Casting our Nets: singing a fishing song from the past, in the present, for the future

Introduction

In 1789, the custodians of sites at Tubowgule, Warrane and Woccanmagully (places surrounding what is now known as Sydney harbour) continued lifeways, cultural practices and social ties that had been in place for many thousands of years.[1] Only a year earlier, a fleet of ships from England had brought a crew of hundreds of military personal and convicts exported with the dual purpose of expanding the colonial empire and finding solutions to the overcrowded prisons of the imperial centre. Though the imposition of these new arrivals had wrought profound changes to life on the sites surrounding what had been renamed Sydney Cove (Warrane) and Farm Cove (Woccanmagully), people continued to live on and care for the Country undergoing transformation.[2]

Songs had long been a mode of historical record for Aboriginal people. In the ways of the people of the Country around the harbour, songs were themselves forms of knowledge documentation. As the Gay’wu Group of Women state:

If there’s a story, there’s meaning behind that story. If there’s a song, there’s meaning behind the song. We don’t sing meaningless songs![3]

In the ways of the newly arrived colonizers, transient visitors and settlers, songs they heard could, in turn, be documented by being written down in musical notation and transcriptions of text. European travellers around the Pacific ocean were intrigued to document songs for ethnographic comparison and other scientific purposes but were limited in their abilities to understand what they heard and render it accurately using the tools of European notation.[4] Grappling with the gap in understanding between the two sides of the colonial encounter, Paul Carter describes the deathly hush of writing:

So much of what is individual about speech is lost when we write it down that it is unsurprising perhaps that we can ‘read’ at all …. It may not be possible to recover the voice, but writing at least gives us access to what it said.[5]

As Carter suggests, writing down spoken and sung sounds loses something, and the violent colonization of the Country around the harbour led to the loss of even more, disrupting long-established practices of intergenerational knowledge transmission and the singing of songs that hold knowledge. In this article, we combine historical documentary research with Indigenous methods of creative recuperation being practised by people who have borne the brunt of the most intensive and longest period of colonization on the Australian continent. We focus on one song, transcribed in three European sources from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The historical sources are incomplete and fragmented not just in their partial and variable transcriptions, but also in their separation from the singers of the songs. Musical scores have been widely shown to be inadequate representations of the sounds of live performance.[6] In the case of this song, the inadequacy is marked not only by the absence of expressive devices or shared musical conventions left off the score (though this is part of it). It is also marked by a disconnect between the transcriber and the singer and their lack of shared vocabulary, cultural framework and musical understanding.[7]

Surveying the historical sources and combining these with contemporary cultural knowledge and practice, we argue that connection with community and Country is essential in attempting a historically informed performance of this song. Aboriginal groups around the continent have differentially experienced the impacts of colonization, and not all can rely on continuous knowledge transmission through family and kin relationships. In parts of the continent where songs have been passed on through generations, songs hold an expansive body of knowledge and are a ‘continuum of past evidence and long-established precedents’, as Aaron Corn writes about the manikay of Yolngu songman Joe Gumbula in Australia’s far north.[8] Seeking reconnection to this deep intellectual and spiritual continuum, Darug people in south-eastern Australia are developing creative methods to be attentive to Country and to combine their growing knowledge of Country with insights captured in fragments of historical documentation. Hearing these songs today has the potential to unlock knowledge about the people who sang, the Country in which songs were sung, and the roles and functions of the songs themselves as records of history and memory, modes of communication with the non-human world (animals and the land), and instruction of coming generations in the proper ways of the world.[9]

The three co-authors have collaborated both in preparing performances of the song, and in preparing this article.[10] These processes have involved engagement with the saltwater Country this song comes from, with the resources of that Country, and have drawn on the creative license and cultural knowledge of people descended from the singers. Jacinta Tobin and Ceane Towers are both Cannemegal women of the Dharug dalang (tongue/language of the original people from Greater Sydney language group) and of mixed heritage. The Cannemegal are freshwater dialect speakers of the Dharug dalang. Both women’s ancestors were at the first Native Institute at Parramatta – a site on the estuarine tidal river that meets Sydney harbour – freshwater meeting saltwater.[11] Amanda Harris is a non-Indigenous musicologist and historian who has lived on Darug Country and neighbouring Dharawal Country since childhood. Her known ancestors came from Ireland and England and travelled to the Australian continent from the late-nineteenth century onwards.

We start by describing the history of the people who sang this song, and what is known about their life on the harbour from 1788 onwards. We then examine the fragments of historical documentation of the song for what they tell us about text, melody, rhythm, and meaning. Finally, we give first-person accounts of the processes of re-connection, re-imagining, creativity, spiritual and cultural knowledge that were brought together in realizing a version of the song that can be sung by people of the region today. Jacinta and Ceane have cast their nets wide to bring community and Country into relation through re-singing a fishing song from the past.

The Original People of the Sydney Region

In a time when the Original people lived and fished at Warrane (Sydney Cove), the cove was brimming with aquatic life. Whales would birth their calves in the safety of the deep calm waters. Dennis Foley from the Gai-mariagal has spoken about the song the women would sing if a whale was sick.[12] Foley talks about the sounds produced, that the song and the feet moving on the sand were ways of trying to disorient the whales. Areas like Palm Beach and Manly were places to encourage the whale to beach itself. This knowing of song and sound is part of the greater story of the whale song line which is connected up and down the coastline. Part of that story involves the whale and the nawi (canoe) which brought the people to the mainland.[13] The fishing song that is the subject of this article was sung from a nawi before people came ashore with their catch, joining their singing with others.

Jacinta’s ancestor Maria Lock, daughter of Yarramundi, was part of the Burubirongal clan, she was married to Dickie (Digidigi), the only son of Wangal man Bennelong (Bennil-long). Dickie died before he and Maria had children.[14] Ceane’s ancestor was Black Kitty of the Cannemegal-Warmuli clan of the Darug Nation based around Marrong (Prospect Hill) in Western Sydney. Warmuli was Kitty’s birthplace. Black Kitty was married to Chief Colby (Colebee/ Kolbee), Maria Lock’s brother and Yarramundi’s son. Ceane was told by her Great Uncle that Kitty was married to Bennelong at a different time and that they travelled from fresh water to salt water to fresh water again; her line is connected to both fresh and saltwater ways.

