Warlpiri Women Research Articles

Yawulyu Mardukuja-patu-kurlangu: Relational Dynamics of Warlpiri Women’s Song Performance

ABSTRACT Warlpiri women, as with other groups across Indigenous Australia, sing to sustain and nurture their relationships with Country and jukurrpa (dreamings). For the custodians of these singing traditions, spiritual agency and power are consigned to songs and their singers, and performances are centred around nurturing relational links between people with Country and to other participants. Within contemporary contexts, in which Warlpiri singers are finding fewer opportunities to perform and pass on songs, new performance spaces are being created to continue to carry forward the significant cultural work of maintaining social and spiritual order through song. In this article we consider a number of performance instances of Warlpiri women's yawulyu (ceremonial songs) and discuss the inter—group dynamics and negotiations which are central to these events. We explore the ways in which Warlpiri women are continuing the cultural work of maintaining the relational aspects central to yawulyu through these performances despite shifting purposes and performance contexts. We illustrate through examples from contemporary events, how the dynamics of the particular performance instances involving ceremonial songs, dances, and other activities, direct the ways in which participants assert and reshape their intimate links to Country and to broader social networks of others.

‘We don’t show our women’s breasts for nothing’: Shifting purposes for Warlpiri women’s public rituals – yawulyu – Central Australia, 1980s–2020s

Warlpiri women from the Tanami Desert of Central Australia have across generations passed on their yawulyu ceremonies, which nurture kin, country and cosmological connections. Dussart has previously shown distinct shifts in purpose in the 1990s, as Warlpiri women first began to perform yawulyu for non-Indigenous audiences. In the past decade, a further shift has occurred, with yawulyu being held predominantly as part of community-development arts initiatives. These opportunities are now the primary contexts in which yawulyu are held, while redefining the values, power relations and types of capital central to these performances, be they surrounding prestige, monetary payment or cultural recognition, as well as providing ambiguous and elusive communitas of ‘contentment’ for the performers as they engage with their audiences. In this article, the authors present case studies that span from the 1980s, when Warlpiri women first considered how to present yawulyu to non-Indigenous audiences, through to the pan-Aboriginal Women’s Law and Culture meetings of the 1990s and 2000s, and the Warlpiri-led Southern Ngaliya dance camps of the 2010s, and up to the present day, where they are being invited to perform yawulyu as part of larger theatrical events. As the authors examine performative events during different periods in Australia since colonisation, they draw on Thomas Turino’s definitions of participatory and presentational genres of musical performances to analyse how and why the reasons to perform have shifted. The authors conclude by highlighting that such shifts shed light on how entangled politics of relatedness are also changing.

“That is Why I am Telling this Story”: Musical Analysis as Insight into the Transmission of Knowledge and Performance Practice of a Wapurtarli Song by Warlpiri Women from Yuendumu, Central Australia

AbstractInsights into the knowledge, performance, and transmission of songs are pivotal in ensuring the survival of traditional Aboriginal songs. We present the first in-depth musical analysis of a Wapurtarli yawulyu song set sung by Warlpiri women from Yuendumu, Central Australia, recorded in December 2006 with a solo lead singer accompanied by a small group. Our musical analysis reveals that there are various interlocking parts of a song, and this can make it difficult for current generations to learn songs. The context of musical endangerment and the musical analyses presented in our study show that contemporary spaces for learning yawulyu must consider the complex components that come together for a song set to be properly performed.

Documenting the Dreaming: Designs and Songs of the Present, in the Past, for the Future

This paper is based on fieldwork carried out in 1981–82 with the Warlpiri women in Willowra, Northern Territory. The basis of discussion is the documentation of women's ceremonies and the return of the data many years later to this community. My role as an ethnographer in the past, and the potential outcomes of the reintroduction of ethnographic data, indicates there is much of value in the documentation of Indigenous cultural and intellectual heritage. Documenting religious ceremonies reveals a variety of values: that of the ethnographer in the documentation of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property; the intrinsic value of these material renditions to the tradition-bearers themselves; and the value of these contributions in applied community contexts. In regard to the community benefits of research and documentation, the paper addresses archival documentation for revitalisation of culture.

