Keepsakes and surrogates: hijacking music technology at Wadeye (northwest Australia)

Abstract

This paper focuses on some uses of recording technology in the township of Wadeye in Australia’s Northern Territory, resulting from a project focusing on djanba, a genre of public ceremonial song created and performed by Murriny Patha people. Murriny Patha is one of the healthiest Australian languages, with about 2500 speakers, most living in Wadeye and nearby. In recent years, with substantial social change in the community and the deaths of key composers and performers of the traditional ceremonial genres djanba, wangga and lirrga, performances of ceremonial song have markedly declined. In collaboration with the Wadeye Aboriginal Languages Centre (WALC), the Kanamkek Yile Ngala Museum and the Wadeye Library and Knowledge Centre (WLKC), our research team (Allan Marett, Michael Walsh, Joe Blythe, Nick Reid and Lysbeth Ford) recently completed a project to digitise and document all the song recordings held by WALC, and to make them available through an iTunes database in the WLKC. Port Keats (the early name for Wadeye) was originally established in 1932 as a Catholic mission, and the Catholic church and the Catholic school are the two most visible institutions in the community. In the past, live performances of traditional ceremonial music were used as part of church liturgy, but in recent years recorded music has taken over this function, and indeed one of the main uses for the iTunes database has been to provide music for playing at funerals in the church. Family members of the deceased often ask for CD copies of this music as a keepsake. This paper addresses the modalities of production of these recordings, and how the adoption of these new technologies supports various aspects of traditional social organisation while creating new channels for social interaction and displacing old ones. I am particularly interested in the extent to which localised diversity of place and family affiliation is played out in the composition, performance, content and circulation of the songs.