Crow Fire Music
Waak Waak Jungi
Larrikin Music through Festival
Review by Barry Healy
This unpretentious recording of traditional and contemporary Aboriginal music gently pushes back the parameters of what is generally understood as "tradition". It is a pointer to what is possible through the reconciliation process.
Waak Waak Jungi is not so much a band as an ongoing collaboration, a work in progress. Over the last four years two traditional "songmen" from Arnhemland, Bobby Bunnunggurr and Jimmy Djamunba, have joined with classical guitarist Sebastian Jorgensen, contemporary composer Peter Mumme and singer Sally Grice, who are based in the Christmas Hills outside Melbourne.
They lived together intensively so as genuinely to understand their different traditions, with the deliberate intention of sharing and combining "the very old with the very new".
Crow Fire Music is the result. The songs are mostly sung in Aboriginal languages, some of which are recorded in the traditional setting and some with contemporary musical instruments. Four of the 20 songs are presented first in the traditional way and immediately afterwards with a modern arrangement.
Some are ancient Aboriginal chants, others recent compositions (such as "Kava Song"). Four attempt to reconstruct songs from snatches of the languages of Aboriginal peoples in Victoria that were wiped out by the European invasion.
The lyrics of "All Gone Dead" consist of the clan names of 14 mountains in the Yarra Valley. They were identified by Kurburu, an elder of the Bunwurrung people, and recorded in the 1840s by William Thomas, the assistant protector of the tribes.
Less than a decade after European settlement began in 1835, these people were, as Kurburu put it, "all gone dead". The singing is respectful and performed in waltz time with classical guitar, didgeridoo and clap sticks.
Other tracks are bouncy and joyful, such as "Mother I'm Coming", a tribute to Mother Earth by Bobby Bunnunggurr, which celebrates a living religion that is far from stultifying.
The overall effect of this collection is quite hypnotic; there is nothing contrived to leap out at the listener. It rewards repeated hearings and, where the lyrics are translated, offers poetry that ranks with Japanese haiku for power and simplicity.
"Wenbri's Song", in the Woiwurrung language, is a lament for a dead brother composed by the clan leader Wenbri, who was himself murdered by police in 1840. It speaks volumes about the crimes committed against Aboriginal Australia and echoes powerfully through the ages; this is not the voice of a dead culture, but of a tradition that lives and breathes:
"We go all bones; All of them shining white in this Dulur country; The noise rushing (of) Bunjil; Father ours singing in breast mine; This inside mine."