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The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern AustraliaMaking Aboriginal Men and Music in Central Australia

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21567417.67.2.11

2156-7417

Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg,

Australian Indigenous Culture and History

Anthropologists Daniel Fisher and Åse Ottosson have written texts that address different but complementary topics. Their books fill distinct lacunae in our understanding of Indigenous Australian engagement with music and media; however, they also share many overarching themes and ideas. In this review, I focus on (a) the complementary knowledge gaps identified and filled by each author; (b) the challenge of “authenticity” in the public imagination, media outlets, scholarship, and Australian bureaucracies that influence the construction of Indigenous identities; and (c) the interrogation of negative stereotypes of Indigenous people that abound in Australian settler media and politics and how Aboriginal Australians exercise agency by challenging and reappropriating these stereotypes through musical and media practice.First, the gap in knowledge that Fisher identifies is, as he sees it, the “relative paucity of scholarship on Indigenous broadcasting radio,” which he suggests is caused by the absence of media objects that can be abstracted from or easily circulated outside of the Aboriginal domain (50). Fisher's anthropological text focuses on the production of audio media and “the voice” in Indigenous Australia. “The voice” is conceptualized physically and in its mediated, recorded, edited, and broadcasted form. Fisher examines how the voice is used to influence the “linking-up” (4), formation, and maintenance of kinship bonds across forms of intra-Indigenous difference, Australian processes of reconciliation, and the politicization of indigeneity, race, identity, and belonging. Fisher successfully conveys the “reproduction of a particular Indigenous distinction and difference from a broader settler Australia” (261). In the process of examining the Indigenous voice, or voices, Fisher draws heavily on musical genres such as country, hip-hop, and rap, which give the book its ethnomusicological appeal. He poetically interweaves interview quotes, ethnographic experiences, and historical information gathered through multisited fieldwork over more than ten years.Fisher's ethnography is set against a backdrop of contemporary Australia, along with the colonial and political history of Indigenous activism and the use of media to further the Indigenous cause (152–157). He sees the Indigenous mediatization of voice as a form of Aboriginal agency that draws together and repairs relationships ruptured by colonial violence and settlement (4). This backdrop also includes Australian government initiatives, such as the drive toward self-determination in the 1970s (see also Ottosson 8) and later processes of reconciliation, begun in 1991. Self-determination strategies also led to the creation of the Council of Aboriginal Affairs (1967–1976) and many Aboriginal media associations and radio stations thereafter. Fisher shows how political trends and activism are reflected in the working ethos of Indigenous radio stations such as 4AAA in Brisbane and Sydney-based channels such as Radio Redfern and their collaboration with Skidrow (152–160).Ottosson characterizes the knowledge gap as being one of academic focus insofar as anthropologists and ethnomusicologists working on Australian Indigenous topics tend to be “preoccupied” with the documentation and interpretation of “ancestral bodies of knowledge and values, and how such features persist in the present” despite having long recognized the incompatibility of traditional frameworks with contemporary Indigenous lifestyles (178). The implication of Ottosson's observation is that this fixation on ancestral genres, along with an unwillingness to explore Indigenous engagement with contemporary genres such as country, gospel, rap, reggae, and hip-hop, renders anthropologists and ethnomusicologists complicit in the perpetuation of primitivist stereotypes. Ottosson notes that “popular” musical styles have received significantly more attention from scholars of media, communication, and popular culture (10) and that contemporary studies of Indigenous men's changing self-perception of their masculinity are rare (14).Both Ottosson and Fisher thus address the critical challenge of academic focus and emphasis by providing us with much-needed texts that avoid romanticizing ancestral bodies of knowledge while rightfully acknowledging the latter's ongoing role in Indigenous relationality, reciprocity, and performance and broadcasting etiquette. This approach is entirely appropriate for spiritual and ethical reasons given the contemporary musical genres the authors cover and the contexts in which they worked. Ottosson points out that Indigenous musicians of Central Australia consciously avoid mixing their own or other Indigenous people's ceremonial features with more recent musical genres (31). She also emphasizes that such attitudes vary across Australia and that musicians from the Northern Territory are more accepting of the use of markers that point to their individual kinship and ancestral affiliations such as colored flags and body paint (50–51). Fisher makes a similar point when he notes that proscriptions apply to the circulation of secret and sacred knowledge handed down by ancestral beings, meaning much of traditional Aboriginal cultural production seems “quarantined from circulation” (30). In the Northern Territory, traditional culture is visible and audible through the performance of popular music genres, but carefully mediated: only those aspects suitable for a more public consumption are shared openly. Fisher goes on to say that like other cultures, however, Indigenous culture changes and so do attitudes toward the opening up of domains of cultural production through technology. As an example, Fisher points to Indigenous laws around the circulation of names and images of the deceased. These laws are susceptible to generational changes in attitude and can be negotiated through respectful discourse with Indigenous communities during the processes of media production (30–31).Second, both Ottosson and Fisher challenge the essentialist rhetoric of authenticity by emphasizing Indigenous diversity, agency, and cultural change while looking at the performance of nonancestral musical styles, mediatization, and production in