The Best Australian Essays 2015

by Geordie Williamson

  I was at that performance. An unsettling ambivalence was apparent. Excitement was high and such was the shouted ‘love’ for Gurrumul that Michael Hohnen eventually replied with the affectionate riposte: ‘He’s not the messiah, you know!’ This and other related quips – the kind of ‘easygoing humour’ Mugan experienced at the Barbican performance a few weeks later – probed the complexities of Gurrumul’s reception. Hohnen’s wry commentary shows an awareness of the limitations of the pop-star reception Gurrumul receives.

  When Everettsmith opened the night, his energy and talent were evident. Everettsmith radiates the very openness and engagement with audiences that Gurrumul is chided for lacking. Yet a rustle of derision and a hostile shout greeted him: ‘Where’s Gurrumul?’ There was a long, uneasy pause. Everettsmith must have considered walking offstage. Then he said words to the effect ‘I love you too’. The musicians were given encouragement in the form of loud applause from other audience members, but this did not obscure an ugly moment, with its sense as to how provisional and conditional the kind of respect offered to Gurrumul might be.

  I thought of Bob Dylan’s unforgettable riposte ‘I don’t believe you … you’re a liar!’ in response to shouts of ‘Judas!’ at a concert at Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966 after he ‘went electric’ in 1965. On that occasion Dylan did address his band, adding: ‘Play it LOUD!’ But the terms of the argument weren’t quite the same.

  What kind of person calls out from the dark belly of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall? It sounded like a middle-aged woman. The shout followed Everettsmith’s description of his mother’s inability to care for him and his subsequent adoption (one of the ‘startlingly blunt stories he tells between songs’, as his manager, Martine Delaney, puts it; Everettsmith does not conceal the fact that his background has been traumatic). The heckle was violent enough, but its timing was heartless.

  When I asked Delaney about the incident, she talked about his difficult background, and the resilience this has built in him:

  So, he approaches audiences with the understanding he’s not going to please everyone. He doesn’t want to please everyone. We were advised a couple of years ago, by a very successful producer, that Dewayne needed to change his repertoire and sound if he wished to be commercially successful – that his chosen style really wasn’t going to make it big with the audiences who bought tickets, CDs and downloads. But he performs because he loves his music and has no desire to be a ‘manufactured’ success.

  Delaney notes that other members of the group were a bit thrown. ‘Sadly for the heckler,’ she adds, ‘the guys recovered from that incident quite rapidly because of the much louder and consistent positive feedback they received from everyone else.’ But the moment carried the reminder that bridges are subject to destruction. Their careful engineering may be destroyed by bombing or natural disasters. They may prove structurally weak in some way, susceptible to breakage. There is a two-way balance required for bridging, and the outstretched arm of a jetty like Wagan Watson’s invites and needs a reciprocal gesture.

  In considering the engineering of bridges in Gurrumul’s work, two other aspects deserve attention. One is the collaboration between Hohnen and Gurrumul. The gentle and intuitive relationship between the self-effacing Hohnen and Gurrumul is evident.

  Hohnen, as the number of mentions of his name here suggests, is a crucial figure in the story of Gurrumul’s success. Almost twenty years ago, at the height of his own musical career, touring with orchestras, jazz bands, and independent band the Killjoys, Hohnen, who is a couple of years older than Gurrumul, left Melbourne and set off with his double bass in the back of his car. This was in response to the hollowness and egocentricity in the Western music industry. Hohnen worked as a lecturer at the then Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University), teaching Indigenous musicians and later establishing Skinnyfish Music.

  Hohnen’s encouragement of Gurrumul’s talent and his careful directing of his career underpins Gurrumul’s success. As Hohnen mentions in ‘You’re the Voice’, he is mindful of the ethical complexity of a white man speaking for a black man. My own observation of Hohnen in concert with Gurrumul is that he is an enabler, doing what needs to be done so as to foreground his talent.

