Musicology Australia

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Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero

Tribe’

Jakelin Troy & Linda Barwick

To cite this article: Jakelin Troy & Linda Barwick (2020) Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the
Menero Tribe’, Musicology Australia, 42:2, 85-107, DOI: 10.1080/08145857.2020.1945254

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2020.1945254

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Musicology Australia, 2020
Vol. 42, No. 2, 85–107, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2020.1945254

Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the

Menero Tribe’

JAKELIN TROY AND LINDA BARWICK

The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

This article aims to re-evaluate Johann Lhotsky’s published sheet music ‘A Song of the Women of the
Menero Tribe near the Australian Alps’ to claim it as a distinctively Ngarigu document that speaks to
Ngarigu people today. Following a method suggested by Graeme Skinner, we recover additional infor-
mation, strip out the ‘improvements’ of the arrangers and create a new Ngarigu-oriented reading with
what we hope will be ‘real value for song revitalisation’ by providing ‘usable details’ of text, melody and
rhythm. We suggest that the evidence tends to substantiate Skinner’s suggestion that Lhotsky’s original
publication was more ‘ethnographically honest’ than Isaac Nathan’s revision. We present new conclu-
sions as to who originally performed the Song, and when and where the performance witnessed by
Lhotsky took place. We show that Lhotsky’s untranslated text is clearly in an Aboriginal language and
provides important clues to its significance to Ngarigu Country. We contend that various musical fea-
tures of Lhotsky’s publication, while departing from the norms of settler colonial parlour music, bear
witness instead to Ngarigu performance practice of the time.

Introduction
In March 1834, women of the ‘Menero tribe’ of the alpine region of south-eastern
Australia performed a song witnessed by Johann Lhotsky, a Central European botanist,
geologist and medical doctor with a keen interest in political economy who undertook an
expedition to the area in January–March 1834 (see Figure 1). These women were most
likely from the group who now identify as ‘Ngarigu’ of the Monaro district, whose home-
lands encompass the ‘High Country’ or ‘Snowy Mountains’ of the Australian Alps. This is
Jakelin Troy’s community, referred to in this article as Ngarigu people in keeping with
current usage by Aboriginal communities from the Snowy region.
Sometime after his return to Sydney in April 1834, Lhotsky organized for his notes on
the song he had heard to be arranged as a piece of parlour music for voice and pianoforte,
with the assistance of three ‘musical gentlemen’,1 and in November 1834 he published the
sheet music entitled ‘A Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe near the Australian
Alps’ (henceforth, ‘the Song’) (Lhotsky 1834a). It is remarkable that this remains ‘the ear-
liest-known piece of music, of any sort, printed in Australia’ (Skinner 2015, 296).
While many aspects of Lhotsky’s publication betray layers of misunderstanding,

1 As explicitly noted in the published score, Mr Pearson was credited with the vocal arrangement, Mr
Josephson with the piano arrangement, and Mr Sippe with the simplified piano arrangement
(Lhotsky 1834a).

# 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
86 Musicology Australia vol. 42, no. 2, 2020

Figure 1. Schematic Representation of Johann Lhotsky’s 1834 Expedition to the Australian Alps,
Superimposed on a Modern Location Map. Note: Dates and names of places in boxes are drawn from his
published account of the journey (Lhotsky 1835). Locations visited by Lhotsky on the nights of the full
moons of 25 January, 23 February and 24 March are highlighted.

misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the original performance, other features sug-

gest that it also conserved traces of the language and music performed so long ago.
In a spirit of creative application of judgement and understanding, we present here for
the first time new information about the circumstances of the Song’s production, a gloss-
ing and translation of the Ngarigu text, and a sketch of its likely musical features.
To arrive at our conclusions, we have had to reimagine ourselves into Snowy Mountains
 Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick, Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’ 87

Country at that time. We have read painstaking reconstructions of Lhotsky’s itinerary by

historians and geographers, we have pored over topographical maps and we have drawn
on our own disciplinary training as documenters of language and music. This has helped
us not only to reconstruct the processes of performance and production that led to the
sheet music publication, but also to propose creative re-interpretations of the Song’s
content, with the purpose of incorporating it within a larger renewal of Ngarigu cultural,
performative and linguistic practices.2

Significance of the Song Today

For Troy and her people, the Song is a document of immeasurable importance, bringing
the voice of her ancestors into the present. For settler Australians and their descendants,
study of the production and reception of the Song calls into relief the shaky foundations
of settler appropriation of Indigenous lands, languages and performative cultures. For
musicologists, it calls to attention the ways in which settlers have repeatedly attempted to
make sense of Aboriginal performative cultures by trying to mould them into ill-fitting
European musical conventions (Harris 2020).
Very few researchers have paid attention to the Snowy Mountains people. The excep-
tion is Josephine Flood (1973, 1980), whose ‘Aboriginal prehistory of the Australian Alps’
provides an analysis of the archaeological record and associated ethnohistorical texts.
Flood called the people of the High Country ‘The Moth Hunters’ for their practice of
holding, with other local communities, great feasts of bogong moths (Agrotis infusa) from
spring to early autumn each year. Moths were key to the social ceremonies and rituals of
the lives of the Ngarigu and surrounding communities. Flood observed:
although the highland tribes could have feasted independently on moths within
their own tribal territories, yet they gathered together for moth feasts within one
tribal territory. This inter-tribal contact and shared ceremonial life would appear to
have been the raison d’^etre of moth feasts. (Flood 1980, 76)

It was early autumn, the end of this bogong season, when Lhotsky came through
Ngarigu Country, a time when alpine wildflowers carpeted the valleys and meadows. For
Lhotsky, it was a fine time for botanizing and collecting examples of the unique alpine
flora. For Ngarigu, the end of summer and the beginning of autumn is time to start think-
ing about bringing back the snow so that the alpine environment will continue to thrive.
For Troy, the Song speaks of a continuous shared concern for ‘caring for Country’,3
ensuring that everything human and non-human that depends on proper Indigenous
management of the environment is safe and has a future. As others have suggested:
Country is often misunderstood as being synonymous with ‘land’, but it goes far
beyond that. It comprises ecologies of plants, animals, water, sky, air and every aspect
of the ‘natural’ environment. (Foster, Kinniburgh and Wann Country 2020, 68)

