Australia
Landing in the Kimberley region
c.1920
scarification
Land of the Aborigines
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG-CNqOhO2c
Musicians from Australia

The Little River Band,
The Bee Gees, Nick
Cave, INXS, AC/DC,
Midnight Oil, silverchair,
and, yes, Kylie Minogue
are Australia's most
famous music exports.
Live music is common in
Australian pubs, with
Melbourne now hosting
the liveliest scene.
Food from Australia
Vegemite is made from leftover brewers' yeast extract (a by-product of beer
manufacture) and various vegetable and spice additives. It is very dark
reddish-brown, almost black, filled with Vit B. It's thick like peanut butter,
but it’s very salty. Australian children are brought up on Vegemite from the
time they're babies.
Film industry
4/16/2010 Gibson splits with girlfriend

Peter Weir, Bruce
Beresford, George Miller,
Gillian Armstrong are all
well-known Australian
directors, while Mel
Gibson, Russell Crowe
and Nicole Kidman are the
country's best-known
actors. The Aussie film
industry is small but wellsupported.
Russell Crowe & Family
Hollywood Walk of Fame Star
4-13-2010
Opera and Australia
Dame Joan Sutherland is
Australia’s best known opera star.
Busy in the 1960s, she is a very
famous coloratura soprano. She
was recently honored at the
Kennedy Center.
 Nellie Melba (as in Melba toast
and Peach Melba) from
Melbourne, get it, get it?, was the
world’s biggest opera star at the
beginning of the 20th century

Nellie Melba

THE prima donna at Covent Garden in
London during the 1910s and 1920s
Current topics…..


Film: Rabbit Proof Fence
Sisters Molly Kelly (d. January 2004,
at age 86) and Daisy Kadibil, 79, are
the central attractions of a tourist
boom in their remote Pilbara
community being fuelled by the
success of a small-budget film telling
their story from seven decades ago.

The film tells
the true story
of a 2000km
journey by the
pair and their
cousin Gracie,
as chronicled by
Molly's
daughter Doris
Pilkington in
her book,
Follow the
Rabbit-Proof
Fence.

The young trio
walked home to
Jigalong from the
Moore River
settlement where
they had been
forcibly taken by
the government in
the 1930s
Australia’s Stolen Generation 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3TZO
GpG6cM
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp5w1
Zp0-vQ

A second film about Aborigines

Where the Green Ants Dream--1984
a slow paced, very interesting view of a
sacred space and its destruction by modern
developments of a mining company
 Tells of an Aboriginal tribe's struggle to save
their sacred grounds from encroaching
civilization.
 They believe that man's so-called reality is no
more than the dream of a strange insect
indigenous to the Australian continent.

Books



Dreamkeepers (1994)
A Spiritual Journey into Aboriginal Australia
by Harvey Arden
The Songlines (1987)
By Bruce Chatwin
1940-1989
Australian Aboriginal culture
•can claim to be the
oldest continuous living
culture on the planet
•Aboriginal presence in
Australia has been
traced to at least 40,000
years BP. Some of the
evidence points to dates
over 60,000 years old.
Aborigines land
The Kimberley region of Western Australia is one of the world's last
great wilderness areas. It has one of the fastest population growth
rates in Australia, yet has fewer people per square kilometer than
almost any other place on earth.
Kununurra Australia weather
The word “aborigine” has Latin roots and means “there from the beginning”
Some Aboriginal tribes

Ewamian
Muddie

Girramiy
Jittabul

Dunjgar
Gunninggurr

Jidinji

Birri-Gubba

Kuku Yalanji
Hallmark of culture

The hallmark of Aboriginal culture is oneness with
nature.

In traditional Aboriginal belief systems, nature and
landscape are comparable in importance to the Bible
in Christian culture.

Prominent rocks, canyons, rivers, waterfalls, islands,
beaches and other natural features - as well as sun,
moon, visible stars and animals - have their own
stories of creation and inter-connectedness.
Belief system

To the traditional Aborigine they are all sacred:
environment is the essence of Australian
Aboriginal godliness.

