Today’s dispatch is ‘Magic Moments’. Originally dispatched on 20 March 2016
As-salaam-alaikum tovarichi,
When our family first came to live in Central Australia, Yuendumu was a neo-colonial outpost. Long white socks and Bermuda shorts and an open necked shirt were the apparel de rigueur for mostly white men. They even had a name for it “Territory Rig”.
When Nangala started work as a teacher in Yuendumu, she was initially installed into a “Health Flat” with our children (I was working for an exploration company in the area, and was tolerated as a “house husband”). The Matron told Nangala, that she shouldn’t allow those ‘Native Children’ into the flat. Those ‘Native Children’ were her students and they had names and they came to play with our children whom they’d befriended at school.
The policy of ‘self-determination’ slowly eroded such attitudes.
This from a recent article by Martin Flanagan, the Melbourne Age’s Sports Writer:
“ Three of the most momentous days of my life occurred in 1987 when I attended a football carnival at Yuendumu on the Warlpiri tribal lands north-west of Alice Springs. In three days, the glass tower of my preconceptions about Aboriginal Australia was shattered. I could tell a dozen stories as to why, each as important as the last…..….And I went to a party where a traditional man with initiation scars all down his chest played the electric guitar like Jimi Hendrix and a white geologist who lived in Yuendumu accompanied him like a jazzman on a trumpet. In that room, that night, Aboriginal people and white people mingled in a spirit of fraternal respect. Walking back to the car I was sleeping in, I thought there has to be some way of taking that spirit to the rest of Australia.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3JsuWz4xWc (Jimmy Hendrix- ‘Hey Joe’ one of the songs we often used to play)
Louis Armstrong was born on the 4th August 1901, exactly 42 years before yours truly. The Yuendumu Sports Weekend has been going for half a century and coincides with Satchmo’s birthday. On 7th July 1969 the Louis Armstrong version of ‘Give Peace a Chance’ was released in the U.S., one day short of two years later Louis Armstrong shuffled off this mortal coil (or in Yiddish: ‘schlepped off this mortal coil’) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6p5P2X8cbA (enjoy, and pay particular attention to the bass player).
I never tire of telling, that on one such birthday party, Japangardi did an impressive traditional dance with a spear in our lounge room. He miraculously avoided hitting the ceiling with the long spear. Jungarrayi and his ‘gang’ where clicking their boomerangs in a steady rhythm with great gusto. It was then I noticed (or imagined) something that may explain to some extent why traditional Aboriginal music sounds so different to western ears. The clicking of the karli was a fraction of a beat behind. Not an off-beat (like Brubeck’s ‘Take five’) but a fraction, and always the same fraction and identical for all the members of Jungarrayi’s ‘gang’.
The loud music emanating from a gramophone player, was the Rolling Stones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5zZpMIrWu8 (The Rolling Stones: ‘Brown Sugar’). So what is rhythm? As Fats Waller once famously said : “If You Got To Ask, You Ain’t Got It!”
Over the years many visiting musicians joined with Yuendumu’s local musos (some are readers of these Dispatches). A lot of assimilationist, ethnocentric nonsense is written about Reconciliation and ‘Closing the Gap’. Racism and ‘Culturism’ are confused. Racism is plain ignorant and nasty. ‘Culturism’ is a Trojan Horse: “Everyone has the right to live and be like me”
On one such occasion, Neil Murray, after he’d just released his album ‘Calm and Crystal Clear’ played ‘Ocean of Regret’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOkBbGn0Mpk
Our local musicians instantly backed him up to brilliant effect. Putting in the odd trumpet lick whenever I saw an opening, was most enjoyable. Years later Neil remember that occassion and said it was a “magic moment”
Many a magic moment happened over the decades in Yuendumu.
Warlpiri people consider people they get to know to be family. A musician friend of ours, when our different attitudes to possessions caused a slight disagreement, remarked: “We are not a good family, but we are a good band!”
Being the optimist that I am, I think that true Reconciliation could be found in music (and dancing)…
‘Lets Dance’- David Bowie and Tina Turner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=619kF0Y7zE4
Sadly, Martin Flanagan’s “there has to be some way of taking that spirit to the rest of Australia” hasn’t eventuated. Instead that spirit is being strangled by ever tightening control of people’s lives. It isn’t a huge leap from the ‘seatbelt police’ to the ‘thought police’.
But hey, the flickering candle of that spirit is alive and well. Just check out Warlpiri Art:
http://warlu.com/
Shalom and mazel tov
Frank