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The Old Songs are Always New

Singing Traditions of the Tiwi Islands

Genevieve Campbell author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Sydney University Press

Published:31st Jul '23

Should be back in stock very soon

The Old Songs are Always New cover

Approximately 1300 ethnographic field recordings of Tiwi songs, made between 1912 and 1981, are archived at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra. In November 2009, Genevieve Campbell and eleven Tiwi colleagues travelled to Canberra to reclaim these archived songs and song texts. The Old Songs are Always New explores their return home to the Tiwi Islands and reveals that the fundamentally contemporary, topical and current nature of the Tiwi song culture has resulted in the preservation of a rich social, cultural and historical oral record. Campbell describes the melody, rhythm, vocal technique, language, performance context and function of the twelve Tiwi song types, and gives an overview of the language and poetic devices used in song composition.

“For everything that has happened on the country of Indigenous people, there is always the version told or sung that is told by Indigenous people themselves – full of humour and pathos, sadness and grief – that never makes it into the ‘objective’ accounts of Western history. ... Enables non-Indigenous readers to come to know how any one event can have another story, another way of it being interpreted.”

-- John J. Bra

ISBN: 9781743328750

Dimensions: 254mm x 178mm x 12mm

Weight: 420g

320 pages