modern Australian history. Fisher points out that government initiatives begun in the late 1960s during self-determination facilitated many new Indigenously led broadcast opportunities within the media sector. Such government initiatives, however, also raised questions about Indigenous authenticity and diversity through processes of funding allocation and audit (136–137 and chapter 6). Similarly, Ottosson also argues that the creation of the Australian Indigenous cultural sector perpetuates an essentialist rhetoric promoting the multilayered segregation of society based on concepts of authenticity. At the same time, she suggests, the Aboriginal cultural sector generates legitimate spaces that support specific forms of Indigenous creative agency in arts and music (6). Fisher's chapters 5 and 6 illustrate this well when he compares and contrasts how, due to competition for funding and frequent funder audits, different Indigenous groups in Northern Australia and Queensland set themselves apart from one another, choosing either to focus on their locally specific identities and communication needs (such as the Yolngu Aboriginal Resource and Development Service, in this case) or to develop more intra-Aboriginal approaches to broadcasting, such those adopted by the Top End Aboriginal Broadcasting Association and 4AAA in Brisbane, Queensland.Ottosson also offers a nuanced approach to analyzing Indigenous diversity and authenticity through her record of how Indigenous identities and manhood are constructed, going beyond the usual binary approach, which typically contrasts Northern “traditionalist” music-making with the more politicized, confrontational southeastern approach (49–57). Throughout her book, she shows how Indigenous masculinities are shaped through music, context, kinship, and region, focusing on different performative settings: the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association music studio in Alice Springs; performances in Aboriginal communities as well as predominantly white towns; and the touring context. For every setting, Ottosson explores how Indigenous masculinities are actively shaped, developing what she calls the concept of “intercultural mediation,” a fundamental tool for analyzing “the continuous making and re-making of indigenous and male ways of being in the social world of music making” (5).What Ottosson illustrates is that few of the Aboriginal musicians she encountered see themselves as part of a national, pan-Aboriginal protest movement, in contrast to performers in the southeast of Australia. Neither did musicians perceive of themselves as being Aboriginal, but rather as belonging to specific kinship or linguistic groups. Fisher similarly observes that Indigenous North and Central Australian identities rest on their legitimization by kinship and linguistic groups. Aborigines in those areas identified first and foremost as being Yolngu, Arrernte, Burrara, Larrakia, or Warlpiri, as opposed to Aboriginal (e.g., 3, 24). This identification in turn influences specific musical and broadcasting choices made by Indigenous people (see both Fisher and Ottosson's chapters 5 and 6, for example) as well as their social guidelines concerning stage presentation and dress code (e.g., Ottosson 4, 125).Lastly, Ottosson and Fisher regularly interrogate other kinds of stereotyped behaviors and the normalization of Indigenous incarceration, substance misuse (e.g., Ottosson 65, 151–152), and domestic violence within Indigenous communities—all the consequence of intergenerational trauma caused by colonization and multiple ineffective governmental policies. Both Ottosson and Fisher show how such features of Indigenous life find their way into song compositions and radio dedications to family. Such compositions and dedications are designed to showcase the emotional strength of a community, perform kinship relatedness and links to country, encourage good behavior, call for a return to the home bush environment after an (often alcohol infused) absence from the bush communities, or chastise perceived and actual bad behaviors (e.g., Ottosson 131 and Fisher 38). Heavy drinking and rowdiness, Ottosson observes, are common during Indigenous performances in major towns by both Aboriginal audiences and performers. Non-Indigenous music venue proprietors expect Aboriginal crowds to behave in unpredictable and disorderly ways (138–139), while the rate of incarceration of Aboriginal men during and after such events is far higher than that of white men generally (Ottosson 65 and Fisher 47).Ottosson documents too, however, how her Indigenous interlocutors reconciled themselves with such stereotyping. The musicians she worked with stated that Australian settler society finds it difficult to deal with “too much blackfella” behavior. She notes how seemingly derogatory, Indigenously appropriated words such as “mongrel status” were used to describe Indigenous masculinities and musical aesthetics in positive, if sometimes ambivalent, ways. Such appropriated words are ambiguous, self-declared, and reinscribed with a self-assertive meaning through Indigenous music-making and vernacular idioms (133–134) leading to a vague construction of Indigenous identities during intercultural musical interactions at concerts in white towns.Both Ottosson and Fisher make it clear they write as anthropologists with an interest in Indigenous contemporary, nonancestral music and media. In-depth (ethno)musicologically oriented analyses of musical material are not included in either book. As a result, Indigenous Australian engagement with nonancestral musical genres remains underexplored still, from an ethnomusicological perspective. These authors do, however, provide some musical observations that point toward areas for potential enquiry. Fisher, for example, briefly comments on the technique, aesthetics, and vocality (90) of Indigenous-Indonesian performer Jessica Mauboy (108–110) and the need for clear lyrics, Australian accents, and noncombative battling during rapping sessions in Brisbane (133). Ottosson remarks on how Indigenous performers often “skip beats and bars” during their renditions of country and western repertoire, while using urgent and irregular rhythmic patterns (2). Both authors also refer to the Christian influences on Indigenous history, music, media, and sociality (e.g., Ottosson 36–38 and 107–108 and Fisher 222–223). I hope, therefore, that scholars will provide the field of ethnomusicology with additional studies that will complement these two excellent works and build on their insights.