First Dispatched 6 October 2013
शुभ दिन अपने दोस्तों और अन्य लोगों
Unlike many of my Aboriginal friends, neighbours and family, my father lived to a ripe old age (91). He grew up as a Dutch child in pre-war Germany. His ‘native’ command of the German language stood him in good stead and on several occasions saved his life in occupied Holland.
I remember asking him (in Dutch) what he thought of the (first) Iraq war, which had just broken out. He answered me in German:
“Wie man in den Wald hineinschreit, so schallt es wieder heraus” (As you shout into the forest, so it echoes back out)
A favourite German expression of dad’s was ‘Man muss dass können begreifen’ (an imperative: one ought to/should be able to understand that)
Before babies can walk and talk they will ‘bob’ to music. No matter what their skin colour or the language spoken by their families, they dance to music, any music, before they can speak and sing.
Music and dancing transcends race and culture.
I remember old man Granites doing a very graceful dance with a spear in our lounge room at my birthday party. Emanating from our record player were the Rolling Stones. His mates were clicking boomerangs.
Even if not a single word is understood music can ‘speak’ to you, it can make you get up and dance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBCytQZvOMo
For my birthday Jon Altman gave me a copy of his latest book: ‘Arguing the Intervention’.The front cover painting is by Chips Mackinolty. He painted it in 2007 as his response to the Intervention. It is titled ‘…and there will be NO dancing’ Ich begreife dass.
Recently on ABC TV the film ‘Big Name No Blankets’ was shown, it is a documentary on the all too brief life of George Rrurrampu. George came from Elcho Island. His mother tongue was Gumatj. It is not well known that before joining Sammy Butcher and Neil Murray and others as lead singer in the newly formed Warumpi Band in 1980 he lived in Yuendumu. He learnt Warlpiri and rendered a number of ‘Top End’ stories into Warlpiri readers for the bilingual programme. These booklets are much liked by Warlpiri children even today on the few occasions they get to see them.
George sang with the Poor Boys, one of several bands that had sprung up in Yuendumu. Our open garage with its extension lead power hosted a large number of young musicians (mostly men). Wendy at school staff meetings was often urged to tell the musicians to turn down the volume, or to turn off the power. She suggested they should ask them themselves. “But it is your power!” she was told. Schoolkids would surround our garage and dance. The volume remained. Wendy did not feel the urge to abuse her power. The garage is no more, the Department of Education replaced it with a security cage to lock your vehicle in.
In the Big Name No Blankets film, Rachel Perkins said “I saw George and the Warumpi band play to thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people all around Australia, and I saw how George could reach out and touch people, open their hearts to make them celebrate and embrace Aboriginality, and just DANCE with us and sing our song…” We in Yuendumu got to see that too, we got to sing and dance.
In 1986 the blackfella/whitefella tour came to Yuendumu. 1986 was also the year in which what was to become the most successful Aboriginal Band ever (Yothu Yindi) was formed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BSAqjtSbkw
Peter Garrett’s unique dancing style both intrigued and amused us. When musician Peter Garrett became a politician, he no longer danced. He couldn’t because his bed was burning.
Are you the one that’s ready with a helping hand,
Are you the one der begreift these family plans?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GULW1sOpzo
In 1992 a group of us drove all night to go to the inaugural Broome Stompen Ground Festival.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHYbwHTGOv4
Scrap Metal and Yothu Yindi were there. The Warumpi band had reformed to be there. ABC TV was there and Australia got to celebrate and embrace Aboriginality. And we were there and we got to sing and dance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3RAPV7p-nc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XH3E22JAQo
Micah and myself used to drive into Alice Springs to take part in the Monday night jam-session at the Riverside Hotel featuring the Booze Brothers. We’d run into other Aboriginal musicians such as Sammy Butcher and Frank Yamma that would travel large distances to be there. We’d fire up the mostly white audiences and get them to get up and dance. On one occasion I walked in and the bouncer made a gesture acknowledging my naked (I didn’t have a case) trumpet. When I looked back I saw Micah held up at the door. By coincidence my entry had resulted in “a full house”. My offer to swap places with Micah as he was “a far better musician” bounced. I insisted on talking to Herman (the Booze Brothers musician in charge) and we somehow managed to squeeze Micah into the full house. Micah didn’t play or dance that evening.
Some years later our son Joseph went to an Alice Springs music venue. His friend Grant was refused entry on the basis of the clothes he was wearing. They retreated to their car and swapped clothes. To no avail, Grant was again refused entry. When Mark Twain said: “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society”, he left out skin colour!
I forget exactly when but in Yuendumu we were treated to a concert that featured both Slim Dusty and Yothu Yindi. A veritable musical smorgasbord.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUi2Ae0ksxE
Before you object to the last verse “ his skin was black but his heart was white” keep in mind Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blue “I’m white inside…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSjH1h7-m5E
It is all a matter of context and sentiment.
A state funeral was held for Slim Dusty in 2003. He was 76.
A state funeral was held for Yothu Yindi’s lead singer, Mandawuy Yunupingu in 2013. He was 56.
In the film No Name No Blankets Rachel Perkins tells of when George Rrurrampu died in 2007 (he was 50) a phone call to the responsible minister suggesting a state funeral was responded with “We don’t hold State Funerals for musicians”
The ethnocentric assimilationist interventionists that are intent on Closing the Gap (instead of Bridging it), don’t dance. They don’t begreif much.
If they have their way, …there will be NO dancing.
नृत्य पर रखें
Frank
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-eqrc_jVVA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWYUsKCYPLg
Mackinolty describes his print …and there’ll be no dancing (2007) as having ‘a complicated origin’. It was his own response, as an artist, to the Northern Territory Emergency Response (the Intervention), staged by the Howard Government in June 2007.
The centrally positioned road sign, recording the size of the Northern Territory, acts as a politically sanctioned cartographic marker, announcing a national emergency in Australia’s Northern Territory. Subversive road signs are an established motif in Mackinolty’s repertoire, deployed to great effect in other works such as Signs we should have (1998) and 20 years of road kill (2009). Falling frangipanis and ukuleles are also recurring motifs in fabric printing and other graphic works.
Here, they create a plummeting background curtain that draws us to the work’s intriguing title.
…and there’ll be no dancing (2007) takes its cue from a re-working of a quotation attributed (without any hard evidence) to Emma Goldman, a late 19th – early 20th century Lithuanian born American anarchist.
Goldman is believed to have once declared that ‘revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having’, or ‘if there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming’.