2 Ours is far from the first scholarly engagement with the Song (Hall 1951; Covell 1967, 67–68; Hort 1987;
Saintilan 1993, 56–59; Troy 1994; Skinner 2011, 2014; Skinner and Wafer 2017, 372–73).
3 Country is capitalized when writing about an Aboriginal homeland, as dictated by Aboriginal protocol. ‘On
Country’ is the way Aboriginal people describe the embodied experience of being immersed in the environ-
ment of their homelands.
88 Musicology Australia vol. 42, no. 2, 2020

Troy’s people continue to remain in their Country and keep their cultural connections
strong. Since the early nineteenth century, Ngarigu people have faced the ongoing chal-
lenge of settler colonial invasion and occupation and their destructive impacts on the
environment of the Monaro district. The Song’s epilogue (probably penned by Lhotsky
himself) asks why Troy’s people were so vulnerable in the new colonial world, an
‘unprotected race of people’ whose ‘children shrink so fastly’, reflecting what Lhotsky saw
then as a declining and unsupported Aboriginal population being overrun by colonial
expansion. Today, 185 years later, the Ngarigu community is spread across the Snowy
Mountains region and beyond, a dispersed community like so many others. We number
in the thousands, but there has never been a true census of Ngarigu people. Our commun-
ities continue to be organized into small family-oriented groups similar to those described
in the historical and archaeological record (Flood 1980). Troy and her people must still
care for Country, but it is a great challenge to know how to do so in this much altered
world, where a maze of outside interests claim the right to make policy about and manage
Country.4 Unpacking the Song has helped Troy to understand how her people managed
Country and their engagement with climate and season.

Reception of the Song

At the time of its publication, the Song was already a contentious document, received by
settler society with mixed acclaim. From the time of his arrival in Sydney in 1832,
Lhotsky had begun to publish polemics attacking the British colonial government, which
had also offended him by refusing to appoint him colonial zoologist at the Australian
Museum. A political exile from his homeland,5 Lhotsky had come to Australia with fund-
ing from the King of Bavaria, but by the time of his 1834 journey to the Australian Alps
he was largely self-financed by selling specimens collected on his travels (Anon. 1833;
Lhotsky 1834b). Lhotsky’s publication of the Song, offered for sale as one of the first
products of his journey, was not solely an attempt to remedy his ailing finances. It can
also be read as a political act, as made clear in its epilogue: ‘Unprotected race of people/
unprotected all we are/and our children shrink so fastly/unprotected why are we?’.6 This
sentiment is consistent with Lhotsky’s strong views regarding the British colonial author-
ities’ oppression and neglect of Aboriginal people. These attitudes were expressed not only
in the published record of his journey (Lhotsky 1835, 19), but also in an earlier polemic
published anonymously in 1832, in which he condemned those who had stigmatized
Aboriginal people ‘with incapacity and inferiority in the scale of human beings’, and

4 This leads to what Tess Lea calls ‘wild policy’ and a chaos of management that exhausts individuals and com-
munities (Lea 2020).
5 Born in Lemberg (Galicia), the son of a Czech-born Austrian government official, Lhotsky was imprisoned
for political activities by the Austrian empire for several years in the 1820s (Paszkowski 1977). Following his
collecting expeditions in Brazil and Australia, he returned to Europe and continued to live in exile in
London, where he died in around 1866.
6 A more or less direct translation into German follows: one of Lhotsky’s own languages, and that of some of
his closest European colleagues and funders. Oddities in the English (lack of rhyme in lines 2 and 4; use of
‘fastly’) may suggest that the original verse was in fact first written in German and then translated into
English, pointing to Lhotsky himself as the likely author. Covell (1967, 68) suggests (on unknown grounds)
that Mr Sippe may have been responsible for the verse epilogue. As discussed more fully in the following,
the epilogue is not a translation of the Song lyrics, as some commentators have assumed.
 Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick, Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’ 89

blamed the British colonial powers for passively and apathetically allowing ‘to die away,
and to become extinct, a poor and helpless race of people’ (Lhotsky 1832, 3). Lhotsky’s
fundamentally humanist perspective placed settlers and Indigenous people (termed here
‘Papuas’) on the same plane:
Let a hundred specimens of our boasted civilization (we speak of children) be
placed amidst the penury of Australian bushes, and we shall see how they will
exhibit their fancied capabilities: they will suffer and shrink, like their despised
fellow-creatures. … These Papuas will have, perhaps, as good Franklins and
Washingtons, Byrons and Shakespeares, as the cannibals and wild fellows which the
Romans called once Picts. (Lhotsky 1832, 3)

In a similar vein, Lhotsky’s 1834 assessment of the Song placed it alongside music con-
sidered by settler society as the height of European musical achievement: ‘for majestic and
deep melancholy, it would not dishonour a Beethoven or a Handel’ (Lhotsky 1835, 45).
Sentiments of melancholy or nostalgia were particularly associated with the parlour (or
drawing-room) ballad, a popular music genre that reached its heyday in the nineteenth
century, generally consisting of sheet-music arrangements for voice and pianoforte, and
intended for use in amateur domestic musical settings, often performed by women (Scott
2017). As discussed by Scott, the ‘cultivation of refined folk airs’ including those of
Britain’s own rebellious internal colonies, Scotland and Ireland, was one of the key foun-
dations of the genre (2017, 22–32). As Scott comments, ‘[t]hroughout the nineteenth
century musical features from a variety of ethnic cultures were introduced from time to
time as exotic decoration to drawing-room ballads’ (2017, 81). Any political interpreta-
tions were mostly effaced by foregrounding a ‘melancholy nostalgia’ (Scott 2017, 26).7
According to Lhotsky, the ‘most competent judges’ assessed the Song as ‘very pretty’
and even ‘sublime’ (Sydney Gazette, 27 November 1834, 3). Others apparently condemned
it as ‘a Portuguese air’ (insinuating, perhaps, that it was a fake, based on Lhotsky’s previ-
ous travels in Brazil in 1831–32), although Lhotsky defended it as nothing other than ‘a
wild air, carrying however a great depth of feeling’ (Sydney Monitor, 27 November 1834,
3). Little evidence remains that the Song was widely circulated or performed in settler
circles, despite Lhotsky’s assertion that several families had ‘expressed their wishes to buy
this Air for their children’ (Sydney Monitor, 27 November 1834), and a report that ‘a con-
siderable number’ of copies of the sheet music ‘had been lately purchased for friends in
Cambridge, Edinburgh, and other eminent places in Great Britain’ (Sydney Gazette, 11
December 1834 cited in Skinner 2011, 115).8
We have no historical records contemporary to Lhotsky of Ngarigu people’s responses
to the publication of the Song, although in the following decade Isaac Nathan reported an
Aboriginal person’s response to his arrangement of another Ngarigu song, ‘Koorinda
Braia’: ‘[he] alternately laughed and wept from excessive joy, at hearing his own native
melody, sung and accompanied by us on our own Piano Forte’ (Nathan 1848, 117).
Perhaps this was the same person ‘of the Maneroo tribe’ who Nathan reported having
inspired his own revised arrangement of Lhotsky’s Song, published with English text by
Eliza Dunlop as ‘The Aboriginal father of the Maneroo Tribe’ (Nathan 1843). Nathan
famously poured scorn on Lhotsky’s arrangement, describing it as:

