What's That Song About?: Interaction of Form and Meaning in Lardil Burdal Songs

Abstract

Burdal is a public genre of song and dance belonging to the Lardil people of Mornington Island. The meanings of burdal songs can be interpreted on several levels: culturally ascribed meaning; meaning from the music; and meaning from the song text. Each of these levels is explored with examples. Metre and song text are focussed on in relation to their contribution to meaning-making. Phonological differences between song language and spoken language are examined, along with implications for teaching songs.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal Song
• Tangkic
• Lardil
• Burdal
• Metre
• Song Words

Acknowledgements

This work is based on my honours thesis, completed in 1999. Kenneth Jacob, Nelson Gavenor, Ian James, Paul Memmott and Jane Simpson were particularly important in helping with this early research. Between 2000 and 2002 I worked on a further project with songmen to retrieve even more recordings from the archives and to transcribe and re-record as many songs as possible. Altogether there are now about 230 songs in the database, 150 of which are classified as public burdal songs. A version of this paper was presented at a workshop on the language of poetry and song in September 2007, Adelaide, where I benefited from insightful comments by participants. I thank Myfany Turpin and Tonya Stebbins for providing helpful comments on earlier drafts as well as two anonymous reviewers for providing many useful ideas on how to improve this article.

Notes

¹The nature of untranslatable song language has been studied by several researchers, including Merlan (1987) and Apted (2007).

²Based on Strehlow's work in Central Australia (Hale 1984).

³Alpher has identified similar difficulties in identifying origins of Yir-Yoront song words (Alpher 1976).

⁴See Hale and Nash (1997) for a description of Damin.

⁵Arandic songs incorporate similar vowel changes (Turpin 2007).