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WE WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE ABORIGINAL PEOPLE OF AUSTRALIA FOR SHARING THEIR CULTURE AND THE DIDJERIDU WITH THE WORLD. MAY OUR DESCENDANTS, AND THEIRS, KEEP THE STORIES ALIVE.

About the Didjeridu

The didjeridu is possibly the oldest wind instrument in the world. It is a tree or limb that is naturally hollowed out by termites, who eat the dead (heartwood) part of the tree. It is used for ceremony, celebration, healing, stories, and to connect the aboriginals to their ancesters in the dreamtime. In modern day it has evolved into a versatile musical instrument. It is used for healing, meditation, rhythm, and is played in all styles of music.

"Non-aboriginal people first documented encountering the didjeridu when an explorer named T.B. Wilson described an aboriginal man playing an instrument called the eboro in Raffles Bay on the Coburg Peninsula in 1835. He described the instrument as being made of bamboo and about three feet in length. The earliest references to the instrument all occur in the later part of the last century. In the century that followed, the instrument was observed by anthropologists on mainland Arnhem Land. The hard wood instruments particular to Arnhem Land (yirdakis) were usually crafted from eucalyptus species like "stringy bark" and "woolybutt" in the North, and Red River Gum further south near Katherine. There is also documentation of didgeridoos made of palm even further south. By the time anthropologist Alice Moyle was publishing her field work in the mid 1970s, aboriginal groups where using found pipes such as land rover tailpipes and water pipes as didjeridus."
Ref:
Ed Drury

"As with imagemaking, Aboriginal music also unites consciousness with the invisible laws and energy patterns of nature. Aboriginal art is perhaps most accurately described as a method for gaining knowledge of nature and its invisible Dreaming. An example is the playing of the didjeridoo, a long wooden flute, perhaps the oldest musical instrument on earth.
Traditionally, an Aborigine would go into nature and listen intensely to animal sounds, not just voices, but also the flapping of wings or the thump of feet on the ground. The Aborigine would also listen to the sounds of wind, thunder, trees creaking, and water running. The essences of all these sounds were played with as much accuracy as possible within the droning sound of the didjeridoo. For the Aborigine, the observation of nature immediately requires a state of empathy, which leads to an imitative expression."
Ref:
Voices of the First Day
Published by Inner Traditional

Termites and the Eucalyptus:

Termites, often called white ants by Australian aboriginals, are not in fact, ants at all. It is believed that termites and eucalyptus have co-evolved an association in which the termites eat at the dead (heartwood) component of the tree, causing it to fall, decompose and become fertilizer for the other trees. The hollow stems are formed when natural self-thinning takes place. It is all part of the life cycle and is an efficient way of recycling nutrients from the less successful plants back to the more successful.

Myths of the Didjeridu

DIDJERIDUS WERE ONLY FOUND TRADITIONALLY IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA

At an elementary stage in the development of blowing techniques, areophones sounded by vibrating, or 'buzzing' the lips inside a tube, may have been more widely distributed in Australia than at present.

Some evidence for this is to be found in the literature on central Australian groups. Spencer and Gillen (1899) refer to a 'rudimentary trumpet" (60cm. In length) called ilpirra or ulpirra.

This was used by Aboriginal men as a magic charm for obtaining wives. C.Strehlow (1908) shows illustrations of the tjurunga ulburu and the karakara, the latter used in an Aranda Itata, or public celebration in which women participated.

T.G.H Strehlow (1947) writes of a 'low toned wooden ulbura trumpet' used by southern Aranda people on the Finke River. The instrument is pictured representing the neck (rantja) of a venomous snake 'playfully "biting" a novice from another Aranda group' .

Eylmann (1908) refers to wooden and bamboo trumpets; and his illustrations include a 'Trompete der Waramunga', that is of a desert group.
Ref:
Aboriginalart.com

ALL WOMEN SHOULD NOT PLAY THE DIDJERIDU

This aims to clarify some misunderstandings of the role of Didjeridu in traditional Aboriginal culture, in particular the popular conception that it is taboo for women to play or even touch a Didjeridu.

While it is true that in the traditional didjeridu accompanied genres of Northern Australia, (e.g. Wangga and Bunggurl) women do not play in public ceremony, in these areas there appears to be few restrictions on women playing in an informal capacity. The area in which there are the strictest restrictions on women playing and touching the Didjeridu appears to be in the south east of Australia, where in fact Didjeridu has only recently been introduced. I believe that the international dissemination of the "taboo" results from it's compatibility with the commercial agendas of New Age niche marketing.

My understanding of Aboriginal culture in Australia has been formed as an academic ethnomusicologist, through acquaintance with the ethnomusicological and anthropological literature as well as through personal contact, during classes and fieldwork, with the Aboriginal people in a number of communities in South Australia, the Northern Territory and New South Wales.

It is true that traditionally women have not played the Didjeridu in ceremony. However let us review the evidence for Aboriginal women playing Didjeridu in informal situations. In discussions with women in the Belyuen community near Darwin in 1995. I was told that there was no prohibition on women playing and in fact several of the older women mentioned a women in the Daly River area who used to play the Didjeridu.
In a discussion with men from Groote Eylandt, Numbulwar and Gunbalanya it was agreed that there was no explicit Dreaming Law that women should not play Didjeridu, it was more that women did not know how to. From Yirrkala, there are reports that while both boys and girls as young children play with toy instruments, within a few years, girls stop playing the instrument in public. There are reports that women engage in preparation of Didjeridus for sale to tourists also playing instruments to test their useability. Reports of women playing the Didjeridu are especially common in the Kimberley and Gulf regions the Westerly and Easterly extremes of it's distribution in traditional music. The Didjeridu has only begun to be played in these areas this century where it accompanies genres originally deriving from Arnhem Land (Bunggurl) or the Daly region (Wangga, Lirrga and Gunborrg)

The clamour of conflicting voices about the use of Didjeridu by women and by outsiders has drawn attention to the potential for international exploitation and appropriation of traditional music and other Aboriginal cultural property. In addition, the debate has drawn to international attention the fact that there are levels of the sacred and the secret in traditional Aboriginal beliefs, many of them restricted according to gender. Perhaps the Didjeridu in this case is functioning as a false front, standing in for other truly sacred and restricted according to Aboriginal ceremonial life that it can not be named in public. In this way, the spiritualising of the Didjeridu not only panders to the commercial New Age niche, but also serves as a means of warning non-Aboriginal people to be wary of inquiring too closely into sacred matters.
Written by Linda Barwick
REF
The Didgeridoo, From Arnhem Land to Internet
Perfect Beat Publications / Karl Keuenfeldt Back to Index

This is a list of a few tribal groups, where they are from and their name for the didjeridu.

Copyright ©2006 Sacred Hollow