7 Later in the century, blackface minstrelsy became a key component of the parlour ballad genre.
8 See Graeme Skinner’s (2011, 112–15) PhD thesis for further details on settler reception of the Song.
90 Musicology Australia vol. 42, no. 2, 2020

so deformed and mutilated by false rhythm, so disguised in complete masquerade,

by false bases and false harmony, that I cast it from me with no small share of
regret at the poor chance thus afforded me of adding anything in favour of the
claim of the aborigines to the pages of musical history. (Nathan 1843, 2)

Twentieth-century assessments were little kinder. In Roger Covell’s opinion, the

arrangement ‘removes effectively any genuine Aboriginal flavour it may have had in
Lhotsky’s own memory or rough jottings’ (Covell 1967, 67). He continues: ‘if any trace of
the original melody or melodic pattern remains, it may be in the chant-like semitonal
alternations of the first phrase and its later repetition at a lower pitch’, suggesting that the
complementary phrases following are ‘either partially or wholly the work of Dr Lhotsky’s
Musical Gentlemen’ (1967, 67). Covell concludes his discussion of the 1834 arrangement
with the statement ‘The sentiments were all too accurate, even if the notation was not’
(1967, 68).9

Recovering Contextual Information

Contextual information is of great significance for Ngarigu people to help identify associ-
ation with Country and likely contemporary relations of the original performers.
Unfortunately, none of Lhotsky’s notes relevant to the occasion of the Song have yet been
located (if indeed they still survive). Who were the people who performed the song and
probably helped Lhotsky document it? When and where did they perform? The sheet
music itself gives few clues beyond its title. We have supplemented this sparse information
by close reading of Lhotsky’s other published works (including the itinerary of his journey,
published newspaper articles and journal articles), by detailed correlation of Lhotsky’s
accounts of the performance context of the Song with mid-twentieth century historians’
analyses of his itinerary, and by interpreting musical features of the work in the context of
other nineteenth-century settler records of performances. We have also drawn on Troy’s
previous investigation of Lhotsky’s material for her PhD research (Troy 1994, 323–6
and 332–3).

Who
We believe it is likely that the Song was performed by members of the same group of peo-
ple of the ‘Menero tribe’ who assisted Lhotsky with a brief vocabulary collected on the
same trip and published some years later (Lhotsky 1839). We also presume that they
assisted him to note down the words of the Song, which are clearly in an Australian lan-
guage. Since this language would have been previously completely unknown to Lhotsky, it
is unlikely that Lhotsky alone could have quickly memorized or written them down with-
out assistance from speakers. Lhotsky’s vocabulary was collected in the course of an
encounter with several young people between the ages of thirteen and nineteen (Lhotsky
1839, 157), part of a group of Aboriginal people that also included a man and his two
wives (Lhotsky 1839, 158). Could these two wives have been amongst the ‘women of the
Menero tribe’ referred to in the title of the Song? If the vocabulary was taught and learned
by indicating things present in the environment in which it was elicited, it is telling that it

9 Ann Carr-Boyd’s (1971) instrumental arrangement of the Song for trio of flute, cello and piano (Carr-Boyd
1971) remains one of the few known traces left by the Song in more recent Australian performance history.
 Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick, Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’ 91

includes a number of words associated with performance—song (yangang), dance (tibir-

ibi), belt (kumel), pipe-clay (miridni, kobat), red ochre (neir) (Lhotsky 1839, 161), (to)
paint10 (murugembeli) (1839, 162) and opossum11 (buckani) (1839, 159)—as well as words
relating to the song content we shall shortly present: moon (kabata) and snow (kunyima)
(1839, 159).12

When
As for the likely date of the Song’s performance, some clues are provided by Lhotsky’s
partial account of his journey in ‘A Journey from Sydney to the Australian Alps’ (Lhotsky
1835), although neither the performance of the song nor the vocabulary he collected are
mentioned. Published in 1835, the ‘Journey’ finished after seven of a planned twenty
instalments. The published version covers the period from 10 January to 18 February
1834, but a copy held at the British Museum contains a further nine pages of handwritten
notes and two maps by Lhotsky covering the period 30 January–22 March (Jeans and
Gilfillan 1969, 1–4). The latter part of his journey, from 23 March, is not covered at all,
but a letter written from Limestone Plains (near present-day Canberra) on 5 April, during
his return journey, announces the performance of the Song (Lhotsky letter to Sydney
Gazette dated 5 April 1834 cited in Andrews 1973, 126). We can therefore presume that
the dates of both Song and vocabulary were somewhere between 22 March and 5 April.
We can further narrow down this range of possible dates by reference to Lhotsky’s
account of a ‘corrobery’ performance he witnessed on a ‘full moon night’ at Fish Creek on
25 January 1834 (Lhotsky 1835, 45). Here, Lhotsky foreshadows that he will later
describe a ‘like scene witnessed near the Alps’ and give music and words for a song (1835,
45). The only ‘full moon night’ between 22 March and 5 April was that of 24–25
March 1834.

