Folk Routes
Strings and Stringybark in the Land Down Under
By
Peter Anick
(reprinted from
Fiddler Magazine)
A few summers back, I was invited to present a paper at a conference in
Now I’ll confess that, in spite of a long-standing interest in world
music, I had never even seen a real didgeridoo at this point in my musical
career. But I was headed to the right
place. The town of
My host in
“I’m not sure if
there’s such a thing as a distinctly Australian music other than, perhaps, some
bush music, songs about shearing sheep and carrying on which you might have
heard. There’s
a lot of bush bands around the country that do that sort of thing. The question was raised a few years ago, is
there such a thing as Australian jazz? I
doubt it, I think it’s a collection of influences from
around the world.”
Tony Rutter
and Tony Joyce
The local influence
I was most interested in learning more about, both because of my aforementioned
shoulder injury and my curiosity about world folk music in general, was the
Aboriginal didgeridoo. A visit to
“The didgeridoo is
an opera instrument. It’s played behind
voice, clap sticks, and boomerangs. When you’re playing traditional didgeridoo,
you have to follow the voice in Aboriginal ceremony, so you’re restricted by a particular
set of rhythms or a particular rhythm for each ceremony. And you have to get it right. It’s very important that you have the correct
rhythm when you play traditional.
It’s one of the oldest instruments, found in
Trying out
didgeridoos at Indigenous Creations.
So, here was an
indigenous Australian instrument with a prehistoric Celtic connection! With thousands of them now leaving
“David Gulpilil, the Aboriginal actor, stayed with us for a while,
and he danced, he played didge, he played sticks, he
sang. (Guitarist) Tony Joyce and I
played around that, and it took on almost a jazz approach. The didge sometimes sounds like a bowed double bass. So it works well – violin and didge. Charlie
McMahon, another bloke I played with, plays a slide didge,
a trombone sort of thing. He has two
pipes, one within the other. I played a
concert recently with him. And with a percussionist as well. We’d just exchange rhythms and solos. He’d set a rhythm and I’d pick it up on the
violin and he’d go haring off on some little trip on didgeridoo and come back
and take over the rhythm and I’d go haring off on the violin. It wasn’t quite as formal as that. We’d mix in and out of the rhythm and purely
improvise. There’s
just enormous amounts of room to do anything! That’s the thing about violin – you can do
just about anything, you can get from one end of the register to the other in
no time. Charlie might be playing a C
and an E which gives you a whole range of key possibilities. You could be in C or A minor. You can set your own rhythms against what
he’s doing, in a polyrhythmic way. You
know the difference between playing with a piano player who will play really
full chords and flowery kinds of things - it doesn’t leave a whole lot for a
violin to fill in there and do things.
Playing with Charlie’s didge is just the
opposite. It leaves you so must space to
fill up or just do sparse things yourself.”
A pair of boomerangs serves
as a rhythm instrument.
I was curious to
learn more about the culture behind the instrument, so I joined a small
four-day safari into Arnhemland, a vast tract of land
still under the jurisdiction of its traditional Aboriginal landowners. This is the birthplace of the didgeridoo and
the “bush” here is dotted with the stringybark trees
and termite mounds so crucial to the instrument’s construction. As our Toyota
Land Cruiser rumbled down the long dirt road spewing a menacing cloud of dust,
tour leader Shane Rowe began to describe the Aboriginal view of the world. It is a view based on complex inter-relationships
between individuals, the land, and the spiritual world. Many of the concepts have no natural
translation into English. Still, by the
time we finally retired to our swags that evening, Shane’s folk tales and
animated didge playing had transported us to a
different world.
The next morning, we
were joined by our Aboriginal guide
“It’s funny,” Shane confided, “People tell me when they go into Klicklimarra by themselves, they can hear the corroboree
(traditional singing and dance). And I
can just imagine it. You only have to
sit down and shut your eyes and you can hear it – in the wind, in the water,
the dirt.”
I asked Shane
whether every animal had a song. “As I
understand it,” he said, “they’ve got a song for everything. From the wind to the wet season clouds to a
nail fish to a jiggety jiggety,
they play ‘em. If you’ve got a lot of
time on your hands, if you’re not worried about logging on and all this sort of
stuff, you’ve got time to sit down and listen to animals, and reproduce their
movements, their sounds, everything in music.
Often, in their dances, you do see animation. I’ve seen kangaroos playing in the grass when
someone was playing the didgeridoo. And
they’ve been men, but they were kangaroos. Pretty special.
You sit there and see men become kangaroos, and when they get close – it’s even
in their eyes.”
