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.

KEYWORDS:

• Warlpiri
• women’s songs
• ceremonial exchange
• performance
• relationalities

These songs are not just about Country, but places which have stories and a spirit. (Barbara Napanangka Martin)

The position outlined above by Warlpiri educator Barbara Napanangka Martin in expressing the significance of Warlpiri ceremonial songs, reflects a focus on the relational qualities often emphasised in Indigenous knowledge systems (Kovach 2009). Aboriginal Australian songs have been shown to be powerful instruments in shaping the way the world is and how it comes into being (Von Sturmer 1987; Ellis 1994; Marett 1994).¹ For Warlpiri groups, ceremonial songs have the power to transform the world in very functional and vital ways including: to increase the growth of bush foods; to make people fall in love; and to heal sick people and transform young boys into adult men. Songs are also powerful in their capacity to support the continual and timeless creation of jukurrpa (dreaming) stories and places as well as the links to generations of interconnected kin. With respect to wangga songs sung in the Daly region of northern Australia, Allan Marett has emphasised:

How much more care must be exercised when we understand that the power of songs is believed to reside in their capacity to tap into the very sources of creativity and to influence the way in which the universe comes into being? (Marett 1994: page?)

This position assigns considerable agential power to songs and underscores a motivating aspect for singers to care for and fulfil their ongoing responsibilities over generations. For Warlpiri people, it is not just knowledge which is nurtured within songs but also the spiritual essence which they and their kin for generations before them have shared with those places, the jukurrpa and further extended kinship networks across broad sections of the Central Australian desert. As Aileen Moreton-Robertson (2017: 69) emphasises:

Relationality is grounded in a holistic conception of the inter-connectedness and inter-substantiation between and among all living things and the earth, which is inhabited by a world of ancestors and creator beings. It informs our epistemological and ethical premise that social research should begin with an awareness of our proper relationships with the world we inhabit, and is conducted with respect, responsibility, generosity, obligation, and reciprocity. (Moreton-Robertson 2017: 71)

Warlpiri scholar Steven Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu, who is also key to the approach taken to relationality across this special issue (see introduction) emphasises the importance of first considering the interconnected nature of these vital elements of Warlpiri being-in-the-world in his model of nguru-kurlu, a conceptualisation of ‘the home within’ that illustrates the interconnectedness of kinship, law, land, language, and ceremony as vital for ‘looking after the health of people and the health of Country’ (2008: 10). Similarly discussed by Sylvie Poirier (2005: 121) are the relational worlds of Kukatja people in Balgo existing with manifold dimensions of relatedness among human, and again among them, the land and the ancestral order . More broadly, Amanda Kearney (2022: 1) theorises ‘being-in-relation’ with the intent of ‘expand[ing] the horizon over which understanding the self and non-self/other in relation is engaged’. This is a useful approach to understanding the forms of relationality in the intercultural contexts on which this article is centred. Our examples of recent performances illustrate the ways in which Warlpiri women use these dynamic spaces for the formulation of relations to others in ways which are ‘known, boundable, and manageable’ (Merlan 1998: 236). It is through performance of the songs which maintain and foster the deep interconnections between Country and people that Warlpiri women are gaining broader global recognition and managing the contexts in which they engage with others.

While Warlpiri ceremonial songs are embedded in places on Country, their performance contexts are rarely located at the focal sites, instead being held mostly in distant settlements, outstations, bush sites, towns, and increasingly further afield in larger Australian and international cities. Yet the power of these places and their stories and the connections they have to contemporary singers and dancers is central regardless of the performance location, as is the maintenance of the relational connections between singers and dancers. In these contexts, the performers are also fostering new connections to broader networks who engage in the performance in various ways. In this article, the term ‘place-based song’ is used to reiterate that all Warlpiri ceremonial songs connect to particular places with embedded ancestral stories and links to Warlpiri individuals. For example, Barbara Napanangka Martin, whose statement began this article, is associated with the site Minamina, in the west of Warlpiri Country as she has inherited it from her biological father. The associated songline links to the journey of ancestral women eastwards across hundreds of kilometres, and performance of Minamina yawulyu is therefore a powerful assertion of Martin’s (and her kin’s) cultural identity, ways of being-in-the-world and ways of relating to others across generations, including those with related jukurrpa as will be discussed further in this article.²

