Aaron Corn

Sustaining Australia's Indigenous Music and Dance Traditions: The Role of the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance

This article examines the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia as a dedicated network of Indigenous performers, and allied scholars and curators, to protect and sustain Australias highly endangered traditions of Indigenous music, dance and ceremonies. The paper examines how the National Recording Project has developed into a community of practice for the making and archiving of Indigenous Australian music and dance recordings in response to Indigenous community agency and concerns, and how its annual Symposium on Indigenous Music and Dance has developed into a unique forum for intercultural exchange. Strategies for this initiatives future growth are identified and explored.

Outside the Hollow Log: The Didjeridu, Globalisation and Socio-Economic Contestation in Arnhem Land

Abstract Enthusiasm for the didjeridu is a global phenomenon that attracts interest from players and collectors worldwide despite the many popular fallacies that circulate about this instrument and the indigenous peoples of North Australia from whose cultures it originates. In this article, I address emerging initiatives among the Yolŋu (People) of North-East Arnhem Land that respond to the rapid globalisation and commercialisation of the didjeridu in recent decades, and draw on my own ethnographic observations and participation in festivals at Barunga (1996) and Guḻkuḻa (1999, 2001–3). Ultimately, I will demonstrate how Yolŋu imperatives for these initiatives stem from hereditary beliefs and values that contemporary Yolŋu strive to uphold in the face of radical socio-cultural change.

Burr-Gi Wargugu ngu-Ninya Rrawa: Expressions of ancestry and country In songs by the Letterstisand

Abstract This article documents the musical creativity of the Letterstick Band from Maningrida on Arnhem Lands north-central coast and in particular focuses on the musical and socio-contextual analysis of two prominent songs in their repertoire: ‘Bartpa’ and ‘An-Barra Clan’. Although as musicians the bands members have availed themselves of new media and technologies that have been introduced to Arnhem Land since the mid 1960s, through such analyses it is demonstrated how songs in the bands repertoire are informed by the aesthetics, formal elements and themes of local manakay and borrk song traditions. Drawing upon observations first made by the Hiatts in the late 1950s, it will be established how two key members of the Letterstick Band, David Anjawartunga Maxwell and his younger brother Colin Jiliburr, have extended the musical legacy of their father, Harry Mulumbuk, by balancing continuity of local musical traditions against creative engagement with new musical media and technologies.