Instruments from Australia & the Pacific Islands

When Captain James Cook (1728–1779) landed in Botany Bay in 1770, he was not the first European to set foot in Australia. It had been “discovered” several times before. But when Britain claimed sovereignty, nobody disputed its claim over this vast, distant, and apparently barren land. The British themselves did very little with it for the next two hundred years, apart from using it as a penal colony. It is estimated that 157,000 convicts were sent to Australia between 1788 and 1856, and those who didn’t die or find their way back home stayed on to become the country’s first European population. Many of them became sheep farmers. A number of adventurers, prospectors, surveyors, and naturalists crisscrossed the continent in all directions, but large parts of the interior remained unexplored until the second half of the nineteenth century.

Nobody showed much interest in the indigenous population either. The sad truth of the matter is that early settlers were not only incurious about the native people, they were hostile. “Aborigines,” as they came to be termed, were generally regarded as a sub-human species. The impact of white settlement on the native population was disastrous. Aboriginals were routinely exterminated to make way for new farming communities, and those who did not die as a result of superior British weaponry were wiped out by diseases to which they had no natural resistance. By the early twentieth century, Australian Aboriginal culture lay in ruins.

Australian Aboriginal culture can lay reasonable claim to being the oldest continuous living culture on earth. Recent dating of archaeological sites on the Australian continent have pushed back the date for Aboriginal presence in Australia to at least 40,000 years. Some of the evidence points to dates over 60,000 years old. Without possessions beyond a few rudimentary tools and weapons, Australian Aboriginals represent an extraordinarily successful human adaptation to one of the world’s most hostile environments. A nomadic people, they created a sophisticated mythology out of nature, and their very deliberate and organized wanderings followed paths laid down by legendary beings in a distant past known as the Dreamtime. These beings sang the world into existence.

Today, most Aborigines have assimilated into the largely white Australian society. Many Aborigine musicians have adopted European instruments and song styles, but traditional Aboriginal music still holds a very important part in the life of most Aborigines. From an early age, children are generally taught to dance and sing, and upon adolescence they learn the songs that are specific to their particular tribe—there are hundreds of Aboriginal tribes, each with its own customs and its own identifying songs. Aboriginal musical instruments, in common with the lives of the people, tend to be of simple construction but can produce a remarkably wide range of sounds and tones.

Didgeridoo

The instrument most often associated with Aborigines is the didgeridoo. The name is an approximation of the sound the instrument makes. The didgeridoo is made from the hard, tuberous stem of a mallee tree (a kind of eucalyptus), which has been hollowed out by termites. The stem may be cut to anything between four and seven feet. It is left open at both ends, and the playing end is smoothed with gum. Sound is produced by blowing and buzzing the lips, much like a brass instrument. The didgeridoo produces a fundamental note, overlaid with rich and complex harmonics. A continuous sound is maintained by simultaneously blowing out through the mouth and breathing in through the nose, using the cheeks as a reservoir. This process is called “circular breathing.” The didgeridoo produces a constant drone on a deep note, and this drone is broken up into a great variety of rhythmic patterns and accents by the skilful use of the tongue and cheeks. Many different tone colors are achieved by altering the shape of the mouth cavity and the position of the tongue, and by shutting off various parts of the anatomy which act as resonating chambers for the human voice. The great skill of the didgeridoo player lies in the use of two entirely different notes, pitched a major tenth apart, the upper note being the fundamental note’s first overtone. These are alternated in rapid succession to form complex, fascinating, and hypnotic cross-rhythms. The didgeridoo often accompanies sacred and festive dance, but is played for recreation as well.

Bull Roarer

Another instrument closely associated with Australian Aboriginals is the turndun, or bull roarer. This consists of a small, heavy piece of wood, carved into an oval shape and decorated with significant designs. This is attached to a long string, usually plaited from human hair. The turndun is swung in a vertical circle to make its characteristic roaring sound, which is enriched by harmonics. The pitch and tones of the turndun can be modified by alterations in speed, and by lengthening or shortening the string. A skilled turndun operator can do both very rapidly, and since the sound of the turndun carries for great distances, the instrument is used as a means of communication, as well as in the fertility rituals with which it is usually associated.

