- Title
- Ghost-writing for Wulatji: incubation and "re-dreaming" as song revitalisation practices
- Creator
- Wafer, Jim
- Relation
- Recirculating Songs: Revitalising the Singing Practices of Indigenous Australia p. 187-244
- Relation
- https://hunterpress.bigcartel.com/product/recirculating-songs-revitalising-the-singing-practices-of-indigenous-australia
- Publisher
- Hunter Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- This chapter elaborates a rationale for revitalising Aboriginal singing practices by means of the traditional but endangered technique of composition through dreams. It is based on exegesis of a song in the language of the Hunter River and Lake Macquarie that was published in 1848 by Eliza Hamilton Dunlop. Her transcription of the song text was accompanied by a commentary that associated the name of the composer with a ‘god of Poesy’ called ‘Wallatu’. I argue, on the basis of a comparative overview of ‘dream composition’ in Aboriginal Australia, that this mythical being was plausibly responsible for ‘song incubation’ in this region, and conceivably both ancestor and inspirer of the poet who was Mrs Dunlop’s informant. My reconstruction of the text and metrical pattern of the song provides the foundation for an analysis of its stylistic devices, and this in turn may have implications for understanding both mnemotechnical practices (‘arts of memory’) and kin classification in the region in question. For the sake of contextualising the notion of ‘song incubation’, the chapter includes also a brief survey and listing of relevant ethnographic and historical observations from Australia and other parts of the world.
- Subject
- musical dream; dream composition; song incubation; re-dreaming; arts of memory; Wallatu; Eliza Hamilton Dunlop; Wollombi, (NSW); Hunter Valley, (NSW); Lake Macquarie, (NSW)
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1389877
- Identifier
- uon:32942
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780994586315
- Language
- eng
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