Sustaining Traditions: Ethnomusicological Collections, Access and Sustainability in Australia

Abstract

Researchers and collecting institutions have long been concerned with issues of sustainability and accessibility in relation to the audio and video recordings, metadata and documents that they create and manage. While early research sought to create a sustainable record of performance traditions that would be available to future generations, archives have striven to ensure that these recordings are held in durable and sustainable formats. In recent years this view of sustainability and accessibility has widened to include making records of cultural heritage discoverable and accessible to their countries and communities of origin often to support local efforts to reclaim cultural heritage materials and to sustain their traditions into the future. The potential for repatriation and research to contribute to sustaining traditions for future generations, however, is tied to an array of historical, political, economic and interpersonal factors and challenges. This article explores a range of these issues through two case studies that describe research activity and aspirations around two geographically, historically, and politically distinct ethnomusicological collections held in Australia: one a digital collection of recordings of dance-songs from the Kimberley region of northwest Australia dating from the 1960s to the present, currently the subject of a repatriation and cultural maintenance-focused research project; the other a unique collection of recordings and documents, primarily of South African Venda performance traditions that were collected by John Blacking in the 1950s and that are held in the Callaway Centre at the University of Western Australia.

Notes

¹ Landau and Topp Fargion provide a valuable recent account of ethnomusicological research that seeks to make archival holdings accessible to cultural heritage communities, and investigate the relationship between these efforts and notions of sustainability and preservation in relation to UNESCO's statements on the role of archives in safeguarding endangered cultural heritages (Landau and Topp Fargion 2012).

² Seeger, for example, suggests that by returning items ‘we can actively reverse the colonial process and help “repatriate” the recordings’ (Seeger 1986, 267).

³ One of the earliest discussions of this topic in Australia comes from the 1988 Colloquium at which Stephen Wild discussed how repatriated recordings can be ‘evidence and symbols of cultural identity, an identity which may have radically altered in the intervening years but which nevertheless asserts a measure of continuity with the past, that they are a people with a continuous and continuing history’ (Wild 1992, 11).

⁴ Marett and Barwick, after Stubington and Dunbar-Hall (1994, 255), describe how Mandawuy Yunupingu's performance of two djatpangarri songs that had been revitalized after the return of recordings made by Waterman in 1952 ‘cut through the dichotomy between preservation and recording of songs and their continuity in living tradition’ (Marett and Barwick 2003, 144).

⁵ ‘On’, ‘in’, or ‘from’ Country refers to an approach to teaching and learning wherein cultural knowledge and skills transmission activities are conducted in locations that are intertwined with the ancestral, cultural, personal and social identities of the participants and the knowledge being generated/transmitted. It is a widespread concept used by many Aboriginal groups and programmes (for example, Bedford and Casson 2010; Christie et al. 2010), and is an expression in everyday usage in the Kimberley.

⁶ Marett estimates that some ninety-eight per cent of songs have been lost since colonization (Marett 2010).

⁷ AIATSIS Research Grant G2009/7458: ‘Sustaining junba: recording and documenting endangered songs and dances in the northern Kimberley’ (Investigators: Sally Treloyn, Scotty Martin and Matthew Martin). In 2012 the AIATSIS Research Grant scheme was suspended for the first time in twenty years, due to decreases in Federal Government funding. As one of the primary sources of seed-funding for research projects that are orientated towards community-focused outcomes, the loss of this programme may conceivably have a significant impact on subsequent research that addresses cultural, song, dance and linguistic maintenance in Australia.

⁸ ARC Linkage Project LP0990650: ‘Strategies for preserving and sustaining Australian Aboriginal song and dance in the modern world: the Mowanjum and Fitzroy River valley communities of WA’.

⁹ A map depicting the approximate location of language groups of the Kimberley can be viewed online: (Accessed 5 December 2012) < http://www.klrc.org.au/languages>.

¹⁰ Recordings of these sessions, made in the course of the project, will be archived at AIATSIS in 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sally Treloyn

Sally Treloyn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne in the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. She has conducted ethnomusicological research in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia since 1999. At the time of writing this article, she holds two Australian Research Council Linkage grants in partnership with Indigenous organizations in the area.

Email: [email protected]

Andrea Emberly

Andrea Emberly is Assistant Professor at York University and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Emberly is continuing research with children and young people in Venda communities in South Africa, where she has conducted research on children's music since 2004, and is currently working on a collaborative book project on Venda children's songs. Together, Treloyn and Emberly are collaborating on a second project supported by the Australian Research Council in collaboration with colleagues from the Kimberley Language Resource Centre, The University of Western Australia, and The University of Sydney.