Linda Barwick is a musicologist specialising in the study of Australian First Nations musics, immigrant musics and the digital humanities (particularly archiving and repatriating ethnographic field recordings as a site of interaction between researchers and cultural heritage communities). She has studied community music practices through fieldwork in Australia, Italy and the Philippines. She has collaborated with Warlpiri performers since 1996 when she first visited Alekarenge. Recently, she has collaborated with Central Australian organisations, including the Central Land Council and Pintubi Anmatjere Warlpiri Media and Communications (PAW Media), on various projects concerning cultural archiving and supporting community performance traditions. Linda’s co-edited book Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond (Sydney University Press, 2020; co-edited by Jennifer Green and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel) won the Australasian Society of Archivists Mander Jones Award. She is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney, Sydney Conservatorium of Music and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Georgia Curran is currently an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award postdoctoral fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, working on a project titled “Rethinking the Dynamics of Place in Warlpiri Song” (2020–2023). She received her PhD from the Australian National University for a thesis on “Contemporary Ritual Practice in an Aboriginal Settlement: The Warlpiri Kurdiji Ceremony” (2010). Her interests include Indigenous music and languages, performance ethnography, and cultural continuity and change, and the revitalisation of endangered song traditions. Since 2005, she has undertaken research with Warlpiri people in Yuendumu and other Central Australian communities, including collaborative research projects with PAW Media. Georgia is the author of Sustaining Indigenous Songs: Contemporary Warlpiri Ceremonial Life in Central Australia (2020, Berghahn Books, with Foreword by Otto Jungarrayi Sims), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. Georgia has collaborated with senior Warlpiri women to produce two song books, Jardiwanpa Yawulyu (2014) and Yurntumu-Wardingki-Juju-Ngaliya-Kurlangu Yawulyu: Warlpiri Women’s Songs from Yuendumu (2017), both published by Batchelor Institute Press.

Yukihiro Doi completed a bachelor’s degree in International Culture Studies at Tenri University (Nara Prefecture, Japan) in 2000. In 2004, he completed a master’s equivalent-level course at the Tenri Graduate Seminary. In 2016, he was awarded a PhD by the Australian National University for his research on Milpirri at Lajamanu. He was a researcher at Oyasato Institute for the Study of Religion at Tenri University from 2013 to 2015. He performed at 95 concerts, workshops and TV appearances with gagaku composer and musician Hideki Togi from 2000 to 2015. He was accredited by Australia’s vocational education and training assessment provider, VETASSESS, as a Music Professional Not Elsewhere Classified in 2016 and Musician (Instrumental) in 2017. Currently, he is a tutor at CIT Solutions of the Canberra Institute of Technology and the Canberra Japanese Supplementary School.

Françoise Dussart is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her specialties in social anthropology include Australian Aboriginal visual systems; Indigenous rights; various expressions of gender, ritual and performance; and Indigenous ontologies, entanglements, health and citizenship. In 2015–2016, she curated a major presentation of contemporary Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts at the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City, Canada. She is the author of La Peinture des Aborigènes d’Australie (Australian Aboriginal Painting, 1993, Parenthèses) and The Politics of Ritual in an Aboriginal Settlement: Kinship, Gender and the Currency of Knowledge (2000, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press). She is the author of many articles and chapters as well as edited volumes on media and ontology, Media Matters: Representations of the Social in Aboriginal Australia (2006, VAR, 2006), Engaging Christianity in Aboriginal Australia (2021, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, with Carolyn Schwarz), Entangled Territorialities (2017, University of Toronto Press, with Sylvie Poirier) and Contemporary Indigenous Cosmologies and Pragmatics (2021, University of Alberta Press, with Sylvie Poirier).

