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'Billy Mandji was a prolific and popular Belyuen songman. Active from the 1960s to the 1980s, he travelled widely and was recorded in Kununurra, Timber Creek, Oenpelli and Beswick Creek as well as his home community of Belyuen (Delissaville). He was a prominent participant in the tourist corroborees presented by people from Belyuen in various locations around Darwin and the Cox Peninsula. In addition to composing songs of his own, Billy Mandji inherited songs in Emmi-Mendhe from the Emmiyangal people with whom he lived at Belyuen, and he also sang the Emmi-Mendhe songs of Jimmy Muluk (see Muluk's Wangga ), often in the role of backup singer. His own language, Marri Tjavin, appeared rarely in his songs, and many of Mandji’s songs are composed in untranslatable ‘ghost language’. Although Allan Marett recorded Mandji’s songs in 1988, he was never able to work with him on documenting his songs, so the translations and interpretations are the result of working with other speakers, especially his extremely knowledgeable ‘daughter’ (brother’s daughter), Marjorie Knuckey Bilbil.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Dedication: Dedicated to the late Marjorie Bilbil, beloved elder of Belyuen and brillant cultural worker, who helped us in many ways
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Related Works
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For the Sake of a Song : Wangga Songmen and their Repertories
Allan Marett
,
Linda Barwick
,
Lysbeth Julie Ford
,
Sydney
:
Sydney University Press
,
2012
7074307
2012
selected work
lyric/song
Indigenous story
'Wangga is a genre of public dance-song from the Daly region of northwest Australia; the country that lies to the north and south of the mouth of the Daly River. The book (and this website) focuses on the songmen (Medjakarr in Batjamalh; Ngalinangga in Marri Tjavin) who have composed and performed wangga in the Daly region in the last fifty years.'
'Many of these singers are now deceased, though their descendants and heirs continue to perform the songs in ceremonies and various public events. At the core of the book is a corpus of some 150 wangga song texts, organised into six repertories: four from the Belyuen-based songmen Barrtjap, Muluk, Mandji and Lambudju, and two from the Wadeye-based Walakandha and Ma-yawa wangga groups, which are named after the ancestral song-giving ghosts of the Marri Tjavin and Marri Ammu people respectively.' (Source: wangga.library.usyd)