As Warlpiri people nowadays frequently travel widely across Australia and internationally, new connections are often established across broad inter-cultural networks extending well beyond the central desert. ‘Intercultural’ in this context is used to refer to Inter-Indigenous engagements between Aboriginal groups in the desert and throughout Australia, as well as with other non-Indigenous people and groups who visit Warlpiri Country and engage with ceremonial song performance, or who attend events in Australian cities and towns.³ While in many of the intercultural contexts discussed the other groups may also showcase their own cultural materials, this term is specifically used to denote contexts in which Warlpiri women present their songs and hold power as the cultural experts for the performance forms to audiences who have respect and desire to appreciate them but ultimately do not adopt the forms themselves – a shift from the contexts of ceremonial exchange in the past which were opportunities to adopt or transfer ritual material between groups (Curran and Dussart 2023). Through examples from contemporary Warlpiri performances, we will show that intercultural contexts are today key forums in which song performances activate and strengthen place-based identity and provide opportunities for rejuvenating and establishing relational ties to others, including Warlpiri, other Aboriginal, and broader intercultural groups.

We also explore some of the ways in which these relational dynamics are fostered within contemporary performance spaces of a widespread genre of public women’s song known as yawulyu, in Warlpiri. We discuss this Warlpiri specific form but note that this genre is also sung by Aboriginal women across a broad region of Central Australia (see Curran 2020a for a fuller description of this genre). We present examples of four contemporary performance instances, each of a particular yawulyu, and discuss the ways in which it was performed in that instance to maintain, foster, and reforge intimate connections between the performers, and the places and jukurrpa to which they are associated. We use an approach to knowing about songs which is embodied and multimodal in its incorporation of music, dance, body designs, ritualised movements, and the surrounding social and performance contexts. This understanding has been taught and passed on to both authors by generations of Warlpiri women and involves analysis of both form and content in a consideration of the place-based forms of identity which are core to the songs, as well as the dynamics of the particular performance contexts.⁴

The four performances that we discuss are all led and accompanied by senior female singers, with dancing by middle-aged and younger women. The audiences varied for these events – some involving only Warlpiri groups and some larger intercultural groups.⁵ First, we discuss the performance of a Ngurlu ‘edible seed’ yawulyu song at a Southern Ngaliya dance camp held at Bean Tree outstation in 2018, which saw the gathering of many different female Warlpiri groups from Willowra, Nyirrpi, and Yuendumu. Second, we discuss a performance of Jardiwanpa yawulyu at the Barunga Festival in 2018, a celebration of remote First Nations Australian groups who gathered for a 3-day event to showcase music, sport, traditional arts, and cultural activities. Third, we discuss a performance of the Yarlpurru-rlangu (‘Two Age Brothers’) yawulyu at the NT Writer’s festival in 2018, where a large group of Warlpiri women gathered to launch a Warlpiri women’s yawulyu song book (Warlpiri Women from Yuendumu 2017) to an intercultural audience gathered for the festival.⁶ And lastly, we discuss the performance of Ngapa yawulyu as part of a community-arts event held at the Alice Springs desert park, a theatrical event involving a number of other multi-cultural arts groups and an audience who walked through a series of stages to view performances by these groups. To begin, we give an overview of the yawulyu genre, a significant public genre of Australian song, describing some of its general features, as well as shifting performance contexts, dynamic nature, and its emphasis on relational interconnections between kin and other groups.

Warlpiri Women’s Yawulyu

As Gallagher explains:

Our yawulyu [women’s songs] are the way we sing and the way we dance. It’s about the jukurrpa [dreamings] for all our families. Yes, it’s yawulyu that we sing. We follow the songlines through our family’s Country. The countries that belong to our families. The ones belonging to our grandmothers. The ones belonging to our aunties [father’s sister]. Following their jukurrpa. A long time ago, a whole big group would sing yawulyu singing altogether. It’s those same places, they don’t change where they are about. Our yawulyu are always like that forevermore. We always sing them like that. It’s the same for the men, the men sing like that too. It’s the jukurrpa that they sing. And that’s the way (the women) sing yawulyu. They got it like that from the jukurrpa.

Yawulyu is the main genre of place-based song sung by Warlpiri women and other Aboriginal women across the Central Australian region. A core group of senior women collectively sing and hold in their minds hundreds of hours of songs which relate to the Country around a broad area of the Tanami Desert. Warlpiri women understand these songs to be originally composed by ancestral beings in a timeless creational moment known in Warlpiri as jukurrpa, and these songs are intimately related to individual Warlpiri women’s identity, including their patrilineally inherited Country and associated ancestral stories.

