Knowledge Intersections Symposium recording now available
The recording of the 2021
This online symposium was held within the 20th Symposium on Indigenous Music and Dance, in association with the Musicological Society of Australia’s 44th National Conference.
The symposium explored the relationships between music and lore through multidisciplinary panel discussions.
00:00:00 Introduction and Welcome to Country
00:14:25 Global perspectives on cultural continuity and change
This panel brings together a diverse array of speakers from Aotearoa (New Zealand), Taiwan, Brazil, and Australia to discuss how Indigenous peoples understand and negotiate ideas and expressions of cultural continuity and change in their respective counties. We will examine how understandings of cultural continuity in a changing world are often at odds with outsider assumptions about Indigenous cultures and, in some cases, work against the localised cultural maintenance needs of Indigenous peoples. Speakers will bring to this discussion reflections their own research and cultural practices, as well as their own engagements with (other) Indigenous cultural practitioners across a range of contexts from local to global.
Speakers: Meri Haami, Akawyan Pakawyan, Professor Yuh-Fen Tseng, Professor Jorge José de Carvalho, Professor Marcia Langton AO, Professor Aaron Corn
1:31:31 Sky knowledge and performance traditions
Indigenous peoples hold the world’s oldest continuous cultures of astronomy. Developed and passed down over tens of thousands of years, Indigenous observations of the Sun, Moon, and stars inform navigation and calendars, and predict weather, while the meanings and agency assigned to astronomical phenomena significantly inform Indigenous laws and social structures. This panel brings together Indigenous Elders and other speakers from Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the USA to share how Indigenous song and dance traditions, as performed in public ceremonies, carry detailed intergenerational knowledge of how Elders read the stars and other astronomical phenomena.
Speakers: Wanta Jampijinpa Patrick, Inawinytji Williamson, Dr Diana James, Associate Professor Duane Hamacher
2:35:20 Engineering and aquaculture in Indigenous knowledge practice
Over tens of thousands of years of habitation, Indigenous Australians developed sophisticated understandings and techniques for engineering, physics, and aquaculture in the design of elaborate stone fish traps, such as the ancient Ngunnhu in Brewarrina, and the 100 km squared eel farm at Budj Bim (Lake Condah) in Victoria. These aquaculture structures comprise complex canals systems linking weirs and ponds made of river stones and may be some of the oldest surviving human-made structures in the world. This panel brings together people with ancestral ties to important ancient aquaculture sites and discusses the sites' significance for Indigenous law, culture, and resource management both historically and today.
Speakers: Damein Bell, Associate Professor Juliana Kaya Prpic, Jesse Hodgetts, Tyson Lovett-Murray
3:33:53 Wild Honey: Caring for Bees in a Divided Land screening
For more than a century, the island of Timor has been divided by a colonial border. This border has displaced and separated the people of Lookeu, dividing their land, water, and history. Timor's migratory wild honey bees challenge this division. Their migrations are essential to the agricultural and spiritual wellbeing of the people and places who depend upon them. In community honey harvest rituals, queen bees are courted in ceremony by men who climb high into the canopy to sing nocturnal forest love songs. These songs express gratitude to the bees, enticing and imploring them to give up their sweetness and maintain their seasonal visits. This panel will screen and discuss the film Wild Honey: Caring for Bees in a Divided Land. This film is the outcome of a long-term collaboration between researchers Balthasar Kehi and Lisa Palmer and the people of Balthasar's homeland of Lookeu. It portrays a border community who, despite changing farming practices and increasing commodification, are determined to maintain the bees' movement across the region and preserve their shared identity.
Speakers: Associate Professor Lisa Palmer, Balthasar Kehi, Professor Marcia Langton AO
4:33:50 Closing remarks