Yurntumu-wardingki Juju-ngaliya-kurlangu Yawulyu: Warlpiri Women’s Songs from Yuendumu. 2017. Batchelor Institute Press. Recorded by Georgia Curran and Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan. Annotated by various. Produced by Georgia Curran. 112-page book with notes in English. Colour and B/W photographs, musical notations, map, glossary, bibliography, QR codes. 4 CDs and 1 DVD. CD 1, 15 tracks (29:06); CD 2, 11 tracks (30:09); CD

Yurntumu-wardingki Juju-ngaliya-kurlangu Yawulyu: Warlpiri Women’s Songs from Yuendumu. 2017. Batchelor Institute Press. Recorded by Georgia Curran and Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan. Annotated by various. Produced by Georgia Curran. 112-page book with notes in English. Colour and B/W photographs, musical notations, map, glossary, bibliography, QR codes. 4 CDs and 1 DVD. CD 1, 15 tracks (29:06); CD 2, 11 tracks (30:09); CD

Representations of Indigenous Cultural Property in Collaborative Publishing Projects: The Warlpiri Women's Yawulyu Songbooks

ABSTRACTThis paper explores issues around the representation of Indigenous cultural property, voices and images in two books of Warlpiri women's yawulyu song traditions that form part of a series published by Batchelor Press (Gallagher, C.N., et al., 2014. Jardiwanpa Yawulyu: Warlpiri Women’s Songs from Yuendumu. Batchelor: Batchelor Press and Warlpiri Women from Yuendumu. 2017. Yurntumu-wardingki juju-ngaliya-kurlangu yawulyu: Warlpiri Women’s Songs from Yuendumu [with Accompanying DVD]. Batchelor: Batchelor Press). These publications stem from collaborations between Indigenous knowledge holders and non-Indigenous researchers and involve long-term relationships between the team members. We draw out discussion of the motivations for making these books, and the agency within these intercultural teams, considering the colonising impact of academic research, the intercultural dimensions to Indigenous identities and the role of publications such as these in repatriation and reparation efforts. We demonstrate how Warlpiri women have directed the production processes and surrounding events so that these books not only represent forms of Warlpiri cultural knowledge but also contribute to the dynamic forms of cultural reproduction that ensure continued engagement with these song traditions into the future.

Warlpiri experiences highlight challenges and opportunities for gender equity in Indigenous conservation management in arid Australia

Gender equity has been recognized as a guiding principle for conservation management globally. Yet little attention is paid to gender in the design and implementation of many conservation programs including those in the vibrant and expanding arena of Australian Indigenous conservation partnerships. We examined the impact of gender in management of the Northern Tanami Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) in arid central Australia through qualitative research (interviews and participant observation) with senior Warlpiri women and men and members of the all-male Wulaign community-based ranger group. Senior men and women had many similar perspectives including that customary knowledge, skills and activities were important in managing country and were occurring less through the IPA's management partnerships than they would like. Additional challenges reported by women included lack of vehicles to access country. Senior men specifically called for greater gender equity in allocation of resources including establishment of a women's ranger group. These perspectives indicate that gender equity is a Warlpiri cultural norm for management of country. Differences between Indigenous women's and men's management of country elsewhere in arid Australia suggest that opportunities also exist for gender equity to enhance conservation outcomes.Prevalent belief systems in Australia, and many other developed countries, are gender blind in that they fail to recognize differences between men's and women's needs, interests, knowledges, behaviors and power. Monitoring of Australian Indigenous conservation programs shows that an increasing proportion of Indigenous community-based rangers are women. However factors that might explain and support this trend cannot be readily identified because little or no attention to gender is apparent in program design and project planning. Gender-aware design of conservation management policies, programs and projects is important for challenging and changing gender blindness. Brokers and bridging institutions, or ‘two-way’ approaches, have been important in progressing cross-cultural equity in the implementation of Australian Indigenous conservation partnerships and can be expected to be also valuable for promoting gender equity.

Jardiwanpa Yawulya: Warlpiri Women's Songs from Yuendumu. 2014. Batchelor Press. Field recordings by Georgia Curran, Yuendumu, 2006. Annotated by Georgia Curran and Barbara Napanangka Martin. 88-page booklet with notes in English and Warlpiri. Colour and b/w photographs, drawings, musical notations, maps, bibliography, discography, filmography, glossary. CD, 3 tracks (67:50).

Jardiwanpa Yawulya: Warlpiri Women's Songs from Yuendumu. 2014. Batchelor Press. Field recordings by Georgia Curran, Yuendumu, 2006. Annotated by Georgia Curran and Barbara Napanangka Martin. 88-page booklet with notes in English and Warlpiri. Colour and b/w photographs, drawings, musical notations, maps, bibliography, discography, filmography, glossary. CD, 3 tracks (67:50). - Volume 48

Edge Effects in Warlpiri Yawulyu Songs: Resyllabification, Epenthesis, Final Vowel Modification

Song genres vary as to which aspects of language and music are matched to create a well-formed song. For example, English folk songs match stressed syllables to strong musical beats. Some song styles have no requirements on how language and music should align. This article analyses how text and music align in Warlpiri women's songs from central Australia and finds there are ‘text-setting’ rules for setting text to musical rhythm. We first identify the formal units of the text and music and then account for their combination by two matching rules. In Warlpiri, text-setting involves matching each syllable to one metrical (rhythmic) position and aligning phonological phrase edges with bar edges. Linguistic units smaller than the phrase, such as those in reduplications and other polymorphemic words, require no such alignment. Alignment is often met through lengthening the right edge of a phrase, which often results in a distortion of the patterns of syllabic prominence in speech. Preferred structures for both text and music can lead to variations of a song based on a reordering of these preferences. This can be exploited to restructure songs when words must be avoided for social reasons.

