Description
What do you need to know to prosper as a people for 65,000 years or more? The First Knowledges series provides a deep understanding of the expertise, wisdom and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians.
We perform ceremonies every day. Some are personal, some highly organised and others are repeated for generations. For First Nations Australians, ceremonies create the backbone of cultural practice.
Ceremony: All Yesterdays for Today tells how Indigenous ceremonies link people today to those of the past in a continuum of inherited stories, places and memories – from rights of passage to smoking ceremonies and Welcomes to Country, and many others.
The authors focus on examples from their lives, including personal ceremonies from Quandamooka waterways and lands, community-centred ceremonies held by Warlpiri people in the Tanami desert, stories told to them by Elders and experiences of performing at Opening ceremonies for national events. Stories of ceremony are vast and diverse and many ceremonies are of a secret scared nature and cannot be told to those not initiated or intimately connected to the people, as the authors acknowledge. Rather, this book highlights the importance of ceremony across time and place on both a personal as well as national level that recognises and celebrates Australia’s First Nations history and culture.
‘Ceremonies can take many forms; in First Nations cultures it is the sense of intergenerational observance that connects us to our families, our Countries and our histories. Ceremonies are a way of connecting all our yesterdays to today.’
– Wesley Enoch
Wesley Enoch AM is a proud Quandamooka man from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), an internationally acclaimed playwright and artistic director. Most recently, Wesley was the Sydney Festival Director for five years and a Director at Sydney Theatre Company for his production, Appropriate. His previous positions include artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company, and artistic director at Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts and the ILBIJERRI Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-operative.
Wesley has also held the 2002 Australia Council Cite Internationale des Arts Residency in Paris and was the Australia Council's Artistic Director for the Australian Delegation to the 2008 Festival of Pacific Arts. He was creative consultant, segment director and Indigenous consultant for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.
Wesley has written and directed many iconic Indigenous productions including, The 7 Stages of Grieving and Black Medea. The Story of The Miracles at Cookie's Table won him the 2005 Patrick White Playwrights' Award. He has directed productions of The Sapphires, Black Diggers, I am Eora, The Man From Mukinupin, Yibiyung, Parramatta Girls and Black Cockatoo. He directed Riverland in 2004 for Windmill Performing Arts which premiered as part of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts and won the 2005 Helpmann Award for Best Presentation for Children.
Georgia Curran is a research fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. She completed her PhD studies in Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia (2010) and BA (Hons) in Anthropology at the University of Queensland, Australia (2002). Georgia was previously an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award fellow (2020-2023) for a project titled 'Rethinking the dynamics of place in Warlpiri Performance' and is currently a University of Sydney Robinson fellow (2024-2026) on the project 'Holding on to Warlpiri Songs: Supporting intergenerational transmission of Indigenous cultural heritage'. Georgia is the Chair of the ICTMD Study Group on Music and Dance of Oceania.
Georgia's research interests focus on Indigenous music and language, performance ethnography, cultural continuity and change and the maintenance and revitalisation of endangered musical traditions. Since 2005, she has undertaken close fieldwork with Indigenous communities in Central Australia, particularly Warlpiri communities in the Tanami Desert region. She collaborates with Warlpiri people and community organisations to produce resources to support intergenerational transmission of song knowledge and practice vital to Warlpiri cultural heritage. She is the author of Sustaining Indigenous Songs (2020, Berghahn) and the co-editor of Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs (with Linda Barwick, Valerie Napaljarri Martin, Simon Japangardi Fisher & Nicolas Peterson, 2024 Sydney University Press).
