The Spinifex Campfire
Topology and Iain Grandage join forces in Canberra this coming Monday and Tuesday for the Canberra International Music Festival.
Venue: Arc Cinema, National Film and Sound Archive
Dates: Monday 12 May, Tuesday 13 May
Time: 8pm
Duration: 80 minutes including intermission
Tickets: $25 / $15 concession
We’re playing several big pieces:
Mirramirratjara (2006)
Inma Kutju (2002) for amplified cello, delay and CD
For many thousands of years, indigenous people from across southern central Australia travelled to a soak near Maralinga for trade and community business. That soak was named Ooldea. It was a meeting place. Today, with the water long gone and a modern story of removal from the land for nuclear tests to add to the countless ancient tales, the soak carries within its constantly shifting dunes a sense of captured history, a sense of buried time.
Soon after my first trip to Ooldea in 2001, I was fortunate enough to come in contact with a number of the Elders of the Spinifex lands – one of the groups who used to visit there. In making a work about their community for the Black Swan Theatre Company in Perth, they sang many traditional songs (Inma) that helped tell their stories – both ancient and modern – of a relationship with the land, a removal from it, and an eventual successful return. Three of these Inma form the basis for my work, Mirramirratjara..
Inma is a single word encompassing the meaning of our English words song, dance and ceremony. In essence, in both cultural and practical terms, the three activities are inseparable. An Inma in musical terms consists of a series of verses, each 15-30 seconds in duration, each sung 2 or 3 (or more) times before moving on. Each verse consists of three phrases – each rhythmically similar, each with a descending melodic contour, each featuring intervals close to our traditional western tonality of 3rds and 5ths. So while I have avoided direct quotation of Inma in this work – it’s not my song to sing - I have used many of the inherent musical characteristics of traditional song to generate the musical material.
Structurally, the work is a single continuous movement, featuring Mamu Inma – a song series about a spirit-being best equated to the western ideas of the devil or a trickster god.
During 2002, I travelled with a group of 15 members of the Tjuntjuntjarra community from their homelands just north of Eucla (and 800 kilometres east of Kalgoorlie), to Adelaide, Perth, the North West and finally to Germany. The purpose of this travel was to present the community’s story through their own eyes in the Black Swan production Mamu. Their story centres around their removal from their homelands for the Maralinga nuclear tests, and their subsequent decision to return to their country after the Royal Commission in the 1980s. During the course of the show, elders of the community sang Inma while I and another western musician accompanied them on cello and percussion. These on-stage improvisations formed the basis for this work.
At the heart of the piece is the Kalaya Inma (the Emu song) – a song about the
owners of the spinifex lands before the spinifex people became custodians. It is
sung by three elders - Mr Underwood, Mr Jamieson and Mr Grant, and the
recording is used with their permission. This being my first collaboration with
them, I have titled it Inma Kutju, Kutju being the Pitjantjarra word for “one” of
“first”. It is dedicated to the elders, for all they have taught me and continue to teach me.
These works I regard as a meeting place. A work within which the musical forces of Australia’s European heritage share a campfire with some of Australia’s traditional owners. A campfire around which history may become a source of shared pride, and where time might reveal a communal future rather than a buried, stolen past.
Iain Grandage
Ruth Portrait, from Taken (2002)
1. Rag Torn
2. Namun
3. School
4. Church
5. Discipline
6. I waved her goodbye
Ruth Portrait, composed as part of Taken for the 2002 Brisbane Festival, represents a white composer taking a stance of listening - listening to one woman’s story of family breakup through Government policy.
Aunty Ruth Hegarty, a Gunggari woman born in Mitchell in 1929, was removed
from her mother in the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement in the 1930s. She has written a moving account of her life as a “dormitory girl”, Is That YouRuthie (UQP, 1999).
I interviewed Aunty Ruth in 2002, making a rough home video of our conversation for my own reference. When I watched the video, I was struck by Aunty Ruth’s dynamic way of speaking and was moved by her stories, so I decided to set them to music (with her blessing). All of the musical material in Ruth Portrait is based on this homely interview - the ensemble takes its melody and rhythm from Aunty Ruth’s spoken intonation.
The discussion moves through a range of moods and topics, from humorous accounts of mischief to heartbreaking memories of separation.
Robert Davidson.
Writing in The Australian in September 2002, Vincent Plush reviewed the Brisbane Festival premiere of the larger work, Taken, from which the 20-minute extract Ruth Portrait is taken:.
Taken is a kind of Australian morality play, crossed with the music docu-dramas of Steve Reich and John Adams. Like Phillip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence, its parable is woven from the baleful stories of the Stolen Generation, submissions to government enquiries, newspaper reports, first-hand oral history and the writings of Jack Davis and Oodgeroo. A powerful 80 minutes, it leaves its dazed audience gasping for breath.
…. Bleak and angry, it offers no solace or comfort – how can it? – and is about as intractable as John Howard’s refusal to concede the simple word, “sorry”.
…Moving beyond his recent Airwaves, which has grown to an impressive social statement over the past year, composer Robert Davidson gives the text more direct prominence, without obscuring it with Reich-like speech patterns.
“People have got to listen to our stories,” Aunty Ruth Hegarty maintains in her oral history recollections. (Over time), people will listen to Taken as a truly major milestone in Australian political art, appreciating its art, as well as its politics.
