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Quest to save Australia’s dying songs

Corroboree performers at Mandorah in 1987. Bobby Lambudju Lane is at the back, second from left. CREDIT:SYDNEY UNIVERSITY PRESS / SUPPLIED.

Liam Mannix, ‘An ethical and moral imperative’: One woman’s quest to save Australia’s dying songs, The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January 2023

Warning to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers: This story contains images and references to a deceased person.

Every society and culture is united by a single, shared tradition: singing. Humans sing when they are happy, and when they are sad. They sing alone and in groups. But everybody everywhere sings.

“We have it as children, as adults, when we’re dying. It’s tied in with how we identify in our world,” says Professor Linda Barwick. “It is something we need in our lives.”

Human history is encoded in these songs. In cultures that practise oral traditions, songs may be the only historical record. But that means as the singers grow old and die, the songs can be lost and a link to the past severed.

Barwick, a musicologist at the University of Sydney, has made a career of ensuring that does not happen. She founded an archive that has collected more than 200 terabytes of songs, performances, storytelling and oral traditions from endangered cultures, including many First Nations communities.

Some recordings are in languages that are no longer spoken. Others were made in places now rendered uninhabitable by the climate crisis.

Barwick says there is an ethical and a moral imperative to preserve them.

For her “significant service to the preservation and digitisation of cultural heritage recordings”, Barwick has been made a member of the Order of Australia – one of several scientists to be honoured.

Barwick co-founded the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures in 2003, in the face of two urgent pressures.

Australia sits at the centre of an extraordinary web of linguistic and cultural diversity. More than 2000 of the world’s 6000 languages are spoken in Australia, the South Pacific and South-East Asia.

Within the next 100 years, the number is predicted to dwindle to just a few hundred as communities age, traditions break down, and the climate crisis claims islands across the Pacific. The archive contains field recordings from the village of Tahal Nessa on Paama Island – a part of Vanuatu that is no longer inhabitable due to climate change.

Bobby Lambudju Lane at Indian Island in 1989. CREDIT: ADRIENNE HARITOS.

Also, many of the recordings field researchers have taken over the years are on reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes – some are even on MiniDisc.

“Who has a MiniDisc player any more?” says Barwick. Losing those recordings would be a loss to science “but it’s also loss of cultural information that is part of the birthright of the people we’d worked with”.

Professor Linda Barwick.
Professor Linda Barwick.

The fully digitised archive now runs out of several universities and the data is accessed by a cultural diaspora across the world. There are songs and stories from Afghanistan, Benin, Kiribati, Nauru and Uganda.

Many were recorded by Barwick, who spent years doing field work with communities across Australia and the Pacific.

The recordings of Bobby Lambudju Lane, a songman who made a name for himself in Belyuen, just south of Darwin, in the late 1980s are particularly special to her.

Lambudju mixed two languages, Batjamalh and Emmi, and sung original songs and the songs of his fathers and family. Many of the songs are about his country, north of the Daly River, and Rak Badjalarr, North Peron Island, the place where people from Belyuen return after death.

Lambudju died at an early age, so his archive is small. But the songs are beautiful, says Barwick.

Karra-ve Kanya-verver, which contains the words of wunymalang ghosts as they return to Rak Badjalarr, is her favourite.

It [a breeze] is forever cooling my back /
Away now to Badjalarr forever

See also: Uncle Archie receives posthumous Order of Australia honour