Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was Australia’s most successful, charting-topping Indigenous musician. He was born blind and during his short life, wrote haunting songs celebrating his Yolngu heritage – he died at the age of just 46 in 2017 of liver and kidney disease.
Now, just under three years later, comes Buŋgul, a tribute concert co-produced by Perth festival and Skinnyfish Music, Gurrumul’s record label, owned by his close friends. Over the course of 90 minutes, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra perform his final and fourth studio album, Djarimirri. Woven over the top is a pre-recording of Gurrumul’s own voice and dancing by nine Yolngu male family members, who created their performance on country in North East Arnhem Land.
What makes Djarimirri (meaning “Child of the Rainbow”) special is not just the four years it took to record or the fact that it is Gurrumul’s last gift to the world, released posthumously. But that the album was designed to act as a mediator between two traditions in Australia: European orchestral music and millennia-old Aboriginal song.
Eight of the songs in Djarimirri are derived from Gurrumul’s father’s clan, the Gumatj, and are sung in Dhuwala. Putting them to a minimalist contemporary orchestral score co-created with Michael Hohnen and Erkki Velthiem (with hints of Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, among other influences) was a way to bring them to the masses. It ensured that the sheet music could be played, and read, by any orchestra worldwide.
This is important. As Buŋgul’s co-director, Don Wininba Ganambarr, puts it in the program: “To the Yolngu, our songs, paintings, and dances are our books – they tell us where we have come from and where we are going to … They are our maps, our law books, our title deeds and our family history.” If the songs are a roadmap, Buŋgul is a way to provide some context and to showcase the meanings behind the music.
To this end, a giant screen is erected above the orchestra and the performers, who dance on a round circle filled with sand. Each song title is projected on the screen, which also depicts the performers dancing on country, as they mirror the same routines live for the audience.
The manikay, a series of songs passed from generation to generation, range from Baru – the songline for the Yirritja ancestral crocodile Baru – to that of a scrub turkey. Performed by a taut, skinny dancer, he transforms into the bird itself, scuffing up the sand, clucking away, as he builds his nest. Used at the start of ceremony and funerals, the turkey represents the clearing and cleansing of the ground.
But if the screen has an important role to play – giving a sense how each song would be performed on country, rather than in the more stale surrounds of the Perth Concert Hall – it is also distracting. I wanted to stay present with the performers but, as in a screen playing sport in a pub, I couldn’t look away from the digital films being rolled out. At times, what was presented, if well intentioned, felt like a tourism advert.
For the last two songs, thankfully, the technology at last felt transcendent – as it should have been all along. In Sunset, a song about endings and renewals, a giant hot sun towers on the screen above the performers, radiating warmth. Visually stunning, it allows the dancers to breath.
And for the final song Dark Clouds, an image of what seems like rolling clouds appears on screen to the clap of thunder. As it pans out, slowly, it becomes apparent that this is not a menacing, billowing sky at all but the 2009 Archibald prize-winning painting of Gurrumul’s face by Guy Maestri. Gurrumul looks down, in the shadows, deep in thought – a fitting ending indeed.