Where
Lhotsky is likely to have passed the night of 24–25 March in Ngarigu Country at Mutong
hut, near present-day Dalgety, which acted as the base for his two excursions into the
Alps (Figure 1).13 Aboriginal people were highly likely to have been living in the area.
Although Lhotsky’s sketchy handwritten notes do not explicitly mention the presence of
Aboriginal people at Mutong, settler colonial accounts agree that Aboriginal people were
in considerable numbers in the early years of settler occupation:
The early settlers speak of the aboriginals as existing in great numbers on Manaro,
though they consistently agree that at no time were they dangerous. The country, in
those days, was practically owned by them, as they were the only ones who

10 The verb ‘to paint’ (or ‘to paint up’) refers to the application of ceremonial paint to the body of the dancers
(and sometimes singers), which features widely in ‘corroboree’ performances across Australia.
11 As will be discussed later in this article, women used tightly bound bundles of possum skin to beat time for
corroboree songs (Mitchell 1926, 18).
12 The vocabulary does not include, however, the Ngarigu word for ‘corroboree’, which according to Robinson
was Woc.kite (Koch ‘wagady’), ‘corrobery’ (Robinson 2000, 193).
13 On 22 March, Lhotsky was heading back to Plato’s Plains hut (near present-day Currowong), a day’s jour-
ney from his base at Mutong. Described by Lhotsky as ‘the last out-station in that direction of the alps’,
Mutong’s nearby waterhole supported a variety of European vegetables (described in Lhotsky 1835, 104).
92 Musicology Australia vol. 42, no. 2, 2020

penetrated its gorges and passes. It was not unusual to see five hundred of them at
the one time. (Mitchell 1926, 18)
A strong indication of Aboriginal presence in the Mutong area at the time of
Lhotsky’s visit is the fact that both of his excursions from Mutong into the Alps followed
traditional Aboriginal pathways (Wesson 2003, 155, Figure 30 ‘Monaro and Map pre-
contact travel routes’; Blay and Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council 2011). On 4 March
1834, Lhotsky’s group followed a ‘Black Path’ in the course of his first excursion from
Mutong to ‘Mount King William IV’ (page 6 of handwritten notes appended to British
Museum copy of Lhotsky 1835). His second excursion southwards, in the direction of the
Omeo plains, seems to have initially followed the route of a traditional pathway southward
from present-day Dalgety to present-day Currowong (Wesson 2003, 155, Figure 30),
which lies close to the Bundian Way, the most prominent of the many traditional path-
ways followed by coastal people journeying to and from the highlands of the Australian
Alps for the annual bogong moth season (Flood 1973; Blay and Eden Local Aboriginal
Land Council 2011; Blay 2015). It is likely that at least one of Lhotsky’s party on this
second excursion was Aboriginal: Wakefield comments that ‘this is demonstrated by the
direct route taken—particularly the short-cut across the mountains from Dellicknora to
the Amboyne Crossing area and by the abundant use of native place names’ (Wakefield
1975, 243).
A variety of historical sources from just a few years after Lhotsky’s visit confirm that
Aboriginal people were indeed living at Mutong. In 1841, the government administrator
John Lambie distributed blankets and counted fifty-five Aboriginal people resident at
‘Snowy River’ (Lambie 1924), which is identified by Andrews and Wesson as Mutong
(Andrews 1977, 95; 1998, 136; Wesson 2003, 154). In 1881, Mickey, one of the Ngarigu
people who later provided information to Howitt via squatter John O’Rourke, stated that
he ‘was born at Mutong, near Buckley’s Crossing [present-day Dalgety], at Rutherford’s
Old Place14—it is his country’ (letters from John O’Rourke, 1881, held by Museum of
Victoria, Howitt papers). Wesson (2003, 79) estimates that Mickey was born in the
period 1838–41.
The waterhole at Mutong would certainly have been of great significance to Aboriginal
people living there or passing through the area on summer migrations to enjoy the
Bogong moths of the Alps (Common 1954; Flood 1973). As elsewhere in Australia, care-
ful husbandry of water and food resources by Aboriginal people in this area is widely
attested (Blay and Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council 2011; Pascoe 2018). Some indi-
cation of the food resources available in this period was given by William Crisp, son of
the squatter Amos Crisp, who described the abundance of the nearby Matong creek as he
experienced it as a child in the late 1830s:
Matong Creek for about five miles above and below its junction with Jimenbuen
Creek was a succession of deep waterholes, there being no high banks, and the
grass ran to the water’s edge. Hundreds of wild ducks could be seen along these
waterholes, and platypus and divers were plentiful. (Cited in Hancock 1972, 107)

14 Around the 1860s–70s, William Rutherford was a squatter at Marinumbla (also spelled ‘Marranumbla’) sta-
tion, described as ‘near Buckley’s Crossing’, present-day Dalgety.
 Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick, Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’ 93

It is therefore highly plausible that both the Song and the vocabulary originated with
Aboriginal people on Ngarigu Country at Mutong, on or around the full moon night of
24–25 March 1834.

Reliability of Lhotsky’s Documentation

To evaluate the linguistic and musical features of the song document, we need to consider
the circumstances that led to its production. Between Lhotsky’s witnessing of the perform-
ance and publication of the sheet music, several intervening activities must have taken place,
each with potential for slippage in transmission of the cultural information. A key question
concerns the reliability of Lhotsky’s notes, the pivot point between him and Ngarigu cultural
practitioners. Even if assisted by Ngarigu people to note down the text and other relevant
information, Lhotsky heard both performance and language with European ears. Whatever
the shortcomings of his understanding and medium of documentation, however, there is
evidence that Lhotsky’s European scientific training led him to approach the collection of
cultural material in a similarly systematic manner to that applied in his botanical and geo-
logical work.15 Back in Sydney later in the year, the notes would have again become a pivot
point as the basis for Lhotsky’s interactions with the ‘Musical Gentlemen’ called in to
rearrange the song according to the conventions of British parlour music.
With regard to the reliability of his linguistic notes, Lhotsky’s own multilingualism sug-
gests that he was likely to have been alive to phonological and other linguistic differences
between languages. Born to a Czech family in the ethnically Polish city of Lwow, then
part of the Austrian Empire, and educated in Prague, Berlin and Vienna, Lhotsky must
have spoken several European languages (Whitley 1967). People for whom English is not
the first language are often able to hear sounds in Australian languages that are not appar-
ent to first-language speakers of English, particularly the phonemic vowel sounds and mul-
tiple variants of consonants, such as rhotics, that are not evident in English. Indeed,
Lhotsky explicitly avoided using an English-based orthography to write Indigenous vowels,
as outlined in a footnote in his 1835 Journey, as well as in his published vocabulary
(Lhotsky 1835, 39; 1839). With regard to Lhotsky’s ability to note down musical features
of the Song, his own musical training is mentioned in his article ‘Music in Australia’
published in June 1836 in his short-lived journal The Reformer, where he claims to have
practiced music himself ‘in the happier days of our youth’ (cited in Anon 1838, 117). That
he apprehended musical qualities of the Australian songs he encountered on his 1834
journey is demonstrated by his comments in relation to the performance (‘corrobery’) he
witnessed at Fish River, on 25 January: ‘Their strain was in 2–4 time, which they marked
by beating crotchets and in moments of greater excitement quavers’ (Lhotsky 1835, 45).

