With the recent attempt to establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Australian Constitution having failed at referendum on 14 October 2023, work to support their survival is more important than ever.

Voter disquiet over changing the Australian Constitution to establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament is symptomatic of why distinct Indigenous traditions remain so distant from the broader public consciousness. Ceremonial songs typically carry esoteric language to express legal concepts that, for Indigenous Australians, have always evidenced enduring rights and responsibilities to their myriad homelands, which flow to them today from their foundational, eternal ancestors. Those rights and responsibilities long predate 1788, with human history in Australia dating back more than 65,000 years. Because no treaty has yet been made with Indigenous peoples to legitimise British settlement across the continent, they remain in existential dissonance with the Commonwealth of Australia’s exertion of sovereignty over Australia today.

In 1996, I started working with musicians from the Yolŋu communities of Northeast Arnhem Land, one of Australia’s most remote regions. In the 1980s, songs composed by these musicians increasingly drew on thematic, lyrical and musical materials quoted directly from the Yolŋu manikay tradition of public ceremonial song in ways that directly espoused their sacred ancestral connections to specific homelands. By the 1990s, these Yolŋu musicians were utilising their extensive knowledge and experience of Yolŋu ceremonial repertories and performance practices to create increasingly overt and elaborate interplays between their own musical traditions and the globalised popular styles they had adopted as youths. Striking examples include ‘Djäpana’ by Yothu Yindi and ‘Djiliwirri’ by Joe Gumbula of the Soft Sands.

Evidence of manikay traditions can be traced back even further. From at least the 1750s until 1907, the Yolŋu people engaged extensively in independent international trade with fishing fleets from Makassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. To this day, entire series of manikay songs associated with different Yolŋu homelands are still performed in remembrance of this rich and cherished history. Some manikay songs still performed today possibly hark back to the last major sea-level rise. They sing of freshwater vents on the sea floor, that were once sacred springs above ground millennia ago, and inland lakes, like the one at Gapuwiyak, that were once ceremony grounds.

Many Indigenous knowledge-holders across Australia now seek to engage equitably in research aimed at sustaining their traditions, such as at the University of Melbourne’s Indigenous Knowledge Institute. Their choices to engage in these new research opportunities are often informed by immense generosity and certainty that the values and insights enshrined in their traditions can help to make the world a better place for everyone.