How WA’s Noongar culture became the centre of Perth Festival

Keeping First Nations culture and country alive has been the career highlight for two stalwarts of the Perth Festival.

Clint Bracknell. Picture: Marnie Richardson

lint Bracknell was at an existential impasse. At the vanguard of the movement to rescue and revive indigenous language across Australia, he was increasingly growing discontent with what he perceived as perfunctory political engagement in Aboriginal language and culture.

Suspended in a bromidic transience between hotel rooms and serviced apartments in Brisbane – an exile of the pandemic, 4000km from home – he found himself ruminating on one fatalistic proposition: “is there really a point to all of this?”

A riposte would soon enough come from the most unlikely of places: the realm of the unliving.

“I was invited along to a ceremony to rebury some ancestors,” Bracknell recounts, clearly still affected by the memory. “They were being dug up and returned home. One of the aunties asked me to translate the ceremony into language. She grabbed me and said: ‘The spirits, the ancestors, they don’t speak that language. They don’t understand English.’ It was a turning point. I finally understood: I’m a conduit to my culture.”

Bracknell’s culture, the Noongar nation, is one of the country’s largest First Nations linguistic and cultural groups. Encompassing the entirety of Western Australia’s southwest region, it spans two oceans and five regional jurisdictions. It is a land of extremes: where mountains bleed into cerulean seas, and knotted woodlands eventually buckle at the iron-stained margins of the desert beyond.

It is deeply storied country: lazily delineated by its Arcadian beaches, coveted wine and a capital city burnished with the spoils of minerals and fossil fuels. But Bracknell’s country — geologically defined by the gneissic terrane of the Yilgarn Craton, one of the most ancient landmasses on earth – is the keeper of more than 45,000 years of stories: 14 unique cultural subgroups woven together with the unseeable thread of songlines and lore.

Bracknell shrugs diffidently when pondering such impossible scale. Consequence was never in his purview, growing up on the fringes of then-provincial Albany, on WA’s untamed southern coast. A wannabee rock star in a town where AFL was the only valid currency, he would hide out in his bedroom “trying not to get beat up or bitten by tiger snakes”, strumming a tennis racket and daydreaming of escape. This innate sense of alienation would only further manifest in school, when a one-off lesson on Aboriginal Australia was little more than a grainy black and white film of men with spears hunting goanna in the desert.

“It just confused the absolute hell out of me,” he says, laughing before growing meditative. “It looked very different to my life. I ran home to Mum and said: ‘What’s the deal?’ I’d never eaten a lizard. I didn’t own a spear. It was a very confusing time.”

On completing school Bracknell made his escape like so many before him, taking the blistered asphalt of the old Albany Highway five hours north towards the place they called the city of lights. He enrolled in a course in radio production (“I was convinced radio was the future”), but spent his nights stumbling in and out of Perth’s beer-stained music haunts, home-ground to a nascent indie rock scene featuring Jebediah, Eskimo Joe, The Sleepy Jackson and countless others.

He would establish his own rock group, Longbo Tom, in the early 2000s and release some independent recordings with nominal success. “I have always related to the energy of rock’n’roll, that’s something that has always been a true visceral reaction – I see it in my son when he hears AC/DC or Chuck Berry,” Bracknell reasons. But, as he became increasingly aware of his cultural uniqueness, he found the prefabricated tropes of western music growing evermore fallow. “It was always uncomfortable for me. It was a sort of displacement. An element of fakery and dissonant distance – it wasn’t mine. There’s always a degree of discomfort in that.”

It would be in the lecture theatre of the university where his worldview would radically shift. A highly awarded scholar, Noongar elder and co-curator of the inaugural bilingual Australian Aboriginal Wikipedia site, Professor Len Collard was preparing to give a lecture when he abruptly mounted the desk and started hollering in Noongar at the students.

“He was holding the white board pointer like a spear,” Bracknell recounts, “and yelling ‘Who the hell are you – this is my country. You got to go now.’ It was just a great performance. I was just blown away. I had never heard language in such a performative context. It changed everything for me.”