‘Now we got truck everywhere, we don’t travel anywhere’: A phenomenology of travelling by community mutika in the northern Kimberley, Western Australia

Motor vehicles tend to be highly personalised in all kinds of cultural milieus. The process of personalisation is primarily achieved through a projection of the travelling subject's own bodily schema onto the body of the vehicle. These strongly libidinal/narcissistic bodily investments are made visible, for example, in the penchant for personalised numberplates that expand parts of a vehicle owner's/user's bodily ego into that of their vehicle, in how some male truck drivers paint their wife's or girlfriend's name on their cab panels so that the driver is imaginarily travelling inside the desired woman's cab/body, or even in the way we might speak of a vehicle being 'gutsy' or 'gutless'. The projection of bodily schemata is also apparent in the way we internally differentiate a vehicle so that we might speak not just of its 'body', but also of its '/zeacflights', its 'tail' or 'arse-end', its steering arms and so on. Conversely, a vehicularisation of the human body is evident in idioms such as 'punching someone's lights out', 'making tracks' or 'going off the rails'. This dialectic between corporealisation of vehicles and a vehicularisation of the body is no less evident in the tropes used by the Indigenous people of the Kimberley region of north-western Australia where the forms of embodiment that are projected onto (and introjected from) vehicles take on the specificity of local body imagery and the particular ways in which vehicles are used there. At the conclusion of one long bush trip, my wife, our Ngarinyin neighbour Molly, and myself had almost arrived back in the settlement where we lived when the rear axle of our vehicle disintegrated just as we pulled off the main road onto the long, corrugated track leading home. Molly, an elderly widow, clambered out of her seat, sat herself down on the dirt road and began to cry loudly and inconsolably not just for herself but for the mutika (motorcar): 'that ungulman [old woman], he bin carry we bala every place... finish up now... praply buggered up.' Other moving examples of this corporealisation of vehicles in another part of Indigenous Australia appear throughout the Warlpiri Media TV series Bush Mechanics.1 In one of the more reflective interludes sandwiched between comedie scenes, a senior man picks through the rusted bones of a prewar Chevrolet truck. Pointing to the disembodied monohth of the engine block, he wistfully muses on how this particular truck - on which he and his age-mates first learnt their mechanical skills - 'bin grow us up that one', and then goes on to say how its now disintegrating presence in the country continues to act as a 'witness for us'. Gertrude Stotz also recorded some of the personahsing statements about vehicles made by Warlpiri women, including a scenario in which she was admonished for pushing her overheated vehicle too hard by a passenger, who said of the car: 'Your mum got headache, you got to drive slowly.'2 For many Ngarinyin people, what the corporealised vehicle also imphes (and this is something I also see in the Walpiri examples just given) is that the vehicle acts as an objectified container of relationships while simultaneously becoming bodily relativised (as in 'made a relative of) to its contents. This is hardly surprising when we consider that our bodily schemata are always inter-subjectively constituted from the face-to-face situations that provide a corporeal mirroring in which we not only recognise, but also build up, images of own bodies. This bodily mirror image - although constituted through social engagements - tends to remain a highly differentiated one marked with the particularities by which we carve ourselves out from others. In terms that resist a Durkheimian tendency towards hypostatising the body image as emblematic of 'society' itself, the pioneering psychoanalyst and phenomenologist of bodily experience Paul Schilder described a dual process of differentiation from, and dependency on, the bodily image of others as one in which a body image is in some way always the sum of the body-images of the community according to the various relations in the community. …

Linguistic Imagery in Warlpiri Songs: Some Examples of Metaphors, Metonymy and Image-schemata in Minamina Yawulyu

The language of Aboriginal songs is often described by both researchers and Aboriginal people as being unintelligible to those who do not have the ritual knowledge to understand it. The Minamina yawulyu performed by Warlpiri women from Yuendumu community, Central Australia, is one such song cycle that is described in this way. However, it does not display many instances of ritual or archaic words or phonological skewing that would clearly differentiate this language from everyday Warlpiri. Instead the Minamina yawulyu uses regular language in a connotative way such that it is unintelligible without knowledge of the symbolic associations intended. In this way ritually knowledgeable people who understand the connotations of this language are required to interpret these songs giving them a degree of control over how this knowledge is transmitted. In this paper I will present some examples of metaphor, metonymy and image-schemata along with accompanying exegesis provided by Warlpiri informants. In highlighting this symbolic way of using language I will show that Warlpiri song language uses familiar physical and social experiences in Warlpiri people's lives such as those around landscape, kin relations and physical appearances and movement, to connote emotive responses to country and associated ceremonies. This paper will demonstrate the role of song in passing on the complexity of religious knowledge and also the ways in which ritually knowledgeable people control its transmission.

