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Didgeridoo craftsmen under threat

By Christian Mahne

Rripangu Yirdaki 2002

13 March 2003 - Manyallaluk, Northern Territory, Australia - The Didgeridoo is both the cultural icon of Aboriginal Australia and a keepsake for thousands of tourists each year.

How do you keep true to one, while being accessible to the other? In the community of Manyallaluk, five hours drive from Darwin, didgeridoo making and playing is an art form as old as the hills.

Commercial pressures of supply and demand don’t sit well with traditional craftsmen - with so many visitors to Australia wanting a didgeridoo to take home with them, the old fashioned methods of production just can’t keep up.

Master Didgeridoo Maker “Long John” Dewar has been walking the forests of Manyallaluk for over 40 years.

He finds the most suitable trees for making didgeridoos out of by tapping the tree to tell if it’s been hollowed out by termites.

He might find one an hour.

After cutting it down by hand and stripping the bark he can carry it back to the community.

Shaping the stick into one of the 30 or so “yedaki” he will make this year, each one a time-consuming endeavour that will sell for around A$100.

Communities like Manyallaluk make and sell their didgeridoos direct to the public but they are in a minority.

Of the 10,000 or so sticks that leave this region to feed the world market each year, less than half are “fair dinkum” - the genuine
article.

Poachers are coming onto Aboriginal ground in ever-increasing numbers.

They clear-fell trees en masse and mechanically drill out the heart to enable the log to be played.

The sticks are then painted up - sometimes by traditional artists, sometimes not - and sold in tourist shops throughout Australia.

Stephen Ariston from the Katherine Art Gallery believes the vast majority of didgeridoos sold are now produced this way. ...and sell to eager tourists

“Ninety percent of didgeridoos these days are made by white people. Aboriginal people just can’t keep up the supply and demand for them,” he said.

“A hundred percent of our didgeridoos are painted by Aboriginals and I think it’s wrong for them to be painted by white people, which goes on in Cairns and stuff like that.”

Wrong or not, it is on the increase. Mass production of didgeridoos is the only way to meet demand but it comes at a high price - cutting Aboriginal people out of the supply chain.

Nick Decandillo, business manager for the Jawoyn Association, said a tagging system was the answer.

“Aboriginal people are losing control of their icon, and I think a tagging system which says ‘this didgeridoo is made, is cut, is
processed, is handled and painted by Aboriginal people’ with a tag commands a much higher price.”

But whether tourists, such as those visiting the recent “Didg Rocks Festival” in Sydney, are willing to pay top dollar for an authentic
instrument most will never play is very hard to tell.

Source: BBC

related links :

• Didgeridoo popularity cuts both ways
  19 December, 2002 - As demand grows, so too does poaching for the prized didgeridoo timber on traditional Aboriginal land, particularly in the Northern Territory, the Top End, where it's known more as the "yedaki". Now Aboriginal leaders are looking at ways to wrest back some control of their cultural icon.
• We must be careful to preserve the value of Australia's Indigenous art
  13 December 2002 - Earlier this month, the Australia Council for the Arts (OzCo) announced a series of protocols for dealing with Indigenous cultures. Developed to guide non-Indigenous artists and the wider community in how to interact respectfully with Australian Aboriginal identities, imagery and ancestral myths, the Oz Co's Indigenous Protocols are a major step towards protecting the status of native Australian's cultural heritage.
• Ancient didgeridoo adopted by the digital generation
  June 23, 2002 - For aborigines, the music of the didgeridoo is less an art in itself than a conduit to Dreamtime, the ongoing creation story that is the center of Aboriginal ritual and myth. For Goma, the challenge was fitting the ritualistic, transcendent possibilities of the instrument to his own particular background.
• Was the didgeridoo a bit of Irish to the Aborigines?
  June 23 2002 - Faith and begorrah! The linguistic origins of Australia's most iconic musical instrument, the didgeridoo, have been called into question with an academic claiming the name is of Irish derivation rather than from an Aboriginal dialect.
• Stolen Identities
  29 January 2000 - As Aboriginal people transferred their visions onto canvas, buyers swiftly began to recognise their value. Aboriginal painting is now recognised as one of the most important movements in modern art. It generates around 200 million Australian dollars a year: some canvases are worth as much as A$40,000 each. For a while it looked as if the sale of art would be a means by which the Aborigines could start to recover some of the self-respect of which they have been deprived, as well, of course, as some of the resources. As soon as their painting became valuable, however, white marauders began to steal even that.
• Didgeridoo & Co Magazine carrys news and dates for Didgeridoo lovers in Europe. English version. German version
• Didjeridu Events in the UK

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