Bennelong and Colebee are two of the most thoroughly documented individuals in colonial records and, as we will see, they are each associated with songs transcribed in the 1790s.[15] What Jacinta and Ceane know about their ancestors and the lifeways of their people around the harbour and inland from the ocean is informed by historical records, but equally by stories told by uncles and aunts that carry knowledge forward through generations, and by intuitive understandings of Country and the Gunyalungalung (often translated into English as the Dreamtime). As Ceane explains:

I am a grandmother who has the gift to see things others can’t see, the gift that my mother had, the gift that my grandmother had, as well as her mother had. I knew them all when they were alive. They talked to me about their gifts. I am also aware how some of my children have this gift too. The Darug ancestors I belong to were high in the Darug clan having been born to a Darug chief at Prospect (my Great Aunty once told me).

In Jacinta’s ontology:

we are in the Gunyalungalung (Dreamtime). Every one of us as a human being is immersed in frequencies and vibrations from those first giant beings who created the mountains and rivers to the present day. Sounds that vibrate my body, hopefully create positive change to the environment. In the ocean, the marine life responds to sound.[16] These are the hidden gems of our existence.

Jacinta theorizes that her people would, over tens of thousands of years, have learnt the songs which would be retained in communities because they created an effect on the life of the fish they were trying to catch:

We are a people of relationality and connections with our Country. We would only take what was needed. Some would be related to some food sources, and they too would make sure what was taken was only what was needed. We are also an intelligent people. If there is an easier way to help you catch food for you and your family, then the easiest way would be chosen. How easy is singing a song while fishing?

Jacinta and Ceane’s understanding of the Dreamtime, and of relationality with Country and the more-than-human world is widely reflected in Indigenous knowledges across the Australian continent.[17] For example, Bawaka Country is the lead author of a recent article about relational understandings of place and space, in which the co-authors seek to:

look to Country for what it can teach us about how all views of space are situated, and for the insights it offers about co-becoming in a relational world …. Co-becoming is our conceptualization of a Bawaka Yolŋu ontology within which everything exists in a state of emergence and relationality. Not only are all beings – human, animal, plant, process, thing or affect – vital and sapient with their own knowledge and law, but their very being is constituted through relationships that are constantly re-generated.[18]

Similarly, the Gay’wu Group of Women articulate the connection between animals, ancestral beings, Country and people:

Our places have been created by animals or beings who travel. That is how the songspirals reach out, spiral out. Another clan will take up the next step of the journey of the whales or the hunters or the ones on shore, watching. This way, our songspirals connect and travel, all the way across the Pacific and to Asia. We are not isolated.[19]

Yawuru lawyer and scholar Mick Dodson describes the many concepts held within the Aboriginal notion of Country:

the word best describes the entirety of a people’s ancestral inheritance. It is Place that gives meaning to creation beliefs. The stories of creation form the basis of Indigenous law and explain the origins of the natural world. To speak of country is to speak both of the economic uses to which it may be put and of a fundamentally spiritual relationship that links the past to the present, the dead to the living and the human and non-human worlds. Country is centrally about identity.[20]

Darug scholar Liz Cameron considers how creative research might follow Country’s lead:

A Country-guided approach is one involving the researchers being directed and steered by the spiritual world. The concept encompasses the interaction with cultural sites in the recognition that the earth, the oceans, and the skies were created first, and humans followed … To understand Country, one must first know that it is full of ancestral movements, where space and energy intertwine, and all places are marked, known, and commemorated.[21]

As we will discuss, the relevance of ancestors is continually present in our exploration of the fishing song and, as Cameron suggests, the singers’ interactions with the spiritual world have been crucial to making sense of historical documentation of ancestors’ singing.

For Jacinta and Ceane:

reconnecting with songs documented in the past is a chance for us to feel a vibration and frequency from the harbour and to tune into singing that took place there over thousands of generations. We are honoured to learn to sing this song and recreate a time of peace and laughter that once filled Sydney harbour.

Song Fragments from the Written Historical Record

A number of early sources document the fishing song that is the subject of this article, two giving only the text, and a third (published later) recording text, melody, and titling the song ‘Air de pêche’ (Fishing song).[22] A further two sources replicate parts of the song text. Each of the published accounts is accompanied by descriptive text, and Amanda now details and compares these historical accounts.

The earliest published account of this song appeared in John Hunter’s 1893 Historical Journal, describing his experiences at the settlement known as Port Jackson on Sydney Harbour. A captain in the British Navy, Hunter compiled the material published in his volume from a number of primary sources, including the journals of the colony’s first governor, Arthur Phillip and subsequent governor, Philip Gidley King.[23] In the Historical Journal, following a vocabulary of language words, Hunter described the tribes living around the harbour settlement he called Port Jackson. The vocabulary was derived from Wangal man Bennelong – perhaps the best documented individual of the local people in first contact with the colonizers.[24] Recording the events of April 1790, the Historical Journal emphasized that Bennelong ‘sings a great deal and with much variety’ and that more widely, ‘the natives sing an hymn or song of joy, from day-break until sunrise’.[25] The words of a song heard were printed by Hunter as:

E eye at wangewah-wandeliah chiango wandego

mangenny wakey angoul barre boa lah barrema.[26]

The two other sources were published later than the first, though they rely on observations from the same period. The second account comes from David Collins – Judge Advocate and Secretary to Governor Phillip. Collins’ description of two songs printed alongside word lists and details of dialects around Port Jackson was published in 1798, though his observations were dated 1790. The words resemble the two lines printed in Hunter’s account, but notably, Collins suggests these are two distinct songs (he presents them in reverse order):

Mang-en-ny-wau-yen-go-nah, bar-ri-boo-lah, bar-re-mah.

This they begin at the top of their voices, and continue as long as they can in one breath, sinking to the lowest note, and then rising again to the highest. The words are the names of deceased persons …

E-i-ah wan-ge-wah, chian-go, wan-de-go.

