Performance, aesthetics, experience: thoughts on Yawulyu mungamunga songs

Abstract

In 2000 a CD of Warumungu women’s Yawulyu Mungamunga songs was published by Festival records (Papulu Apparr-kari Aboriginal Language and Culture Centre & Barwick, 2000, 479), and launched in Tennant Creek and in Sydney at the National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia. In Sydney a large audience of musicologists and academics witnessed the launch of these songs into the national and international arena, an event marked by speeches and ceremonial exchanges of gifts as well as a performance of the songs with dancing by a group of women who had travelled to Sydney for the occasion. The Sydney CD launch was just one in a long line of performances that Warumungu people have presented for outsiders. In a canvas painted by E.G. Nakkamarra to celebrate the launch of the CD, cultural precedent was invoked to situate the publication of the CD as ngijinkirri, a Warumungu tradition of ceremonial sharing of food and performances with outsiders. For centuries, Warumungu people have performed their ceremonies in exchange with neighbouring Aboriginal groups, and ever since the Overland Telegraph Line was established north of present-day Tennant Creek in the 1870s, performances have also been mounted for papulanji (the Warumungu language word for non-Aboriginal people). These instances demonstrate that Warumungu people expect their performances to have social and aesthetic power for outsiders as well as for cultural insiders. This article reflects my own aesthetic engagement with these Yawulyu Mungamunga songs, which I first recorded near Tennant Creek in 1996.