Cirrus@Austlit

'Longlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize, Song Spirals is a groundbreaking publication, a unique invitation into Aboriginal women’s traditional cultural practices. Written by a collective of Yolŋu and non-Indigenous women known as the Gay’wu Group of Women, their name, Yolŋu for dilly bag, deftly captures the potent container of ideas that reflect the complexity of Yolŋu ontology, epistemology and knowledge. They were given their gay’wu by the Djan’kawu Sisters, ancestral beings who create ‘Country, the people, animals, plants and birds. The Djan’kawu Sisters gave us our knowledge, language and Law’ (xxi). The text, expressed through song lyrics and stories both traditional and personal, spirals in and out, interweaving layers of time and space and all that contains.' (Introduction)