AustLit

'Given the paucity of research pertaining to Indigenous vocal music in the south-west of Western Australia and the present endangered state of traditional music knowledge in the region, this paper discusses contemporary community-driven Noongar language revitalisation activities and explores relevant archival song texts. Oral accounts and archival records from the south-west of Western Australia highlight the centrality of vocal music in the local Aboriginal (Noongar) society. Accordingly, Noongar people composed songs in response to new experiences and phenomena as colonial influence extended across the south-west in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These compositions experiment with point-of-view, vocabulary and metaphor, indicating the ability for Noongar singing traditions to maintain continuity and intergenerational transmission while demonstrating linguistic, thematic and semantic flexibility.' (Abstract)