The words of another song, sung in the same manner as the preceding, and of the same meaning.[27]

As well as the above musical description of the song, the song texts were also paired with a description of the context – who was singing and what activities the song accompanied:

Having strolled down to the Point named Too-bow-gu-lie, I saw the sister and the young wife of Ben-nil-long coming round the Point in the new canoe which the husband had cut in his last excursion to Parramatta. They had been out to procure fish, and were keeping time with their paddles, responsive to the words of a song, in which they joined with much good humour and harmony. They were almost immediately joined by Ben-nil-long, who had his sister’s child on his shoulders. The canoe was hauled on shore, and what fish they had caught the women brought up.[28]

The text line given as the first in Hunter’s account, and as the second song in Collins’, appears in two additional early sources. The first source is contemporaneous with these two 1790 accounts – that of William Dawes. The chief documenter of what linguist Jakelin Troy calls the ‘Sydney language’,[29] Dawes’ primary language teacher was Patyegarang, and Graeme Skinner has speculated that this song could have been transcribed from her singing.[30] However, the subsequent page of Dawes’ notebook discusses both Wariwear (Bennelong’s sister),[31] and Gadigal man Kolbee (Colebee/Coleby), implying that other sources of the song text are also possible. Dawes’ transcription of the song text follows:

Parabulā Paramā Manginiwā Yenbōngi

[and on final repeat] Parabulā Paramā Berianggalangdā
Toindinmā Manginiwā Yenbōngi[32]

Including words that closely resemble the first line of Hunter’s text, and second song of Collins’, Dawes’ text is also replicated in a further source published in 1811 by Edward Jones. Jones’ song, both text and musical notation, was transcribed from the singing of Bennelong and Yam-roweny – the men taken to England by Arthur Phillip in 1793, where Jones heard the song.[33] Like Dawes, Jones’ text flips the first and second half of the phrase printed in Hunter’s and Collins’ accounts:

Barrabula barra ma, manginè wey enguna[34]

The final account of the song comes from Louis de Freycinet and is the one that gives the title ‘Fishing Song’ (‘Air de pêche’). Its later publication in 1819 could be seen as testament to the longevity of the song’s circulation, though whether this circulation was among Bennelong, Wariwear and their kin, or was rather a circulation between written sources penned by recently arrived Europeans, is unclear. Grace Karskens draws attention to the reliance of colonial authors on the observations of others, suggesting: ‘the sheer repetitiveness [of colonial sources] should raise a warning flag’.[35] Secondary circulation among non-Indigenous interlocutors, often without the involvement of Indigenous people, has been described by settler colonial studies theorist Patrick Wolfe as a ‘soliloquy – a Western discourse talking to itself’.[36]

Freycinet’s later publication is the only one that gives musical notation for the song sung by women fishing off Tubowgule (Figure 2).

While Freycinet notes that three of the five musical examples given in this section of his book were transcribed by Barron Field in the era of the Baudin voyage (1802–1803), he gives no source for the fourth and fifth – including for the transcription of this fishing song.[37] As a result, we are left to speculate on whether Freycinet heard the song himself (either on his 1803 visit or in 1819), or whether indeed his semi-tone wise descending movement is merely an interpretation of Collins’ description of the song’s contour in the earlier publication (‘they begin at the top of their voices, and continue as long as they can in one breath, sinking to the lowest note’).

As perhaps the most erudite author of these early documenters, Freycinet makes clear his close acquaintance with a wide range of previously published written sources.[38] Several sections of Freycinet’s account rely on, or are a direct translation of, sections of Collins’.[39] Could Freycinet have also sought to realize Collins’ description of the descending melody by notating a descent by semi-tones over an octave?[40] Like many hymns set for maximum participation by congregations, the song starts on D and arrives an octave below (with an extra semi-tone to finish on D-flat). Freycinet’s lyrics are closer to those given by Collins than to any that appear in other sources, with Freycinet replicating the number of syllables, and phonetically rendering the text according to French, rather than English, pronunciation.

Freycinet: E-ya Wan-djé-oua. Tchi-an-go Wan-dé-go

Collins: E-i-ah wan-ge-wah, chian-go, wan-de-go

Just as he seems to have transliterated the text and inferred the melodic descent, Freycinet appears to take Collins’ assertion about the translation of the words as the basis of further interpretation of meaning. Admitting that the exact meaning of the fishing song’s lyrics are unknown, Freycinet cites Barron Field to speculate that women could have been invoking the good will of their ancestors to guide the success of the fishing trip. This interpretation adds an additional layer of insight to Collins’ explanation that the words are the names of deceased persons.[41]

We suggest that Freycinet’s more complete version of the fishing song is a rendering of Collins’ documentation and extrapolates from that earlier source’s descriptive content, rather than providing a corroborative account of independent testimony. This also suggests to us that the melody, pitch, tempo, and rhythmic figures are a guide, rather than a precise transcription of a heard melody.

The unreliability of these early documenters could be a source of frustration about the incompleteness of records of singing around the harbour at first contact. However, song always involves creativity and interpretation. The field of historically informed performance has demonstrated the ways in which a musical score is always an incomplete representation of performance.[42] And so, while in the score of the fishing song, the marking Adagio might give some sense of tempo, and the pitches and rhythm may give a sense of the overall contour of the melody and its speech rhythm, these may be little more than an approximation. This does not mean, however, that the sources should be discarded as useless. Rather, having considered this documentation in detail, we take the lead from Troy and Barwick’s ‘creative re-interpretations’, and Bracknell and Nyungar community groups’ ‘grafting [of] newly composed melodies onto historically recorded lyrics’ to suggest that the creative input of song custodians is the missing piece needed to turn fragments of documentation into living musical performance.[43] As in the Ngarigu context of Troy and Barwick’s work, and the Nyungar context of Bracknell’s, significant disruption of intergenerational transmission means there are not unbroken lines of knowledge passed from person to person that can affirm the integrity of the song interpretations. We have already discussed the ways in which transcriptions and notations are also not wholly accurate records of oral practice. Faced with these limitations, we focus not on faithfulness to the letter of the score, but on how deep relationships with Country, language, Ancestors and living people can inform the creative license needed to realize contemporary performances of the song.

Processes of Re-Connecting to the Song: Methodology

Returning to Liz Cameron’s suggestion that creative inquiry can ‘elicit and confirm connections between people, places, objects, knowledge, ancestries, and worldviews’, Jacinta and Ceane now provide first person accounts of the processes that informed their new rendition of the fishing song. Jacinta and Ceane see the performance of the fishing song as a spiritual responsibility to Country and their Ancestors. As Bennelong and his company joined in song with those returning with fish, Jacinta and Ceane are joining in too. This time the harbour is very different, but its songs and connections are being reunited as part of what Jacinta believes is songline repair. Jacinta likens it to talking to plants, the plants do better when the humans give them attention and so does everything on this planet.

Like their Darug Countrywoman Cameron, Jacinta and Ceane’s work is shaped by Indigenous methodologies and ‘Country-guided’ and ‘sensory embodied’ knowledge, and ‘ritual thinking’.[44] Neale and Kelly suggest that it takes 30 or 40 years to be taught and to learn all that is needed to be known about songlines.

