Making Aboriginal Men and Music in Central Australia by Åse Ottosson (review)

Whether Indigenous or not, understanding any Indigenous culture in the global, new millennial age is a vexed question. This not solely for the fact that there is more than one tier to understand, roughly divided between varying levels of unsatisfactory living conditions and cultural output such as art, literature, and music. The latter may not disclose the former, simply because art can be used to transcend the depredations of the everyday. And the legacy of colonialism and "primitivism" all too frequently endows the cultural products of Indigenous peoples with a mystique and a level of authenticity that has more to do with white man's guilt than with genuine appraisal and a need to know. And finally, an ongoing casualty of poor race relations is to homogenize the Other. Yet as Åse Ottosson's invaluable study makes clear, it is impossible to make generalizations because of the ways in which Indigenous people occupy multiple tiers of activity, some linked to a traditional past, another actively adaptive of languages and systems imposed upon them. Her close examination of Aboriginal men in Central Australia and the role that music plays in the reshaping and safeguarding of their cultures, while a key document unto itself, also provides a case study of the global indigeneities, revealing the extent of their inventiveness and the ways in which art and music are potent tools of cultural interpellation.

Ottosson's book is essentially anthropological in focus and methodology, combining background accounts of the history of Aboriginal peoples after colonization, the role that art played in reconfiguring Indigenous identities from the 1970s onward, and, of course, music. This music is adapted from folk, country and western, and reggae, used as a febrile and dynamic tool for self-reflection and social protest. As those unfamiliar with this territory may find surprising, the exponents of these musics do not appeal to musical forms deemed "Indigenous," such as the didgeridoo (an instrument derived from a small region in the northeast cape of Arnhem land but since then identified as a national Aboriginal instrument). Rather, these musicians adopt unflamboyant, gritty personas in the effort to speak directly to their audiences, asserting a powerful masculinity that is, among others, a direct reaction to the emasculating measures of colonialism.

As Ottosson writes in her preface, one of the compelling qualities of this form and approach to music is the difficulty in glib definition:

Every performance is a healthy reminder of the futility in trying to fix categorically what others and selves are and can be. They provide a counter-narrative to a globally widespread preoccupation with defining and purifying national, racial, gendered and other forms of being in ways that delimit it, and, at times, violate, people's rights to define their experiences and existence in their own terms.

This observation has important ramifications, as it points out the ways in which all cultures, and Indigenous cultures in particular, approach themselves and their identity. It is not, as is widely assumed, simply a dissonance of imposed versus traditional threads of being. Rather, altogether new lines of expression are used to transcend this insoluble bind. As a result, as Ottosson observes, Aboriginal musicians stay clear of "traditional" subjects such as the Dreaming, risking derision (or worse, reprisal) if they do not. For Aboriginal lore and "Law" is sacred and secret, and it is recognized that it must be kept as such.

As an account that began as an anthropological field study, the book is littered with first-person experiences and testimonials, including the reflexive judgment of her own status as a non-Australian-born (Ottosson is originally from Sweden) white woman. This part-otherness, or displacement, she avers, conferred on her a special, privileged access and social intimacy. Although, as she confesses, she was subjected to regular sexual slurs, she suggests that Indigenous women would have found such a project next to impossible because of demarcated gender boundaries...