Yawulyu is multimodal with complex interlocking components essential for proper performance. Singing is accompanied by dances, painted designs and other movement (Barwick et al. 2013: 191, Turpin 2005). Prior to dancing, women spend many hours painting one another’s chests, breasts, and upper arms (and sometimes other parts of the body) with ochred designs, which link together the songlines and Country with which they identify. Women play clapsticks and incorporate other percussive beats including clapping against their thigh, as well as the thud of dancers’ feet. There are no accompanying tonal instruments and the pitch is determined in each performance by a lead singer who is, in most cases, the most senior owner of the particular jukurrpa or most proficient singer of a particular repertoire. In the performance instances that we describe below, Warlpiri women sing yawulyu to reproduce and renegotiate important relational connections among themselves, as with the new groups that are part of these encounters.

Ethnographic literature from across the Central Australian region documents a Warlpiri intercultural history going back to the beginnings of the region’s pastoral industry in the 1880s, hints at the rich history of ceremonial trade and exchange across a broad area of Central Australia (Berndt and Berndt 1964; Meggitt 1966; Kolig 1981; Glowczewski 1983; Moyle 1986; Michaels 1991). Many elders today also reflect on the past trading of ceremonies and can give extensive oral histories of the places and Aboriginal groups involved in these social networks to time-depths well beyond their own memories. Substantive collections of song recordings exist in archives, including the Australia Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Yuendumu-based Warlpiri Media Archive, and other individual collections, which demonstrate that Warlpiri people have travelled widely for ceremonies for at least the last seven decades and likely much longer. These ceremonies were vital in sustaining the interconnections between Aboriginal groups across large areas of the north-west of the Australian continent. Recent ethnographic documentations show that Warlpiri women travelled frequently to Balgo in 1980s (Moyle 1997) and to the Kimberleys in the 1990s (de Ishtar 2005). Despite the lack of emphasis in early ethnography, Aboriginal women in Central Australia have long had important ritual roles with both their own gendered genres of music and by participatingin these larger ceremonial events (Kaberry 1939).

Françoise Dussart (2004) has traced Warlpiri performative priorities for Warlpiri women over several decades noting distinct shifts away from these traditional systems of exchange, towards presentational modes that forge connections to non-Indigenous and inter-Indigenous audiences. More recently, we have shown that Warlpiri women are using contemporary performance contexts to assert their unique cultural identity in broader intercultural contexts (Curran and Dussart 2023). Through these changes, ceremonial singing remains potent in Warlpiri lives as a modern form of cultural production (Bourdieu 1994) and a context in which traditionalised notions of Warlpiri connection to places are maintained, rejuvenated, and shared. Current Warlpiri interest in travelling to perform place-based ceremonial songs reflects a desire to share and engage with a broader networks including those centred on more globalised notions of Indigenous identity. At art exhibitions in distant Australian cities and in New York, associated performances have been shown to ‘weave new forms of political identity’ (Dussart 2004: 253), and ‘constitute salient contexts for the contemporary negotiation and circulation of Indigenous peoples’ identities’ (Myers 2011: 679), such that these performances have ongoing vitality in the settler-colonial present and future. Through each performance instance, places on Warlpiri Country that are linked to the performers are evoked and their vitality is reasserted in the contemporary world. The examples which we present in this article illustrate that performance of songs in inter-Indigenous and intercultural contexts are nowadays key forums in which to activate and strengthen the relational components of place-based identity which are core to Warlpiri engagement with others across the Central Desert of Australia and beyond.

Ngurlu ‘Edible Seed’ Yawulyu Performance at the Southern Ngaliya Dance Camp, Bean Tree Outstation: Activating Relational Ties Between Warlpiri Groups

Since 2010, Warlpiri women have held dance camps twice a year at various outstations (see Curran 2020b; Curran and Dussart 2023). These events are supported by an Alice Springs-based community arts organisation, Incite Arts, as well as the Warlpiri Youth Development Aboriginal Corporation (WYDAC, formerly Mt Theo Program) based in Yuendumu. The dance camps, held over a 4-day weekend at the beginning of each April and September school holidays, are intended to be contexts where Warlpiri women have space away from the pressures of community life to hold yawulyu and pass on their songs and dances and associated knowledge and practices to younger generations. These bush camps are set up to provide this opportunity, and also the resources required including camping equipment, food, vehicles as well as ochres, feathers, oil, and other ritual materials required for the performances.