Bracknell became all-consumed in learning and understanding the language of his ancestors, by now perilously close to falling to desuetude. This urgency to rehabilitate traditional language would soon come to define his career — by now a professor of linguistics at the University of Queensland. But the timbre of music would never fall silent. With his wife, actress, director and fellow Noongar activist Kylie (nee Farmer), he would help create one of the Perth Festival’s most consequential productions of recent decades in 2020’s Hecate, a triumphant Noongar language reimagining of Macbeth. The production would beget a proliferation of interest in the language — further augmenting a recrudescence in Noongar culture.

“It was transformative,” Bracknell states for all involved — a production that included free language lessons for the public. “It gave us the confidence to take it all further.”

Now at the precipice, looking down upon his final program as artistic director of the Perth Festival, Iain Grandage is unflinching when citing Hecate as the curatorial apogee of his stewardship. Both Kylie and Clint have been crucial tenets of his tenure, with Kylie an associate artist, director and adviser and Clint a leading composer.

Beyond Hecate, Bracknell would compose the music for what would manifest as 2022’s Noongar Wonderland and was subsequently commissioned to write a work for the progressive San Franciscan based Kronos Quartet for 2023’s festival.

This commission would fortuitously be followed by an invitation to return home, a newly minted professor at the University of Western Australia’s Conservatorium of Music: a position he continues today.

Bracknell would ultimately release the music from Noongar Wonderland in 2022 under the moniker Maatakitj, an affectionate nickname gifted to him by Kylie, loosely translating to “long legs like a spear”.

The music was recorded between hotel rooms under the enduring spectre of the pandemic, with musicians contributing remotely. It was an arduous process that threatened to unspool as deadline neared. A breakthrough would come in the guise of an intervention by Noongar elder Roma Winmar, who declared matter-of-factly: “The kids won’t go for it unless it has big beats.”

Perth Festival director Iain Grandage and Noongar writer Roma Yibiyung Winmar. Picture: Marie Nirme

“And where do you go when you need big beats,” Bracknell smirks. “You go to Paul Mac.”

While sonically avant-garde and instantly compelling with the dancefloor nous of Mac, Australia’s leading electro-pop musician, the songs are equally a manifestation of their ancestral lineage — circular cadences that swell and recede, offset by shifting rhythms that perpetually reframe the meaning of a word or a phrase. While on the surface stories of bullshark migration and the poetic dance of the dragonfly, the works become deeply parabolic as the lyric is re-contextualised within the architecture of the composition.

“I went to the elders to ask about the old songs,” Bracknell recounts, looking down to the meandering Derbarl Yerrigan — or Swan River — where he composed many of these songs, including Kworlak, the bullshark song. “But they said, ‘we all know the old ones, how about you come up with some new ones?’. So I just went for it.

“Aboriginal culture was cutting edge back then and it still is now,” he furthers, citing his frustration at a tendency to explore Aboriginal art and song through the pedagogical paradigms of the anthropological and ethnographic. “But we’re still here … this story continues.”

It is under this contemporary pretext that Grandage would approach Bracknell for the 2024 festival with a singular proposition: “Who do you want to work with? Pick anyone, anywhere.”

“He immediately said Angelique Kidjo,” Grandage recalls of the acclaimed Beninese artist, before drawing breath. “Then the next day I get a phone call: Angelique is going on tour, would we like to bring her to Perth.”

Song Circle, part of Perth Festival

Whether divine interference or mere happenstance, Grandage will not be drawn. “I don’t question it, I just celebrate it,” he offers, speaking in a whisper before looking down to Supreme Court Gardens below, where the collaboration will take place. The crescendo of the festival, Under The Same Sun sees the multi Grammy winner couple in a real-time collaboration with WA’s leading indigenous talent, including Maatakitj, Gina Williams and Stephen Pigram — all buttressed by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

Grandage’s tenure has been predominantly defined by his engagement with Noongar and local talent. But what in 2020 was a declaration of an artistic manifesto suddenly transmuted into an existential lifeline as the world shuttered with the pandemic.