Returning to “civilization” after four days in the outback took some
adjusting. I brought along a souvenir to
help with the transition, a didgeridoo made by one of the local elders. It took about a month to get the hang of the
circular breathing and a few more months to sustain some simple rhythms long
enough to try accompanying my band members on a tune or two. To our mutual surprise, the didge sounded pretty good accompanying string music. So, even though my bow arm has finally healed
and I am back to playing fiddle again, I have a feeling I’ll be continuing to
pursue this unlikely musical combination of string and stringybark.
If you go to
And if you’d like to
hear a sample of a didgeridoo playing along with a fiddle, the cut “Bonaparte”
on Joe Craven’s 1996 Camptown CD (Acorn Music) may well be the
harbinger of a new trend!
Many thanks to Tony Rutter,
Tony Joyce Shane Rowe, Tariq Zawawi,
and Daniel Lee for their hospitality and insights.
A discussion with Shane Rowe about the didgeridoo
Top: didgeridoo by George Jangawanga.
Bottom: didgeridoo from Indigenous Creations
At the end of the Arnhemland safari with Shane Rowe, we sat in a coffeeshop in Katherine and Shane filled me in about the
didgeridoo I had purchased in Arnhemland (top in
photo).
Shane: All the paints on that are from the country. There’s white clay, yellow clay, the hematite, and it’s all waterbased.
Who’s the maker?
George Jangawanga. Left hand George, they call him. Left hand George because he throws his spear with his left hand. And the other George is George Manita and he throws his spear with his right hand, so they call them George Right Hand and George Left Hand. He’s on my brochure.
He’s got his totem on
it?
Yeah. The water lily. His own didgeridoo is like that. Actually the one you’ve got is quite special. Because often he paints them like this (draws). This part is the bulb, the root underneath the ground. These here are the stems, and that’s what we ate for lunch, kopolu. The leaf, and this one in the middle is the flower. But the one you bought is like this (draws). Now I can’t tell you everything about his totem. But this one is the bulb, so this is a bit more special, because this is all hidden, under the water. It’s not showing you what’s above the water. It’s only showing you what you can’t see. So it’s a bit like the culture. So on that didgeridoo, you only get to see what you can’t see normally. So it’s got a bit more meaning than these ones. George will only tell you so much. He’ll only tell you what he wants you to know. But these ones, to him, are more special, because it’s a bit of the unknown, a bit more mysterious. These ones you see ‘em. These ones you don’t see ‘em but you know it’s there. And also George is the lawman. He’s in charge of the law for that country. And one of his jobs is punishment. And a bundook, a spear thrower, is shaped like this, quite long. (draws). And on this end you’ve got bee’s wax and a point. You hook the spear end around here. And one of his jobs is dishing out punishment, spearing. So when you have a bit of bundook, the handle. One way, it’s the flower, but to someone who knows, it’s the handle of a bundook. But it’s not a double meaning to people who don’t know it. People who don’t know it, it’s a flower. People who are more in the know – lawman. So you always find something, even on that didgeridoo of mine… And mine’s a bit unusual, because he always, always does these. The one he did for me, he did the snake and the goanna, three-tongued lizard, and I don’t know whether he is making one of his, but it really is different in a big way. Even when I look at that (spear handles), I see them everywhere. I don’t know. And they call them, in that country “moloo”. The part that you blow into, they use the sugar bag wax, which is from the sugar bag bee, a native bee.
I would not ever again buy a didgeridoo from a shop, because you don’t know what you’re getting. At least out there, you know it’s sugar bag wax, and I know how much effort and time goes into getting the wax. I know it’s not candle wax dyed brown. And all the paint brushes are reeds from the spring. He just sits there for days and days doing that. To get the black, he’s got to drive 90 k – mangenese. Hematite, he’s got to go up there to that meteorite crater. That’s the red. So it involves a lot of time and distances. He gets those didgeridoos a hundred and twenty kilometers away.
Where does he get them
from?
Side of the road, just walking through the bush. But he gets the right ones. See, that also makes a difference. See, I’d much rather get a didgeridoo from someone who’s been brought up making them and cuts a bit of bark off and picks it, who knows the country where it’s coming from, knows the name of the country, knows everything about where he is. I mean, that makes the instrument. Not just Joe Blow down here with a chain saw. It’s left hand George in his country. Everything is his. He owns it. He makes the right ones.
I’m glad you gave me a
chance to meet him.
Oh, he’s a funny old man. To listen to him talk, I could just sit and listen to him all night. But what’d he say the other night? “I’m all finished up now. He’s got no more strength. He can’t stand up and be a big man like he used to be. I mean, people still listen to him. He still tells people off. But he’s getting a bit too old. Nobody’s worried about getting a spear off him as they used to be. It’s really sad. There needs to be people coming up in his footsteps. But to be able to do that, those people have got to be the right person, not just anybody, but that right person’s pretty special. You’re entrusting someone not with just one set of encyclopedias but volumes and volumes and volumes and volumes.
What else did he tell
you about didgeridoos? Is that
particular one more for ceremonies?
