Woven Together in Song: Collaborative Knowledge and the Creativity of Raypirri’

The Wind Is Always Blowing: Generative Crosscurrents of Ethnographic Dialogue in Australia

“…(Gurrumuruwuy et al 2019, 'Can a book hum?') Like Corn's imaginative prose, the literary and visual style of Phone and Spear extends from Deger's extensive research on Yolŋu creativity and performance, in which she has considered the ways ancestral narratives emerge through the thickly textured aesthetic object (painting, photography, film)akin to the way that the 'livingness', 'brilliance', or 'power' of an ancestral subject emerges through the shimmering surface of painting or song (Deger 2006(Deger , 2007(Deger , 2016; see also Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2023a;Morphy 1989). As in photography, which has a 'unique capacity to make absence present', the subject of photography comes from elsewhere, in time or place (Deger 2016:125).…”

“…These writings by Corn, Deger, and Verran have encouraged me to experiment with different ways of engaging Yolŋu voices within established formats of academic publishing. My articles with Daniel (Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2023a, 2024) and Warlpiri elder Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu (Curkpatrick et al . 2024a; Pawu and Curkpatrick 2023) have been developed from conversations (usually recorded over multiple meetings) that are subsequently worked into written dialogues, prioritizing the original conversational progression through narrative themes, albeit with some clarifying phrases added, and others deleted or spliced together from other recordings.…”

“…We took lunch and sat down in the wide, sandy gorge to chat. The previous night, I had spoken with Daniel about ceremony as a gathering of many different language groups and songlines – everyone ‘different together on the sand’ (see Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2024).…”

“…Recently, wata was the theme of a large collaborative work composed by Paul Grabowsky, in collaboration with Daniel and his uncle David Wilfred, and performed by the Australian Art Orchestra and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (2021): ‘Wata: a gathering for songmen, improvising soloists and orchestra’ (see Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2024). Having flown to Darwin following our conversation on the roadside in Alice Springs, we considered how wata has shaped Daniel's collaborations, gathering us in our differences and moving us forward together with purpose.…”

“…Grabowsky and Knight have both been artistic directors of the AAO. For a more detailed exploration of this work, see Curkpatrick and Wilfred (2024).…”