Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’

Abstract

This article aims to re-evaluate Johann Lhotsky’s published sheet music ‘A Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe near the Australian Alps’ to claim it as a distinctively Ngarigu document that speaks to Ngarigu people today. Following a method suggested by Graeme Skinner, we recover additional information, strip out the ‘improvements’ of the arrangers and create a new Ngarigu-oriented reading with what we hope will be ‘real value for song revitalisation’ by providing ‘usable details’ of text, melody and rhythm. We suggest that the evidence tends to substantiate Skinner’s suggestion that Lhotsky’s original publication was more ‘ethnographically honest’ than Isaac Nathan’s revision. We present new conclusions as to who originally performed the Song, and when and where the performance witnessed by Lhotsky took place. We show that Lhotsky’s untranslated text is clearly in an Aboriginal language and provides important clues to its significance to Ngarigu Country. We contend that various musical features of Lhotsky’s publication, while departing from the norms of settler colonial parlour music, bear witness instead to Ngarigu performance practice of the time.