Throughout this long process, access to knowledge is considered both a right and a privilege. With the knowledge comes responsibility for the stories, songs, ceremonies, art and, of course, the Songlines themselves.[45]

Over a period of several years, Jacinta and Ceane combined a series of methodological approaches to interpreting the fishing song. These processes can be summarized under the following six headings:

• Consultation of historical documents (in collaboration with Amanda Harris and Graeme Skinner)
• Translation of text (in collaboration with Jakelin Troy)
• Experiments in musical performance (in collaboration with Toby Martin, Amanda Harris and Graeme Skinner)
• Yarning (a form of storytelling and sharing) creating community input[46]
• oolgna the intuition, a gut feeling,[47] or what Laura Harjo calls ‘felt knowledge’[48]
• ngara the dreams of Ceane Towers, or in Harjo’s terms ‘dream knowledge’.[49]

The results of Amanda, Jacinta and Ceane’s consultation of historical documents have already been discussed. We focus now on the last five steps in this methodology. Though we discuss them in sequence here, in fact these were iterative processes that involved regularly skipping back and forth between steps rather than following them in a linear sequence. Drawing together the six approaches summarized above was also a creative and speculative process, with each step involving creative enquiry and deep feeling and thinking. Harjo, writing about Mvskoke knowledge and practice of music and dance suggests that:

Speculation enables the community to draw on their knowledge to recognize their current state and conceive of extending their communities in ways that they care about, now and in the future … for Mvskoke people … knowledge is produced … through feeling an experience, daydreaming, observing elements of the physical world, and sensing and intuiting relational energy, metaphysical energy, and entities.[50]

Relatedly, Cameron’s explanation of how creativity informs her archaeological research emphasizes these key elements:

• creative making transforms investigation into an authentic research experience …
• [creative] process represents a synthesis between intuition and logic …
• making does not necessarily adhere to evidence-based rationality but is rooted in transformative thinking that yields a deeper understanding …
• The importance of cultivating a relationship with Country cannot be overstated, as it stands as the ultimate teacher, the source of stories, knowledge, and the means to disseminate them.[51]

Translation of text

Jacinta pored over the translation of the Fishing Song with linguist Jakelin Troy, author of The Sydney Language.[52] Jakelin helped Jacinta work on the language as a trained linguist and authority on the earliest documentation of the Sydney language, giving her feedback on pronunciation of the written form. Not all words were able to be translated, however, this was not cause for despair. Indeed, scholars have shown that it is common for songs in many Aboriginal languages to include words from ancient or spirit languages that are incomprehensible to contemporary singers. Songs in Mawng language of western Arnhem Land for example ‘express connections not only to spoken languages or dialects no longer spoken, as well as to spirit languages belonging to ancestral spirits of the country’.[53] Language is thus a way of keeping connection with ancestors, who may be evoked through unintelligible song texts:

Spirits and memories of those who have died … who once dwelt in Bawaka continue as affective presences that constantly co-become and co-constitute the landscape. These lasting connections are made possible by the relationships which underpin them and by Bawaka itself.[54]

After working through the translation drawing on known words, and reflecting on the historical sources that suggest women were singing the names of ancestors, Jacinta arrived at the following translation:

E-i-ah wan-ge-wah, chian-go, wan-de-go.

Hello Country, Ancestors of great fishing skills, `

mangenny wakey angoul barre boa lah barrema

collect bad eye fish, we’re sitting and caring

bar-ri-boo-lah, bar-re-mah

come up, make my hook a fishing hook

Experiments in musical performance

In Jacinta’s creative process she thinks of the canoe and the women paddling and creating yaban (‘singers dancing or beating on two clubs’)[55] with their strokes on the water. It takes her to times that Foley talks about when we would be able to communicate with nature. Jacinta has recorded several different interpretations of the song. The first version Jacinta sang was not with the understanding of the notation of the tune of the music. In this first version Jacinta focused on a drone sound, inducing a mediative state of consciousness. When first played to Jakelin Troy she responded with ‘it gives me goose bumps’ which in Aboriginal talk can indicate a sense of our ancestors, or something quite spiritual in nature.

When Jacinta first heard Toby Martin play the notated tune on a keyboard and Amanda sing the melody, it made her laugh as all she could hear was the tune ‘Teddy bears picnic’, by Henry Hall (1932). The hearing of the tune creeping down from ‘mangenny wakey’ triggered that connection to Hall’s tune. This laughter that was created gave Jacinta an insight into the song and how it is a play with sound descending to the death of the fish. Through this musical experimentation, Jacinta arrived at the understanding that the tune evokes an uneasy feeling of being hunted, yet overall brings an uplifting message of gathering to feast, with caution. The tune helps by placing Jacinta’s mind in Warrane (Sydney Harbour) with family doing what it does best: singing, fishing, fire, feeding, and sharing, while having a laugh surrounded by nature.

Yarning

Many Darug people have contributed to efforts to revitalize language in recent years. An important part of Jacinta’s analysis of the documented text was yarning with a collective of different Dharug speakers. Jacinta put a call out on the Bayala Facebook page dedicated to providing Dharug language courses, information, and connections. This Facebook page is set up for Darug people to learn their language and talk to others who are interested in revitalizing their Original dalang (tongue). Due to the age of the song, no one at the time was able to help translate, which seems to be a common outcome when dealing with songs from Sydney.

Jacinta then decided a different approach was needed so she asked cousins (a cousin is anyone related to the Dharug speaking language group) if anyone had heard the word wakayi. Two cousins came forward: Burru – Nikki Parsons – a Catti and Yuin woman and Ceane Towers. Burru said that she knew it as a word meaning bad eye, or pidgin English meaning wonky eye. Ceane, when asked about the word wakayi, replied ‘I had a Darug Great Aunty Wakayi’. Jacinta said ‘don’t tell me she had a bad eye’, and Ceane replied ‘Yes how did you know? – she had a humorous nickname that was said in front of her first name by her siblings, as she had an eye that was not aligned with the other. We understood what wakayi meant by this.” This is how the insider researcher can bring new insights into language revitalization processes.