Language of the Song

Known to Lhotsky as members of ‘the Menero tribe’ (also spelled Maneroo), the perform-
ers of the Song were speakers of a language that has not been a community language for a

15 Alan Andrews comments in relation to Lhotsky’s notes on his travels that ‘they give the decided impression
that he had recorded the excursion with complete honesty and has recorded features and impressions to the
best of his ability’ (Andrews 1973, 114).
94 Musicology Australia vol. 42, no. 2, 2020

Table 1. Six-phrase Text of the Song as given by Lhotsky (1834), with transliteration by Troy.

Phrase Form Lhotsky Transliteration (Troy)

1 A Kon-gi kawel-go yue-re (8) Gu-n-dji gawal-gu yuri
2 A con-gi kawel-go yue-re (8) Gu-n-dji gawal-gu yuri
3 B kuma-gi ko-ko kawel-go kuma-gi (11) Gu-ma-dji gu-gu gawa-l-gu gu-ma-dji
4 C ka-ba ko-ma-gi ko-ko (7) Gaba gu-ma-dji gu-gu
5 B koma-gi ko-ko kabel-go koma-gi (11) Gu-ma-dji gu-gu gawa-l-gu gu-ma-dji
6 D ka-ba ko-ma-gi yue-re (8) Gaba gu-ma-dji yuri

Note: Phrase breaks here correspond to quaver rests in Lhotsky’s transcription. Syllable count of each
phrase of the Lhotsky version is given in parentheses.

very long time, although its use is now being renewed by Troy and her community. It was
only sparsely documented. The most useful and voluminous primary source material
currently known to researchers for the languages of the Snowy Mountains region is the
documentation of George Augustus Robinson when he was Chief Protector, Port Phillip
Aboriginal Protectorate, and travelled through the region in the mid nineteenth century
keeping notes and documenting Aboriginal language and cultural practices (Robinson
2000). Other sources of primary data for the languages of the region include Lhotsky
(1839) (as discussed in this article), Robert Hamilton Mathews (1908), and Luise Hercus
and Janet Mathews (1969). Troy has drawn on her own analyses of these sources and the
analyses of Harold Koch (2011, 2016, 2019), as well as her own work on related New
South Wales languages (Troy 1990, 1994, 2019). The Song’s text as given by Lhotsky has
been transliterated in Table 1, assuming a three-vowel system and the consonant phon-
eme system proposed by Hercus and Mathews (1969) and reconsidered by Koch (2016,
150–1), and drawing on Troy’s own work on the sound system of and orthographic con-
ventions for the Sydney Language, which has some features cognate with languages of the
Snowy Mountains (Troy 2019).
This is the first time that the Song’s text has received detailed linguistic attention.
Although there are some inconsistencies in Lhotsky’s text transcription (e.g., ‘kon-gi’ ver-
sus ‘con-gi’) we can clearly discern the poetic form AABCBD. Comparison of this poetic
form with that of the epilogue reveals no apparent relationship, weighing strongly against
the proposition offered by some commentators that the epilogue is a translation of the
Song’s text (Saintilan 1993, 58). Therefore, the free translation offered by Troy and pre-
sented in Table 2, based on her analysis of the text, constitutes the first translation of the
song’s Ngarigu text into English. Troy’s analysis of the text features the key terms given
in the vocabulary kunyima, ‘snow’ (here, gu-) and kabata, ‘moon’ (here, kaba). One could
say that Troy has here engaged her ‘feeling for snow’ (gu-), a feeling common to people
whose Country is characterized by a frozen landscape (Høeg 1993).
On examining the Ngarigu lyrics, it became clear to Troy that the Song provides a sub-
stantial clue about her heritage and how her people cared for Country. It appears to be a
song about snow, perhaps a snow increase song, the kind of ceremonial song Aboriginal
people across Australia create to ensure that important environmental events continue.
It makes sense that Ngarigu, as the people of snow and ice, would have a snow increase
ceremony to ensure the continuation of this essential element in the maintenance of the
alpine environment that the people depended upon and were responsible for maintaining,
an essential part of ‘caring for Country’. Increase ceremonies have been widely discussed
in anthropologies of Aboriginal people.16 The Song text as analysed appears to be an
 Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick, Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’ 95

Table 2. Proposed glossing of the lyrics of the Song, by Troy.

Line A (repeated): Gu-ndji gawa-l-gu yuri

gu -n -dji gawa -l -gu yuri [yuwari]

snow -make -IMPV by_and_by -IT -DAT send

Line B: Gu-ma-dji gu-gu gawa-l-gu gu-ma-dji

gu -ma -dji gu- gu gawa -l -gu gu -ma- -dji

snow -make -IMPV snow -REDUP by_and_by -IT -DAT snow -make -IMPV

Line C: Gaba gu-ma-dji gu-gu

gaba gu -ma -dji gu- gu

moon Snow make -IMPV snow REDUP

Line B: Gu-ma-dji gu-gu gawa-l-gu gu-ma-dji

Gu -ma -dji gu -gu gawa-l -gu gu -ma -dji

snow -make -IMPV snow REDUP by_and_by-IT DAT snow -make -IMPV

Line D: Gaba gu-ma-dji yuri

gaba gu -ma -dji yuri
moon snow make -IMPV send

Line A: Free translation: Make it snow again, send the snow for us soon! [Song exhorts the moon to
influence the return of the snow]
Line B: Free translation: Let it again snow and keep on snowing more and more for us
Line C: Free translation: Moon, make it keep on snowing more and more
Line D: Free translation: Moon, make it snow, send the snow

