Yurabirong – the people of this place. Song of Sydney is a sound work for radio commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), Classic FM’s program, The Listening Room, in 1994.

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), 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 are used as a counterpoint to recordings of contemporary Indigenous Australians pronouncing words from the lexicon of pre-colonial Sydney, as evidenced in The Sydney Language (1994), the work of Ngarigu linguist, Professor Jakelin Troy [1]

A starting point for Yurabirong was the city of Sydney and its surrounds, the peoples of the place and the landscape before English colonisation. The collaboration with artist and curator Brenda L Croft became a cornerstone of the work. 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 [2]  and 1998, but notably on 26 May 1997, by the ABC to mark the occasion of the National Reconciliation Convention on the 27th May 1997