Out of this deep reverence for nature Aborigines
learned to live in remarkable harmony with the
land and its animals.
Dreamtime

This term is most often used to mean the
time before time…or the time of the
creation of all things
Dreaming
often used to refer to an individual's or
group's set of beliefs or spirituality
 'Ancestor Spirits' came to Earth in
human and other forms and the land,
the plants and animals were given their
form as we know them today.
 These Spirits also established
relationships between groups and
individuals

Dreaming beliefs
Where they traveled across the land or
came to a halt, they created rivers, hills,
other landmarks. There are often stories
attached to these places.
 Once their work was done, the Ancestor
Spirits changed again; into animals or
stars or hills or other objects

Dreaming, con’t.

The Ancestor Spirits and their powers
have not gone, they are present in the
forms into which they changed at the end
of the 'Dreamtime' or 'Dreaming.

For Indigenous Australians, the past is still
alive and vital today and will remain so into
the future.
Dreaming con’t
Stories are handed down from
generation to generation
 responsible for topographical
features which can still be seen
 responsible for living creatures
which are present in rites
performed
 responsible for structured society
whose codes are still observed

And more….
After the creation of all of that, the
powers either sank into the earth or
water or rose up into the sky to form
constellations and stars
 The powers can fluctuate between
human or animal forms, so you see
distortion of these images sometimes

Supernatural communication
Belief that communication does exist
between powers of The Dreaming and
people of the present
 Signs show this…. such as a rainbow.
That is evidence that the Rainbow Serpent
has been busy.
 Paranormal experiences of dream and
trance are another sign.

Creativity?

Creativity is attributed ONLY to the powers
of creation. People don’t create the
forms, but receive and reproduce them.

This is not unlike the Native American
belief of unraveling what’s already in the
universe.
People and relationships

In Aboriginal society, people are related by
an extremely complex system to one
another, to places, and to animals, birds,
or insect species.
MUSIC



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In music, there are
rites of life
rites of death
rites of passage (ages and stages)
Rites of Death
Major position in Aboriginal society
 death is considered to be the result of
sorcery
 often brought about by “singing” a person
 that is, performing a poison song against
someone



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7qHJ1b7nGw
(funeral in Arnhem Land)
Subtleties of the music

May seem to be the same, but there are subtle
variations

Rhythm, harmony and musical expression vary

The texts vary, of course
Brolga ceremony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh2g3Rzcxp8&mode=rela
ted&search=
Music is primarily vocal
Most instruments are percussive
 Sticks, boomerangs
bark bundles struck on the palm
 Bullroarer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvNR9Xo8z3M
 hollow log drums
 body slapping and clapping
 hissing, calls, growls, grunts, shouts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qahSU4RYblY
,
Song types
Wonga:
didjeridu
clapsticks
singing by one or more songmen who set the rhythm
http://www2.wou.edu:7777/pls/wou2/jukebox.juk_pub.view_tracks?ptrack_id=21970&pcd_id=3244&pcd_num=
1
Djunba:
no didjeridu
men and women singing harmonies
men play clap sticks
women clap
http://www2.wou.edu:7777/pls/wou2/jukebox.juk_pub.view_tracks?ptrack_id=21999&pcd_id=3244&pcd_num=
1
traditional
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_6eSvlau2o&mode=related&search=
Didjeridu
Most distinctive and typically
Aboriginal/Australian instrument
 made of a tree branch that was hollowed
out by termites
 piece of bamboo
 any hollow tube (PVC pipe)
 1.5 meters long or so
 3 cm diameter at the mouthpiece

Painting a didj, member of the Gunninggurr
tribe
Didjeridu con’t
Decorated with designs, either carved or
painted or both
 EXTRAORDINARILY difficult to play well…
 Sing and blow at the same time, then can
alter the fundamental pitch
 use circular breathing

Graham Wiggins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwCE-4sbUMo
What did you learn from the
aboriginal masters and how has it
changed your own personal sound?
I had to learn a whole different way of holding
my mouth and producing the sound on the instrument
in order to imitate their style. It was philosophically
important just on a musical level because I discovered that
for them the circular breathing is not something that's
primarily to do with keeping a note going for a long time.
For them circular breathing is how you create the rhythm,
the basic in and out cycle of the breath, the circular
breathing cycle creates the rhythmic phrasing of the music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4o0140IHd8
Q. What do you call a boomerang that
won’t come back ?
A. A stick