Central Australian Songs: A History and Reinterpretation of their Distribution through the Earliest Recordings

Abstract

This paper contains a discussion of an unpublished essay by TGH Strehlow concerning the historic wax cylinder recordings of songs from Central Australia made by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in 1901. The manuscript, written by Strehlow in 1968, begins with an explanation of the historical context of the song recordings, and the distribution of song and dance traditions across the Australian inland. Strehlow elucidates the content via information imparted to him by a number of Arrernte and Luritja men, who first heard these recordings over 50 years after they were made, in 1960. Their explanation of these songs reveals further information on the diffusion of song verses across vast regions in Central Australia (including Warumungu, Anmatyerr, Arrernte, and Warlpiri country), and the incorporation of European words and themes within altharte (public) songs in which men sing and dance. I have expanded Strehlow's information on Spencer's recordings further with additional information from other ethno‐historical sources and my own contemporary fieldwork. Combined, this research deepens the anthropological understanding of some of the earliest ethnographic sound recordings ever made in Australia.

German Ethnography in Australia

“…Strehlow's emphasis on empirical documentation has, thankfully, made his work amenable to reinterpretation and reanalysis by interested researchers and has provided further avenues for re-engagement with the material (Gibson 2015;Kenny 2004;). There are, however, stumbling blocks.…”

Memory in Place: Locating colonial histories and commemoration

“…One reason for this may be that the killings at Itarlentye and surrounds occurred about 50 years before the Coniston reprisals. Audio recorders had only just been invented and were not used in Central Australia until much later, at the beginning of the twentieth century (Gibson, 2015b). Moreover, eyewitness survivors of the Itarlentye killings did not live to see the arrival of the Aboriginal rights movements of the 1970s and 1980s, when representative bodies such as lands councils, Aboriginal media and other organisations were established and scholarly interest in these oral histories increased.…”

‘Only the best is good enough for eternity’: Revisiting the ethnography of T. G. H. Strehlow

“…Strehlow's emphasis on empirical documentation has, thankfully, made his work amenable to reinterpretation and reanalysis by interested researchers and has provided further avenues for re-engagement with the material (Gibson 2015;Kenny 2004;Morton 1997). There are, however, stumbling blocks.…”