Ti Tree is a town about 160km north of Alice Springs, NT. Although it's in Anmatyerr country, the Anmatyerr and Warlpiri peoples (and their languages and cultures) live together there. The Warlpiri and Anmatyerr (pronounced "Anmatjerra") languages have very little in common, despite millenia of being neighbours. Many people would be unaware that English is a second language (and often a fifth or sixth language) for most of the Aboriginal people of Central Australia. I've been visiting Ti Tree School for four years now as part of Music Outback Foundation, an organisation started by Steve Berry, which visits a good number of schools in Central Australia, teaching song writing and instrumental skills. At Ti Tree, I teach alongside the fabulous Seini Taumoepeau. As often as possible, we write songs in Anmatyerr and Warlpiri, doing our best to contribute to the language and culture program at the school: It's been as much an education for us as for them!
The CD has 29 tracks: 24 songs written with the students and teachers of Ti Tree over the past 2 years and recorded over several visits. One song, "Tyerrty Atyenh Map, was written with Mt Allan school and lovingly adopted by Ti Tree, and another, "Wenh-Apatherram Ntwang?", which is all about skin names, was written with both schools. The remaining 3 songs (tracks 2, 10 and 23) were produced as a result of a series of visits to Ti Tree School by Corey Noll several years ago. The order of the CD is purely alphabetical to help it co-ordinate with the songbook (with chords) that Seini and I have produced with the help of Ti Tree teacher Ben Knowles (Ben really should have had a huge thank you on the CD cover, but he wrote the thankyous and I didn't notice 'til now...whoops! Onya Ben).
To download the songbook as a MS Word doc, click here.
