Singing Up Spirit of the Land + Healing Country

Singing Up Spirit of the Land and Healing Country on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) is a 2019-21 initiative inspired by 24 months of audio recordings with Uncle Bob Anderson.

Mining is set to end on Minjerribah, traditional home lands of the Quandamooka peoples in 2019 – a result of Native Title granted to the Quandamooka peoples in 2011. But this is a win for indigenous peoples and environmentalists alike.

“We will perform wadama, dance and sing up the spirit of the land once more” says Uncle Bob Anderson.

Conceptually it invites people into an onsite interactive and collaborative multimedia performance. It experiments with inter-cultural collaboration and finds common ground in our collective relationship to the Land.

The initiative is in three stages:

1. Wadama; Aboriginal ceremony involving song and dance and symbolically replacing the footprints of the ancestors on mine site, 2019.

Aboriginal people will walk once more where Aboriginal people have been forbidden by foreign-owned mining companies since the 1940s.

2. An inter-cultural and trans-disciplinary land healing ceremony within Naree Budjong Djara National Park, 2020.

3. Documentation of the fore mentioned and representation of it as living archive in a gallery context and online.