Simon Japangardi Fisher is a Director and Archives Researcher at PAW Media and Communications in Yuendumu. He is the owner for Pikilyi region to the north-west of Yuendumu and has a Master of Arts (Indigenous Studies) from Charles Darwin University, Sydney, for a thesis titled Pikilyi Water Rights – Human Rights. Simon has been a Partner Investigator on the “Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs” project (2016–2020); in this role, he has presented his archiving work at various conferences, including at the Foundation for Endangered Languages conferences in Alcanena, Portugal, in 2017 and in Sydney, Australia, in 2019. These presentations have resulted in papers in published conference proceedings. Simon has also held an Indigenous Remote Archival Fellowship to work at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in Canberra (2015). He has conducted archival research for many documentary films created at PAW Media, particularly those on Warlpiri history, including So They Can Carry On – Jack Cook’s Story (2014), Coniston (2012) and a recent documentary on Olive Pink (2022). He is currently also researching the story of his great-grandfather, Warlpiri man Gwoya Tjungurrayi, ‘One Pound Jimmy’, who was sketched by Ainslie Roberts and whose portrait features on the Australian $2 coin.

Barbara Gibson Nakamarra was born in 1938 in the Tanami Desert. She settled at Yuendumu as a young girl and was married, along with her sister Beryl, to Tony Japaljarri Gibson. She worked at the clinic in Yuendumu and then moved to Lajamanu, where she became a leading authority in rituals. In the 1980s, the family spent much time at the Kurlurrngalinypa outstation, where they were asked to re-enact their hunter–gatherer life for a Japanese museum crew. She helped B. Glowczewski with many translations for the Dream Trackers: Yapa Art and Knowledge of the Australian Desert CD-ROM (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 2000) and started to paint in 1986, exhibiting in many galleries. One of her paintings was presented in a touring exhibition in France (1991, B. Glowczewski, Yapa: peintres aborigènes de Balgo et Lajamanu (Yapa: Painters from Balgo and Lajamanu Catalog), edited by Baudoin Lebon) and the Lenz Culture Institute, in Austria (2000, Zeit: Mythos Phantom Realität, Springer: https://www.amazon.com/Zeit-Mythos-Phantom-Realit%C3%A4t-German/dp/3211834176). After her husband’s death, she went to live in Tennant Creek and Kununurra, where she continued to paint. She passed away in the mid-1990s.

Barbara Glowczewski is a high-distinction professorial researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), a member of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France and teaching at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. She has undertaken regular fieldwork with the Warlpiri people from Lajamanu (since 1979), with the Djugun and Yawuru people from Broome (where she lived in the 1990s), and with Palm Islanders (adjunct professor at James Cook University 2004–2017). She is an anthropologist specialising in Australian Indigenous issues, strategies of recognition and networks shared with other Indigenous peoples, and alternative collectives for social and environmental justice against ecocide. She is the author of many publications and multimedia productions in collaboration with Warlpiri artists from Lajamanu (www.odsas.net) and Djugun/Yawuru/Jabirr Jabirr filmmaker Wayne Barker, The Spirit of Anchor (https://images.cnrs.fr/en/video/980). Her latest books are Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze (2020, Edinburgh University Press) and Réveiller les esprits de la terre (2021, Dehors).

Elizabeth Napaljarri Katakarinja is a Western Arrernte woman who was born in 1963 in Ntaria (Hermannsburg). After her schooling at Yirara College in Alice Springs and Early Childhood Studies at Batchelor College, she moved to Yuendumu when she married Simon Japangardi Fisher. She has worked for the Yuendumu Social Club, the Yuendumu Old People’s Program and the Mount Theo Program, the Yuendumu Night Patrol and, most recently, at PAW Media. Elizabeth has a Warlpiri connection through her grandfather. She has been involved in numerous video productions with PAW Media as well as research projects, including the Whole of Community Engagement Initiative with Charles Darwin University and the “Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs” Australian Research Council Linkage project with the University of Sydney.

Luke Kelly is a consultant applied anthropologist based in Istanbul, Turkey, specialising in land tenure, cultural mapping and survey work. He worked in the Tanami Desert, Central Australia, as a regional anthropologist for the Central Land Council between 2009 and 2016. At the invitation of the Warlpiri Education and Training Trust (WETT) and the Granites Mines Affected Area Aboriginal Corporation (GMAAAC) Willowra committees, Luke helped Elders organise and conduct field trips for the Willowra cultural mapping project. This work was undertaken during various periods between 2013 and 2020; in 2018, he assisted Elders with the Ngajakula recording sessions. He has a Master of Arts in Social Anthropology and Sociology from the Central European University, Budapest.

