Gretchen Miller | Homeground

Music for twilight

On Into the Music today we’re taking as our starting point a time of day—twilight. As day turns to night our thoughts turn to the larger issues than our daily lives. We hear the news and think about global conflict, about the quickly changing environment, about individual violences that beggar belief. Earlier this year the second Dark music festival in Hobart, also celebrated those liminal, in-between planetary shifts—particularly the solstice, when the Earth turns around on itself and begins the transition from winter to summer, from long nights to long days. The festival drew large crowds to Australia’s southernmost point, to take in a winter feast each night, with performances at midnight and dance parties til dawn. Inspired by the themes, Gretchen Miller talks with some of the performers in the festival—Diamanda Galas and Nick Tsiavos—on death and mourning. She speaks to academic Andrew Shenton about the soaring music of the world's most popular contemporary classical composer, Arvo Pärt, and she also speaks to composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood whose recordings of rivers document an ever changing environment, and immerse us in sound. We’ll hear compositions in music and in environmental sound, which help us meditate on things beyond the mundane, and connect us to the fate of the planet, and humankind.

Scratch

In the early 1700s the Dutch ship Concordia was wrecked off the Western Australian coast. For more than a century, the rumour has circulated that survivors of the wreck of the Concordia made their way overland through the desert and established a settlement, probably in Palm Valley, near what is now known as Hermansburg in Central Australia. As the story has it, eighty men and ten women found their way into the valley, and the community finally grew to some 300. The colony's existence was 'documented' in two newspaper reports published in England in the early 1830s, and there were other articles, including a paper in a Dutch scientific journal; and yet no hard evidence for the existence of the colony has ever been found. Despite the lack of physical evidence, a small number of academics and explorers - including Les Hiddens of 'Bush Tucker Man' fame - are determined to prove the colony existed. 'Scratch' is not simply the investigation of a historical myth, but is also an exploration of the desire that sustains belief in the existence of the lost colony in the face of all the arguments to the contrary. What keeps an idea alive in the minds of the believers? What is the distinction between belief and evidence? 'Scratch' is a mix of real-life interviews and poetic speculation. Writer, producer, composer: Gretchen Miller. Sound engineer: Russell Stapleton

In the tracks of the two dogs

The country of the two dogs is traditionally known as Paruku, and it lies on the edge of the Tanami Desert, in Western Australia. In the tracks of the two dogs takes us, with writer and artist, Kim Mahood, to Paruku, to explore the powerful history and post-settlement stories of the lake, and the families who care for it.

Gold dust of Hill End

The legends of the isolated NSW gold mining settlement, Hill End, loom large.
370,000 ounces were found in a quarter mile area, over two short years. Hill End is unique for the records which remain of its gold hey day. Hundreds of photographs by Beaufoy Merlin document the rush of the 1870s, while the town itself has a number of well restored buildings remaining. But while the gold rushes capture the popular imagination, what of the community which has lasted 150 years through tough times and good? This program also looks beyond the gold history, at the families who stayed, generation after generation, and still call the village home.

Ghost Songs

The community is abuzz. A new song has been received by the elder, Marjorie Bilbil, and everyone's talking about it. The ghost of a much beloved didjeridu player gave it to her in a dream, just a few days ago. It's the first new song for Cox Peninsula community Belyuen in several years. Rare for a woman to receive a song, rare for her to sing it, I sit on the dusty concrete veranda at her camp, and she performs for my microphone. The Ghost Songs is about a revolutionary new approach to the collection of traditional Aboriginal music. 
The digital and the spiritual are the two systems of transmission here, travelling side by side. The electronic way ensures the passing on of songs to those not yet born, songs that might otherwise disappear with their singers – from digital recorder and microphone they go to remote community hard-drives and are copied onto cd, onto an mp3 player on a piece of string around an old lady's neck, onto cassette. It's all part of the National Recording Project. The days of anthropologists taking recordings away to Canberra, where they might as well be lost to the community forever, are now gone.
But of course there's a much older way of passing music down... deeply spiritual, seemingly ephemeral yet powerfully enduring – the giving of songs by ghosts, through dreams, to the living people. It's no coincidence that in Belyuen the word used for a recording is the same as the word used for a song-giving spirit. Maruy.
In July this year, Radio Eye producer Gretchen Miller visited two small Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. They're linked by their music, culture, history, and by their country around the Daly River.
Gretchen joined musicologists Allan Marrett and Linda Barwick at Wadeye, or Port Keats as it's locally known, about 200 km southwest of Darwin. Sometimes heard about on the news in the context of gang riots and unrest, Wadeye in this program is a very different community which, together with Belyuen on the Cox Peninsula, is focusing on a special music project. The National Recording Project is organic in origin, made up of many smaller research programs, each capturing thousands of traditional indigenous songs as they're being composed and performed, each with detailed notes on who performed, what it was about, and more. The project is modestly revolutionary in the history of ethnomusicology, anthropology. What's different here is that performers, and language experts from the communities, are recognised as co-researchers alongside the university based musicologists, linguists and anthropologists. Instead of the music being recorded onto tapes and taken away to vast archives in the southern cities, it's recorded digitally and is stored on solar powered local computers in remote communities. New music, as well as the old recordings made by Strehlow, Stanner, Elkin, are being given back and passed around to families and relatives of the song men. Already music thought gone for good is being revived in the communities and there is tremendous potential to support and maintain and enhance a living practice. And through the story of Marjorie Bilbil's new song, we get an intimate insight into the vital role of music for one particular family.