Oolgna ( intuition, the body’s way and feelings of knowing)

Liz Cameron describes expanded senses that are part of Indigenous way of knowing:

The internal senses comprise of intuitive being (‘oolgna’) and imaginative knowing (‘ngara’). While there is a loss within English translation, oolgna is interpreted as felt gut sensations – a natural bodily alertness that generates deep, emotionally felt insight. Ngara refers to the imaginary, an ability to observe through a sense of curiosity that is deeply grounded within memory and dreams.[56]

For Jacinta:

I am helping to recreate frequencies for the health of Warrane (Sydney Cove) through the song that is being sung. I believe that each song is a geometrical frequency that is just for the harbour, just for our language group to perform. It is the Darug people’s responsibilities to keep that connection alive. There was a time that our families were forbidden to sing or speak this language that relates to Country, but that time has passed and Darug are now safe to dance and sing again. Singing regenerates a time past, creates an energy felt presently, and sings for the future as thousands of generations have sung for us. I believe old songs are embedded in the landscape. Songs, knowings, visions, and feelings come to many family members in Country. Country is still singing for us and we need to sing for Country.

Through a set of relationships Ceane and Jacinta were asked to sing for the welcome that launched the ‘Reimagining Musical Programming’ symposium in 2022 (see Audio Example 1). Ceane had always wanted to sing with Jacinta, and both had performed together as part of the Wagana dancers for Jo Clancy, but they had never sung as a duo. Relationality to Country and its signals and signs play a key role for those Countrymen and women, creating deep connections. To these women, this is not a performance, but a responsibility to Country and ancestors.

Ngara Dreams and Visions

Ceane travels in her dreams to the Country on Sydney Harbour, as she describes:

3 October 2019 – flew to Sydney Harbour through the waterways again on the songline paths. There was the house again with the sandstone bottom on the saltwater way at Sydney Harbour. I see a little flower (lily I wrote in my journal) a lily flower, a white one natural to them. I met my mother there who was waiting. I remember sitting in the shallows of the water way watching the water, and my feet in the water just touching from the shoreline. I could not go deeper into the water there in my spirit form whilst in dream because there would be no return to my body if I did at this stage. It was a meeting place for Mum and the Darug women. There were other spirits there including children. My daughters Jannali and Khya were also with me in spirit as I was. I remember thinking when I woke that our bodies slept in our home in the Blue Mountains while we all journeyed to the sacred place to be taught by ancestors.

As Jacinta recalls, these travels in dreams soon became physical voyages:

Ceane turned up at my house early morning on 11 April 2022 on her way to Sydney Harbour. We have known each other since 2000 as Aboriginal women of different tribes but later found out we were both from the same Cannemegal clan of the Darug people. My house is on the old songline which crosses the Blue Mountains ridge line now called the Great Western Highway. When Ceane came, she had her kayak in the ute. I asked her what she was up to. “I’m on my way to the harbour; there is a place I keep dreaming of and I need to find it”.

Ceane recalls having sung the sounds that Country was giving her, many months before she saw the historical documentation of the fishing song recorded at Tubowgule:

12 April 2022: I parked the kayak to go back onto the country and record a song from the Country whilst I was talking to Ngurra. I sing E-ya, E-ya, E-ya, repeatedly and recorded it and still have this recording today. What is amazing is that “E-ya” is the first sound in the Darug fishing song and at this point I had not been introduced to it yet! The ancestors connected me to this word and rhythm. I felt I knew what it meant. This is to call on the ancestors and sing the tune of the Harbor like a showing sound that I can feel them, they can feel me, I am watching them, they are watching me. It’s like I am here, you are there. It’s like saying warami in Darug. It’s like you say “E-ya” before you ask for something or say something, or make a wish for something, it’s a bit like Coo-ee.[57] It’s like a phone number and line. That’s how it was.

Ceane is using what Cameron called ngara, her dreams or visions to connect with Ngurra, with her ancestors, following their lead and taking note of what was being shown to her in her dreams. This notion of dreams showing Aboriginal people of Australia information has also been described by the late Uncle Tex Skuthorpe and Karl-Erik Sveiby:

In pre-European times, the Nhunggabarra would have been encouraged from childhood to explore meditative states and to remember what they saw in dreams. They were taught how to behave when they met their Ancestors in the dreams and also how to protect themselves from spirits and the earth-bound ghosts, who would do their best to distort the Ngunggabarra person’s travel. When a person woke up from such trips they had a deeply spiritual and emotional personal experience that reinforced their belief system.[58]

Only later, in 2022, when Jacinta began to work on performing a version of the notated fishing song, did she recall the video Ceane had sent months earlier. For Jacinta and Ceane, this process reinforces their understanding of their relationality with Country and the strength of their practice of songline travel. The song Ceane heard from Country began with the ‘E-ya’ sound transcribed in 1790, it also oscillated down a semi-tone and back up again (initially E-flat to D and then A to A-flat a tritone below), mimicking the first two pitches of the transcribed fishing song. Ceane explains:

The sound E-ya is a vibrational sound that I tuned into on the harbour when I was led there without knowing about the sound at all. I recorded myself singing what I was sensing through body and spirit whilst connecting to Country. ‘E-ya’ I sang in a higher pitch. Then the ‘E-ya’ went low in vibration. To me it was the pitch and sound of the awakening, awakening the magic in the environment. As if saying I am here connecting with the Country surrounding me and its voice. The beginning of tuning into vibration. It just came to me, to alert the ancestor that called me there, I am here. The older woman with long hair who was the old knowledge woman of this place asked me to come, and I was gifted with the knowledge of the place.

In addition to theorizations from their own communities and other east coast people, Jacinta and Ceane also look to other Aboriginal groups, where the later impacts of colonization mean that intergenerational transmission of knowledge has been able to be maintained through direct knowledge transfer between family members. Practices in these groups reinforce their assertion that Country communicates with people, and that ceremony and singing are important parts of the refreshing of people’s inter-relationship with Country. In Warlpiri knowledge for example, as Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu, Holmes and Box explain:

land has a language through which it communicates to people. This language is non-verbal and Wanta has called it the ‘body language’ of country. It means that if you are very observant, the land, through its sights, sounds, patterns, and shapes, will tell you how it is functioning and tell you how to live with it.

Wanta clarifies further:

Warlpiri peoples’ home should be on their country: they belong there; it’s the right place for them … You can learn from it now: learn to sing that song, to talk that language, that language of country.[59]

A Culturally and Historically Informed Performance of the Fishing Song

The culmination of our historical research, translation work, musical experimentation, yarning, oolgna and ngara came in several performances of the fishing song in 2022 and 2023. To keep Country at the centre of the performance, we arranged to gather at a site in the area of Woccanmagully (Farm Cove) with a view down to the shore of the harbour where the early records describe women singing in canoes and then coming ashore where Bennelong joined in the singing (See Audio Example 1 and Figure 3). We also liaised with our colleague Matt Poll at the Australian National Maritime Museum to borrow a nawi (canoe) held by the museum and constructed by Dean Kelly in 2014 through the revitalization program on nawi craftsmanship.[60] Jacinta, Ceane and Dean had already had a connection through a 2010 camp at Bents Basin, and with his wife being from the Darug people.[61] It seems only natural that his nawi is part of Jacinta and Ceane’s ceremony celebrating their survival and connection to their Ngurra (Country).