Well, I just find the little ones they use more for what they call a corroboree. They’ll get to dance, women and children, good fun. But for ceremonies, more somber, it’s usually much more deep. It really makes your insides vibrate. And very hard to play, because you need a lot of wind. But when someone passes away and there’s a ceremony, a didgeridoo will just appear. That’s the ceremony didgeridoo, and that’s sacred. It’s regarded as a sacred object. And only certain people can touch it. And then after the ceremony, it disappears. I’ve seen in George’s house, one up against the door when someone’s passed away. It’s already there, you know, it just comes. He never brings it out, never talks about it.
It is a big or deep
one?
No, it’s just long.
Often things, when they go into ceremonies, become sacred, and once
they’re sacred, they remain sacred. One
guy drove his
In the 70’s when those old guys did that tour with that
musician from Australia, when he was here, he said he was invited to hear some
music and he was sitting by the fire and there was an old man playing the clapsticks. He said
the old man hopped up and walked away from the fire out into the darkness. So he hopped up to follow him to see what he
was going to do. When he got out there,
he was just going to the toilet. So he
went to the toilet as well, came back to the fire. The old man sat down by the fire, stoked the
fire and then started feeling around on the ground for his clap sticks. And it was then that the man from
Because my only lesson, it involved going up to George, “teach me a song”, which perhaps is a bit too forward for them. But you know, if I could play one song like they play it, I’d be happy, but you just get “dijimo diju dotu dijimo, dijimo dotu dijimo, diju diju diju ditu ditu dijimo diju.” And it just goes on forever.
He sang it to you, he
didn’t play it?
Yeah, but what he plays is exactly what he sings when he’s playing the didgeridoo. That’s where they got the name didgeridoo, because white people heard them, “diju dijuridu, diju dijuridu, diju diju diju diju dijuridu, diju dijuridu.”
So when you’re playing
through your lips, you’re actually pronouncing that as well?
“Diju ditoo, diju
ditoo, dijimo ditoo, dijimo ditoo.” Kookoburra,
the “krakrow”, the call they
make. To make his noise, “kra kra co co co
co co” when you’re playing
the didgeridoo. The water bird’s “quak quak”, when you hear ‘em out on
the billibong. “qua qua qua qua
qua…” Those
little willy wagtails “jigge jiggety”. The cockatoo “wah wah” calling out his name all
the time. It was funny to hear
You play with the side
of your mouth?
I play with the side, which is “mooninga style”, white-fella style. When you play straight on, it make the breathing much easier, but I just can’t get the noise. It doesn’t sound as crisp, it’s all muffly.
Do people play
didgeridoos together, or is it always one at a time?
They use one at a time. We once went out to the camp with that old fellow (singer) and David Blanassi, and to hear that, you don’t hear that any more. It’s funny, people tell me when they go into Klicklimarra by themselves, they can hear the corroboree. And I can just imagine it. You only have to sit down and shut your eyes and you can hear it – in the wind, in the water, the dirt.
What area does the
didgeridoo come from?
That kookaburra noise, that dingo howl, that dog bark, that’s not everybody, that’s from here. They’re very protective of it. One night, I remember George telling all the little kids, you want rock and roll? You want Yotha Yindi? I’ll give you rock and roll. And he picked up his didgeridoo and just went for it. Kicked up dust and the kids went “woo!” just laughing and calling out, and then he told them. He said, you all listen to music, didgeridoo with rock and roll and you think it’s good, but you got to remember that all that’s – from here. From our people. So- they’re quite protective of that sort of stuff . And they’ll tell you that a didgeridoo comes from there. It doesn’t come from anywhere else.
So every animal has a song?
As I understand it, they’ve got a song for everything. If you can comprehend the word “everything”. It’s certainly blanketing. But, from what I’ve seen, it’s everything. From the wind to the wet season clouds to a nail fish to a jiggety jiggetty, they play ‘em. If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, if you’re not worried about logging on and all this sort of stuff, you’ve got time to sit down and listen to animals, and reproduce their movements, their sounds, everything in music. Often, in their dances, you do see animation. I’ve seen kangaroos playing in the grass when someone was playing the didgeridoo. And they’ve been men, but they were kangaroos. On that day, I was looking at men but I was seeing kangaroos. Pretty special. You sit there and see men become kangaroos, and when they get close, even in their eyes. I think in their entirety, that’s what they have become. Think, act, that’s a big statement and I’m not saying it’s right, but in my eyes, that’s how I saw it. You remember it for a long time.
So that’s different from the corroboree? Corroboree would be more fun dancing?
Yeah, dust kicking, circles, lots of kids. They get the kids involved, that’s how they learn. Grab a kid, put him in the middle of one. All the kids can do it. Maybe they don’t get it right, but the kids have a good time.
Celebration
in