thoughts on aoba 40 years later

 

40 years later and I realise we made one great omission. Our task (we had set ourselves) was to make sound recordings of all the music we heard on Aoba. This we achieved. Signally well. But, just now, as I was printing some of the leica frames from our inspection of instruments at the Australian Museum, I realised our singular omission. Yes, we had photographs of the Hunggwe slit drum ensembles. Yes, we had sound recordings of the country and western style of popular music for the social dancing after the outdoor Christmas feast. But we had no photographs of the modern musical instruments. We had the sound of guitars but no pictures. Our search for ‘folk music’ had led us astray. We had devoted too little consideration to the everyday instruments that had acculturated.

It was while I was printing the Australian Museum frames I realised, as though quite suddenly, that we had neither seen nor heard any panpipes, though these were prominent in the museum’s collection. The men wore coconut shell rattles round their ankles for their ceremonial dances. We have no special pictures of these percussion instruments.

My preparations led me to expect to see bare-breasted women wearing grass skirts. There were none. The books I had consulted in Sydney all dated from the 1920s. There had been much intrusive influence in the meantime. The panpipe situation is a parallel. In focussing rather too much on survivals from the past we had overlooked the presence of evidence from the present.

francis cameron, oxford, 7 january 2011

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