Mary Laughren has researched and documented Warlpiri language since 1975. From 1975 to 1993, she was employed by the Northern Territory Department of Education to conduct linguistic research to support bilingual education programs, mainly in the Warlpiri community schools in Central Australia. In 1993, she joined the linguistics program at the University of Queensland and has continued researching Warlpiri and supporting language and culture programs in those communities. She is the chief compiler of the Warlpiri Encyclopaedic Dictionary (Laughren et al. 2022). Between 2000 and 2008, she undertook fieldwork to record and document the Waanyi language and engaged in a series of language renewal workshops with Waanyi people from Doomadgee (Queensland). In collaboration with anthropologists, linguists, musicologists and Warlpiri Elders, Laughren has recorded and documented traditional Warlpiri yawulyu songs, building on her extensive photographic collection of performances at Yuendumu and Willowra in the 1970s and 1980s.

Teddy Jupurrurla Long was born on Coniston Station on his Country, Yarruku, and grew up at Willowra. He is Anmatyerr and also speaks Warlpiri. When he was young, Teddy worked as a stockman at Willowra and on neighbouring stations. During holidays, he lived with the old people in bush camps, where he continued learning Lander Warlpiri Anmatyerr Law. Reflecting on earlier Ngajakula performances, Jupurrurla commented, “that business was holding a lot of young people really safely, a safe life without people hurting each other; it was really very good times”. Now, as the last surviving male Elder at Willowra, Jupurrurla takes seriously his responsibility to teach younger generations about their jukurrpa and Countries. It was Jupurrurla’s vision to undertake the Willowra cultural mapping project. As senior kurdungurlu for Ngajakula, he led the singing and recording of the songline with kirda George Jungarrayi Ryder and shared his deep knowledge of the ceremony for this chapter.

Barbara Napanangka Martin has dedicated her life to working as a teacher at the Yuendumu School. She is now retired but still assists the school’s Bilingual Resource Development Unity, as well as working on other community-based cultural projects. She is a skilled Warlpiri to English transcriber and translator and is interested in engaging senior women to figure out ways of representing oral stories and songs in written forms from which younger Warlpiri people can learn. Barbara has inherited kirda rights for Minamina, a region in the far west of Warlpiri Country. She was involved in the production of two Warlpiri women’s songbooks (Jardiwanpa Yawulyu, 2014, Batchelor Institute Press; Yurntumu-Wardingki Juju-Ngaliya-Kurlangu Yawulyu: Warlpiri Women’s Songs from Yuendumu, 2017, Batchelor Institute Press) and has also collaboratively published numerous other research articles and educational resources.

Valerie Napaljarri Martin is a Director at PAW Media and Communications and Partner Investigator on the “Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs” project (2016–2021). She is kirda for Yarungkanyi (Mount Doreen), which is important Country to the north-west of Alice Springs, and has inherited these ties from her father, Jimija Jungarrayi. Valerie has worked in areas of cultural liaison, interpreting services (especially for the Yuendumu court), video and production work, and archive management. Valerie is also politically active and has spoken out about issues of the Northern Territory Intervention and involved in more localised mediation work for the Yuendumu Council. She was a founding member of the Warlpiri Media Association board and has sat on the board continuously since the 1980s. Some of Valerie’s early work on the Warlpiri Media radio features in the documentary film Fight Fire with Fire – 30 Years of PAW History (2014).

Megan Morais (aka Jones and Dail-Jones) has studied dance since 1961 and Indigenous Australian dance since 1974. She trained in movement analysis and notation at the Benesh Institute of Choreology (London, UK) and went on to teach choreology at the United States International University, Sussex. Later, she received degrees in Anthropology (San Francisco State University) and Dance Ethnology (University of Hawai‘i). Her first experience in ethnochoreology began with notating dances from film, recorded during the Groote Eylandt Project in 1969. Via various grants, Megan has documented dances of several Indigenous Australian groups, including Nunggubuyu, Wanindilyaugwa, Anindjilana, Yanyuwa and Warlpiri. She has been Visiting Researcher with the University of New England and with the University of Sydney, and has published articles in various journals and encyclopedias. Currently, she is the lead author for Yawulyu: Warlpiri Women’s Ceremonies (in press); co-authors include Peggy Nampijinpa Martin, Helen Napurrurla Morton and Myfany Turpin.

