Sustaining junba in the Kimberley through local archives

  • Sally Treloyn, Charles Darwin University, Australia
  • This paper will report on the ongoing project ‘Sustaining junba in the Kimberley: documentation of songs and community access’, which aims to establish, monitor, and plan for the creation of a network of local, accessible archives of song-based material in the northcentral and western Kimberley in northwest Australia. Drawing on ethnomusicological research on the junba tradition (a public genre of dance-song indigenous to a broad region of the Kimberley), and on data collected during the early stages of creating and maintaining a pilot junba archive in one junba-owning community, the objective of the paper is to report on the attitudes of Ungarinyin-speaking junba performer/owners to local archives. The paper will present a survey of local attitudes to the role of archives in: preserving the junba tradition, history, and the traditional knowledge associated with it; health and wellbeing; and, reestablishing indigenous control over and access to material that has previously been held in archives that are not accessible to indigenous performers in remote locations.