  The second is the broader sweep of music courses and initiatives in improving the lives of Indigenous Australians. In the Northern Territory, Hohnen, again, has been a key player in this transformation. Martin Jarvis, musician and academic at Charles Darwin University, whose work has attracted an Order of Australia award, writes about the work done through the University, The Northern Territory Indigenous Music Education program, and the Darwin Symphony Orchestra. Jarvis has lived in the Northern Territory for more than two decades and has seen the conditions in which many Indigenous people in the area are living as a result of European settlement. He writes: ‘I’m now tempted to believe that there is an unspoken and deliberate plan to carry out a form of genocide through simple non-action on the part of government.’ He argues that ‘seeking better social justice outcomes for Australia’s Indigenous people demands that we examine different ways in which we can implement educational outcomes’ and prefaces a paper on the subject with the deceptively simple comment by Yolngu musician G. Rrurrumbu, founder of the Warumpi Band, that ‘we learn through song and dance’. The point, though, is essential. Indigenous communities do not learn through writing down their history, so Western education needs to find ways of being more hospitable to Indigenous students if it is to have anything to offer them.

  In a paper whose title invokes the idea of active bridging – ‘Music, Dance & Culture – Building Bridges & Opening Doors’ – Jarvis outlines the delivery of contemporary music programs in Indigenous communities of the Northern Territory, starting with the Northern Territory University and growing to extend into high schools through the Northern Territory’s Education Department. While the programs’ broader initial aim was the linking of ‘contemporary music with traditional ceremony to give a unique voice to indigenous music’, he quotes Hohnen as saying that developing income for the communities is crucial.

  Alongside these achievements other results have emerged. Jarvis includes a letter from Judith Hummerstoll, remote area nurse at the Willowra Health Centre. She comments that communities receive ‘many well-intentioned visitors and programs which fail to meet their stated objectives’. The music programs, though, have lifted social and emotional well-being as a result of increased self-esteem, productivity, and purpose.

  Students performed with the Darwin Symphony Orchestra, which has a long history of interaction with Indigenous musicians. One involved song-man Don Weluk and brass teacher at Maningrida Secondary College Scott Trenwith writing and performing material for the brass ensemble and the Orchestra, with Don as vocalist. Another was the collaboration of the Maningrida’s brass ensemble with the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Simone de Haan. The resulting fusion of traditional and Western music went on to be performed at the Fusions World Music Conference in Canberra.

  Fusions and reciprocal bridgings in terms of translation through music and performance are central to the work of Sri-Lankan-born Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. Ondaatje has made ideas of a poetics of bridging central to his work. His novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987) begins with literal bridge-making with some of his characters building the Bloor St Viaduct. Ondaatje shuffles the key figurative elements of the novel so that translation, masquerade, fusion and metaphor itself move to stand in for one another like the complicated dances he describes throughout his work.

  One of the key bridge-builders, Nicholas Temelcoff, is new to Canada and to the English language. His dreams are filled with translation. Temelcoff himself is ‘a spinner … he links everyone’. His dreams are a tumult of change and bridging: ‘In the dreams trees changed not just their names but their looks and character. Men started answering in falsettos. Dogs spoke out fast to him on the street.’

  Ideas of translation in
Ondaatje’s work, and in Gurrumul’s, as Robert Forster suggests, move quickly beyond the most literal meaning of the term. While translation is most obviously the rendering of something into another language, its secondary meanings open up other layers: change or conversion to another form or appearance; transformation, the idea of a translation of thought into action. Implicit in this is the act or process of translating, and the state of being translated. At its heart are ideas of fluidity and about the dynamic nature of identity. The word comes from the Latin word: translatus: past participle: conveyed, transferred. And since language is itself a translation of object into word and migration involves a translation of self, ideas of a space beyond translation, forged anew by bridgings, are implicit in it.

  This is something suggested by comparisons of Gurrumul’s work with that of Icelandic band Sigur Rós, many of whose lyrics are in an invented language, Hopelandic. But Gurrumul’s languages are not invented, though the music has a capacity to go beyond semantic meanings into something higher. In this, Gurrumul is perhaps closer to Romanian poet Paul Celan, whose post-war poetry moved away from frameworks of narrative clarity towards a poetics of the ineffable. Paradoxically, in doing so his work perhaps comes close to responding to Adorno’s dictate ‘after Auschwitz, no poetry’.

