Making Old Songs New: How a USyd Researcher is Working with Elders to Preserve Indigenous Language

By Jossie Warnant 

Tiwi Island culture has its roots in oral language, with song being vital to the expression of preservation of tradition. Situated 80km off the coast of the Northern Territory, the islands are home to some of the best preserved Indigenous language culture in Australia, a culture that the elders are fighting to preserve. 

That’s where Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Sydney Environment Institute Fellow, Dr. Genevieve Campbell comes in. Campbell has been working with the Tiwi Strong Women’s Group for 13 years, to repatriate traditional language song recordings to the community.

Introduced to the community as a horn player, Campbell learnt about the issues the community was facing with regard to gaining copyright and attempting to gain ownership of their songs. 

“It was really important that we, as a group, really respected cultural ownership but also the intellectual property rights and moral rights of the performers and of the songs themselves,” she says.  

Campbell travelled to Canberra with Tiwi Island elders in 2009, a trip she describes as a “stepping off point” for their ongoing language revitalisation project. They discovered a substantial collection of ethnographic TV, audio and visual material in the institutes of Canberra which had been removed from the rightful owners. 

The discovery of this material was significant because of Tiwi Islander beliefs around song and death. When Tiwi Islanders hear the recorded songs, “the voice of the ancestor is considered to be current and in place again.” 

“For the older people hearing these songs, for all intents and purposes, the ancestor is here, again, when they hear that recording. So there was very much a sense that the ancestors' voice had been sort of trapped, and taken away,” she says. 

Campbell says that the Tiwi language has been significantly changed following colonial invasion, meaning that modern day Tiwi language is about as different “as English to Shakespeare” and the elders have to find new ways to make old language relevant to younger generations.

Campbell has been working with the Tiwi Strong Women’s group to re-work old songs into modern Tiwi language, allowing young Tiwi people to continue engaging with their culture. Projects include using the archive recordings to create modern “dance mixes” which incorporate both old and new language. 

“That has been a really good way in because it's broken down that sense that it's unreliable or unreachable”. 

For Campbell, authentic collaboration with the community is at the heart of her research, a concept she sometimes struggles to marry with traditional Western research methods.   

“I often go through periods of massive self questioning. Do I have the authority as a white woman sitting behind my desk, writing down in English about a fundamentally oral, spoken and embodied knowledge system?”

She says that her role in the community is less of a traditional research one and more of a facilitator who provides resources. 

“I certainly don't see myself as creating observational research...I'm facilitating the elders themselves to preserve what really is in danger of being lost”.

This different approach to research and the need to return ownership of cultural material to the community that it belongs to, makes Campbell’s research project a unique way to collaborate to preserve Indigenous language.