2025-12-18
Clint Bracknell
The vitality of eco-centric Noongar language and song traditions Indigenous to Western Australia’s urban-rural southwest region has been continually compromised by environmental and social upheaval since the onset of settler-colonisation in the nineteenth century. The Noongar region is today recognised as an area of globally significant biodiversity under significant threat, and a global drying hotspot. This article considers how revitalising and publicly sharing Noongar expressive culture could destabilise the separation between nature and culture imposed and maintained by settler-colonial systems. It positions Noongar performance revitalisation in the transdisciplinary field of ecomusicologies, considering the potential for Indigenous expressive culture to help move the needle on nature-culture challenges and motivate action on pressing global environmental issues. While many Indigenous communities are engaging in processes of revitalising culture, language and performance across Australia, the ecological and social benefits of revitalised Indigenous performance genres are yet to be fully realised and understood, especially in urban-rural contexts. Given the primary function of Indigenous expressive culture to maintain reciprocal relationships among communities and everything in landscapes, broader public engagement with Indigenous performance could productively enrich perceptions of local environments among all Australians. Still, tensions exist between the resource-intensive demands associated with reaching large audiences through festival productions and the eco-friendly, community-focused motivations for Noongar language and performance revitalisation.
2025-12-18
Myfany Turpin, Maya Ward
Many cultures use songs to influence the world around them (e.g. Levin 2006, Feld 1982). In Australian Aboriginal societies, song can be a tool to influence one’s environment. Such practices can affect the physical world—people, animals, plants— and the non-physical world, where spirit beings reside, a realm referred to as the Altyerre in Arandic languages of central Australia (Dobson 2007, Turner 2010, Wallace & Lovell 2009, Green 2012). Like the Tuvan people of Siberia who use singing and other verbal practices “to coexist peacefully with these spirit-masters and gain access to the resources under their control” (Levin 2006:28), many Indigenous Australians engage in ceremonial and other vocal practices to influence their world. In this article we explore song as a means to experience sentient ecology in two contrasting Aboriginal Australian contexts. In doing so, this contribution invites us to consider more broadly the role of humanly created sound in society.
2025-12-18
Georgia Curran, Enid Nangala Gallagher, Nellie Nangala Wayne, Peggy Nampijinpa Brown
Warlpiri women’s ceremonies are centred on lengthy songlines which contain verses holding intimate knowledge of the environment and interconnected cultural practices. These practices and the knowledge they maintain have sustained Aboriginal populations and the environment in the Tanami desert region of Australia over millennia. Indeed, for Aboriginal peoples across Central Australian communities, singing traditions are the primary means by which place-specific biocultural knowledge is passed on through generations, seasons and shifting social and ecological contexts. In this article, we discuss two Warlpiri women's songs relating to the rain (Ngapa yawulyu), and fire (Warlukurlangu yawulyu). The knowledge and practices surrounding these songs reinforce and reproduce intimate interconnections between these two environmental phenomena, the social groups to which they associated and associated cultural practices. We argue that attention to and support for the ongoing performance of Warlpiri songs enhances broader understandings biocultural knowledge crucial for survival and may be able to contribute to the challenges surrounding contemporary climate crises.