At one such dance camp in 2019, Warlpiri women from three different Warlpiri communities, Yuendumu, Nyirrpi, and Willowra, came together at Yuwali (Bean Tree) outstation around 50 km north of Yuendumu. Because participants are always invited, it was unusual to have so many people from these different communities at this particular camp, which more usually are dominated by one group of women from Yuendumu. This meant there was a wider representation of women who identified with a broader section of Warlpiri Country. One of the dances performed on this occasion was the Ngurlu yawulyu, an ancestor associated with a generic edible seed. Across the broad region of Warlpiri Country, there are four different sections to the Ngurlu yawulyu, a jukurrpa sung only by women but which joins the northern section of the Jardiwanpa yawulyu, which will be discussed further with regards to another performance instance at the Barunga Festival. As has been shown in an article focused on biocultural knowledge in Ngurlu yawulyu, these groups have some interesting interconnections reflected in song, both groups singing identical rhythmic-text verses but set to different melodies that signal their connections to particular places, family groups, and jukurrpa (Curran et al. 2019). Warlpiri women assert that these are sections of the same songline which they pass over to these different groups. At the event at the Bean Tree dance camp there were women present who had patrilineal connections to two different sections and the groups took the opportunity to perform together (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Ngurlu ‘Edible Seed’ jukurrpa across a broad area of Warlpiri Country. Map by Brenda Thornley.

Songs associated with the individual women’s patrilineal identity were sung whilst painting up: Molly Napurrurla (from Willowra) was painted up to a verse associated with the site of Arrwek in the east of Warlpiri Country, whilst Maisy Napurrurla (from Yuendumu) was painted up with songs associated with Mijilyparnta, a site in the creek bed to the west of Yuendumu. A younger Warlpiri woman who was dancing for the first time, Nakamarra Marshall, was painted with the same designs and to the same song verse as Molly, directly teaching her the connection through her father’s family and Country. At this dance event, the two senior women led the dancing of the two different groups, as in Figure 2: one from Arrwek (Yarruku) and the other from Mijilyparnta (southern Ngurlu).

Figure 2. Women affiliated with southern (right) and eastern (left) sections of the Ngurlu jukurrpa join together to dance. Photo: Georgia Curran.

Drawing together different groups of Warlpiri women this instance fosters interconnections with people from other regions within Warlpiri Country. The particular context in which the two communities had come together enabled this possibility. In this performance instance, the two senior leaders for the dances were nurturing these connections through a joint dance. Whilst the painting up was very much reinforcing place-based connections of individual women, the dances became an opportunity to reforge the connections between the two Warlpiri groups, ensuring that the younger dancers knew of these interconnections and the groups to which their own families were affiliated. This example illustrates the ways in which Warlpiri singers assert and nurture the participants connections to particular places and the connections to each other by due to these place-based aspects of their inherited identities. Ceremonial performances like this are key contemporary spaces in which relational ties are kept active, responding to the specific dynamics of the performance space as determined by the particular individuals who participate.

Jardiwanpa Yawulyu Performance at Barunga Festival: Showcasing Relational Links Between Warlpiri Families

A group of Warlpiri women travelled to the Barunga Festival in July 2018 to perform to an audience of other Aboriginal peoples, mostly from across the Northern Territory, and other visitors who had come for the festival. The Jardiwanpa songline follows the journey of an ancestral taipan snake northwards through Warlpiri Country from the site of Wirnparrku to the east of Haasts Bluff, encountering other ancestral beings including the wirlititi ‘emu’ (see Gallagher et al. 2014). The dancers, in this case senior women Maisy Napurrurla Wayne and Marlette Napurrurla Ross, and younger women, Nakamarra Marshall and Nakamarra Sims have important connections to these ancestors, being directly linked through patrilineal inheritance to the Ngurlu ‘seed’ ancestor discussed in the previous case study. This Ngurlu ‘edible seed’ is an important female component of the Jardiwanpa songline (see Gallagher et al. 2014). Enid Nangala Gallagher dances as the wirlititi ‘emu’ coming in to meet with the group. By embodying these ancestral beings in the dance, performers maintain the links between different Warlpiri groups and showcase these to the broader audience (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Warlpiri women from Yuendumu dance the Jardiwanpa yawulyu at Barunga Festival, 2018. Photo: Video still from footage taken by Ludo Kuipers (used with permission from dancers).