Audio Example 1 Fishing song performance #1 24 November 2022 – Jacinta Tobin and Ceane Towers

The late Darug Songman Richard Green and linguist Amanda Oppliger emphasize key questions that arose from their negotiation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems:

How does the land teach people and speak to people?

What is the place of stories in Law and learning?

Do the ancestors teach people today?[62]

These questions alert us to the complexity of song and the role it plays in the current day. They point to the importance of ancestral guidance in language and song. It encourages our minds to dare to believe that one song can create change. If their belief system is strong the effects will be manifested in the real world. As Darug women of Country, Ceane and Jacinta have been taught to trust, honour, respect and love all the different experiences they have, because in their ontology the interconnectivity is seen in their real-world day to day lives. The process up to the final performance is a journey of interconnectivity, a general movement into a space of connection to a past that is never distant from our present or our future.

Cameron writes about these feelings of responsibility, commitment and connection to Country:

A sense of cultural place within Dharug notions relates to feelings associated with identity that emphasise community belonging. It is a place that is central to Dharug philosophical life purpose, as the concept of land is not connected to self-ownership – rather, it is a state of internal wealth where customary obligations in caring for Country is fulfilled and maintained. Spiritual space provides a sense of purpose to living, and appears through dreams, visions and ancestral guidance. Therefore, Cultural place and Spiritual space are connected to philosophical understanding within Dharug Gunyalungalung.[63]

The first public singing of  the fishing song by Ceane and Jacinta was not done for a performance. This song was sung because Ngurra (Country) gave its signals and signs to both Jacinta and Ceane to come and sing for it and all those who had come before. This is a song to revitalize and regenerate while honouring those who had sung before for their Ngurra, men and women singing their own story, their own history, their own connection. Notably both women had fresh-water connections to the broader language group, but fishing was both salt-water and fresh-water business.

Three versions of the song have now been recorded. In addition to Jacinta and Ceane’s first version in November 2022 (Audio Example 1), a further version was sung as an act of diplomacy with the NSW Governor in Government House at the site of Warrane (see Introduction to this volume):

Audio Example 2 Fishing song performance #2 31 October 2023

In Jacinta’s ongoing explorations of the resonances of the song and Country, she has also recorded the song with Yuwalaraay musician Nardi Simpson and Wiradjuri, Yorta Yorta singer Kaleena Briggs, with the three singers experimenting with drones and the descending movement as well as with repetition:

Audio Example 3 Fishing song performance #3 26 April 2024

Listening to this recording, Ceane hears similarities with whale song, giving her a deeper connection to whales as the women move into a chant like movement. She describes this listening experience as oolgna.

Conclusions

The practice of song is not just the singing itself but the environmental threads of lived experience that bring a depth to a revitalized song of the past. Writing about the singing of Aboriginal women in Central Australia, Linda Barwick notes:

As the Country itself changes over time in response to human activity or larger flows of climatic or ecological change, the song system is able to adapt, to find new contexts for meaning making.[64]

The process of producing a new performance of the fishing song informed by historical and cultural knowledge addresses challenges that historians of sound have long identified. As Ross Gibson has suggested:

a history of meaningful sound needs to be speculative and spatial. And the speculators need to be unfazed by the degrees to which such a history is nebulous, contentious, inconclusive, despite how site-specific the sound would have been.[65]

In bringing together a variety of methods, creative, intuitive and historical, we have endeavoured to bring back into sounding what Paul Carter terms ‘echoic dialogues’. That is, to sound a song that is not just an interpretation of what is written down, but that in its singing enacts a dialogic relationship between people and Country, between text and action, bringing sound to the ‘hush of writing’.[66] This is not just a performance by two women to cast their nets back through time and place but an enactment of cultural responsibility that is vibrating an ancient story of creators who once roamed the land and sea, reconnecting to the more-than-human as well as giving those participants signs and signals from our lived experience.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for feedback on earlier drafts of this article from Toby Martin, two anonymous reviewers and editors Christopher Coady and Nicole Cherry, and for the inputs of colleagues and community members acknowledged throughout the article. This research has been supported by funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Hearing the music of early New South Wales, 1788-1860’ (DP210101511).

Endnotes

[1] These place names were all recorded in William Dawes’ manuscript ‘Vocabulary of the language of N.S. Wales in the neighbourhood of Sydney’, in the part understood to have been drawn from Arthur Phillip, John Hunter, David Collins and Phillip Gidley King, see Jakelin Troy, The Sydney Language (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019), 33; 84–5.

[2] Hunter noted the absence of people around the harbour in May 1789 following the devastating smallpox epidemic during April 1789, but people returned later that year as they recovered and rebuilt. See discussion in Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2009), 372, 378.

[3] Gay’wu Group of Women, Songspirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country Through Songlines (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2019), p. 218.

[4] Vanessa Agnew has demonstrated how German travellers adapted their transcriptions of the music of Pacific Islanders to fit their pre-conceptions about musical development, rather than adjusting those assumptions in light of new evidence. Enlightenment Orpheus the Power of Music in Other Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Matthew Gelbart, Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

[5] Paul Carter, The Sound in Between: Voice, Space, Performance (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1992), 26.

[6] Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[7] See Covell’s argument that ‘eighteenth and nineteenth century central European musical culture was singularly ill-fitted in temperament and in its conception of structural and rhythmic principles to have the slightest understanding of any other musical tradition’. Roger Covell, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1967), 1–2.

[8] Aaron Corn, ‘Joe Gumbula, the Ancestral Chorus, and the Value of Indigenous Knowledges’, Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture (PDT&C), 47/3–4 (2018), 77.

[9] Anna Johnston (following Ann Laura Stoler) also points to the potential for historical records to ‘remain available for making new meaning. Archival sources can … allow glimpses of the people who provided information under the conditions shaped by their own agendas and interests’. The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 20.

