“Creating Your Vision and Understanding”. The Musical Legacy of Wirrinyga Band within and beyond Northeast Arnhem Land

Abstract

Focusing on the musical production by the Australian Indigenous rock-pop fusion group Wirrinyga Band from Milingimbi, an Indigenous community in Northeast Arnhem Land, North Australia, I propose that popular music is not only an arena where Indigenous people of this region have been negotiating colonial and postcolonial power relations, it is also a “construction site”, a creative space where new ideas, experiences, visions are created. Wirrinyga Band’s songs do not only express local ideas, values, principles or a set political agenda in the face of difficult past and present life conditions, but also and most importantly, have contributed to shaping a novel individual and collective identity that – rooted in the past but reaching out towards the future – places performers and listeners in a field of relationships where alternative modes of social interaction can be forged. This is accomplished by employing music as a means of education both in transmitting knowledge from the old to the young generations within the community and the region, as well as sharing and explaining Yolngu ways of being to non-indigenous people. I will conclude the paper by considering how Wirrinyga Band’s legacy has been taken up and elaborated by a new generation of Yolngu hip-hop musicians who use music as an educational means of “making people”.