Support the Children's Song project
The Children’s Songs project will collaborate with teachers, musicians and translators of six remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory to collect, translate and perform their children’s songs. The first community to participate will be Galiwin’ku, which is the home of Gurrumul Yunupingu.
This program reflects the wishes of Gurrumul. It provides a creative and positive opportunity for Indigenous young people from remote communities to actively participate in the arts. It will create a safe space for the young people to further investigate their cultural traditions by learning their songs and acquiring the skills to perform to Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences.
Pre-colonisation, in Australia’s First Nations communities, there was a strong history of storytelling through song. This was the way in which cultural information was shared with children, in the many languages that were then spoken by First Nations people.
Post-colonisation, some of the languages have disappeared, and with them the children’s songs, and the cultural knowledge embedded in the words and music.
The Children’s Songs program aims to address this sorry loss by collaborating with translators, teachers and musicians from six remote communities across the Northern Territory to collect, translate, record and perform some of those lost songs.
The program will provide a culturally safe space for children in remote communities to re-engage in a learning process with guidance from appropriate First Nations adults. This process will provide opportunities for children to understand more about their traditions through learning the songs in First Nations languages, promote the use of those languages through the Arts, and highlight the extraordinary language diversity of Northern Australia.
