Dancing in Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance

by Anna Haebich

xix + 405 pp., UWA Publishing, 2018,

ISBN: 9781742589718 (pbk), $29.99

Review by Clint Bracknell

The University of Queensland

‘Nyungar’ (also spelled Noongar) describes the people, land and language of one of Australia’s largest Aboriginal cultural blocs in terms of population and geographic area, including the capital city of Perth and encompassing the south-western corner of Western Australia from Dongara in the north-west to Cape Arid National Park on the south-east coast. Anna Haebich’s Dancing in Shadows draws on meticulous archival research to provide deep, lingering snapshots of entanglement between Nyungar and other people, settler colonialism and performance. Dancing in Shadows is grounded in themes of ‘Nyungar sustainability through performance against the odds; cultural maintenance and agency through performance activism; cultural change, continuity and innovation; and the healing power of performance’ (p. 4). Haebich effectively casts the net wider than the performing arts to interpret tourism, official welcomes, sports, karaoke and activism ‘through the lens of performance’ (p. 5). Tracing thematic links across almost 200 years of activity in the south-west of Western Australia, she presents a chronological history from onset of colonisation, through the assimilation era and up to the beginning of this century, highlighting some of the public institutions and individuals involved alongside more intimate accounts. Dancing in Shadows is not an exhaustive study of Nyungar performance but serves as a valuable and foundational resource for future work in this area.

In earlier sections of the book, Haebich unpacks the colonial and missionary gaze to glean clues about Nyungar motivations, a method reliant on the values and interpretive skills of the researcher. Written records of something as dynamic and ephemeral as performance are especially problematic. The very act of writing down and notating an Indigenous song can be tantamount to its colonisation; reducing and enshrining it in written form according to a narrow interpretation, and trapping it as an artefact of the past.¹ The ambitions and limitations of prominent recordists such as Bishop Salvado of New Norcia Mission and the journalist/ethnographer Daisy Bates loom large over the significant Nyungar presence they describe. Haebich highlights the sad truth that despite their occasional praise of Nyungar talent, the people who wrote the scant early descriptions of Nyungar performance did very little to support its continuation. In many cases, they actively sought to suppress and replace it with something more exotic or assimilated it to suit colonial tastes or their own agendas. Building upon her monumental past works, Haebich expands on histories of the New Norcia Mission, Moore River Native Settlement and Coolbaroo League with pertinent insights associated with performance training and repertoire, and details about the lives of Nyungar performers such as William Monop and Paul Piramino. Discussion of the ways in which Nyungar have engaged with popular music and karaoke on their own terms displaces popular music as inherently Western and assimilationist. Haebich’s decidedly pro-Nyungar approach underpins her analysis and the consistent links she draws between corroboree-style performance and more recently adapted modes and genres.

The theme of cultural survival is nevertheless a source of consistent tension throughout the book. The settler colonial project has devastatingly impacted Nyungar language and performance traditions, both of which are pivotal to the sustainability of inherently local Nyungar lifeways and worldviews. Aaniiih-Gros Ventre psychologist Joseph P. Gone challenges Indigenous researchers to account for:

how precontact Indigenous epistemologies could survive today, given that we’ve endured so much culture loss. Every community you go to, you’ve got this funny paradox. On one hand, ‘We’ve lost everything. The White man took it all.’ On the other hand, ‘Oh, but we have our own traditional ways of knowing. We have Indigenous epistemologies. We can do our own thing our own way.’ Those two things don’t really go together very well. So, I think we need to spend some thought thinking about which is it, and in what way, and how do we make sense of it?²

The links Haebich draws between past and present Nyungar performance practices are grounded in Nyungar ideals of multi-generational inclusivity and the maintenance of identity and wellbeing. Relationships between performance and Country are not as thoroughly explored. Central to the surge of linguistic and cultural revitalisation spearheaded by individuals including the late Ken Colbung since the 1970s, Nyungar performance still powerfully embodies connection to Country. Journalist Victoria Laurie’s impression that the Nyungar focus in the 2006 Perth Festival did ‘more for black/white relations in Perth than any single event in the city’s history’ attests to this.³

The book’s second half focuses principally on cross-cultural collaboration in theatre, drawing on a lengthy interview with non-Aboriginal director Andrew Ross, and featuring a chapter about the play Bindjareb Pinjarra. Haebich begins here to illustrate the profound influence of Aboriginal creatives from Western Australia on the development of meaningfully Australian work. Although a gracious interview with Nyungar-language singer Gina Williams concludes Dancing in Shadows, the book eschews a standard concluding chapter. The past decade of Nyungar theatre – in which Nyungar have increasingly taken up creative leadership roles – is wrapped up in one page (p. 272), signalling directions for future study of performance practices in one of Australia’s most innovative regions. Since the book’s publication, 12 Nyungar creatives worked together to lead development and presentation of the first ever Shakespearean work to be fully adapted in a language of Australia (Hecate in 2020) and, in a subsequent world-first, 21 Nyungar voice-actors dubbed an international feature film in Nyungar language (Fist of Fury Noongar Daa (2021)).

References

Gone, Joseph P. ‘Considering Indigenous Research Methodologies: Critical Reflections by an Indigenous Knower’. Qualitative Inquiry 25, no. 1 (2018): 45–56.

Tomlinson, Gary. The Singing of the New World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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