Yurabirong (Song of Sydney) 1994
Yurabirong – the people of this place 1994, audio compact disc, stereo, duration: 25 mins.
Voices: Bradley Byquar, Brenda L Croft (Gurindji/Malngin/Mudpurra peoples and Anglo-Australian heritage),
H J Wedge (Wiradjuri people), Jody Chester (Wiradjuri people), Tjanara Talbot (Wiradjuri/Bundjalung peoples).
Produced by Derek Kreckler (Irish/French), Brenda L Croft and the ABC, directed by Derek Kreckler.
Concept: Kreckler and Croft.
Yurabirong – the people of this place. I also call this work Song of Sydney. It is a sound work for radio commissioned in 1994 by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) for Classic FM’s program, The Listening Room.
Yurabirong, meaning ‘the people of this place’, evokes a sonic picture of Sydney through recordings and re-enactments drawn from the ABC archives. Examples include: the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (1932), and re-enactments of the arrival of Captain James Cook and Captain Arthur Phillip, respectively (1938), the Rocks Green Ban (circa 1971), the launching of Alan Bond’s Endeavour (1993), and snippets of various twentieth-century radio dramatisations.
The archival recordings were mixed with field recordings from Sydney recorded over Spring and Summer in 1994: trains, birds, thunder, New Year’s Eve in the Rocks, Sydney Harbour water sounds, and downtown street sounds. These audio memories serve as a counterpoint to recordings of contemporary Indigenous Australians pronouncing words from the lexicon of pre-colonial Sydney, based on William Dawes’s 1790-91 notebooks and informed by other contemporary records of the Sydney and surrounding languages.
Yurabirong’s starting point was the city of Sydney and its surrounds, the peoples of the place, and the landscape before English colonisation. A collaboration with fellow artist and curator Brenda L Croft (Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra Peoples) developed and was invaluable. Brenda’s knowledge of Indigenous protocols and contacts, and her friendship, made a difficult task rewarding for everyone involved. The work concludes with actor Bradley Byquar, naming each headland and island in Sydney Harbour using words from The Sydney Language, as if moving east to west from the heads to the mouth of the Parramatta River.
Yurabirong – the people of this place. Song of Sydney (1994) was broadcast four times between 1994 [1] and 1998, but notably on 26 May 1997, by the ABC to mark the occasion of the National Reconciliation Convention on 27 May 1997
Listen to a shortened, low-resolution version of Yurabirong … 1’45” (full hi-res duration 25 minutes available on request).
[1]( Excerpt), played at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, exhibition: Sound In Space: Adventures in Australian Sound Art (1995)