Wurrurrumi Kun-Borrk
Kevin Djimarr
Sydney University Press
ISBN:
9781920898618
Joint winner of the traditional music award at the 2007 NT Indigenous Music Awards!!
Kun-borrk is a genre of individually owned songs
accompanied by didjeridu and clapsticks performed in
the western Arnhem Land region of the Northern Territory.
The songs on this CD represent the majority of a repertoire
belonging to the song man Kevin Djimarr, a member of the
Kurulk clan and the Kuninjku (Eastern Kunwinjku)
language group. Djimarr has lived much of his life at
Mumeka on the lower Mann River, a tributary of the
Liverpool River about 50km south of Maningrida
settlement. He is one of a number of celebrated Kun-borrksingers but in addition he is also renowned as a traditional
healer or 'clever man' known as na-kordang in Kuninjku.
Kun-borrk song series are often named after vegetable foods or
plants. The name of Djimarr's series is Wurrurrumi, which is the
name of a climbing monsoon forest vine Tinospora smilacina.
Some other song series by other singers are named after yams,
other climbing vines with tubers, or spirit beings.
Unlike the totemic song genres of many other ceremonies in Arnhem
Land, kun-borrk songs concentrate more on the episodic minutiae of
human emotions, subtle physical movements of the body,
conflicts, suspicions, and the gossip of interpersonal relationships.
An examination of the song texts on this CD reveals an almost
haiku-like poetic beauty. Small isolated incidents without any given
context are presented in a few lines of a song. They might involve
a wave, a gaze, the turning of the head or attention to a sound, an
admonition or a complaint.
Kun-borrk song texts do not fit the stereotype of the popularised
notion of 'song lines' with individual songs relating to tracts of
land or sites along a route taken by ancestral creation heroes. The
texts rarely say anything about individual places (although for an
exception see track 32) and except for a small number of songs in
a special unknown spirit or animal language (e.g. track 4), the song
texts are otherwise in ordinary Kuninjku with the literal translatability
being completely transparent (although the contextual meaning may
appear allusive).
Kun-borrk songs are also often referred to as gossip songs or love
songs because many of the topics of the songs are concerned with
oblique references to romantic relationships and affairs. One way
that kun-borrk song men make indirect references to risqué or even
illicit behaviour by lovers is to place the characters of real life dramas
into the guise of other beings such as the spirit beings known as
wayarra. So whilst at the literal level the song man might say that the
text is about the wayarra and their incorrigible behaviour, the songs
are really about actual people in the camp and what they have been
getting up to, including activities that others might find hilariously
funny or 'naughty'. Thus the term 'gossip songs'.
Many of Djimarr's songs in the Wurrurrumi series are, however,
strictly about the activities of wayarra spirits. This may be a result of
his ability as a 'clever man' or traditional healer, as it is believed that
the wayarra can endow humans with the power to heal. In Kuninjku
cosmology wayarra live inside the hollow trunks of certain trees.
They have a fascination with spear grass and they examine the
stems of the grass to identify each and every growth node starting
at the bottom and exclaiming when they reach the top kondanj
kanganjboke 'here it is coming into seed'.
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