This much celebrated broader ceremony is often described as being a ‘conflict resolution’ ceremony – an opportunity for Warlpiri groups to air grievances and resolve issues. Fire is used in the ceremonyIt involves the use of fire and people in particular roles. Jardiwanpa’s ownership has its roots in an exchange event between Warlpiri, Warumungu, and Mudbura, in the region further to the north-east. This predates the settlement of Warlpiri communities by many decades but Warlpiri elders tell oral histories passed down to them of this exchange event. Dussart has observed that, in the 1980s:

Although the Warlpiri already had Dreamings and ceremonies associated with the lands implicated in the Jardiwanpa, that specific ceremony had not been part of the Warlpiri ritual repertoire until it was performed by the Mudbura. When it was exchanged, ownership of the ceremony was bestowed both on the Warlpiri participants in that exchange and on all the Warlpiri already linked by pre-existing ties to Dreaming tracks implicated in the Jardiwanpa (for example, the Ancestral Emu track or the Ancestral Snake track). (Dussart 2000: 32)

Perhaps due to these north-eastern origins where there are different styles of singing, this ceremonial complex differs from other Warlpiri ceremonies in involving as the central content of their songs, the journeys of several Dreaming ancestors, such as Yarripiri ‘Inland Taipan’, Wampana ‘Spectacled Hare Wallaby’, Ngurlu ‘Edible Seed’ and Yankirri ‘Emu’. Whilst encounters with other jukurrpa ancestors are common in other Warlpiri song series, more usually they are focused centrally on the journey of one particular ancestral group. Due to this difference in ceremonial ownership, and the emphasis on the groups with ownership rights across several different jukurrpa itineraries, more people are implicated in these conflict resolution ceremonies than in other site-specific Warlpiri ceremonies. Yet this ceremony and the songs refer intimately to sites on Warlpiri Country which are core to Warlpiri identity.

This is a popular ceremony to share with outsiders, as it was at Barunga, and often projected as a ceremony which really shows others who Warlpiri people are, possibly because of its inclusivity of several Dreamings owned by one half of the Warlpiri population – the other half being managers – resulting in everyone having an important role. This is also likely why it was chosen by Warlpiri families in Yuendumu to be the focus of the film made by Ned Lander, Rachel Perkins, and Marcia Langton in the early 1990s, where a Jardiwanpa ceremony was staged for the purposes of filming and broadcast on SBS (see Langton 1993; Curran 2019). At the Barunga festival in 2018 this songline was again chosen in this inter-Indigenous context to emphasise the connections between Warlpiri family groups represented by dancers, but also to re-assert the relational links already established through a history of presenting this ceremony to broader, non-Indigenous audiences. While the diverse audience, consisting of Aboriginal people from Arnhem Land, the Kimberley, the Central Desert, as well as tourists and non-Indigenous locals from surrounding towns, may have seen, heard, and experienced this performance in different ways, for the Warlpiri group from Yuendumu, this nevertheless provided an important context to demonstrate their powerful connections to focal ancestral beings and associated Country.

Yarlpurru-rlangu ‘Two Age-Brothers’ Yawulyu Performance at the Northern Territory Writers Festival: Establishing Mutual Interests in Intercultural Contexts

A large group of women from Yuendumu travelled to Alice Springs to perform yawulyu at the Northern Territory Writers Festival in 2017 as part of the launch a newly published song book that they had been working on for a number of years (Warlpiri Women from Yuendumu 2017). The festival site that year was the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens in Alice Springs. The group chose to perform a yawulyu known as Yarlpurru-rlangu ‘Two Age Brothers’, notably focused on bringing together two different kin groups from across the desert, the related story emphasising the important lifelong bond formed between two age-brothers who go through initiation ceremonies together and their interations when they meet again.⁷

Barbara Napanangka Martin share this story following the performance:

Two age brothers, one came from the west, from Minamina and another one came from Mt Theo Puturlu, from the east. He was staying there in his Country at Puturlu, while the other two were coming from the west to visit him, from Minamina. So this dance is called Yarlpurru-rlangu ‘two age brothers’. That’s the dance that we did today. It represents our Dreaming. It’s from our father’s Dreaming, not [our]mother’s, our grandfather (father’s father) and father.

Martin later noted that this particular yawulyu was chosen for this event as it brought together two different, but related, Warlpiri family groups, addressing the broader festival themes of ‘Iwerre-Atherre: Crossings’ and the meeting of different people for whom there is a shared common interest and a context around which to engage. Audrey Napanankga Williams danced as the Mt Theo ancestor, and two sisters Elsie and Alice Napanangka Granites danced together as the Minamina ancestor. As they danced towards each other they communicated through Warlpiri sign language about their meeting which can be roughly translated as ‘Where have you come from my age-brother?’ ‘I’ve come from the west to see you’ (see Figure 4). Both Mt Theo and Minamina jukurrpa are owned by the J/Napangardi and J/Napanangka patricouples, so there are important links between these two Warlpiri areas and the young boys, whose patrilineal connection means they must undergo initiatory business (kurdiji) together.⁸ The dancers are embodying these male roles but illustrating the lifelong bonds of going through ceremonies at the same time, and carrying them forward into new ceremonial contexts in contemporary spaces, to continue to nurture these relationships. The relational focus of the jukurrpa story is performed metaphorically in this context as illustrative of the broader connections the female singers and dancers also make when they travel away from their home communities to perform for intercultural audiences.

