AustLit

'Central Australian songs are renowned for their association with tracts of land and for texts that are difficult to decipher. The Alyawarr women's songs of the Antarrengeny land-holding group are remarkable in that most verses can be parsed into speech equivalents with considerable consensus among the singers. The songs are thus revealing of how traditional Aboriginal verse is constructed. Drawing upon recordings from 1977-2011, this paper identifies 78 different verses, comprising 107 different lines of poetic-musical text. All 107 lines are set to one of 14 rhythmic patterns, which are arrangements of smaller 2-note and 3-note rhythmic patterns. Despite the transparency of the text, one question that arises concerns the role of the ubiquitous bar-initial consonant 'l', which appears to be the Alyawarr relativiser ='arl' ('where, which'), also common in placenames. Is this its meaning in the songs, or is it just a syllable inserted to achieve the preferred 10-syllable line structure? This paper suggests that ='arl' is both: it enables the preferred line structure to be met and alludes to a place through its structural resemblance to a proper name. In an area where songs, like places, are owned by family groups, this structural similarity expands the 'song-land relationship' (Moyle 1983). ' (Abstract)