GULF COUNTRY SONGBOOK

 

Gulf Country Songbook: Yanyuwa, Marra, Garrwa and Gudanji songs

by Yanyuwa, Marra, Garrwa and Gudanji families with Karin Riederer

Published by Waralungku Arts

 

 

[02:] The Gulf Country Songbook, is an immersive showcase of some of the many songs composed in Yanyuwa, Marra, Garrwa and Gudanji languages in the last 100 years. There are songs of land rights claims, of the maranja – ‘dugong hunters of excellence’, of paddling a canoe on the sea at night, of boundary riders on a pastoral station, and Ancestral Beings journeying across country... ‘This was our way of history keeping,’ says Allan Baker, who is learning songs from his Gudanji family.

 

 

 

 

[03-05:] The songbook offers insights into the social history of the region, the critically endangered languages of this part of the country and the song-makers and singers. It is a vivid celebration of relationships, place and belonging, and the capacity of song to hold languages and nourish kinship. The Gulf Country Songbook includes:

  • Yanyuwa / Marra / Garrwa / Gudanji words of the songs and English translations / interpretations
  • photographs of and stories about the people who composed or found the songs, the people who sing the songs, and their country
  • rhythmic structure of each song
  • audio of every song (a CD and QR codes)
  • a DVD of short documentaries

The Gulf Country Songbook has sound

You can listen to the songs using a mobile device (a smartphone or a tablet) if you have internet access. Download a QR scanner app (some are free), and use it to capture the QR codes printed on the pages to play the song audio files through your device.

The audio files are streamed, which means a little bit of your data credit is used each time you listen to a song this way.

Or, you can use a ‘sound pen’ preloaded with the audio files, and point this at the sound code on the pages of the book to play the audio file of the songs and the radio documentaries. If you want to buy a ‘sound pen’, please contact us.

The songs are also on the CD that is in the songbook, so you can listen to them old-style, too. And you can find the Gulf Country Songbook radio documentaries online, on Indigitube.

 

 

 

 

 

Buy the Gulf Country Songbook and sing along with us in our languages, good way!

$60 plus postage. Hardback, full colour, 112 pages, CD + DVD. Published December 2015. Email to place your order: waralungkuarts@mabunji.com.au

Proceeds from sales will be used for other language and song revitalisation activities.

[02:] Singing Yanyuwa songs: Dinah Norman, Marjorie Keighran and Jemima Miller; photo by Benjamin Ellis Bayliss

[03-05:] Gudanji performers at Garrinjini, photo by Sandy Edwards; Marra performers: Daniel McKinnon, Jacob Riley, Jacky Green and Cedric John, photo by Benjamin Ellis Bayliss; Garrwa singers: Marjorie Keighran, Hazel Godfrey, Shirley Simon and Maureen Timothy, photo by Benjamin Ellis Bayliss