Shown but not Shared, Presented but not Proffered: Redefining Ritual Identity among Warlpiri Ritual Performers, 1990–2000

Little has been written on the construction and projection of indigenous social identity in public (‘non‐restricted’) ritual among Aboriginal Australians. Elsewhere, I have analysed nearly half a century of such public rituals (1946–1990) among the Warlpiri of Yuendumu in Central Australia, concentrating on the shifting forces of gender and kinship. This paper focuses on the key moments motivating senior Warlpiri women, since the 1990s, to reconfigure their ritual participation and roles in inter‐indigenous ceremonial events. I analyse how these women participate in inter‐Aboriginal performances, exhibiting the iconic and sensory virtues of the Dreaming and weaving new forms of political identity, shaped by the pressures of neo‐colonialism, with female ambassadors of other Aboriginal groups. I argue that in this performative process women are reconfiguring the meanings of Aboriginalities and rearticulating their connectedness to one another, a connectedness rooted in their beliefs and responsibilities towards the Dreaming.

Shown but not Shared, Presented but not Proffered: Redefining Ritual Identity among Warlpiri Ritual Performers, 1990-2000

Little has been written on the construction and projection of indigenous social identity in public (‘non-restricted’) ritual among Aboriginal Australians. Elsewhere, I have analysed nearly half a century of such public rituals (1946–1990) among the Warlpiri of Yuendumu in Central Australia, concentrating on the shifting forces of gender and kinship. This paper focuses on the key moments motivating senior Warlpiri women, since the 1990s, to reconfigure their ritual participation and roles in inter-indigenous ceremonial events. I analyse how these women participate in inter-Aboriginal performances, exhibiting the iconic and sensory virtues of the Dreaming and weaving new forms of political identity, shaped by the pressures of neo-colonialism, with female ambassadors of other Aboriginal groups. I argue that in this performative process women are reconfiguring the meanings of Aboriginalities and rearticulating their connectedness to one another, a connectedness rooted in their beliefs and responsibilities towards the Dreaming.

What's in a Dedication? On Being a Warlpiri DJ

This article reports on the operation of the Pintupi Anmatyerre Warlpiri radio network, established by the Warlpiri Media Association in the north‐west of Central Australia in late 2001. It traces the history out of which the network emerged and considers the distinctive approach taken to broadcasting by a group of young Warlpiri women. In exploring the on‐air invocation of particular forms of social relations, I argue that radio has come to play an important role in facilitating expressions of Warlpiri sociality across an expanding social field. At once a driver of social transformation and the transcendence of localism, as well as the glue that might bind people to each other in a changing world, the activity occurring around the Warlpiri Media Association provides a window onto the multiple challenges and choices faced by Warlpiri people in the present. This article is most particularly interested in how Warlpiri youth are negotiating these challenges and choices. The final section considers whether this new radio network might be understood in terms of the emergence of a new public sphere.

Red Bucket for the Red Cordial, Green Bucket for the Green Cordial: On the Logic and Logistics of Warlpiri Birthday Parties1

Birthday parties are a relatively new occurrence at Yuendumu, a Warlpiri settlement in central Australia. By focusing on the food prepared and consumed at these parties, I examine the ritualised Warlpiri and non‐Warlpiri elements of these events, with a particular view to Warlpiri women's creativity in shaping and re‐shaping them. I contrast birthday party food from everyday staple foods and so‐called ‘bush tucker’, and analyse these different food types in regard to generational differentiation. Lastly, the role of the anthropologist in shaping birthday parties as well as in writing about them is scrutinised.

Reviews - Warlpiri Women's Voices: Our Lives Our History Stories collected by Georgina Napangardi and Janet Nakamarra Long, and edited by Petronella Vaarzon-Morel IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1995,118 pp

Reviews - Warlpiri Women's Voices: Our Lives Our History Stories collected by Georgina Napangardi and Janet Nakamarra Long, and edited by Petronella Vaarzon-Morel IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1995,118 pp - Volume 24 Issue 1

Notes on Warlpiri women's personal names

ABSTRACT This article looks at Aboriginal personal names, an area of study neglected for over 40 years, and concentrate on an Aboriginal group in Central Australia. Personal names are considered to be linked to the Dreamtime, and the methods by which names are acquired, and the people involved in bestowing names, are discussed. It is argued that naming may be seen as a rite de passage. Usage of personal names, and the factors affecting such usage, are presented, along with some observations on the relationship of personal names to territory.