Figure 4. The two ancestors from Puturlu (Mt Theo) and Minamina meet together, reforging the connection established when they went through ceremonies to become young men together.

Ngapa Yawulyu Performance for Unbroken Land, Alice Springs, 2018: Creating New Relational Connections Through Participation in Intercultural Events

In September 2018, a group of Warlpiri women from Yuendumu were invited to participate in a community arts event held at the Alice Springs Desert Park. The event, called Unbroken Land, was convened by Incite Arts, an organisation which facilitates arts access opportunities in Alice Springs and the surrounding Central Desert region. Warlpiri women have a long running relationship with Incite Arts as they have supported the Southern Ngaliya dance camps described above.

Ormay Nangala Gallagher speaks about the Unbroken Land event for an interview to promote the event:

We brought our dancers to show our Ngapa [Rain/Water]dreaming, jukurrpa, the Water dreaming. It’s our jukurrpa, dreaming that travelled across the Country. It is our father and grandfather’s jukurrpa that we follow. If you’re lost in the desert there is ngapa, that travelled all the way undergound. They make waterholes, soakages that you can find ngapa and also you can sing to it and the ngapa comes. We do Ngapa jukurrpa in ceremonies, we take it out to the bush and do it with young girls. We teach them this strong story. (Incite Arts 2018)

This event was a promenade performance, in which the audience were guided though the lighted paths of the Alice Springs Desert Park, to seven different stages, each with a performance around the theme of water – a precious resource in this desert region of Australia. The Warlpiri group gathered in the late afternoon in their allocated ‘staged’ area to prepare for their performance, involving painting up their chests with ochred designs while singing and chatting amongst themselves and with a group of Arrernte women from Alice Springs who had come to welcome them to perform on their Country. Prior to the formal performance event Warlpiri women spent several hours singing Ngapa yawulyu whilst painting of designs on each other’s chests, importantly by senior relatives of the correct kin categories. A group of Arrernte women from Alice Springs joined them for this part of the afternoon to welcome them to perform on their land.

After dark the performance began, and the Warlpiri performers were alerted to the arrival of the audience via walkie-talkie message. As the audience entered the space and seated themselves in the allocated area, the group began to sing and dance a song about Jukajuka, an important Warlpiri site only a short 30 km distance from their home community in Yuendumu. An image of Jukajuka projected on to a floating piece of material as a backdrop to their dancing. The women’s skirts showcased the Ngapa designs printed on them for this performance (see Figure 5). The lyrics of the song directly reference this place Jukajuka. The singers identification with this place is lyrically marked by the use of first person singular suffix -rna, used on the end of the place name. They sing Jukajukarna (I am Jukajuka), directly identifying themselves with the jukurrpa, the Country and the ancestors at once.

Figure 5. Warlpiri women dance Ngapa yawulyu for Unbroken Land, 2018. Photo courtesy of Incite Arts.

Jukajukarna x2 I am Jukajuka (place name)

Warlurna yulyurdu munjuru kujurnu x2 I am the smoke from the lightning strike.

The broader event was focused on the theme of water, with a number of performances from various groups focused around this theme. The Warlpiri women were given the chance to sing this Ngapa jukurrpa from their county in a powerful assertion of Warlpiri place-based identity in front of Arrernte owners of Alice Springs and the broader intercultural audience who enjoyed this as a theatrical spectacle. This was for the Warlpiri women however, an important context to be recognised by a broader audience for this specific place-based identity and specialised cultural knowledge, while also nurturing the connections between the singers and dancers from Yuendumu.⁹