“Covid ruptured lives,” he states soberly, before ceding Western Australia’s relative reclusion from the front lines. “Covid enabled us to observe place at a pace that allowed us to drink it in and ask important questions. For me it was an invitation to better understand one another, and this place where we live.”

As has been his custom across the previous four festivals, 2024 too has taken on an overarching Noongar theme, this time Ngaangt: the sun. In Noongar words habitually enjoy multifarious definitions, with ngaangt also meaning “mother”: the eternal life giver. Similarly, bilya — or river — translates to “naval” and “umbilicus”: the conduits that sustain life.

Ngaangt is a germane choice for this, Grandage’s ultimate festival. The word would prove critical in the native title claim under justice Murray Wilcox of 2006 — linguistic evidence of the continuity of Noongar culture, including evidence dating back to Matthew Flinders’ records from 1801. The successful native title claim would ultimately be overturned by the full court, but subsequently inform the 2021 Native Title Settlement between WA and Noongar traditional owners: the single largest native title agreement in Australian history, covering 200,000 sqkm of land.

Responding directly to boodja — or country — has been critical to Grandage’s programming, and 2024 continues this tradition. Created by Linda Tegg and Vivienne Hansen, major installation Wetland sees native flora reclaim a once popular, now condemned, city food hall — navigating the uneasy fault line between belonging and impermanence. It is this very proposition that would define Hecate: Noongar culture reclaiming the rusted edifice of colonial imposition.

Clint Bracknell. Picture: Marnie Richardson

For Grandage, fashioning liminal spaces where audiences least expect them is equally designed to settle as unsettle. “It’s really a play on memory,” he considers, citing The Pool: a co-production with Black Swan State Theatre Company, written by Steve Rodgers, directed by Kate Champion and starring Kylie Bracknell, and staged in a popular aquatic centre. “In setting you off-kilter hopefully that reminds you to be true to your foundational instincts. We’re just a moment in time. The world goes on without us. What art can do is make you look at the place you thought you knew differently. It alters perspective.”

Perspective is a heightened concept for Grandage today, sipping a generous pour of gin and reflecting on five years of ambition, challenge and – ultimately – cultural succour. Among his most enduring memories he cites 2020’s unlikely Bon Scott bonanza Highway To Hell, as well as his coup of 2023 in Icelandic icon Bjork: an Australian exclusive that dangerously inched within days of cancellation due to delayed freight. For his final festival he points to theatrical thriller Logue Lake (by Geordie Crawley and Elise Wilson), Akram Khan’s fantastical Jungle Book Reimagined and the Ngapa William Cooper production, featuring Lou Bennett and Nigel Westlake, as high watermarks. Fellow West Australian Anna Reece succeeds him from 2025.

In March, Grandage — a cellist and Helpmann Award winning composer (Cloudstreet, The Secret River, When Time Stops, The Rabbits) — returns to his craft, commissioned to score the screen adaptation of Craig Silvey’s Runt. National and international conducting commitments soon follow, as does a continued board directorship with the Western Australian Tourism Commission.

Grandage shifts his attention to the unblemished sky beyond the window, incanting the lyrics of Maatakitj’s song Demangka: a composition celebrating groundwater, the “invisible kiss of life beneath our feet”.

“The single greatest and most rewarding part of anything I have done is collaborating with Aboriginal Australia,” he concludes.

“There is a past, present and future. It’s all in there. Every time they sing (Demangka) it goes deeper and higher. It is the embodiment of now. (Bracknell) has distilled down a vastly complex way of being – tens of thousands of years – and created something so contemporary it’s as though it’s from the future. Perhaps, just maybe, it is.”

Perth Festival opens runs until March 3. Maatakitj supports Angélique Kidjo on her national tour, running February 29-March 12.