[10] Where we as individual co-authors are narrating our first-person experiences or beliefs, we set these statements out as block quotes, in italics, identifying the speaker. The remainder of the text, in third person, has been crafted collaboratively, with Tobin’s focus on the knowledge imparted by other Darug and other community members, Towers focusing on her own experiences of coming into cultural knowledge, and Harris documenting and interpreting the historical records.

[11] Jack Brook and James L. Kohen, The Parramatta Native Institution and the Black Town: A History (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1991); Karskens, The Colony, 501–2.

[12] Radio National, ‘A Living Harbour’, www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/hindsight/a-living-harbour/3042744, 10¢18″, accessed 9 May 2024.

[13] Ray Ingrey, ‘Dreamtime Story of the Aboriginal Whale Symbol’, www.bonditomanly.com/bondi-to-manly-walk-blog/2020/11/13/dreamtime-story-of-the-aboriginal-whale-symbol-as-told-by-ray-ingrey, accessed 9 May 2024.

[14] Kate Fullagar, Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Cammeray, NSW: Scribner, 2023), 32–35.

[15] Colebee and Bennelong were the two men captured by Governor Phillip’s troops in November 1789. Their survival (in contrast to the fate of the first kidnap victim – Arabanoo) meant they are perhaps the most documented individuals of the early contact period. See Karskens, The Colony, 371–74; 378–79; Fullagar, Bennelong & Phillip, 189.

[16] Recently, scientists’ experiments in the Great Barrier Reef Australia are also exploring the key role sound plays in underwater ecosystems where the ‘acoustic enrichment shows potential as a sensory-based conservation tool for contributing to the restoration of coral reef ecosystems’. Timothy A. C. Gordon et al., ‘Acoustic Enrichment Can Enhance Fish Community Development on Degraded Coral Reef Habitat’, Nature Communications, 10/5414 (Nov 2019), doi:10.1038/s41467-019-13186-2.

[17] Key texts on relationality include Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Halifax: Fernwood, 2008); Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Relationality: A Key Presupposition of an Indigenous Social Research Paradigm’, in Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, ed. Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien (London: Routledge, 2017), 69–77.

[18] Bawaka Country et al., ‘Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a Relational Understanding of Place/Space’, Progress in Human Geography, 40/4 (2016), 456.

[19] Gay’wu Group of Women, Songspirals, 22–23.

[20] Mick Dodson, ‘Foreword’, in An Appreciation of Difference W.E.H. Stanner and Aboriginal Australia, ed. Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008), v.

[21] Liz Cameron, ‘“Reclaiming Their Stories”: A Study of the Spiritual Content of Historical Cultural Objects through an Indigenous Creative Inquiry’, Australian Archaeology, 90/2 (2024), 140–51, here 144.

[22] We are grateful to Graeme Skinner for his extensive work compiling the sources in his online resource Australharmony and discussing them with us on several occasions, Australharmony, https://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/checklist-indigenous-music-1.php#005-2.

[23] Some of the material from other sources was included without the original authors’ permission, as indicated in King’s annotated version of the journal held in the National Library of Australia. See King family and John Hunter, Annotated copy of John Hunter’s Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, 1793–[18–?], MS 8572, National Library of Australia.

[24] Hunter’s Historical Journal uses ‘Wolarewarre’ – King’s preferred name for Bennelong, as Shino Konishi demonstrates in The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World (London: Routledge, 2016), 174.

[25] John Hunter, An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island (London, 1793), https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/1bGMdJXY/6v5gmeAjVk6bo, 413–14.

[26] Hunter, An Historical Journal, 413.

[27] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales: With Remarks on the Dispositions, Customs, Manners, &c. of the Native Inhabitants of That Country. (London: Printed for T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1798), 616, available at https://books.google.com.au/books?id=eRZcAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA616#v.

[28] Collins, An Account of the English Colony, 592–93, https://books.google.com.au/books?id=eRZcAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA592.

[29] Troy, The Sydney Language.

[30] Graeme Skinner, Australharmony, https://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/checklist-indigenous-music-1.php#002, accessed 28 March 2024.

[31] It is unclear whether this is the sister observed coming around the point in the canoe in Collins’ account above.

[32] Notebooks of William Dawes, Sydney, NSW, 1790–91, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, MS 41645, Book B, 31: A Song of New South Wales, www.williamdawes.org/ms/msview.php?image-id=book-b-page-31.

[33] Jones’ musical transcription differs substantially from the melody that is the focus of this article and has been sung by several men in recent years, see details and links compiled by Graeme Skinner on Australharmony, https://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/checklist-indigenous-music-1.php#002.

[34] Edward Jones, Musical curiosities; or, a selection of the most characteristic national songs, and airs; many of which were never before published: consisting of Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Danish, Lapland, Malabar, New South Wales, French, Italian, Swiss, and particularly some English and Scotch national melodies, to which are added, variations for the harp, or the piano-forte, and most humbly inscribed, by permission, to her royal highness the princess Charlotte of Wales … (London: Printed for the author, 1811), 15.

[35] Grace Karskens, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2020), 221.

[36] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 4. See also Amanda Harris, ‘Indigenising Australian Music: Authenticity and Representation in Touring 1950s Art Songs’, Postcolonial Studies, 23.1 (2020), 132–52.

[37] Freycinet arrived in Sydney on 24 April 1803. Leslie R. Marchant and J. H. Reynolds, ‘Freycinet, Louis-Claude Desaulses de (1779–1842)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/freycinet-louisclaude-desaulses-de-2226, accessed online 9 May 2024.

[38] Including, but not limited to: the account of the voyage of Governor Philip, the journals of Hunter, Oxley, Collins, the voyages of White, Tuckey, Turnbull, Flinders, Reid, P. P. King and Evans; the statistics published by Wentworth, Curr, Man and Dawson, geographic memoires of Barron Field, and reports of Bigge. Louis de Freycinet, Voyage Autour du Monde: Entrepris par Ordre du Roi … Exécuté sur les Corvettes de S. M. L’uranie et la Physicienne, Pendant les Années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820 … (Paris: Chez Pillet Aîné, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1824–39), V5, 650, available at https://books.google.com.au/books?id=pWNNAAAAYAAJ.

[39] Freycinet’s reliance on Collins is evident, for example, in the word for word repetition of a discussion of the local word for fisher. See Collins, ‘To the men when fishing they apply the word Mah-ni; to the women, Mahn’, and Freycinet, ‘Au Port-Jackson, ils appliquent encore ce nom de mahn aux femmes qui s’adonnent à la pêche; et ils désignent sous celui de mahni les hommes qui se livrent à la même occupation’. Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 615; Freycinet, Voyage Autour du Monde, V5, 761.