  While translation comes from the Latin word for conveying, its Greek counterpart is metaphor. Like translation, metaphor has an obvious aspect – saying one thing is another – while its imaginative implications revolve around the understanding that, actually, one thing is not another. Metaphor invites complicity – let’s imagine this together – and requires an imagining not unlike a form of empathy. It asks not ‘what is it like to be you?’ but ‘what if this were that’, or even: ‘What if I were you?’

  It is for reasons such as these that, as one of the protagonists in Ondaatje’s novel says: ‘You reach people through metaphor.’ If metaphor is a kind of translation, Gurrumul’s music invites a metaphorical bridge back into Yolngu culture, rather than moving further away – taking Yolngu experience into the twittering Western world of celebrity. It is important, then, to look for a Yolngu metaphor to express this.

  There is a specific metaphor from Yolngu culture that gives an Indigenous perspective on the idea of bridging. Rather than going over water, though, it is about the merging of waters. I discovered the idea of ganma in the work of Karl W.M. Neuenfeldt, who uses it to describe ‘the specific message Yothu Yindi is striving to broadcast to non-Aboriginal Australia. That message is that there are Aboriginal methods for melding the disparate worlds of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians and one such method is ganma understanding, mediated through music in this case.’ He provides a succinct definition of ganma via the educational program ‘Ganma’, or ‘Both Ways’, at Yirrkala in the Northern Territory, which describes its namesake in these terms:

  Ganma is a metaphor describing the situation where a river of water from the sea (Western knowledge) and a river of water from the land (Yolngu knowledge) mutually engulf each other on flowing into a common lagoon and becoming one. In coming together the streams of water mix across the interface of the two currents and foam is created at the surface so that the process of ganma is marked by lines of foam along the interface of the two currents.

  Ganma is made in whirling water. Fiona Magowan writes about the introduction of ganma ideas to balanda (non-Yolngu) people:

  If flowing water carries ‘feelingful’ emotion, it is because the aqua-aesthetics of Yolngu ancestral waters embody identities and personalities. Where these waters come together, an interaction of different personalities is implied in their ebb and flow. And a conjunction of personalities is also a conjunction of groups and kinship relations. Each water has its own flavor, design, and temperament held in its names, which are ritually intoned.

  ‘Treaty’ contains a dream of ganma:

  Now two rivers run their course

  Separated for so long

  I’m dreaming of a brighter day

  When the waters will be one

  In Gurrumul’s music, metaphor and translation are part of a bridging that offers transcendence. His own musical reimaginings create texts of bliss, the effects of which are heightened by the scaffolding of silence. In the context of a reconciliation-inprogress, Gurrumul’s music is a sound bridge that shows a way forward into the possibilities of ‘both ways’ and fusion.

  References

  Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, Éditions du Seuil, 1975.

  Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Indiana University Press, 1995. Ian Birrell, ‘The Term “World Music” Is Outdated and Offensive’, The Guardian, 23 March 2012.

  David Buchbinder, Performance Anxieties: Re-Producing Masculinity, Allen & Unwin, 1998.

  Aaron Corn, Reflections & Voices: Exploring the Music of Yothu Yindi with Mandawuy Yunupingu, Sydney University Press, 2009.

  Aaron Corn with Neparrŋa Gumbula, ‘Ancestral Precedent as Creative Inspiration: The influence of Soft Sands on popular song composition in Arnhem Land’, in Graeme Ward & Adrian Muckle (eds), The Power of Knowledge, The Resonance of Tradition (Electronic publication of papers from the AIATSIS Conference September 2001, AIATSIS, 2005).

  Don DeLillo, White Noise, Viking, 1985.

  Bruce Elder, ‘Gurrumul’, album review, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 April 2008.

  Robert Forster, ‘To the Heart: Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s “Rrakala”’, The Monthly, April 2011.

  Anita Heiss, Am I Black Enough For You?, Random House, 2012.

