Indigenous Tiwi Elders visit the NFSA
Tiwi Elders perform at the NFSA
In November Indigenous Tiwi Elders from Bathurst Island in the Torres Strait provided the NFSA with a special gift: a unique performance of traditional singing and dancing in the courtyard.
Tiwi Elders traditionally create and sing songs for their community, continuing a long history of oral music culture. They perform at ceremonial and social gatherings, recording through song important contemporary events as well as telling in music traditional stories about their land and people.
To a delighted audience of lucky Canberrans and NFSA staff, the elders performed Ngarukuruwala (we sing songs). Ngarukuruwala combines the rhythmic and melodic structures of Indigenous Tiwi music with those of jazz, creating new versions of old songs to inspire reinvigoration and preservation of Tiwi language and culture. The songs and dances tell country stories, history stories and spirit stories.
The Tiwi Elders were at the NFSA to look at audiovisual material in the national collection relating to their community and culture. The NFSA will repatriate materials back to Torres Strait communities for cultural maintenance purposes. The event was part of an ongoing engagement process with peoples of the Torres Strait and followed a performance in September by Indigenous dancers from Poruma.
Out of the past
Sometimes, working at the NFSA, your past can leap up and bite you. Sound archivist Ernie Oxwell was working on the recently acquired collection of tapes and documentation from the late Martin Clarke, the founder of the Perth-based record label, Clarion. Back in the sixties Clarion recorded a young band called Johnny Young and the Strangers, the lead singer being a budding disc jockey on Perth radio station 6KY.
Johnny Young went onto a stellar career having a number of big-selling hits in the sixties with songs like Carolyn and Step Back. One of the tapes Ernie was listening to featured a live cross from radio station 6KY to the Chevron Hotel in Sydney where Johnny was being awarded his first gold record in 1966. The announcer Paul Gadenne refers to the man in the control room as 'Ernie'.
Ernie Oxwell almost fell out of his chair. 'Forty-three years later, and I realised that was a young me in the control room!' Before coming to the NFSA in 1997 Ernie had a very interesting career in radio and television, beginning as a Control Room Operator at 6KY before moving to television station BTW3 in Bunbury, then on to TVW 7 (where he teamed up again with Johnny Young), before moving onto a career in travel and tourism.
Johnny Young has completed the circle: he is currently breakfast host on Perth AM station 6IX.
Flappers to Larrikins: Bruce Johnson Lectures on Jazz
Professor Bruce Johnson, Australia's pre-eminent jazz historian and current NFSA SAR Fellow is presenting insights into the development of Australian jazz in an inaugural SAR series of free public lectures.
In Lecture One, held at Macquarie University earlier in November, Bruce examined the relationship between jazz and the developing sense of Australian identity. Lecture Two, to be held in Melbourne, will look at jazz's perceived anarchy, the hustling and often 'negroid' popular culture of the USA, and the arrival of the 'New Woman'. Bruce will pay special attention to film, sheet music and the press. Lecture Three, titled Jazz and Australia: Bridging the Gap on Screen, will be held on Thursday 3 December at 5.30pm in the Theatrette of the NFSA, Canberra.
Experience, engage, entertain - australianscreen online reborn
ASO relaunches with a new look
On 18 November the NFSA launched the newly redesigned and expanded web resource australianscreen online.
Established in 2007, australianscreen online now encompasses nearly 1400 Australian film and television titles from the last 110 years, represented with clips, curator's notes and additional information.
The new australianscreen online is now located at aso.gov.au. With a fresh new look, the site is now more interactive, creating a host of places for site visitors to contribute to the website. It also boasts a swag of exciting new features such as a series of exclusive interviews with filmmakers, starting with David Caesar and Glenys Rowe and adding Dr George Miller, Rachel Perkins and more in coming months.
New features include regular news items, games, a green room, filmmaker comments and portraits and a place where the user can make comments about titles and publish their own film reviews.
The titles contained in australianscreen online are sourced from the NFSA and its collection partners - the National Archives of Australia, the ABC, SBS and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. This material is freely available online for educational users and the general public. Education resources are produced by its education partner, the Curriculum Corporation, through the Learning Federation.
australianscreen online has received recognition as finalist at the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association Awards, the Australian Teachers of Media Awards, the UK's Learning Onscreen Awards and was recently announced as a Silver Award winner in the W3 Awards of the International Academy of Visual Arts.
The Voss Journey wins critics award
The Voss Journey, widely regarded as one of the most significant events in Canberra's cultural calendar in 2009, was recognised with an award from the Canberra Critics' Circle on Tuesday 24 November.
For The Voss Journey, 15 national institutions, led by the NFSA, collaborated to present a four-day exploration of Patrick White's iconic novel Voss and the rich artistic works it inspired, especially music and cinema.
The Canberra Critics' Circle award was presented to joint curators, the NFSA's Vincent Plush and the NLA's Robyn Holmes for conceiving and directing The Voss Journey, in celebration of the late composer Richard Meale's operatic interpretation of White's novel.
In addition, NFSA board-member and filmmaker, Andrew Pike was presented with the inaugural Canberra Critic's Circle film award for his documentary The Chifleys of Busby Street.