[40] Collins, An account of the English colony in New South Wales, 616, https://books.google.com.au/books?id=eRZcAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA616#v. Freycinet’s note following the fishing song transcription does not help to clarify: ‘Je n’ai pu avoir les dernières paroles de cet air’. It remains an open question whether Freycinet heard the length of the descent, and the words, but was unable to transcribe the final words, or whether he put words sourced from Collins to a descending melody with a presumed number of semi-tones and estimated the allocation of syllables to repeated and distinct pitches.

[41] ‘Mais tout dénote que ces chansons de pêche, comme celle qu’on adresse aux marsouins, ne sont qu’une sorte d’invocation aux âmes de leurs aïeux, pour les prier de leur accorder une heureuse pêche’. Freycinet, Voyage Autour du Monde, V5, 762.

[42] See, for example, Cook, Beyond the Score; Theodor Wesendunk Adorno, ‘Bach Defended Against His Devotees’ in Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 133–46; Dorottya Fabian, A Musicology of Performance: Theory and Method Based on Bach’s Solos for Violin (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015); Richard Taruskin, ‘Setting Limits (a Talk)’, in The Danger of Music: And Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 447–66; Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them (2020) Version 28 March 2024, https://challengingperformance.com/the-book/.

[43] Troy and Barwick suggest that the historical documentation they use as the basis of their ‘creative re-interpretations’ of the song contains ‘layers of misunderstanding, misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the original performance’, but that ‘other features suggest that it also conserved traces of the language and music performed so long ago’. Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick, ‘Claiming the “Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe”’, Musicology Australia, 42/2 (2021), 85–86. Similarly, Bracknell describes how Nyungar people ‘have drawn on sparse archives for inspiration, grafting newly composed melodies onto historically recorded lyrics’ Clint Bracknell, ‘Reanimating 1830s Nyungar Songs of Miago’, in Music, Dance and the Archive, ed. by Amanda Harris, Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2022), 94.

[44] Cameron, ‘Reclaiming Their Stories’, 144.

[45] Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly, Songlines: The Power and Promise (Port Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 70.

[46] Dawn Bessarab and Bridget Ng’andu, ‘Yarning as a Legitimate Method in Indigenous Research’, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 3/1 (2010), 37–49.

[47] Liz Cameron, ‘Australian Indigenous Sensory Knowledge Systems in Creative Practices’. Creative Arts in Education and Therapy, 7/2 (2021), 119.

[48] Laura Harjo, Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019), 84, quoted in Jack Gray and Jacqueline Shea Murphy, ‘Ruatepupuke II: A Māori Meeting House in a Museum’, in Music, Dance and the Archive, ed. by Harris, Barwick and Troy, 47.

[49] Cameron, ‘Australian Indigenous Sensory Knowledge Systems’. Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 85–86.

[50] Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 82–84.

[51] Cameron, ‘Reclaiming Their Stories’, 143.

[52] Troy, The Sydney Language.

[53] Reuben Brown et al., ‘Maintaining Song Traditions and Languages Together at Warruwi (Western Arnhem Land)’, in Recirculating Songs: Revitalising the Singing Practices of Indigenous Australia, ed. Jim Wafer and Myfany Turpin (Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics, 2017), 268–86. See also Allan Marett, Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005).

[54] Bawaka Country et al., ‘Co-becoming Bawaka’, 465.

[55] Troy, The Sydney Language, 74.

[56] Cameron, ‘Australian Indigenous Sensory Knowledge Systems’, p. 119

[57] Ceane’s assertion that the e-ya sound is a call that resonates from ancestors and Country is supported by its appearance in other documented songs, such as ‘Iah, iah, gumbery jah (Harry’s song)’ that begins with the repeated lyric ‘i-ah’, see https://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/checklist-indigenous-music-1.php#006. On the ‘coo-ee’ see Richard White, ‘Cooees across the Strand: Australian Travellers in London and the Performance of National Identity’, Australian Historical Studies, 32/116 (2001), 109–27; Carter, The Sound in Between.

[58] Karl Erik Sveiby and Tex Skuthorpe, Treading Lightly: The Hidden Wisdom of the World’s Oldest People (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2006), 14.

[59] Wanta Janpijimpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu, Miles Holmes and L. Box. Ngurra-Kurlu: A Way of Working with Warlpiri People (Alice Springs: Desert Knowledge CRC, 2008), 20 and 27.

[60] The word nawi/nuwi (nowey, nowee, nao-i) is recorded in a range of colonial sources, see Troy, The Sydney Language, 44.

[61] Dean and others made a nawi at the camp that was used for the Parramatta NAIDOC events between 2014 and 2017. Only while writing about the connection to Dean Kelly, did Jacinta remember the camp and the sequence of events and signs from Country. In Jacinta’s view, these connections run through our western timeline and are patterns of old stories from our ancestral roots. They are what many call coincidences, chance meetings, yet in Jacinta’s ontology these are signals and signs from her ancestors guiding her on a path that helps her see (ngara). Here the women are in the twenty-first century, yet Ceane’s dreams about the harbour bind them to the fishing song. During a workshop at Bents Basin, the women saw falling stars meaning pregnancy. The subsequent birth of Ceane’s twins, who hold the blue whale dreaming, and the invitation to sing the fishing song are all interlinked by the creation story of the whale and the canoe. To Jacinta these connections trigger genetic memory of times gone, a geometrical form in song that is still present from the past. Uncle Wes Marne, Storyteller, Death Letter Projects, www.deathletterprojects.com/uncle-wes, accessed 7 May 2024; Ingrey, ‘Dreamtime Story of the Aboriginal Whale Symbol’; Darug songman and language custodian Richard Green described genetic memory as a term that explains ‘an ancestral passing-on of the language’. Richard Green and Amanda Oppliger, ‘The Interface Between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Systems of Knowing and Learning: a Report on a Dharug Language Programme’, The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 36/S1 (2007), 85.

[62] Green and Oppliger, ‘The Interface between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Systems’, 82.

[63] Elizabeth Cameron, ‘Is It Art or Knowledge? Deconstructing Australian Aboriginal Creative Making’, Arts (Basel) 4/2 (2015), 68–74.

[64] Linda Barwick, ‘Songs and the Deep Present’, in Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History, ed. by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker and Jakelin Troy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023), p. 110.

[65] Ross Gibson, ‘Patyegarang and William Dawes: The Space of Imagination’, in Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, ed. by Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 249.

[66] Carter, The Sound in Between, 26.