attempt by Ngarigu to influence the return of the snow and all that is associated with
snow and its subsequent melt that sustains the alpine ecosystem. Given the time of year it
was performed, it is also possible that the Song marked the end of the bogong season and
was part of a ceremony to ensure the right environmental conditions for the moths to
again increase in the spring. Whether frozen or melted, snow is core to the maintenance
of the fragile landscape of the High Country.
By early autumn, when the Song was performed, the appearance of a frosty moon—a
moon with a glowing frosty ring around it—indicates the beginning of the snow season.
Ngarigu people today look for this and also for brown clouds. When Troy comments that
she thinks it will snow, her mother will say ‘Yes, there are the brown clouds. It will defin-
itely snow’. She also says that when we have a drip on our cold noses, it is snowing in the
mountains. Having these and other markers of seasonal change pointed out to her is
something Troy has grown up with, signs that the much awaited snow, and the fun she
and her family have in their Country during the snow season, is beginning. From March
onwards, the onset of winter is also signalled by the migration down into the warmer
Canberra area of High Country birds like grey currawongs and magpies with large white
saddles from their heads to their lower backs. Troy’s daughter, in her turn, uses these

16 Morton contends that ‘an analysis of the symbolism of “increase rite” has to be integrated with an analysis
of its general effect, not only on the moral subjectivity and social constitution of believers, but also on the
natural phenomena which the rites are said to influence’ (1987, 455).
96 Musicology Australia vol. 42, no. 2, 2020

markers to understand seasonal change with reference to her Country, explaining to her
friends that arrival of the birds signals the change of seasons, as do clouds and the effects
of frost and icy cold on our bodies. Troy’s grandmother told her—and her mother also
reinforces this essential of Ngarigu cosmology—that nothing ever disappears. The past
and the present coexist: we are always living with whatever has happened before and our
ancestors look down on us as stars in the sky. Troy’s mother says: ‘We stand on the
ground and we touch the sky. In Ngarigu Country the sky and the earth meet on our high
mountains’ (Troy 2017). Thus, our work engaging with this Song continues the practice
of caring for snow and caring for Country, as well as creating an opportunity to repatriate
this knowledge more widely to the Ngarigu community.

Ngarigu Song in Regional Context

The following description of a ‘corroboree’ from a settler colonial perspective, published in
an oral history in 1926, is one of the few historical indications of performances in the
Ngarigu area:
The Manaro tribes seem to have been generally in friendly association with the
Canberra, Quanbeyan, Pialago men, as also with Murray and Gippsland natives.
… The people from all these places often held corroborees, for which the men
prepared themselves by painting and tattooing their bodies with alternate lines of
white and red pigments. These gave the individual so treated a truly terrifying
appearance, which was one of the objects aimed at. Women assisted at these
corroborees. Whilst the men shouted and sang as they danced, the women had
bundles of opossum skins rolled as tightly as possible. These they hit as hard as
they could, whilst sometimes joining in the singing. (Mitchell 1926, 18)
This quoted passage (as well as Lhotsky’s title, ‘A Song of the Women of the
Menero Tribe’) points to the key role of women in Ngarigu music, not only in singing,
but also in providing rhythmic accompaniment. This description accords with widespread
reports of women functioning as ‘orchestras’ at other performances witnessed by settlers in
south-eastern Australia in this period, often led by an older male ‘conductor’, while
women sang and beat time with a possum-skin ‘pillow’ on their laps (McDonald 2017,
140–71). See, for example, Eliza Kennedy’s description of Ngiyampaa singing practices
(cited in Donaldson 1987, 27) or Wurundjeri elder William Barak’s depictions of cor-
roboree performances (Barak 1895). This practice is often referred to in English as
‘beating the pillow’.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, any kind of Indigenous song and dance was
generally referred to in English as ‘corroboree’ (in various spellings, a word probably
drawn from the Sydney language; see Gummow 2001). The ‘corroboree’ genre itself is
regarded by some commentators such as Paul Carter as a European artefact:
The corroboree, like the ‘Aborigine’, was a European invention, a cultural
generalization reflective of difficulties of communication in the contact situation.
… the corroboree was a European construction in … that it was improvised and
institutionalized in response to the white invasion. (Carter 1992, 168–9)
Although performances witnessed by settler colonists and called ‘corroboree’ by them
were no doubt conditioned by the presence of the settler colonists themselves, there is
 Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick, Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’ 97

ample evidence in early written records that performances also took place independently of
settler colonist presence, often in the context of intergroup exchange (Casey 2013;
McDonald 2017, 140–71).17 From the perspective of the performers themselves, and of
their descendants today, performances embodied and articulated local social identities, and
thus reflected great typological, thematic and musical diversity. The passage quoted at the
head of this section specifically addresses the kinds of social relationships between neigh-
bouring groups that fostered development of broader regional performance conventions.
Apart from the Song itself and two Ngarigu men’s songs arranged for pianoforte by Isaac
Nathan a decade later, no other detailed accounts of specifically Ngarigu music-making
from this era survive. There exists, however, a useful sample from neighbouring groups.
Around 1896, the surveyor and self-taught anthropologist R.H. Mathews published an
account of ceremonies held by Dhurga people (coastal neighbours of the Ngarigu), including
descriptions of women’s singing, and later published texts and musical notations of some
men’s and women’s songs (Mathews 1896, 1907; Mathews and Everitt 1900, 279–80)
(reproduced and discussed in Gummow 1983, 245; see also Skinner and Wafer 2017,
403–4). In her survey of music-making in New South Wales, Gummow drew together these
historical notations by R.H. Mathews with much later documentation by Janet Mathews
and John Gordon of Dhurga and Dharawal songs by Herbert Chapman, Percy Davis,
Jimmy Chapman and Jimmy Little Snr (Gummow 1983, 239–69). Although Gummow
notes constraints in defining features of musical style of the area due to the limited size of
the sample (1983, 240), she observes that more broadly the music of New South Wales has
general characteristics in common with music from the rest of Aboriginal Australia
(1983, 277).
Thus, useful contextual information for interpreting Lhotsky’s document can be drawn
from discussions of early musical performances by other First Nations people elsewhere in
south-eastern Australia including work by Gummow (1983, 1992, 1994, 1995, 2001) and
Donaldson (1984, 1987, 1995), recently brought together and extended by McDonald
(2017). As observed by Gummow and others, historical records show that although
south-eastern musical style was generally diverse, some common features emerge
(Gummow 1983, 271–3; McDonald 2017, 156). Features relevant to this discussion (par-
aphrased from McDonald 2017) include the following:

 generally descending melodic phrases, with stepwise progression within phrases and
including tonal plateaux, with regular repetition of the final keynote;
 larger ascending intervals (up to an octave) sometimes found between phrases;
 two types of tonal organization, one where the final was the lowest note and another
arranged centrically around the final note; and
 predominantly syllabic rhythmic organization.