Drive

My very first long form feature. 1997!
Take a trip over the Great Divide into the heart of Australia.
Written, composed and produced by Gretchen Miller.

Hot Summer Land Part 3 Rivers

In December, as this intense summer got into full swing, most of the country dried out. Drought held tight in western Queensland, Perth swooned through a series of record breaking heatwaves, and then the south-east and west caught fire with powerful implications for human life, livestock, native animals, plants, and our landscape.
In the Hot Summer Land project RN Earshot and ABC Open teamed up to ask our audience—you—to paint us a word picture of how your landscape changed over the three months of summer.
You posted over 200 evocative stories from around the country. Some of these were chosen to be part of a three part series, tracking the impact of summer as we lived it. In part two we use some of these stories to show how fire attacked the southern part of the country, and how the bush and the community responded.
Stories in this program are from: David Barton - First fire of the season, Polly Musgrove - October garden.
Guests: Captain Steve Warrington, Deputy Chief Officer of the Victorian Country Fire Authority; Professor David Lindenmayer, Professor, The Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University Dr Andrew Watkins
Supervisor, Climate Prediction Services at the Bureau of Meteorology, Captain Leigh Pilkington Deputy Group Captain for the Gosford district of the NSW Fire Brigade, Professor David Bowman Professor of Environmental Change, at the University of Tasmania.

Hounds of Newtown

Nobody knows just how many dogs there are in Newtown, a small, high density, inner city suburb of Sydney. But there are a lot - around one thousand dogs are registered by the two local councils, and after that, it's anyone's guess many more are living untagged and unrestrained.
Street Stories goes walkies on a dog day afternoon, where pooch is absolutely everybody's best friend and dog tales are both tall and true. (Another early one: 2003)

Hot Summer Land: Anticipation

Intense fires, drought, rain in unexpected places, and temperature records smashed—this El Niño summer in Australia both lived up to expectations, and surpassed them. In the Hot Summer Land project RN Earshot and ABC Open teamed up to ask our audience—you—to paint us a word picture of how your landscape changed over the three months of summer. You posted over 200 evocative stories from around the country. Some of these were chosen to be part of a three part series, tracking the impact of summer as we lived it. In part one of our series, Hot Summer Land, we travel back in time to the beginning of the season, and hear your stories of fear and anticipation at the start of the antipodean El Niño.
Stories in this program are from:
Natalie Lincoln - Anticipation Polly Musgrove - October garden Mary Mageau - From our back verandah Viki Cramer - No change coming

Hot summer land part 2 mid-summer

In December, as this intense summer got into full swing, most of the country dried out. Drought held tight in western Queensland, Perth swooned through a series of record breaking heatwaves, and then the south-east and west caught fire with powerful implications for human life, livestock, native animals, plants, and our landscape.
In the Hot Summer Land project RN Earshot and ABC Open teamed up to ask our audience—you—to paint us a word picture of how your landscape changed over the three months of summer.
You posted over 200 evocative stories from around the country. Some of these were chosen to be part of a three part series, tracking the impact of summer as we lived it.
In part two we use some of these stories to show how fire attacked the southern part of the country, and how the bush and the community responded.
Stories in this program are from:
David Barton - First fire of the season
Polly Musgrove - October garden
Guests
Captain Steve Warrington
Deputy Chief Officer of the Victorian Country Fire Authority
Professor David Lindenmayer
Professor, The Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University
Dr Andrew Watkins
Supervisor, Climate Prediction Services at the Bureau of Meteorology
Captain Leigh Pilkington
Deputy Group Captain for the Gosford district of the NSW Fire Brigade.
Professor David Bowman
Professor of Environmental Change, at the University of Tasmania