Deadly sounds, deadly places: Contemporary Aboriginal Music in Australia

Peter Dunbar-Hall and Chris Gibson

Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004

Reviewed by Hans Hoegh-Guldberg

‘Deadly’ is Aboriginal English for fantastic, great, terrific. The authors are Sydney-based academics whose research interests include Aboriginal music, Australian cultural history and Aboriginal economic development. While their book is about ‘contemporary’ Aboriginal music, they are careful to point out (p 16) that “attempts to define Aboriginal expressions through Western concepts such as ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ are futile, and possibly damaging.” One might argue that this is becoming common to all music, not least new music fusing or mixing conventional genres. “Our position, resonant with that of many Aboriginal musicians, is that Aboriginal music is a thread of expression that has always, and is continually changing.”

The book is wide-ranging. It shows the historical context, tracing the roots of the current contemporary music back to the mid-19^th Century ranging from gospel influences to “music hall, vaudeville and gum leaves”. Famous Aboriginal country musician Jimmy Little traces his own artistic development back to these influences (“Mum and Dad were vaudevillians”).

Some of the most revealing insights come from the analysis of specific songs, Top End group Blekbala Mujik’s Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge) and Warumpi Band’s Warumpinya. The significance of place – land – is central in both. Nitmiluk celebrates the return of a specific place to its Aboriginal owners and exemplifies the handing back of land as a recurring topic of Aboriginal rock songs (p 257).

Warumpi Band was the first Aboriginal group to be recognised for rock songs in an Aboriginal language. Like the most famous group of Aboriginal visual artists, it came from Papunya west of Alice Springs. Many of their songs addressed social issues such as cultural maintenance, alcohol abuse and the need to look after children. Another way to understand the music is through its relationship with traditional Aboriginal music in Central Australia, including the use of a didjeridu in a rock group and similarities between the roles of Warumpinya and those of traditional Aboriginal songs. A third aspect is its classification as ‘world music’, influenced by the commercial record industry and regarded with some scepticism by the authors.

Country music is strong in contemporary Aboriginal music, which like rock and other influences has North American antecedents. Dunbar-Hall found in a 1994 survey that about one-third of commercial recordings of Aboriginal music were country songs, showed country music influence or contained sections of country music (p 99). Jimmy Little made his first recordings almost fifty years ago and has since been joined by a large number of other artists including Ernie and Noel Bridge, Troy Cassar-Daley and Roger Knox, whose records are on the book’s ‘suggested listening’ list of country music performed by Aboriginal artists.

Black nationalism transcends borders, and many black musical forms draw on African roots, including reggae, rap, R&B and soul. They “have become popular among disenfranchised groups in Europe, throughout Asia and in Australia, especially among migrant groups, working class youth and Indigenous communities” (p 121). Apart from reggae and jazz, hip-hop is “probably the most widespread transnational black cultural form, distinct in its intense territoriality and its focus on ‘the ghetto’ as a real and mythical space” (p 122). With its rapping and explicit language, it is certainly the angriest contemporary Aboriginal music; it occurs across the continent from big cities to the bush, and unifies young people of many ethnic backgrounds with working class white youth from the poorer suburbs. “Every teenager has to be a rebel. It doesn’t matter whether you’re white, black, Asian or what. That’s your thing; you are oppressed by school and teacher and so on. Hip-hop becomes your voice, and it’s a very potent voice” (Morgan Lewis, aka Morganics, p 124).

The book has separate chapters on geographic areas including Djabugay country north of Cairns, the Top End and the Kimberleys. One chapter deals with the work of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) in Alice Springs, and the influence of cultural tourism around Alice Springs and Uluru, and in Far North Queensland where the Tjapukai Dance Theatre in Kuranda is a major attraction.

Dunbar-Hall and Gibson express the hope (p 33) “that readers (particularly those who are not Aboriginal) are challenged in terms of their perceptions of place, as well as in their understandings of Aboriginal music.” This reviewer was, and warmly recommends it to others as a comprehensive but clear account of a complex subject. The authors may be forgiven the section heading on page 21, ‘Situating musical knowledges’, which is almost a candidate for Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words. Their book is deadly in the best Aboriginal English sense of the word.

Each chapter contains a suggested listening list relevant to the subject of the chapter. The book ends with a full discography, a comprehensive set of references and an index which works. The largest number of page references is to ‘land’, which encapsulates the essence of contemporary Aboriginal music.

Music Forum Vol 11 No 2