Tag Archives | Australia

First there was the Dreaming

In our online classes kids and their parents find themselves in awe of the beauty of Australian Aboriginal’s explanation of creation. “The Dreaming”/”Dreamtime” is an expansive Aboriginal Australian concept that refers at the same time to the sacred era of the world’s creation, the before-life and after-life state in which all people exist until they’re born into the world through their mother, and an individual or group’s set of spiritual beliefs. In Aboriginal lore, everything essential originated in Dreamtime–the society’s structure and rules for interaction, all laws and cultural cues, the most important rituals and ceremonies and, not the least, the actual land on which we all live. During the Dreaming each Aboriginal ancestral being who created the earth developed its own physical path across the land which Aborigines recount and recall in their song, dance and visual art. Aboriginal Australians call these ancient trails “Songlines.”

Ba Ganala Galana, Ba rEdi Ba

“Ba Ganala Ganala” is a mesmerizing Australian Aboriginal song from the Nayangurmarda people who lived for generations in the desert near Eighty Mile Beach in northwestern West Australia. All Around This World first heard “Ba Ganala” on the Smithsonian Folkways album, “Songs of Aboriginal Australia and Torres Strait,” sung by a Nyangurmarda man named Kupangu. While the liner notes indicate that the songs on this album are all secular, they also describe most ancient Aboriginal music as being woven into rituals, with lyrics, often in lost ancestral languages, that have multiple layers of meaning, both in this world and the world of the spirts. When we sing “Ba Ganala” in class we simulate the tone created by a didgeridoo.

One Hollow Branch and 1,500 Years of Sound

One of our favorite instruments at All Around This World is the didgeridoo, an instrument identified most with the indigenous peoples of Australia and rumored to have been in existence for roundabout 1,500. The best didgeridoos are made from eucalyptus branches hollowed by termites and can be as long as nine feet long. NINE FEET! I don’t know how long the didgeridoo Larry Gurruwiwi plays this video is, but we can all agree that it sounds great.

Isn’t it Great to Be an Aussie…?

The existence of a wide open Australian outback led to the development of a cowboy culture that resembled that in America. In the late 1880s, according to National Geographic, “Convicts and pioneers brought the music hall ballads and folk tunes of their homelands as well as the fiddle, concertina, banjo, mouth organ (harmonica),  pennywhistle and tea chest.” By the late 1880s a local tradition of Australian country folk ballads (“bush ballads”) had developed, and by the 1930s that had blended with American country to form Australian Country music. The most popular Australian country star was Slim Dusty who released over a hundred albums containing over a thousand songs from 1946 until his passing in 2003. Watch him in this video performing his iconic song, “G’day G’day.”

Australia’s “Stolen Generations”

In Australian history the relationship between British settlers and the indigenous Aboriginal population has been…complicated. Complicated, complicated. From the late 1860s until the late 1960s Australian colonial authorities were legally allowed to remove Aboriginal children from their families and send them to be raised in church missions or with European-descended foster parents. Record-keeping was poor and there is dispute over numbers, but estimates indicate that anywhere from tens of thousands to a hundred thousand Aboriginal children, mainly under five years old and mainly those that were mixed race–approximately 10% of the Aboriginal population–were taken from their families in this way. They now compose what have come to be called “The Stolen Generations.” The practice officially ended in 1970 and only came to real public light in 1997 with the Australian Human Rights Commission’s publication of “Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families.” In this video, pioneering Aboriginal rock band Yothu Yindi’s “Treaty” blasts the long, long overdue notion that there should be a formal treaty between Australia’s settlers and indigenous peoples, and the empty promises politicians made in the ’90s to sign one.

G’day Australia!

All Around This World -- Australia

This week in our online class we enjoy ourselves tremendously while introducing Australia. Depending on your personal definition of what defines “a nation,” Australia is either one of the newest nations in the world or one of the oldest. European settlement of Australia really only began in the 18th century and Australia consolidated into a unified independent country as recently as 1901. On the other hand, when European explorers first “discovered” Australia in the 17th century and eventually colonized it in the 18th, almost a million people already lived there. The indigenous Aboriginal population had been present for over 40,000 years (some say up to 100,000), making the Australian continent one of the longest- continuously inhabited parts of the world. These million or so people were scattered about the land mass but had developed complex societies as well as spiritual and cultural practices based upon a deep connection with the land. The first British settlers, unable or unwilling to negotiate treaties with decentralized Aboriginal groups, declared the land “Terra Nullius” (essentially, land with no owner). European settlers brought diseases Aborigines had never encountered–the 1792 and 1822 smallpox plagues were especially devastating–and subjected the Aboriginal Australians to a seemingly never-ending series of forced re-settlements and other more lethal occurrences. 

Over about eighty years an estimated 162,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies, 20% of whom were women. Most of these convicts were petty criminals and non-violent offenders. Convicts didn’t live in prisons but instead occupied small villages where they lived in independent structures, wore their own clothes and could even have their families come to join them; still, living conditions were deplorable. Convicts provided labor to build roads, bridges and develop other elements of the new colony’s infrastructure. From the 1850s until the early 1890s the discovery of gold in Australia led to a series of Australian gold rushes that attracted several hundred thousand immigrants. Most of these new colonists didn’t find gold and therefore had ample time on their hands to replace convicts as laborers on infrastructure projects. In the mid 1860s British policy changed and prisoner transports effectively stopped. Thwarted gold-diggers replaced them as Australia’s hungry, eager and independent working class.

Australia officially became a Commonwealth, albeit one still connected to the British Crown, on January 1, 1901.