Productive Ambiguity: Fleshing out the Bones in Yolŋu Manikay "Song" Performance, and the Australian Art Orchestra’s "Crossing Roper Bar"

This paper examines the place of creativity amid orthodox musical elements in the manikay (public song) tradition of the Yolŋu people of Northern Australia, particularly the song repertoire belonging to the Wägilak clan from Ŋilipidji. Beginning with the Yolŋu metaphor of raki (string) as it describes an individual’s historical constitution, an examination of productive ambiguities built into the rhythmic (bilma) and intervallic (dämbu) forms of manikay underpins the assertion that tradition speaks with living relevance through performed realisation and improvisation. The Australian Art Orchestra’s collaboration with Wägilak songmen, "Crossing Roper Bar," is introduced as a dramatic example of the manikay tradition working in and through contemporary expressions and contexts. This project sustains the ancestral bones of manikay, dutifully curated through the generations as an integral, orthodox framework with complex social, legal, and religious significances. Here, discursive musical conversation is central to a non-appropriative engagement with cultural difference and musical forms from the past.