AustLit

'Few musicians have had as profound an impact on Australia’s cultural and political life as those in Yothu Yindi. Formed in 1986, this revolutionary band brought together Indigenous musicians from the Yolŋu town of Yirrkala in Northeast Arnhem Land and their non-Indigenous, or Balanda, friends who played in a Darwin band called the Swamp Jockeys.'  (Introduction)

'Semantic Web ontology files can be flexibly programmed to delineate metadata relationships in machine-readable formats to create relational pathways for discovering resources both on and off the Internet. There is a global community of Semantic Web developers and users across a broad multi-disciplinary range of interests who create and share extensible open-source ontologies. In this article, the author will explore the functionality of Semantic Web techniques for representing the ontologies of relatedness through kinship that typically underpin Australian Indigenous knowledge systems, and investigate their potentials for meeting persistent demands among leading Australian Indigenous collections creators and users to be able to search and discover their hereditary knowledge resources in ways that reflect and reinforce their enduring cultural values, ways of knowing and rights-management concerns.' (Publication abstract)

'In the early 1990s, the Australian band Yothu Yindi rose to national prominence with hit songs like 'Treaty' and 'Djäpana' that would become part of Australia's cultural fabric. With its distinctive blend of global popular styles and rare Indigenous traditions from remote Arnhem Land, international acclaim soon followed, as did a swathe of industry awards and the naming of band's main singer and songwriter, Mandawuy Yunupingu, as Australian of the Year for 1992. Yothu Yindi stood as an icon of the Aboriginal Reconciliation movement at a time when Australia's legal and political institutions were starting to recognise their past injustices against Indigenous Australians and the continuing native title over the lands they inhabited. But how well do we know Yothu Yindi and its songs? Or the culture, history and politics of the remote tropical region in Australia's Northern Territory that shaped its musicians and their music? In Reflections & voices, Aaron Corn takes readers on a captivating journey with Mandawuy Yunupingu through the ideas and events behind some of Yothu Yindi's best known songs. Together they locate the band within a continuum of traditional practice that records the beauty of Arnhem Land as experienced by Mandawuy's ancestors, and has guided local engagements with visitors from across the Arafura Sea for countless centuries. They reveal how Mandawuy's work as an educator and musician championed the continuing importance of traditional Indigenous thought and practice to contemporary life in Australia. Through Yothu Yindi, he inspired an entire generation to rethink Australia's relationship with its First Peoples and to dream of a brighter day when a Treaty with Indigenous Australians will make all the waters one.' (Publication summary)