Alice Skye sings the language of her forebears

Looky Looky Here Comes Cooky is a new film that gives an Indigenous perspective on James Cook’s arrival in 1770.

‘You’re going to think about yourself differently if you’re given a different people’s language’: Musician Alice Skye. Picture: Aaron Francis

For musician Alice Skye, taking part in new film Looky Looky Here Comes Cooky was an ­experience that brought her a mixture of pleasure, pride, sadness and anger, and the song she wrote for it expresses, in a quiet way, all of that complexity.

Looky Looky Here Comes Cooky, directed by Steven McGregor, presents an Indigenous perspective on Australian history, told in part through a “modern songline” with music from leading Indigenous writers and performers including Mo’Ju, Kev Carmody and Trials.

It will have its premiere on August 16 as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, streaming online. It screens 250 years after James Cook’s ­arrival on the Australian east coast in 1770.

Skye said she and other musicians were invited to “retell the story from a blackfella point of view”, or to “write a song that spoke to that in some way”.

Her song, Wurega Djalin (which roughly translates as “searching and listening to speak my tongue”), grew out of her thinking about the Ebenezer Mission in western Victoria where her grandparents were born. They were forbidden to speak their Wergaia language, a loss Skye feels strongly about.

“I only have the words you gave me, only got what you didn’t take from me,” she sings.

The song marks the first time she has written in language, something she hasn’t felt ready to do until now.

She remembers being taught about Captain Cook at school: “I had that experience of just sitting in classes, not connecting and not respecting what was being told to me because I didn’t think it was right. And then learning about missions in school and having to listen to people talk about a place where my family actually lived.”

She said she felt sadness and anger about the mission and what it did to her people by denying them their own words.

“You think about yourself in the language that you speak,” she said. “And so you’re going to think about yourself differently if you’re given a different people’s language.” For her people, she said, “it wasn’t a choice”.

Skye is working to complete her second album, I Feel Better But I Don’t Feel Good, most of which was finished at the beginning of the year.

She is proud of the part she has played in Looky Looky Here Comes Cooky, and what it sets out to show Australian audiences. “I think it does a really good job of opening a dialogue and hopefully people can start to understand more,” she said.

Looky Looky Here Comes Cooky also screens on SBS Viceland and NITV on August 20.