Indigenous Australian Oral History

Introduction

The Australian Aborigines tell the story of their nation in many varied forms, in the form of songs and chants, ritual dramatizations, paintings, dances and oral narratives. For over 60,000 years the Indigenous people of Australia have used oral narratives and songs that are passed down from generation to generation as a way of telling the story of their people in the past whilst embracing the present. There are two kinds of ways that these narratives may be told, openly for all to hear and sacred stories reserved for initiated members of one or the other sex. These stories can be incredibly complicated and profound often containing dozens or hundreds of verses, and often repeated over and over. These narratives, or stories of The Dreaming, often contain important information for the younger members of the tribe such as how the land came to be shaped and inhabited,(Fryer-Smith 2008) how to behave and why, and the personal histories of people’s lives. Many written sources of history often only tell the past from the point of view of the victors. Considering the history of Australia, the traditional oral narratives of the original indigenous inhabitants of is of paramount importance in keeping their time-honoured culture and its story alive.

The oral literature of the Australian Aboriginals is not merely a verbal exercise, it is a performance. It is a performance telling a story. These stories are often involved in a complex and specific relationship with other mediums of explaining and bestowing information. Therefore a song is usually accompanied by dances and gestures or a narrative with diagrams drawn in the sand. And whilst many of the stories of The Dreamtime have to some extent a prescribed method of re...

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...s and animals or about tribal or family history as passed down through time.

Modern Indigenous storytelling has many forms influenced by Western culture. With the modern Indigenous youth showing little interest in learning traditional storytelling many of the Elders are recording these narratives in writing, to save for a time in the future when interest in narrating the stories is revived. However oral storytelling is still very much alive through modern musicians using Western influenced music to carry on the traditions of their forefathers. Modern Indigenous songs tend contain land and community issues such as their love and loss of land as well as protest songs.

Works Cited

Indigenous Australia (2014) http://www.indigenousaustralia.info/languages/oral-traditions.html

Fryer-Smith, S. (2008) 2nd Ed Aboriginal Benchbook for Western Australian Courts.