An Acknowledgement of Country: A First Step

Preamble:

In 2019, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO), funded by a uniquely committed and understanding Helen Macpherson Smith Trust and UNESCO, set out on a project in which we proposed to create a series of musical Acknowledgements of Country featuring an indigenous language from each of the eleven official language groups of Victoria as identified by the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages (VACL). Working in partnership with Short Black Opera, Australia’s only Indigenous opera company, Yorta Yorta composer Deborah Cheetham AO and indigenous workshop leader Jessica Hitchcock, we would collaborate with indigenous language custodians and communities across the state to develop these ground-breaking works, together.

This is the first in a series of posts exploring my personal experience in devising and delivering this project for MSO.

The doors of the Rumbalara Football and Netball clubhouse are closed against the unseasonable mid-April 2019 heat. Outside, a pair of adolescent magpies scratch and caw their comically unsteady way across the pitch. At it’s edge, iconic river red gums stand against the bluest of Shepparton skies.

Inside, eight young girls, members of Short Black Opera Company’s Dhungala Aboriginal Children’s Choir, stand and sing:

 'When you hear the word Aboriginal, tell me what do you see? Do you see you, or do you see me?’

I listen from the next room where I am meeting with an emerging Yorta Yorta leader with whom I have been corresponding via email. She smiles at the sound of her niece’s voice through the glass partition.

I’ve been telling her about this journey, about my role as Senior Manager of Education and Community Engagement at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and about why I’m asking if she and the Shepparton Yorta Yorta community will support the MSO’s Acknowledgement of Country Project.

In turn, she has been explaining to me the complexity for her community around creating a Yorta Yorta Acknowledgement of Country translation for the project.

“It is very complicated.” She says, “We’re still working out how to explain why, how to explain why we are wary of letting our language go.”

She explains that she personally feels that her community, and in particular the young people of that community, are only just getting the chance to get back in touch with their language. They’re rebuilding a connection, through language, with the ancient thread of their indigenous identity. A thread which in more recent history has been badly damaged. She’s aware that, while the language is still in the process of revival, it is vulnerable and susceptible to appropriation. 

“Even with the best intentions, people outside our community can misunderstand and misuse our words and that means misunderstanding and misusing our culture.”

Here I stand, I think to myself, a non-indigenous, non-Australian, representing an arts organisation that is also not from an indigenous background and so yes, I can absolutely understand why she wants to take care, to consult her community both young and old, before lending us a precious piece of who they are.

 “The thing is, it’s not that we don’t want the language out there – I do” she assures me. “Those kids in there”, she gestures toward the sound of singing, this time accompanied by hand claps and the soft slap of bare feet on floorboards, “they’re only just learning it, we all are. Our language is in the process of revival and until we have it back fully for ourselves, it's hard to give it away.”

It is complicated.

In the process of devising and delivering this project, I will engage twelve Language Custodians and work in person delivering on-country workshops with at least six of the represented indigenous communities. In each, there are challenges and complications as unique to each place, to each people as the languages themselves. One thing each community has in common however, is a willingness to try to explain, to help me, my colleagues and by extension our organisation, to understand where they’re coming from. In the early few months of delivering the project, I have inadvertently caused offence, I have been laid bare by my personal ignorance as someone new to Australia and new to engaging with Australia’s cultures, but it is testament to the unfailing courage and will of each community to find a positive way forward, that they allow me my blunders and help me to learn.

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Two years ago in February 2017, I arrived in Australia new to my role at MSO. The first item on my To Do list, was to plan and deliver MSO’s Regional Tour.

So began, a journey of discovery in regional Victoria. First magical encounters with koala at dawn at Tower Hill in Gunditjmara Country, a peck on the shoulder from a curious emu who interrupted me when I was caught out on the long drive between Hamilton and Horsham, glorious golden fields of canola stretching as far as the eye can see through Wadawurrung lands and rows of grapes lining the Murray River on Ladjiladji Country.

An essential element of MSO's Regional Touring strategy (initiated in 2016), is to engage meaningfully and sustainably with key elements of each regional community including: schools, local government, local music-makers and indigenous communities.

I first set my mind to working out what meaningful and sustainable engagement might look like. Schools, local government and music-makers were familiar entities, presenting similar problems whether in New Zealand, Brazil or the UK but nowhere I'd previously worked had presented a challenge quite like the somewhat cursory, catch-all directive to 'engage with indigenous communities'. I sat down at my desk in Melbourne and started to email and call.

Some months later, Gunditjmarra elder Uncle Leonard Clarke, laughed when I told him I had thought I could “Google it.”

“You will find plenty online” he smiled, “But, culture lives here, on country, not on the internet. Lucky you got out of Melbourne and came out here, eh?” I’m congratulated with a friendly wink.

That, as simple as it is, was my first and most important lesson. Indigenous culture lives on country and if we were to truly engage and commit to building long-lasting, rich relationships with the custodians of these cultures, we needed to be there and be present on their land with them.

Six months after that first meeting in Warrnambool, a group of twenty-three MSO musicians gathered in October 2017, barefoot on the sands at the Warrnambool river mouth. Gunditjmara man, Uncle Brett Clarke, fresh ochre gleaming on bare skin, shared with us his story, the story of the Traditional Owners of that land. He told us the stories of the eel traps, (now set to be the first purely Aboriginal site to gain world heritage status: https://bit.ly/2Z24Yz4 ) and showed us which of the prolific seaside flora can be harvested and eaten. Afterwards, he invited us to splash off the ochre, dubbed on our faces and hands, in the waters on whose banks his family have made their home for thousands of generations.

It was an extraordinary first step. A step for me, a stranger, welcomed on this land. A step for MSO, a non-indigenous, leading Australian arts organisation with a commitment to engaging with this community with respect, meaning and depth and in building the mutual trust upon which we can explore our shared future.

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Back in Shepparton in 2019, the song in the next room has finished and my two colleagues, professional MSO players on violin and cello, hold a long, sustained, final chord as the ring of the children’s voices fades away.

“We need to take time to get this right” says my Yorta Yorta companion. 

We move back into the main room as other parents arrive to collect their daughters and nieces. As I do battle with a folding music stand, I hear the mothers talking quietly together about our proposal, about our project. It has taken several months for us to be here and for me to have had this conversation with her but, I feel that we’ve exchanged views and to a certain extent, we’ve come to an understanding. She understands my intent as a representative of MSO and I understand that her role, as a Yorta Yorta representative is complicated, but she’s speaking for us. I can hear her gently rationalising, laying out the possible ways forward for her community and I feel humbled by her trust.

Running from late 2018 until early 2020, MSO’s Acknowledgement of Country project aims to develop musical Acknowledgements of Country in partnership with language custodians and communities across Victoria. Featuring the Languages specific to each place in which MSO performs through its Regional Touring program supported by Creative Victoria, the project aims to build bridges of trust and understanding between the MSO and Traditional Owners, will allow MSO to celebrate the individuality of each community and to pay our respects in our own language of music. Where communities give their blessing, Acknowledgements will be gifted back to those communities in the form of recordings, sheet music and language guides enabling all members of that community from schools to amateur ensembles and venues, to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which they live and work, in the language of that place.

In October – November 2019 MSO will premier Acknowledgements in Bangerang, Way Wurru, Yorta Yorta, Wadawurrung, Gunditjmara and Dja Dja Wurrung on Regional Tour. Our Boon Wurrung premier will be given in Melbourne at the Sydney Myer Music Bowl concert series in February 2020.