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<b>Haunting songs of life and death reveal a fading
world</b></font><br />
<font size="2" face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif">
Nicolas Rothwell</font><br />
<font size="1" face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif">18feb06<br
/>http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18146439%255E5001986,00.html<br
/></font><br />
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<b>Songs, Dreamings and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia</b><br
/><i>
By Allan Marett, Wesleyan University Press, 292pp, $27.50</i><br /><br
/>
A GENERATION ago, when musicologist Allan Marett was beginning his
fieldwork on the Aboriginal song-cycles of northern Australia, he was
asked an intriguing question by a young indigenous man.</font></font><p>
<font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font size="2">Why was
traditional Aboriginal music - music of endless subtlety and beauty -
not as highly valued as the Aboriginal paintings that Australians have
come to view as potent emblems of national identity?
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">This
book is Marett's attempt to provide an answer and to redress that
imbalance. The most profound and detailed study of an indigenous
musical genre yet attempted, it has been two decades in the making, and
even before publication acquired a kind of legendary status among the
small circle of experts addicted to the sounds of indigenous song. It
is a specialist volume, yet it is written with a clear, cool passion.
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">It
sets out the overwhelming evidence for the finesse and compositional
craft of the Top End's song cycles and brings the master-singers of the
region and their beliefs and experiences to vivid life. It deserves the
widest possible attention, not just because Marett is the doyen of
Australian ethnomusicologists, and this is his masterwork, but because
the art form he seeks to anatomise is dying.
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">Aboriginal
song is, of course, elusive: in its traditional form, it is sung in
language, it is brief, coded, meshed with dance. It tends to be
ceremonial in nature, and this has kept outsiders from disseminating
its splendours to the wider world. For what do everyday Australians
know, in truth, about indigenous music, other than the noise of the
didge and the guitar chords of Treaty?
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">Marett
turns his attention on the Aboriginal songmen of the Daly region, who
live today gathered in the remote community of Wadeye, close to the
Bonaparte Gulf, and at Belyuen, on the Cox peninsula opposite Darwin.
Their key song cycles, the Wangga, take the form of sharp, jewel-like
chants, accompanied by clap-stick and didgeridoo. Poetic in the
extreme, filled with rhythms that summon up, like Western leitmotifs,
whole worlds of association, these are musical slivers that make up a
dictionary of the singer's world. Their core is religious: the Wangga
are sung at times when the living and the dead draw together. They are
often learned in dreams; and they plunge deep into the entwined fabric
of the traditional domain. Marett picks apart several songs and unfurls
the aspects of life they express: "The essential interconnectedness
of
the living and the dead through ceremony; the mutual responsibilities
of the living to look after each other in everyday affairs; the
exigencies of everyday life; and the intimate relationship that the
living and the dead maintain with a sentient landscape".
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">The world revealed is one of infinitely varied songs and
rhythms, swift, succinct, full of conviction.
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">Marett
gives his readers a glimpse of the urgency with which these themes are
perfected and performed: there are vignettes where he is scolded for
using the wrong words in a practice singing session; at one point he
turns in amazement from his chapter-length analysis of a single,
minute-long snatch of music, staggered by the amount of submerged
information it contains.
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">In
his field years Marett became very close to several great song-masters
from Belyuen, and he was planning to devote himself to the study of one
of these figures, Bobby Lambudju Lane, a man at once gentle and
voluble, Western-trained, literate, a fluent speaker of English and of
his own traditional languages. Lane "had the rare capacity to speak
the
texts of songs and give their translations the moment he had finished
singing".
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">He
was, in short, the Homer of Wangga song, the man at the end of the
tradition who could fix and read the music's mobile shards. But Lane
died at 52, and, as Marett says bluntly, even though other singers have
taken up his duties, "the tradition will probably never recover
from
this blow".
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">Much
of Marett's book is devoted to examinations of Lane's work, above all a
haunting, evanescent song from Badjalarr, a low-lying sandy islet that
has become, in the imagination of the Belyuen people, a far-off,
generalised land of the dead, although on our maps it is merely North
Peron Island, a favourite weekend sports-fishing haunt for Darwin's
boat-going class.
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">Lane's
death has been duplicated many times across the north: the old songmen
are dying in the Kimberley and in Arnhem Land, a curtain of silence and
mass-consumption music is coming down. Hence the vital importance of
this book as a guide to the power and fluidity of a traditional form.
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">Marett
covers much ground: he shows how singers shift their songs to explain
their relationship to country; how melodies relate to certain ancestor
figures; how songs and dances set out social themes.
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">An
astonishing idea lurks glinting in the closing pages of his work as he
considers the depth and scale of the musical system being uncovered.
Like many music scholars, he is intrigued by the ultimate questions:
where did the music come from and what connections may exist between
Aboriginal and Southeast Asian traditions?
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">
The role of the Macassan traders who visited north Australia in contact
times may well have been critical in spreading musical models. But,
more broadly, Marett speculates that deeper study could well reveal
"something startling" about north Australian music, namely
that it
forms a continuum, in its rhythmic organisation, with the music of the
Middle East, Southeast Asia, India and Indonesia.
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">Such
elusive, attractive ideas: but how can they be tested when the material
is dying out? Marett is centrally involved in a new recording project,
which is strongly supported by the surviving traditional songmen of the
north. "My own experience," he says briskly, "is that
most Aboriginal
communities, at least in the north of Australia, want their music to be
more widely disseminated and better understood."
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">At
the recent Garma culture conference in northeast Arnhem Land, a clarion
call was sent out in headline words: "Indigenous songs should be a
deeply valued part of the Australian cultural heritage. They represent
the great classical music of this land. These ancient traditions were
once everywhere in Australia, and now survive as living traditions only
in several regions. Many of these are now in danger of being lost
forever. Indigenous performances are one of the most rich and beautiful
forms of artistic expression, and yet they remain unheard and
invisible."
</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif"><font
size="2">It
is this trend of eclipse and cultural extinction, tragically immediate
and fast-advancing, that Marett's meticulous, pioneering work - at once
tribute and testament - has been written to resist.</font></font><br
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