Helen Napurrurla Morton is the daughter of the late Dick Jakamarra Morton from eastern Warlpiri Country and Lady Napaljarri Morton from Willowra on the Lander River. Helen was raised at Yuendumu, where her father worked as a stockman, and attended Yuendumu primary school. She received her secondary education at Yirrara College in Alice Springs. On leaving school in 1979, Helen returned to Yuendumu, where she was employed as a literacy worker composing texts in Warlpiri and English for use in the bilingual education programs in Warlpiri community schools. Upon her marriage, Helen moved to Willowra, where she was employed in the school. Helen has successfully completed a number of linguistics and pedagogy courses run by the Batchelor Institute. Some of the children’s books written by Helen can be viewed on Charles Darwin University’s Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages (https://territorystories.nt.gov.au/). Helen has worked alongside many researchers at Willowra and Yuendumu and, over the past 20 years, has been closely associated with efforts to document traditional Warlpiri songs.

Steven (Wanta) Jampijinpa Patrick was born in Lajamanu, northern Tanami Desert, Northern Territory. He is kirda for Pawu (also known as Mount Barkly). Kurlpurlunu, a rain jukurrpa site, is also his and his grandfather’s homeland. Jampijinpa has worked as a teacher in the Lajamanu School for roughly 18 years. He has stated:

Nicolas Peterson is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. For his PhD research in the late 1960s, he lived for eight months on the edge of the Arafura swamp with two groups of Aboriginal people who still supported themselves from the bush. Subsequently, he spent 13 months at Yuendumu working with Warlpiri people, learning about their ceremonial life and relationships to land. This led to working as the research officer for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Land Rights (the Woodward Commission) and to the preparation, with others, of four land and native title claims for Warlpiri people, including the Warlpiri and Kartangarurru–Kurintji claim. His research interests include economic anthropology, social change, land and marine tenure, fourth-world people and the state, and the anthropology of photography. He has a strong interest in applied anthropology. From 2010 to 2021, he was the Director of the Centre for Native Title Anthropology at ANU.

Theresa Napurrurla Ross is a skilled Warlpiri translator and interpreter who has worked for decades in Warlpiri schools as well as for organisations including the Aboriginal Interpreter Services, Summer Institute for Linguistics, Institute for Aboriginal Development, PAW Media and the University of Sydney. She is a National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters–certified translator and interpreter. She has worked as a translator on many documentary films produced by PAW Media. Theresa lives with her family in Yuendumu, where she is heavily involved in caring for her grandchildren. She is currently writing a book in collaboration with Tess Napaljarri Ross on ‘Mothers and babies’ in which she documents traditional Warlpiri ways that mothers cared for their babies.

†George Jungarrayi Ryder was known to many as Cowboy. Jungarrayi sadly passed away in 2020. As a senior Warlpiri man and kirda for Ngunulurru and Yinapaka in the Lander region, Jungarrayi led the Willowra Ngajakula revitalisation project. Jungarrayi’s deep knowledge was gained through a life lived on the land. He was born “in the bush before Welfare time”, near Mungakurlangu on the Lander. Jungarrayi recalled that his father, Fred Japaljarri Karlarlukarri, and mother, Beryl Nakamarra, took him around the Country and “taught me everything. They told me, ‘Don’t do the wrong thing, you’ve got to follow your grandfathers’. The kurdungurlu and old people taught me the stories about country way, Jukurrpa, the law”. From a young age, Jungarrayi worked as a stockman on Willowra and nearby stations and maintained an intimate relationship with the land. He was given the name “Ryder” because he was “among horses all the time”. As an Elder, Jungarrayi shared his knowledge generously, teaching his family as well as other Lander families about their Countries. He also taught kardiya (non-Aboriginal people) while working tirelessly for his people on numerous projects including with Warlpiri rangers, on the Willowra cultural mapping project, and on native title claims. Jungarrayi was a wonderful, caring family man. He was happy to have recorded Ngajakula and to share the story.

