A mesmerizing journey into the musical world of Australia's Aboriginal people. Winner of the Stanner Award from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies (2006) Aboriginal musicians receive songs both from an eternal realm known as The Dreaming and from the ghosts of deceased ancestors. Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts is the first book-length study of wangga, a musical and ceremonial genre of Aboriginal people of the Daly Region of Northern Australia. This work is a labor of love, the culmination of nearly 20 years of field work and research by renowned ethnomusicologist Allan Marett, and represents the only comprehensive documentation of a single major genre of Aboriginal music. With first-hand, in-depth knowledge of Northwest Australia's Aboriginal cultures, Marett provides the reader with a penetrating description and analysis of this compelling musical practice. This book makes a significant contribution to knowledge of Aboriginal studies, and provides a rare glimpse into relatively unknown traditions and cultures. It includes illustrations, musical examples, and links to a web-based virtual CD loaded with samples of this fascinating music, closely linked to the text, at http://www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/wanggacd/.

Wangga, originating in the Daly region of Australia’s Top End, is one of the most prominent Indigenous genres of public dance-songs. This book is organised around six repertories: four from the Belyuen-based songmen Barrtjap, Muluk, Mandji and Lambudju, and two from the Wadeye-based Walakandha and Ma-yawa wangga groups, the repertories being named after the ancestral song-giving ghosts of the Marri Tjavin and Marri Ammu people respectively. Framing chapters include discussion of the genre’s social history, musical conventions and the five highly endangered languages in which the songs are composed. The core of the book is a compendium of recordings, transcriptions, translations and explanations of over 150 song items. Thanks to permissions from the composers’ families and a variety of archives and recordists, this corpus includes almost every wangga song ever recorded in the Daly region.

Wangga, originating in the Daly region of Australia's Top End, is one of the most prominent Indigenous genres of public dance-songs. This book focuses on the songmen who created and performed the song

Collaborative Ethnomusicology explores the processes, benefits and challenges of collaborative ethnomusicological research between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia. While there are many examples of research and recordings that demonstrate close collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, this volume is the first to focus on the ways these processes allow Indigenous and non-Indigenous music researchers to work together and learn from each other. Drawing on case studies from across Australia, each chapter brings significant insights into the many positives and some of the discomforts in collaborative spaces, highlighting the ongoing dialogue needed in order to improve relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and inform the future of ethnomusicological research in Australia.

This volume showcases academic research into the rich diversity of music in Australia from colonial times to the present. Starting with an overview of developments during the past 50 years, the contributions discuss Western and non-western genres (opera, film, dance, choral, chamber); the history of music-making in particular cosmopolitan and regional centres (Canberra, Brisbane, the Hunter Valley, Alice Springs); old, new, and experimental compositions; and a variety of performers and ensembles active at particular points in time. In addition, cultural tropes and music as social practice are also explored, providing a rich tapestry of music and music-making in the country. The volume thus serves as a model for representing and approaching multicultural musical societies in an inclusive and comprehensive manner.

Speaking the Earth’s Languages brings together for the first time critical discussions of postcolonial poetics from Australia and Chile. The book crosses multiple Languages, landscapes, and disciplines, and draws on a wide range of both oral and written poetries, in order to make strong claims about the importance of ‘a nomad poetics’ – not only for understanding Aboriginal or Mapuche writing practices but, more widely, for the problems confronting contemporary literature and politics in colonized landscapes. The book begins by critiquing canonical examples of non-indigenous postcolonial poetics. Incisive re-readings of two icons of Australian and Chilean poetry, Judith Wright (1915–2000) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), provide rich insights into non-indigenous responses to colonization in the wake of modernity. The second half of the book establishes compositional links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, and between such oral and written poetics more generally. The book’s final part develops an ‘emerging synthesis’ of contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, with reference to the work of two of the most important avant-garde Aboriginal and Mapuche poets of recent times, Lionel Fogarty (1958–) and Paulo Huirimilla (1973–). Speaking the Earth’s Languages uses these fascinating links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics as the basis of a deliberately nomadic, open-ended theory for an Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics. “The central argument of this book,” the author writes, “is that a nomadic poetics is essential for a genuinely postcolonial form of habitation, or a habitation of colonized landscapes that doesn’t continue to replicate colonialist ideologies involving indigenous dispossession and environmental exploitation.”