Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Farewell My Country? Hermannsburg, Gus Williams, and the Indigenised Heimatlied
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This microhistory focuses on a little-known aspect of Indigenous musical life in the 1960s in the Lutheran Hermannsburg Mission (now Ntaria) in Central Australia. I contemplate the possible meanings arising when Gus and Rhonda Williams translated the secular German Heimat- cum-Wanderlied [song of home-cum-wandering], “Ade du mein Heimatland”, [Farewell to you my homeland], into Arrarnta as “Ade pmara nukai” [Farewell my country], and “presenced Indigeneity” for a predominantly non-Indigenous, southern audience. I explore how a German song became “travelling culture”; how it was received and modified to suit both missionary and Indigenous purposes, in the process both expressing a vernacularised Arrarnta Lutheranism, as well as maintaining music’s vital role in Indigenous culture, including as a signifier of love of country. I further examine how the song could have a political meaning in the nascent land rights context of the day, as an assertion of attachment to country or “Indigenous Heimat” that could resonate back, across a cultural divide, with a non-Indigenous Lutheran audience. ' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Language: Aboriginal Arrernte AIATSIS ref. (C8) (NT SG53-02) AUSTLANG note: There are several dialects of Arrernte (cf. Koch 2004) but in this database, distinctions between Central Arrernte, Western Arrernte, Southern Arrernte, and Eastern Arrernte are not made
Last amended 10 May 2017 16:12:51
18-31 Farewell My Country? Hermannsburg, Gus Williams, and the Indigenised Heimatliedsmall AustLit logo Journal of Australian Studies
Subjects:
  • Aboriginal Arrernte AIATSIS ref. (C8) (NT SG53-02) AUSTLANG note: There are several dialects of Arrernte (cf. Koch 2004) but in this database, distinctions between Central Arrernte, Western Arrernte, Southern Arrernte, and Eastern Arrernte are not made language
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