  Douglas Khan, excerpt from review of ‘Sound in Space’ at Sydney’s MCA, published in Realtime 8, August–September 1995, on the Singing Bridges website.

  Guy Maestri, ‘Archibald Prize 2009 interview’ on the Art Gallery of NSW website.

  Fiona Magowan, ‘Ganma: Negotiating Indigenous Water Knowledge in a Global Water Crisis’, Cultural Survival Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2, Summer 2002, Nurturing the Sacred in Aboriginal Australia.

  Kevin Rudd, ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’, Parliament of Australia, 13 February 2008.

  Iain Shedden, ‘Sting’s Encounter with Gurrumul’, The Australian, 5 December 2009.

  Samuel Wagan Watson, Smoke-Encrypted Whispers, University of Queensland Press, 2004.

  Sarah Whyte, ‘Music the Language to Lower All Barriers’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 2011.

  Mandawuy Yunupingu, Discussion of ‘Treaty’ on the Yothu Yindi website.

  Galarrwuy Yunupingu, ‘Tradition, Truth & Tomorrow’, The Monthly, December 2008.

  ‘You’re the Voice’, Australian Story, ABC TV, 25 October 2010.

  Albums and songs

  ‘Beds Are Burning’, by Midnight Oil, Diesel and Dust, 1987.

  ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’, by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly, Bloodlines, 1993.

  ‘Let My Children Be’, by Ruby Hunter, Thoughts Within, 1994.

  ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’, by Kev Carmody, Pillars of Society, 1989.

  ‘Took the Children Away’, by Archie Roach, Charcoal Lane, 1990.

  ‘Travellin’ North’ by Kev Carmody, Images and Illusions, 1995.

  ‘Treaty’, by Mandawuy Yunupingu, Gurrumul Yunupingu, Paul Kelly, Stuart Kellaway, Cal Williams, Milkayngu Mununggurr and Banula Marika, Yothu Yindi, Tribal Voice, 1991.

  My deep thanks to the Sidney Myer Fund, Peter Rose, Amy Baillieu, Mireille Juchau, Samuel Wagan Watson, Martine Delaney, Adrian Cook, John Turner and Dean Biron – and especially to Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.

  Australian Book Review

  Leaving Ourselves at Home

  DBC Pierre

  I frequented a beach bar in Spain where there was no internet. A large drowned bird washed up one day. The bar owner was a barnacle of a man called Vincent. I saw him standing over the carcass on the shore, cigar stub twitching from a corner of his mouth. Low sun lit up talons and feathers, askew like his brush of thinning hair. When Vincent chewed his cigar it bobbed and meant he wa
s thinking. Spreading the bird out to look at, he finally nodded: ‘A condor.’

  Now: the bay where we stood was a hem of Spain’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, facing Morocco across the Mediterranean.

  ‘It’s certainly big,’ I said.

  ‘Definitely a condor.’

  I moved around the bird to study it. Its neck was long and shiny. ‘But condors come from the Americas.’

  Vincent crushed the cigar with his teeth and turned a flat gaze to me. ‘So what?’

  ‘It won’t have flown the Atlantic.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘I was born in Australia.’

  ‘And you’re here, aren’t you?’

  Thus a Griffon vulture, native to mountains overlooking Vincent’s birthplace, where he’d spent his fifty years, became a condor. And if no real condor was there to prove otherwise, was it then a condor? The condor marked the emergence in my mind of a pie chart describing ingredients of travel, aside from simple distance: one slice represented the physical difference of a place compared with our own; another represented the different outlook and culture of a place compared with our own – and the biggest showed how much of our own place we carry with us to filter the differences through. And since then I’ve always watched the chart. Or specifically watched the slice grow bigger that contains ideas from home. It’s the slice where we don’t buy the condor.

  On the same beach, not twenty feet from Vincent’s, the slice with the differential mindset of a place gained an example from the local knife-sharpener. He rode a bicycle whose chain also drove a grindstone. Playing scales up and down a panpipe was his way of calling business onto the street, where he would park his bike and set the grindstone to work on knives and scissors. One day hearing the pipes I decided that most of my knives were blunt.