For the Sake of a Song
Wangga Songmen and Their Repertories
Wangga, originating in the Daly region of Australia's Top End, is one of the most prominent Indigenous genres of public dance-songs. This book is organised around six repertories: four from the Belyuen-based songmen Barrtjap, Muluk, Mandji and Lambudju, and two from the Wadeye-based Walakandha and Ma-yawa wangga groups, the repertories being named after the ancestral song-giving ghosts of the Marri Tjavin and Marri Ammu people respectively.
Framing chapters include discussion of the genre's social history, musical conventions and the five highly endangered languages in which the songs are composed. The core of the book is a compendium of recordings, transcriptions, translations and explanations of over 150 song items. Thanks to permissions from the composers' families and a variety of archives and recordists, this corpus includes almost every wangga song ever recorded in the Daly region.
There is a separate website associated with this title, http://wangga.library.usyd.edu.au/, and the song repertories can be streamed at http://wangga.library.usyd.edu.au epertories
Allan Marett is a professor emeritus of musicology at the University of Sydney and is a former director of the National Recording Project for Traditional Performance in Australia.
Linda Barwick is an associate professor at the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney and director of PARADISEC (The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures).
Lysbeth Ford is an honorary research associate in the Linguistics Department at the University of Sydney.
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