On the outskirts of Santa Teresa, a remote community south-east of Alice Springs, half a dozen young Indigenous men are inside a large recreation centre, fine-tuning some desert reggae music.
Santa Teresa, or Ltyentye Apurte, is a small community of about 600 Eastern Arrernte people. Single-level houses with couches, stripped cars, the odd swimming pool and toys in the yard stretch across the flat township, and mobs of brumbies kick up dust running through the thin vegetation.
The community was established on Aboriginal land as a Catholic mission, and a Latin American-style church – with distinctly Australian-themed religious murals inside – is a point of pride. Behind the town a ridgeline is topped with a tall Christian cross, and at the foot of the hill sits the recreation centre, containing a small, bright orange music studio.
It’s here the Eastern Reggae Band (almost every musical group around here has “band” in their name, much to the bemusement of local music industry and event organisers) are mixing the final tracks on their album.
A lot of the album has already been captured at an open-air recording session in the nearby ranges.
The band is in its fourth day of mixing, and the finished product will be the first produced and recorded under a regional music development program run by the Alice Springs Indigenous music label, Caama Music.
The program, in its third and possibly final year, originally selected 16 people from remote communities to be trained as music industry rangers, including four weeks studying towards a certificate II in music at Charles Darwin University, and at least eight weeks in a community learning sound and recording production. More have since enrolled or taken part in training sessions with bandmates.
Donovan Mulladad and Maxwell Meneri – both rangers – sit among a collection of instruments and recording equipment along with Wayne Young, Travis Alice and David Wongway .
Song titles, scrawled on large sheets of butcher’s paper pinned to the wall, reveal subject matter: Arrernte Woman, Broke Heart Girl, Grog No Good, Dreaming. The Eastern Reggae Band sing in both English and Arrernte.
The band are shy in front of a journalist’s microphone, but not in front of a studio’s. Questions prompt a couple of words at best, but a request for some music sees everyone pick up an instrument and debut a new song.
“It’s about one girl who was crying because her boyfriend went away to another place, to his home country,” Alice says at the performance’s end.
Next, Alice takes to a standing microphone so Mulladad can record the vocals for Holy Water. Alice isn’t usually the lead singer, but he’s here and up for singing and that’s enough.
Once he’s finished, Alice paces nervously as Mulladad and Young play it back with the prerecorded instrumentals, fiddling with the levels until they’re happy. Mark McCormack, the ranger program’s full-time trainer, offers advice and suggestions.
In his role with Caama’s program, McCormack travels to remote communities, teaching music industry skills. Some projects are more focused on recording music, others on repair and maintenance of equipment.
“You go out to a community and they’ll have had one person 10 years ago who bought some equipment, and then someone else bought something and then someone else bought another thing and none of it matches, it’s all torn up and no one knows how to use it,” he says.
“You work with what you’ve got and just write on things and tell people what they can and can’t use.”
He’d like to see the program continue, albeit in a tighter format with more frequent training to fewer groups.
Language makes a big difference, particularly with the technical jargon, and the Arrernte men’s English proficiency has seen them advance further than other projects, McCormack says.
Mulladad is in his third year as a ranger and has enjoyed “learning new stuff, setting up stages, how to mix properly”, he tells Guardian Australia quietly.
“Donovan’s being a bit shy at the moment,” McCormack cuts in. “But he knows how to completely set a concert with a fairly big PA system from start to finish, mix the bands, set it all up, organise all the people, the space. He also knows how to keep the music room that he’s in in pretty good condition.”
The music room is owned by the sport and rec centre, for which Donovan works. He maintains control over the studio, in part because of his standing in Santa Teresa.
“They have to have a little bit of authority in their community,” says McCormack of the rangers. “Sometimes you can pick someone out, but if they’re not allowed to chuck people out or tell them off or stop people taking things from the music room, you can’t have them there.”
“Some places are different to others … But the places that run best are the ones like this that have a room like this with someone who’s the boss.”
The band is keen to get on with recording, and an outsider’s presence is cramping their style. Guardian Australia leaves Ltyentye Apurte and meets with Caama Music’s general manager Michael Smith, at the label’s headquarters in Alice Springs.
When Smith arrived in central Australia he noticed there were a lot of musicians but “not a great deal of music being played”.
“People were really keen to play but a lot of equipment was really overused and not managed appropriately,” he says.
“Most of the equipment is or was owned by the local shires so there was restricted use because of overuse … People would run out of drumsticks and start using normal sticks which doesn’t help the drum kit.”
Rangers in Caama’s program learn skills around production and recording, event staging and gig running, often using Caama’s six shipping containers full of hire gear. Some mentor local youths who take care of individual instruments and pieces of equipment. Trained rangers gain hands-on experience and employment at local events, such as the Alice Springs Carols by Candlelight, concerts and night markets.
Smith says almost $35,000 in casual wages was paid to local Indigenous people – including rangers – working on audiovisual gigs in 2014.
However, despite enrolling new rangers in the second and third years of the program’s operation, only those like Mulladad who were first to sign on will complete the full training.
“It’s really expensive, and the way I got the funding and support was as a one-off trial program,” says Smith.
“The amount of money available for these kinds of projects has decreased so unfortunately no one is willing to support it.”
The program is funded through nine different channels, but primarily mining royalties and private donations. An application through the Indigenous Advancement Strategy was unsuccessful, but Smith is pursuing other avenues to keep it running.
“The first year was the most expensive, to set it up,” he said. “It’s changed dramatically over the last three years but it’s running really well now.
“It was set up as a test case on what the strengths of partnerships were and also ‘does this make a change, does this create any evidence to continue it?’ and it has.”
Eastern Reggae Band’s album will be released through a new subsidiary label of Caama’s, Therrka, meaning “grass” in the Arrernte language. The new label is part of a scheme to fast track albums from recording to print runs and sales.