Adapting the Song to Parlour Music Conventions

The Song as published by Lhotsky lies somewhere between the known musical conven-
tions of south-eastern Australian ‘corroboree’ music, on the one hand, and those of
British parlour music on the other. The parlour music style had been imported along with

17 See also the extensive list of newspaper reports of Indigenous performances in early colonial times on
Graeme Skinner’s Australharmony website (Skinner 2014, 2020).
98 Musicology Australia vol. 42, no. 2, 2020

pianos by early settler colonists, but most sheet music was imported, and it was only from
the 1830s that locally composed sheet music began to be published in Australia (Skinner
2020), with the Song constituting the earliest surviving example.18 Because parlour music
was destined for amateur musicians, it was generally technically straightforward, and
indeed simplicity was regarded as an aesthetic ideal, allowing its usually sentimental
themes to be foregrounded in its performance (Key 2016). Composers charged with the
task of transforming the variety of musics from ethnic sources to fit into the parlour music
frame adopted processes described by Scott as ‘part appropriation and part invention’
(2017, 81). Commenting on how modal Scottish tunes were assimilated to the parlour
style, Scott notes that ‘the first thing that could be done to “improve” matters would be to
provide classical harmonies and decorate the melody with classical ornamentation’
(2017, 95).
Given the lack of harmonic basis of most Australian Indigenous musics, we may con-
jecture that a similar process was undertaken in adaptation of the Song. Thus, not only
the piano accompaniment, but also the fitting of the melody itself to the harmonic frame-
work of the parlour music style through introduction of leading notes, passing notes, leaps
within phrases and melismatic decorations, are likely, if not certain, additions by
Lhotsky’s ‘Musical Gentlemen’. Other features, however, remain unidiomatic to the par-
lour music genre—perhaps due to Lhotsky’s insistence on including features he had noted
from the original performance.
First among these anomalous characteristics is the maintenance of the text in an
untranslated Aboriginal language (interpreted earlier as a variety of Ngarigu) as opposed
to assimilation to parlour music conventions by providing English text.19 Instead, the mel-
ancholy sentiment characteristic of the parlour music genre is supplied by Lhotsky’s epi-
logue in English and German. By contrast, Nathan’s version conforms to the parlour
ballad form by setting an English text in three verses by Irish-born poet Mrs Eliza
Dunlop. Entitled ‘The Aboriginal Father’, this text invited the public to contemplate the
despair and sorrow of an Aboriginal father whose child had been murdered.20
As previously mentioned, Lhotsky’s 1834 musical setting of the Song was heavily
criticized by Isaac Nathan as ‘mutilated and deformed’ with ‘false rhythms, false bases and
false harmony’. Nathan was certainly a more accomplished musician and composer than
Lhotsky’s Musical Gentlemen, so his complete rewriting of the piano accompaniment
doubtless produced a more orthodox specimen of parlour music. As observed by Covell,
‘Nathan’s skill allowed him to be more industrious in producing a genteel travesty of trad-
itional chant’ (1967, 68). Some of Nathan’s corrections to Lhotsky’s version, however,

18 According to Skinner (2020), the lithographer was John Austin Gardner, who had arrived in Sydney in
June 1834.
19 Casey suggests that from an Indigenous perspective, ‘performances in Aboriginal languages without explan-
ation can be understood as an offer of knowledge to the settlers that required them to actively engage with
learning in order to understand. This is an offer that the majority of settlers failed or chose not to take up.
Given the violence against Aboriginal people and the need to negotiate safety and access to their traditional
lands and hunting grounds, this maintenance of cultural power and generosity is remarkable’ (2013, 63).
20 While consistent with the sentimental connotations of the parlour music style, Dunlop’s evocation of horror
and melancholy was linked to her political campaigns against massacres of Aboriginal people, notably the
Myall Creek massacre of 1838, for which she had written her most famous poem entitled ‘The Aboriginal
Mother’ (Hansord 2011).
 Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick, Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’ 99

Figure 2. Lhotsky’s 1834 Setting of the Song (Lhotsky 1834a, 2). Note: Courtesy of State Library of New
South Wales.

point to specific points of disjuncture in between the musical stylistics of ‘corroboree’

music and parlour music.
For example, Lhotsky’s version (Figure 2) generally maintains syllabic rhythm (charac-
teristic of ‘corroboree’ style), resulting in the shorter seven-syllable or eight-syllable lines
(A, C and D) being set to three-bar phrases, while the longer 11-syllable line B is set to a
100 Musicology Australia vol. 42, no. 2, 2020

Figure 3. Isaac Nathan’s Rearrangement of Lhotsky’s Original: ‘The Aboriginal Father’, with English Text
by Eliza Dunlop (Nathan 1843, 3). Note: Courtesy of State Library of New South Wales.

