For Warlpiri people living in the Central Australian Tanami desert region, ceremonial songs and ancestral stories associated with places are intimately linked to cultural identity. Understandings of self are for individuals formed through a lifetime of education focused on these songs, dances, the painting of body designs and the continual reiteration of ancestral stories which make them meaningful in contemporary lives. Current, past and future generations are linked through these shared connections and these ways of being-in-the-world are collectively nurtured through ceremonies across lifetimes. In this chapter I discuss Warlpiri women’s yawulyu ceremonies which are held a number of years following the death of a loved senior woman. It is common practice to ‘close’ these ceremonies associated with a deceased person for a substantial period after their death to allow their spirit, also held in the songs, to rest and return peacefully back to the land. The ceremonies I discuss are held after this period is finished, to open the songs up again for public performance, and importantly set up the renewed relational connections which establish future song leaders and ensure their continuation. Sadly, however, this ceremonial tradition is highly endangered with only a small number of very senior singers holding these ceremonies together. I ask how Warlpiri women are today managing the forms of collective, but deeply personalised grief in these ‘finishing up’ yawulyu ceremonies, and particularly in the current contexts in which there are significant challenges to intergenerational transmission of song knowledge and practice.

Speaker:

Georgia Curran is a senior research fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia (2010). Georgia’s research interests focus on Indigenous Australia song, performance ethnography, cultural continuity and change and the maintenance and revitalisation of endangered musical traditions. Since 2005, she has undertaken close fieldwork with Indigenous communities in Central Australia, particularly Warlpiri communities in the Tanami Desert region. Georgia is the author of Sustaining Indigenous Songs (2020, Berghahn), and co-editor of two recent collections: Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs (2024, Sydney University Press) and Supporting Vulnerable Performance Traditions (2025, Routledge). She co-hosts a podcast Music!Dance!Culture! (www.music-dance-culture.com) and is the Chair of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance Study Group on Music and Dance of Oceania, as well as sitting on the Advisory Board for the Music and Minorities Research Centre, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.