Dilemmas in interpretation: contemporary perspectives on Berndt’s Goulburn Island song documentation

Abstract

More than fifty years after the first recording session and twenty-six years after the original publication of Ronald Berndt’s article ‘Other creatures in human guise’ (Berndt, 1987), this paper presents some contemporary perspectives on his documentation of Marrwakara and Kaddikkaddik songs in Warruwi (Goulburn Island) in 1961 and 1964. Several puzzling features emerge from close attention to the documentation, some of which may now never be fully resolved. The authors (in particular O’Keeffe and Singer) undertook further documentation of these and many other archival songs in the period 2006-2012 as part of a larger research project on Western Arnhem Land song led by Barwick and funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project. We situate the Berndt song documentation in the broader context of the public ceremonial dance-song genre (known as manyarti in Mawng, or kun-borrk in Kunwinjku) that was the main focus of our project’s efforts, reflect on the significance of Berndt’s work, and provide re-transcriptions of the song texts, transliterating as relevant into contemporary Mawng orthography, and showing organisation of the text words into lines of verse, usually regularly repeated to form the sung version.