Other Instruments from Australia & the Pacific Islands

Much Aboriginal music and song is accompanied by polyrhythmic handclapping, but various forms of percussion are also used. Singers often accompany themselves with pairs of sticks, one held flat in the palm and the other clapped down on it—boomerangs sometimes serve as clapsticks. Hollow log drums are laid flat and hit with sticks. Notched sticks serve as rasps, and seed pods are used as rattles. The most sophisticated Aboriginal percussion is a single-headed hourglass drum, with a head made from lizard or goanno skin, which can be played with the hands or sticks.

When James Cook found New Zealand in 1769, he was not the first person to reach there by sea. The Maori people were the first settlers in New Zealand, and they arrived there by canoe about 1000 years ago from other parts of Polynesia. Polynesia is a scattered group of over 1000 islands, covering a large area of the southern Pacific. The Polynesian Islands form a triangle, with its three corners at Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand. They include Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, the Marquesas, French Polynesia, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands. Polynesians share a common linguistic and cultural heritage, though this has evolved differently from island to island, according to resources and the degree of contact with other cultures. All Polynesian islanders, nomads in this vast archipelago, share a common belief in a mythical homeland, a paradise island which they all left at one time or another. In Maori mythology, Hawaiki is the spiritual homeland of the Maori people. Maoris all trace their descent back to the arrival of the first waka from Hawaiki—in the Maori language, as in other Polynesian languages, the word waka can mean “canoe” or “descendants from a canoe.” Like the Aboriginal people of Australia, Maori numbers declined as New Zealand was settled by other peoples, but modern Maoris, like modern Australian Aboriginals, proudly maintain their own cultural identity, traditions, and language.

Maori mythology, in common with the mythology of the other Polynesian Islands, is based on the idea that the whole of creation is a family, of which human beings are a fortunate part. Rangi, the Sky Father, and Papa, the Earth Mother, are the parents of the gods of the forest, the sea, the wind, wild food, planted food, and mankind. These gods are celebrated through song and dance, accompanied by a wide range of musical instruments.

Maori wind instruments, known as toango puoro, are generally made from wood, bone, stone, and shell. The putorino, an open-ended wooden pipe with holes like a flute, may be played in three different ways. The “male voice” is produced by covering the holes and vibrating the lips at the open end, like a trumpet. The “female voice” is made by blowing sideways across one of the holes, and the instrument is played as a flute. A third voice is made by humming. The pukea is a large and ornate wooden trumpet, with a slender body which may be up to four feet long, flaring into a wide bell. This is usually used for ceremonial purposes. The koauau (known on Tonga as the fangu-fangu), a nose flute with three finger-holes, may be made from wood, bone, stone, or shell, while the nguru, another small ocarina-like flute, may be played with the nose or mouth and is often elaborately carved from whale’s tooth. The putatara is a conch-shell trumpet with a variety of notes and tones, created by changing the position of the lips and moving the hand inside the shell itself. These instruments, with local variations in name and style, are to be found all over the Polynesian Islands, and bull-roarers, known as kokalu and langumumuhu, are found throughout Polynesia.

Maori dancing is energetic, but restrained in comparison with some of the islands—Hawaii and Tahiti in particular. Dancing is accompanied by a wide variety of percussion. The deep, two-headed cylindrical tenor drum known as the pahu is found throughout the region, as is a fatter bass drum, known as the puniu. The ipu heke, the hula ipu, and the uli-uli are all gourd rattles. But the real soundtrack of Polynesian life is provided by a variety of slit-drums—solid small pieces of wood hollowed into a lateral U-shape and played in arrays of different sizes with different pitches. Beaten with pairs of sticks, these drums, known by many, many names, provide the fast, layered polyrhythms that characterize these islands of the south Pacific.