Myfany Turpin is an Associate Professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, and an affiliate of the Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney. She has been involved in language and music documentation with Aboriginal communities since 1994. Her research focuses on Aboriginal song-poetry, Arandic languages, the relationship between language and music, and ethnobiology. Her research on the Kaytetye language resulted in a co-authored encyclopaedic dictionary, picture dictionary and collection of stories with the late Kaytetye speaker Alison Nangala Ross. She has written scholarly articles in the areas of music, linguistics and ethnobiology, and produced multimedia resources on language learning and Aboriginal songs. She supports remote school language and culture programs in Central Australia and works with local organisations to produce resources and provide opportunities for Aboriginal people to assist in their struggle for cultural and linguistic survival.

Petronella Vaarzon-Morel is an anthropologist who has worked with Warlpiri people for over 40 years. In 1976 and 1977, she taught with Jim Wafer at Willowra School and helped initiate the Warlpiri bilingual program. She subsequently co-authored four land claims and a native title claim involving Lander Warlpiri and Anmatyerr people. At the invitation of Willowra community, in 1987–1989 she undertook PhD research and collaborated on an oral history project that resulted in the book Warlpiri Women’s Voices (1995, Institute for Aboriginal Development). More recently, she was engaged by the Warlpiri Education and Training Trust and Willowra committees for the GMAAAC to work with Elders on and help organise the Willowra cultural mapping project. In 2018–2019, as part of an archival project, she returned photos and recordings made with Willowra people over the years and co-edited (with Linda Barwick and Jennifer Green) Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond (2019, University of Hawai‘i Press and Sydney University Press). She is Global Lecturer in Anthropology at New York University Sydney (since 2013) and an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Sydney.

Jim Wafer is a conjoint senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Newcastle and has worked with Aboriginal languages since 1976. That year, he and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel were appointed as teachers to the two-teacher school at Willowra, where they helped to initiate a bilingual program in Warlpiri. He subsequently studied anthropology at Indiana University’s Bloomington campus, where he received his PhD, based on fieldwork in Brazil, in 1989. He has also worked for the Institute for Aboriginal Development (Alice Springs) and the Northern Land Council (Darwin). He is the co-author of numerous land claim reports for the Central Land Council and co-editor of Recirculating Songs: Revitalising the Singing Practices of Indigenous Australia (2017, Pacific Linguistics & Hunter Press). He is currently collaborating with Wonnarua and Guringai people on language revitalisation, under the auspices of Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative.

†Fanny Walker Napurrurla was a traditional Warlpiri woman who maintained a very strong connection to her father’s Country of Jipiranpa, its stories and rituals. She was born in the Pawurrinji area near a rockhole called Karlampi, from which her personal name Karlampingali derived. Napurrurla lived at the Phillip Creek Native Settlement before being moved with two of her daughters to the Warrabri Aboriginal Reserve, now known as Alekarenge, established by the government in 1956. Napurrurla had a great love and knowledge of Warlpiri yawulyu and was an active performer until her death in 2019. In 2009, she and her sisters collaborated with their son Brian Murphy and his Ali Curung group, Band Nomadic, to create innovative performances combining her traditional yawulyu singing with western-style country rock music, including a song about Jipiranpa. In 1996–1997, Napurrurla was among a large group of Alekarenge women recorded by Linda Barwick singing two series of Ngurlu songs associated with Jipiranpa and Pawurrinji. In 2010, she collaborated with Barwick and Laughren in their documentation of the Jipiranpa song series by again singing the verses, speaking them in Warlpiri and explaining their meaning and geographic context.

Stephen Wild received his Master of Arts in Musicology in 1967 from the University of Western Australia and his PhD in Anthropology in 1975 from Indiana University. He has taught at Monash University (1969–1972), City University of New York (1973–1978) and the Australian National University (1990–2011). He was a Research Fellow (1978–1998) and Research Director (1998–2000) at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. He has carried out field work in Lajamanu (1969–1980, 2007–2009), Maningrida (1980–1990) and elsewhere in Australia. Stephen has published articles and chapters in many journals, books and encyclopedias and has edited several books and scholarly journals. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, was twice President of the Musicological Society of Australia and Vice President of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), and was Secretary General of ICTM 2006–2011. He was elected as an Honorary Member of ICTM in 2019. He is currently serving as a member of the Advisory Board of the Music and Minorities Research Center based in Vienna.