Singing the Coast

Most Australians live on the narrow coastal strip that fringes our island continent. For Aboriginal people a place comes into being each time it is sung, and it is through this process that places are learned about and cared for. These songs can be for all of us, in the places where Aboriginal stories are rapidly overwritten with the grids of roads and towns. Together Tony Perkins and Margaret Somerville explore one coastal group’s experience in maintaining the stories and songs of their country: Perkins’ Gumbaynggirr homeland in mid-north coast New South Wales. These stories and songs are unique in their particularities, yet universal in their sense of knowledge, understanding and openness to sharing.

Tony Perkins is a cultural knowledge holder and member of the Garby Elders of Corindi Beach in New South Wales. He revitalised Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation where he was Manager until he became CEO of an Aboriginal employment agency in Coffs Harbour. He is motivated by the desire to reconnect young Aboriginal people to their culture in order to build a proud and strong Aboriginal future.

Margaret Somerville writes from Indigenous stories of the natural world and is passionately interested in landscape and questions of identity and belonging. This is her fifth book about place attachments, three of these written in collaboration with Aboriginal people and communities. She is a Professor of Education at Monash University.