Australian Aboriginal Music

As with many indigenous peoples round the globe, Australian Aboriginal music has become important as a vehicle for expressing their struggles and concerns in their own country, and to the outside world. But the music isn’t only meaningful – it is popular. Over the past decade, there’s been an explosion of Aboriginal rock and roots bands – Yothu Yindi being the most famous – and they represent a powerful voice. Marcus Breen tells the story.

The Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) was created in Alice Springs in 1980 with three volunteers and little more than a typewriter and a second-hand car. Today CAAMA broadcasts to all of Central Australia, runs a TV company, and owns a recording and publishing label – the only one run by and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The Association has been particularly active in recording and releasing music from the remote desert areas. Among the bands that have emerged under CAAMAs auspices, the current stars are Blek Bala Mujik (see p.14). Their hit single “Walking Together” became something of a mainstream anthem after being adopted by Qantas, the national airline, in the late 1990s.

Aboriginal music has become a feature of everyday life in Australia. Yet the mainstream recording industry has failed to take Aboriginal music seriously, while media outlets have been reluctant to play anything but hit songs. Rising to this challenge has meant that the Aboriginal music industry has grown alongside the major industry. CAAMA – along with Mushroom and Larrikin Records – have become the preeminent names as promoters and commercial custodians of the recorded Aboriginal sound.

For its part CAAMA has established itself as a nurturing centre for Central Australian singer-songwriters and bush bands, many of which are working on a synthesis of indigenous language, combined with English, country and heavy guitar, traditional clapping sticks, didgeridoo and chants. These include Chrysophrase, North Tanami Band, Young Teenage Band, Warryngya Band, Desert Oaks Band, Areyonga Desert Tigers and Blackstorm.

Established artists continue to flourish due to CAAMA’s support. Recent releases include Bart Willoughby’s Pathways, with a softer, radio friendly rock sound, and albums from the rock bands Buna Lawrie and Coloured Stone.

The CAAMA model has been translated to other bush areas and indigenous broadcasters are already set in the regions of Townsville, Brisbane, Warringarri, Cunnunarra and West Australia. These radio stations have a strong link to music creation and production, as do the network of nearly 200 urban community radio stations. Aboriginal music is used extensively on their specialist programmes and it is making waves, too, on national stations such as ABC’s Radio National. Having tried special Aboriginal programmes on radio and TV which were felt to be patronizing, ABC now favours a more integrated approach.

Festivals celebrating all aspects of Aboriginal community life continue to be a focus for music. Many are not easily accessible to outsiders, although it’s possible to apply for permits to visit Aboriginal lands in Central Australia, where events are held. Arts Festivals frequently feature Aboriginal music components. Of special note is the Olympic Arts Festival which will be taking palce during September–October in Sydney in 2000 and 2001, featuring The Festival of the Dreaming, with indigenous musicians, artists and dancers from around the country.

Australian Aboriginal music is one of the newest and most ancient phenomenons on the globe. Australia’s indigenous people can boast the oldest intact culture on earth and the resonant sounds of the didgeridoo evoke a sacred mythological world that demands respect. Sadly, that is what the Aborigines did not get. From 1788, as Australia was developed as a penal colony for white settlers, the indigenous people were driven off their ancestral lands and resettled, or hunted and killed like animals. Such practices persisted until well into this century, and discrimination has continued, with the recognition of Aboriginal rights a relatively recent development.

The sudden growth of modern Aboriginal music has been a consciousness-raising accompaniment to this political movement. In that way it shares many qualities with Native American music, particularly the mystical and sacred attachment to the land that is so much a part of Aboriginal belief. As an expression of that solidarity, Aboriginal and Native American performers (notably the Australian group Yothu Yindi and the American Indian singer John Trudell) have supported each other on concert tours. Bob Marley, too, has been a huge influence on Aboriginal musicians with his espousal of black power and the struggle for rights.

In the fusion of these musical and spiritual influences with their own black, but not African, traditions the contemporary Aborigines have forged a distinctive new musical voice which is reminding the world that they are, after all, the first Australians. The voice is to be heard in many forms, from the roots sounds of ceremonial music and dancing to the powerful Aboriginal rock of bands like Yothu Yindi.

Yothu Yindi burst on the scene in the early 1990s, and thanks to them identity politics reached Australia’s pop charts almost instantly. They went on to become Australia’s best-known group, at home and abroad. Like most other Aboriginal artists, they perform songs that remind European settlers of the history that has been documented and acknowledged only recently. Their songs make contact with a culture 50,000 years old. Although the group’s mainstream popularity has faded of late, they continue to invigorate their local community, taking the lessons learned from musical activism to Aboriginal people in various parts of Australia.

Some Background

Since European settlers and convicts arrived in 1788 the story of the Aboriginals and the white settlers has been a one-sided one. It involves the dispossession of land, suppression of language and culture, denial of identity, dispersion and resettlement, the poisoning of water supplies and, as recently as the 1930s, systematic massacres. The indigenous population of Tasmania was virtually eliminated in this unholy process.

In the late nineteenth century Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries moved into remote parts of Australia to establish mission stations. They rejected the heathen music and culture of the Aboriginals and taught them the hymns of Europe. The strong influence of gospel singing can still be heard in Aboriginal women’s choirs and in the work of some of the Aboriginal singer-songwriters.

In Australia today there are around 250,000 Aboriginals (1.3 percent of the population) and some 200 surviving languages. As well as the mainland Aborigines there are also the Torres Strait Islanders, of Melanesian descent, inhabiting the islands between the coast of Queensland and Papua New Guinea (with which they share their cultural and musical heritage).

The vast majority of Aboriginals are scattered across the continent in country towns and settlements, with large concentrations in the urban centres of Alice Springs, Darwin, Broome and the Redfern suburb of Sydney. In suburban areas Aboriginals are pretty well integrated into Australian society, although elsewhere there is deprivation, unemployment and alcoholism.

Music has become closely aligned with a power struggle over land rights – after all land is the most meaningful aspect of the Aboriginal heritage. And yet as this greatest of all public debates takes place between Australia’s indigenous people and their supporters against pastoralists, lease holders of Crown land and mining companies, music has consolidated its place as a cultural glue, holding the people together, taking the message out and educating the public.

Aboriginal artists famously joined together in 1995 to produce a version of “We Are the World”, an album of songs called Our Home Our Land. Working in Alice Springs at the upgraded recording studios of CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association, see box on previous page), established artists such as Yothu Yindi recorded “Mabo”, Sunrize Band “Land Rights” and Tiddas the title track. Yothu Yindi’s song was a celebration of the historic 1992 case in which the Australian High Court overturned the so-called terra nullius doctrine which regarded the continent as unowned land (meaning that no other colonial power had laid claim to it):

" Terra nullius, terra nullius, Terra nullius is dead and gone

  We were right, that we were here .They were wrong, that we weren’t there . . . "

Land rights continue to be a rallying cry in Aboriginal and Australian music. In 1997, Peter Garrett, lead singer of the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, released the single “White Skin, Black Heart” together with the (Aboriginal singer-songwriter) Kev Carmody’s song, “Thou Shalt Not Steal”.  

      

    -  출처 RGNET1207CD / The rough guide to Australian Aborigine Music -

      * 듣고 계신 음악은 Alan Maralung 의 앨범 Bunggugridj 에 나오는

        Wangga Song(호주전통악기 didjeridu로 반주하는 가장 흔한 노래)

        입니다.

      * 호주탐사를 함께 하신 여러분과  특히 영이 총무의 건강을  위하여,           
         자 ~ 맑은 생수로 건배!!

                                                        -  平  山 -