Jurtbirrk Love Songs from North Western Arnhem Land

Jurtbirrk Love Songs from North Western Arnhem Land David Minyimak and others (composers/ performers), Linda Barwick, Bruce Birch, Joy Williams, Sabine Hoeng (field recording/ editing/transcriptions/notes) 2005 Batchelor Press, CD+48pp booklet, ISBN 1 74131 050 4 This publication consists of an audio CD of 32 songs of the Aboriginal genre Jurtbirrk and a 48-page accompanying booklet. Jurtbirrk are Indigenous to the Iwaidja people of the Coburg Peninsula in the northwestern Arnhem Land, who now mostly live on nearby Croker Island. The genre is described in the accompanying booklet as 'love songs' since the lyrics are about the intimate affairs of the Iwaidja people, although the references to these affairs are cryptic and indirect. The songs could be described as 'topical'; composed by known individuals about recent events. A similar genre belonging to western Arnhem Land was recorded and written about by Ronald M Berndt (1987), which he described as 'gossip' songs, although in the latter, unlike Jurtbirrk, the characters were presented in nonhuman guise (animals and birds), much like so-called love songs (Yilpinji) in central Australia (Wild 1990). A comparison of the similarities and differences among cognate and partially-cognate song genres in Aboriginal Australia would be an interesting undertaking; Berndt laid the groundwork for this in his Love Songs of Arnhem Land (1978). The recordings were made on Croker Island in the period July 2003 to November 2004 by Linda Barwick (ethnomusicologist, University of Sydney) and Bruce Birch (linguist, University of Melbourne) in the context of an Iwaidja language documentation project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation of Germany as part of a larger endangered languages documentation project. Joy Williams (teacher, Croker Island) and Sabine Hoeng (project assistant, Croker Island) assisted in the documentation. The CD was published with the support of the Australian government's Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. The stars of the CD are, of course, the performers and composers: David Minyimak, Reggie Cooper and Ronnie Waraludj (composers and performers), Robert Cunningham (composer), Rueben Arrmunika, Dick Gameraidj, Lindsay Gameraidj, Archie Brown, Sam Namaruka and Jimmy Cooper (all performers). It may be assumed that the Jurtbirrk musical tradition is, like the Iwaidja language, endangered. We are therefore grateful to the musicians for sharing their music with the rest of the world through this CD. Up to the time that this publication was prepared 32 different songs had been identified among 137 recorded items (that is, individual songs were performed and recorded more than once). Forty items each occur on the CD as a separate track, with at least one performance of each song identified. …