four-bar phrase. As can be seen from Figure 3, in revising Lhotsky’s version, Nathan
converted all Lhotsky’s three-bar phrases to four-bar phrases, either by interpolating an
additional bar of repeated melodic material (first system, bar 3) or by extending the
phrase-final note (system 2, bars 1–2; system 3, bars 3–4; system 4, bars 5–6). This irregu-
lar phrasing in the Lhotsky version is perhaps what Nathan meant by ‘false rhythms’,
 Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick, Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’ 101

because apart from some minor alterations to dotted rhythms, he otherwise largely
maintained Lhotsky’s rhythmic setting of the vocal line.
Another striking feature of the Lhotsky setting of the Song is its unusual harmonic
structure, setting the six lines of text in three sections, modulating D minor–G minor–C
minor. Various commentators including Skinner (2017) and Covell (1967) have com-
mented on this feature. Covell considers this feature to be an innovation of the Musical
Gentlemen ‘with a certain air of self-conscious unorthodoxy’ (1967, 67). Skinner com-
ments that Lhotsky’s version ‘defies European rules of tonality so as to end in a different
key from which it began. Perhaps Lhotsky had perfect pitch, and this is what he heard’
(Skinner 2011, 115). Nathan ‘corrected’ this feature by altering cadences and rearranging
the melody of the last line to return to D minor rather than C minor.
In the context of the characteristics of south-eastern Australian ‘corroboree’ style listed
earlier, it is noteworthy that Lhotsky’s version of the last phrase, finishing on C, displays
the centric tonal organization identified by Gummow as characteristic of south-eastern
Australian musical style,21 while Nathan’s version alters the melody to finish with the
phrase-final on the lowest note of the melody. While this ‘correction’ of Nathan’s no
doubt sought to address ‘false harmony’, in all probability it erased a key feature of the ori-
ginal Song. Sequential transpositions of melodies by a tone or a third are mentioned by
George W. Torrance, a nineteenth-century commentator on the music of Yorta composer
William Barak (Torrance 1887; discussed by McDonald 2017, 157). In light of these
observations, it is not implausible that the melody of the Song witnessed by Lhotsky
might have been similarly transposed.
In parlour music style, piano accompaniment often remains closely aligned to the vocal
line, reinforcing the pitch of the amateur singer and not infrequently showing musical
independence only in the pauses between lines or verses (Scott 2017, 29). This feature can
be observed in Nathan’s setting. By contrast, the texture of the piano accompaniment in
Lhotsky’s version involves frequent octaves in the left hand, often marking the vocal
rhythm. However ‘false’ these bases may have been when read from the perspective of the
conventional harmonic framework of the parlour song, they can also be read as invoking
the Menero women’s ‘beating of the pillow’ to accompany their Song.

Resetting the Song for Contemporary Ngarigu Performance

In 2017 Graeme Skinner proposed that:
[insofar] as some usable details of melody and rhythm can be recovered, or
reconstituted hypothetically, by stripping out their ‘improvements,’ even the most
unpromising cases of colonial arrangements––like Nathan’s, Salvado’s and
Taplin’s–– potentially retain real value for song revitalisation. (Skinner 2017, 356)

We have developed a sketch setting of the Song that discards features we consider to
have been introduced to fit parlour music conventions, with some additional reworking
inspired by stylistic features of the group of Dhurga women’s songs from the south coast
of New South Wales notated by Mathews around 1901 (Mathews 1907, 35).

21 Centric tonal organization is also found in the second section of the melody, which finishes on G in both
Lhotsky and Nathan’s versions.
102 Musicology Australia vol. 42, no. 2, 2020

Figure 4. Sketch Setting of ‘Gundji gawalgu yuri’. Note: Text proposed by Troy, music proposed by
Barwick, 2020.

To produce our sketch (Figure 4), based on Lhotsky’s 1834 version of the Song (rather
than Nathan’s later revisions), we have removed the piano accompaniment and stripped
the vocal melody of what we consider to be harmonic alterations (such as insertion of
leading notes) and unidiomatic leaps within musical phrases, otherwise largely maintain-
ing Lhotsky’s pitch contour. We have kept the uneven phrase structure, which we have
organized in a compound triple metre (reflecting the 6/8 time signature of the three wom-
en’s songs notated by Mathews) and inserted regular percussion (to reflect the women’s
beating). We have also realigned musical stress to fit the text stress (which occurs on the
 Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick, Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’ 103

first syllable of most words, as in Mathews [1907] and many other sources, rather than on
the last syllable, as in Lhotsky’s published score).

Conclusion
By claiming Lhotsky’s 1834 sheet music publication as a record of Ngarigu creative
practice, stemming from the heart of Ngarigu Country, our primary aim is to care for
Ngarigu performative culture, honour Ngarigu Country and nurture contemporary
Ngarigu creativity. Our hope is that our work may inspire new creations and new
performances by Ngarigu people on Country, and thus contribute to the great ongoing
dialogue between people and Country. As Troy commented in 2016, ‘We will never be
truly “colonised” while ever we keep these songlines open and we can rehearse the
knowledge of our peoples and our Countries that these songs repeat across thousands of
generations’ (Troy 2016). At the time of completing final revisions to this article, we are
undertaking a series of performance events to allow Ngarigu people to learn and perform
the Song on and for Country, with the support and collaboration of allies from other First
Nations groups and musical experts.
We also hope that this account of our research process will help others to take stock
of their own musical heritage, including understanding the double-edged role of song
documentation and adaptation in histories of advocacy for First Nations people as well as
erasure of First Nations musical agency. As co-authors, we share a commitment to
social justice and to contemporary efforts to re-evaluate and, where appropriate,
revitalize significant cultural records. We have struggled to forge this new story of
the Song. We are both children of the intellectual and social histories addressed in
this article.

Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Nicholas Routley, Allan Marett and Amanda Harris for feedback on earlier versions of
this article. Thank you, too, to participants in the Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project
DP180100938 ‘Reclaiming Performance Under Assimilation’, in particular those who attended the workshop
held on Ngarigu Country at Thredbo in May 2019.

Author Biographies
Jakelin Troy is Director, Indigenous Research at the University of Sydney. She is known as one of the early
founders, in Australia, of the field of language reconstruction from historical records. Specializing in the lan-
guages of New South Wales, her work began with an analysis of communication between Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal people in the post invasion ‘colonial’ period on the east coast of Australia (Troy 1985, 1990,
1994). Her 1993 publication The Sydney Language (second edition 2019) brought together and analysed his-
torical documents on the languages spoken in the Sydney area, including the Patyegarang and Dawes note-
books compiled circa 1791. A Ngarigu woman whose Country lies in the Snowy Mountains region of New
South Wales, she is responsible for the linguistic analysis in this article.
Linda Barwick is an Emeritus Professor in the Sydney Conservatorium of Music at the University of
Sydney. She is a musicologist specializing in Australian music, with a focus on repatriation and revitalization
of archival materials. Her convict settler ancestors were part of the colonial-era erasure of First Nations sov-
ereignty in New South Wales. She is responsible for the music analysis in this article. She is a Fellow of the
Australian Academy of the Humanities.
104 Musicology Australia vol. 42, no. 2, 2020

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