'The Ma-yawa wangga repertory was given to songmen by the Marri Ammu ancestral ghosts known as Ma-yawa. Before the late 1960s, it seems that this repertory was frequently performed at Wadeye, but nowadays Marri Ammu people join their Marri Tjavin neighbours in performing the Walakandha wangga repertory for ceremony. All but one of the Ma-yawa wangga songs were composed by the senior Marri Ammu lawman and artist Charlie Niwilhi Brinken (c. 1910–1993), but so far as we know, no recording was ever made of him singing. Maurice Tjakurl Ngulkur (Nyilco) (1940–2001), the Marri Ammu songman, inherited the repertory and added one of his own songs to it. Since his passing in 2001, the songs have rarely been performed. With its strong focus on the Dreamings (ngirrwat) and Dreaming sites (kigatiya) of the Marri Ammu people, the Ma-yawa wangga repertory holds a unique place within the corpus.' (Publication summary)
For the Sake of a Song : Wangga Songmen and their Repertories
Allan Marett
,
Linda Barwick
,
Lysbeth Julie Ford
,
Sydney
:
Sydney University Press
,
2012
7074307
2012
selected work
lyric/song
Indigenous story
'Wangga is a genre of public dance-song from the Daly region of northwest Australia; the country that lies to the north and south of the mouth of the Daly River. The book (and this website) focuses on the songmen (Medjakarr in Batjamalh; Ngalinangga in Marri Tjavin) who have composed and performed wangga in the Daly region in the last fifty years.'
'Many of these singers are now deceased, though their descendants and heirs continue to perform the songs in ceremonies and various public events. At the core of the book is a corpus of some 150 wangga song texts, organised into six repertories: four from the Belyuen-based songmen Barrtjap, Muluk, Mandji and Lambudju, and two from the Wadeye-based Walakandha and Ma-yawa wangga groups, which are named after the ancestral song-giving ghosts of the Marri Tjavin and Marri Ammu people respectively.' (Source: wangga.library.usyd)