Discussion

In the examples discussed above we have illustrated that in each specific performance instance of yawulyu, singing and dancing are productive in their assertion, maintenance, and establishment of relational networks across a broad region of Warlpiri Country and beyond. As Sally Treloyn has pointed out, ‘In the Kimberley and Daly regions of northern Australia, circulation via the sharing and adoption of songs, dance-songs and musical styles between neighbouring and distant groups permeates the social, ceremonial, linguistic and musical landscape’ (2014: 203). These networks extend to the desert region and beyond such that Aboriginal groups in this area are implicated in widespread interconnections across a large area of the Australian continent. These connections have been long fostered by the circulation of objects and rituals across this region, trade networks which have become over generations essential for social reproduction in Central Australian Aboriginal worlds. This has been illustrated nicely in Barbara Glowczewski’s (1983) analysis of the circulation of ceremonial hair strings, following deaths amongst people living at the more northern Warlpiri community of Lajamanu in the 1980s. In more recent work, Glowczeswki, alongside others, shows that, ‘Since the 1980s, Indigenous peoples of Australia have extended their local tools of expression to global networks: exhibitions, festivals, press, radio, documentaries, short dramas, feature films, and websites’ (2019: 281; see also Dussart 2004; Curran and Dussart 2023). In this article, our aim has been to show how some of the contemporary opportunities that Warlpiri women have to sing and dance their yawulyu continue to do the cultural work of forging these social networks despite the significant shifts in context and move away from exchange of materials. These intercultural spaces are powerful for Warlpiri women as they perform, mostly on their own terms, for appreciative audiences who give them recognition for these valued aspects of their cultural heritage and place-based identity. Despite this outsider interest in the spectacle of the performances of Warlpiri women songs, it is rare for the complex relational meanings to be articulated to these outsiders with them appreciating them entirely on a performative level.

In the case studies described, it is clear across the examples that the patrilineal connections to Country are core to defining the dancers’ roles, with the performance being shaped by the particular individuals who attended the events. Warlpiri women discuss in the lead up to these events the yawulyu which they plan to perform but it is not until the unique combinations of these individuals with their associations to particular families, Country and jukurrpa, come together in the performance space that final decisions are made. As to the songs and dances which will be held, many decisions are similarly made in the moment during the performances and under the guidance of the kurdungurlu (ceremonial managers) who oversee the performance to ensure that it is being done properly. This is a clear area of shift in recent decades as yawulyu are being performed in more public contexts, purposefully to connect to outside intercultural audiences and showcase Warlpiri identity in a positive light that within the control of the Warlpiri singers and dancers (Curran and Dussart 2023). This sharply contrasts to many of the other contexts in which Indigenous people from remote communities engage with mainstream Australia, in which they are represented negatively by media and other outsiders. While the patrilineal connections are emphasised in the singing and designs during the painting up phases of these events, the dancing is an important space for the renegotiation and reestablishment of the roles, responsibilities, and relationships between the women and their family groups. With the dancers embodying the ancestral beings to which they have associated relational links, these spaces are central sites for re-asserting the relational networks which already exist and setting forth the ways in which they will move forward into the future. This is clearly illustrated in all four examples presented in this article.

Nicolas Peterson (forthcoming) has illustrated how in the 1970s ceremonial performances were the spaces used to negotiate and make claims of affiliation to different ancestral Country. He shows through an example of a Munga ‘shortening of the night’ ceremony held in 1971, that senior men were holding ceremonies for the purposes of proving their capability and securing their rights to carry forward particular ceremonies affiliated with Country. He argues that the present-day systems of proving ‘traditional ownership’ through patrilineal connections to Country have been skewed largely by the requirements of the land claim and native title systems of the preceding five decades.

Prior to this era, ceremonial spaces were central to the negotiations of these kind of claims for rights and responsibilities to Country. This is a prominent shift which has fundamentally changed the power of performative agency amongst Warlpiri people. It illustrates, as Karyn Barad (2007: 185) has argued that ‘practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming’. While Warlpiri women’s yawulyu spaces have strong emphasis on the role of kirda ‘owner’ through patrilineal associations passed on from fathers to sons, and aunts (father’s sisters) to their nieces (brother’s daughters), in this article we have shown that contemporary performance spaces, despite this emphasis, still do carry out this powerful role in re-establishing and setting up the relational networks fundamental to the continuation of Warlpiri worlds in an expansive area of across the Central Australian desert and beyond, as well as incorporating the broader intercultural relationships nowadays necessary and desired for global engagement, including in a digital sense.

Conclusions: What is Performed Becomes What is Performed in the Future … 

Contemporary Warlpiri women’s yawulyu performances are productive contexts in which patrililineal inheritance of Country, jukurrpa, and stories is asserted and validated, whilst also maintaining and regenerating the vital social networks the Tanami desert region and beyond. In this way, contemporary yawulyu hold on to their productive power, continuing, as has been long shown to shift the world in vital ways and shape the future while carrying forward knowledge and practices which maintain the long-established relational links to Country, jukurrpa, and kinship networks, and the songs, designs, and dances which also carry the same essence. Warlpiri participants bring these established aspects of who they are to intra-act in performance spaces, such that the yawulyu instances have their own agency which is not centred on ‘an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces’ (Barad 2007: 141). In and of itself, this provides an important reason for valuing and providing support for vulnerable performance traditions. Their continuation into the future is not just a matter of intellectual substance or support for a unique cultural identity but is actually deeply vital for social reproduction and Aboriginal peoples’ positive engagements with a broader world.

