Saving the Yanyuwan language

Vision: Monash University Logo

Title: Dr John Bradley, Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies

John Bradley: "The project came about because Yanyuwa is a dying language.

When I first went there 30 years ago there were 260 speaker of language, there are now 6. And when you lose a language, you lose a lot more than just words. You lose spirituality, concepts of spirituality, a language that's equipped to deal with important things that community holds as cultural values.

"The idea with the animation is to explore it with the community whether this technology can be used in some form of intergenerational teaching and learning.

"I began drawing and at first people were alarmed by the whole idea of drawing, because drawing was associated with sorcery."

Description: Animation showing spirits flying around a water hole.

John Bradley: "But after a while they realized that there was some value in it.

So then we had to work out how do we represent these things as a standard that people will accept. And that's been an ongoing process of negotiation with them."

Title: Dr Amanda Kearney, Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies

Amanda Kearney: "And the whole process it maps onto a whole lot of social change in the community as well. Over time there has been a growing need and a growing interest and push for this type of animation, a type of cultural expression that really appeals to young people. And I think a lot of the people who are elders today in the community they understand that their kids want to learn culture through a different mechanism and in different ways."

"I have tended to work a bit more with younger people and for me it has been brilliant to see the maintenance of the principles of culture and aboriginal law being transmitted by way of creative and fantastic mechanisms like animation."

Description: Animation showing children sitting in a circle near the waterhole and spirits flying overhead.

John Bradley: "I really started with the most difficult thing to animate, because I thought if we can animate a ceremonial song line then anything else is possible."

Description: Animation, shark and stingray swimming underwater.

John Bradley: "The song is about a tiger shark, a tiger shark who has traveled from Queensland and arrived at this place called Manunkura, stood up and then sang the journey that he had just done. He's singing his journey. He's singing the song backwards. He travels through the country, back out through the islands and into the sea."

Amanda Kearney: "Also it's about a place. It's about a sacred geography. It's about the calling of a place name and the anchoring of meaning to that place by the ancestors."

John Bradley: "The song belongs to one clan. There are four clans at Borroloola. It's technically what we could call a sacred song. It's a song that's said to live in the land at all times. It's still meant to be there even it's not being sung. It's still there in the land, moving in the land."

"This particular song is used for two reasons. One is during the initiation of young men who are associated with the country of the tiger shark and secondly, it used to be used when someone was dying from that clan to help send their spirit back to country. So, these are really important pieces of culture. In fact, Yanyuwa people go as far as saying that these are types of songs are like the title deed to country."

Description: Animation, two birds drinking from the waterhole.

Amanda Kearney: "The very minute it was put on, we put it on a big flat screen TV and there were three little kids sitting down in front of it, age range from 2 to about 5 and they were just transfixed."

John Bradley: "The young people could immediately go there. The young people could immediately say, 'Ah this is animation. This is how it works.'"

Description: Animation, spirits fly around the waterhole, then underwater where they swim with a group of sharks.

John Bradley: "Now prior to seeing it, they'd seen stills of the animation prior to seeing it to make sure that people were happy with it. One of the senior elders He looked at it and just smiled. And when he saw the 25 verses that had been done he said, ‘Keep going. Come on keep going. We want to see more'.

"We're hoping to go for more money at end of this series of animations to begin the process of doing more song line animations and it would be great to have enough money to have a team of animators working with us so that we can get more done quickly, because the old people are old and they're not going to live forever. They could die tomorrow.

"If anyone is interested in what we're doing, how we're doing it or why we're doing it, Amanda and I both work for the Centre of Australian Indigenous Studies at the Clayton campus of Monash University.

"They can find us on the web, they can email us, phone us, write us a letter. We're more than happy to talk to them and see what we can do."

Description: Monash University logo, Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, +613 9905 4200, cais@arts.monash.edu.au, http://arts.monash.edu.au/cais/

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