Contents indexed selectively.
'This paper contains a discussion of an unpublished essay by TGH Strehlow concerning the historic wax cylinder recordings of songs from Central Australia made by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in 1901. The manuscript, written by Strehlow in 1968, begins with an explanation of the historical context of the song recordings, and the distribution of song and dance traditions across the Australian inland. Strehlow elucidates the content via information imparted to him by a number of Arrernte and Luritja men, who first heard these recordings over 50 years after they were made, in 1960. Their explanation of these songs reveals further information on the diffusion of song verses across vast regions in Central Australia (including Warumungu, Anmatyerr, Arrernte, and Warlpiri country), and the incorporation of European words and themes within altharte (public) songs in which men sing and dance. I have expanded Strehlow's information on Spencer's recordings further with additional information from other ethno-historical sources and my own contemporary fieldwork. Combined, this research deepens the anthropological understanding of some of the earliest ethnographic sound recordings ever made in Australia.' (Introduction)
'Of all the celebrated anthropological classics penned about Australian Aborigines, Carl Strehlow's Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral Australien is probably the most paradoxical, for it is at once famous and obscure. In her preface to The Aranda's Pepa, Kenny (xv) informs us that Marcel Mauss referred to Strehlow's early volumes as ‘a kind of Australian Rig Veda’. The work was also cited by Durkheim, Lang, Lévi-Strauss, and others, and continues to be regarded as integral to the corpus of ethnographic material that any scholar of Central Australia needs to cover. Kenny describes the five volumes (seven parts) of the work, published in German between 1907 and 1920, as Strehlow's ‘magnum opus’ and as ‘a masterpiece of classical Australian anthropology’ (1), yet underlines the fact that, astonishingly, it has never been republished, either in its original German or in either of the two English translations that have sat quietly and largely immobile in Australian libraries – in one case since the 1930s, in the other since the 1990s. Hence, while many anthropologists know of Carl Strehlow's writing, few Anglophone scholars know it in the round.' (Introduction)