Acknowledgements

With acknowledgements to the custodians of the jukurrpa, songs and dances which we have discussed in the article, particularly Barbara Napanangka Martin, Ormay Nangala Gallagher, Maisy Napurrurla Wayne, and Molly Napurrurla Presley. With thanks also to Amanda Harris, Catherine Ingram, Joseph Toltz, and Toby Martin for comments on an early draft of this paper which has shaped the directions and conclusions considerably, to two anonymous peer reviewers and to guest-editor of this journal issue, Sam Curkpatrick, for their insightful comments. Georgia Curran’s ARC funded DECRA (DE200100120) has supported the research for this article. Previous ARC Linkage project (LP160100743) and support from the Australian Government’s Indigenous Languages and Arts program has supported many of the performance events discussed. The project has approval from the University of Sydney’s Human Research Ethics Committee and custodians of the songs discussed have provided their informed consent for their publication. The content of this article includes cultural knowledge and practices which are owned by Warlpiri people and its use for any other purpose that has not been permitted by them is a breach of copyright and moral rights.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the an Australian Research Council DECRA (DE200100120) and the Indigenous Languages and Arts program (ILAO1800095).

Notes on contributors

Georgia Curran

Georgia Curran is currently a Australian Research Council DECRA fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the University of Sydney. Her interests include Indigenous music, languages and performance. She has conducted research in collaboration with Warlpiri people and Yuendumu-based organisations since 2005 including publications of two Warlpiri women's song books (Batchelor Press 2014, 2017) and Sustaining Indigenous Songs (Berghahn, 2020) as well as numerous articles.

Enid Nangala Gallagher

Enid Nangala Oldfield is a senior Warlpiri community leader with many roles in various Yuendumu-based organisations, as well as the Southern Tanami Rangers. Enid envisaged and has led the Southern Ngaliya dance camps since 2010, working in collaboration with Incite Arts and the Warlpiri Youth Development Aboriginal Corporation. She has been central to the conceptual development and content preparation for Yawulyu mardukuja-patu-kurlangu: a Warlpiri women's digital space.

Notes

1 Myfany Turpin and Jennifer Green point out that in parts of Central Australia, the verb ‘singing’ implies affect and is differentiated from other verbs of vocalisation for this reason.

2 Curran, Barwick and Martin (forthcoming), illustrate through comparison of Minamina yawulyu performance over a 50-year time span, that in contemporary performances the place-centred aspects of songs are the most emphasised and seen as the essence of a song which is vital to pass on to younger generations.

3 The use of this term in this article implies that the space is one of respect and desire for mutual understanding and is used rather than cross cultural, which may emphasise cultural difference.

4 The authors have undertaken collaborative work together and alongside other senior Warlpiri singers since 2005, largely focused on supporting song traditions by setting up spaces for their revitalisation, seeking out performance opportunities, and documentary work on song words, musical aspects, and stories (see Gallagher et al. 2014, Warlpiri Women from Yuendumu 2017, Curran 2020b).

5 It is important to note that the idea of an ‘audience’ for Warlpiri women’s yawulyu, alongside it’s framing as a ‘performance’ is a relatively new concept which has emerged with the rise of public performance opportunities beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, and particularly linked to the requirement to showcase links to particular Country in the land claim era and provide context to the designs on Central Australian dot paintings, which at the time were beginning to occupy an international art market.

6 Yarlpurru-rlangu yawulyu were also performed for similar reasons when a Warlpiri group from Yuendumu visited the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra and danced for an audience of Aboriginal activists and other Canberra locals (see Curran and Sims 2021).

7 An age-brother in this instance refers to two men who went through Warlpiri initiation ceremonies (Kurdiji) together when they were teenagers.

8 Warlpiri people have an eight-part subsection system in which everyone is classified with a ‘skin name’ beginning with ‘J’ for men, and ‘N’ for women. Japanangka and Japangardi are the subsections which together form a patricouple and have ownership for the same jukurrpa.

9 This event was filmed and a creative digital output was produced by Incite Arts and circulated via online social media in 2020, when restrictions to holding live events were in place. The Warlpiri women’s Ngapa Yawulyu film was part of a series of performances.