Today I swim upstream toward the rapid, diving under just for a moment to wet my hair so I am properly in. I strike out across the current, and as it catches me at its swiftest, and I roll onto my back to watch the racing trees and crisp blue sky. It’s bliss. My nerves and my fear and my confusion disappear with the current as the cool comfort of the water seeps into me. I flip onto my front and swim back, catching the eddy, and then make another circuit, emboldened. River is in a playful mood. I don’t want to push it, though. It’s been raining and the river has risen at least two metres, rushing and tumbling through granite narrows that Korra usually sniffs and bounds over.

Later I sit on warm brown boulders, drying off, feeling belonging and loved by River, watching the puppy collecting burrs in her silky red pelt that will take me an hour to untangle later. There is still unease in my heart as Maryann’s verse does its slow work in me. As I look downstream I notice

the slight rippling

on the water at the far end of the lagoon,

and the wind picking up and blowing the ripples

towards me, slowly, silently, gently

until they turn the mirror of sky and cloud and branches

on the surface of the lagoon

into a little sea of ripples

and feeling from the wind,

telling me it’s ok

I’m ok I’m known
and loved
across

worlds

Ria Jago – Composition, arrangement, performance and co-production.
Sound engineering and co-production – Dr Anthony Garcia

Ria with McIntyre River, near Wallangra, NSW, Thursday 18 April 2024

‘Story of my Family’
Australia is the grip of a great silence, that extends over several hundred years into colonial history, about the genocides committed against First Nations Peoples. Many people from all walks of life do not know their family histories. Some are searching, and some are afraid to know. Unhealed trauma is in people and landscape, and the song with River calls Ria into a healing journey with her ancestry, which is mostly Celtic (Irish, Cornish, Scottish). Her ancestors suffered genocide, and then committed, or benefited from, it, in this great land which is her beloved home. She receives prompts from River, Moon, Sun and Fire, that help her and teach her so that she learns from the song as it flows through her.

Making space for hidden Knowledges
This song Story of my Family may be characterised as a poetic co-becoming across time-space, in contact with – among other collaborators – Solar Flares, Ancestral Elders from this land and my Celtic ancestral lands, and my River collaborators. Emergent co-becomings are creating a deepening capacity to sing myself and perhaps others back into Earth-relationship – here in Australia, and – unexpectedly – in my ancestral homelands in Ireland, Cornwall, and Scotland. The relationship between Country and this sensing woman is at the heart of this inquiry, and trusts the co-arising embodied experience and my ‘felt sense’ of my body’s responses to inquiry through the listening and creative methods. As can be seen, the song reveals themes and instructions for this body, as well as the social and political body.

Score
I have attempted both to represent my own ancestral voices that wish to speak, and make space for voices I cannot hear – Beings and powers and still-occurring histories that are influencing me. I struggle, however, to ‘epistemologise’ the ‘geopower’ of Country and knowledges that are not mine either to know or speak, or both. Yet all these voices are profoundly influential in creating, and also healing, all our selves.

Singing in River time
Australian Yolgnu songmen describe their people sitting in long rows, at the fishtraps, waiting. They sing, ‘recalling what is happening now. This has always happened, is happening, and will happen in the future…The past is in the present is in the future’. It is as though the singing describes and makes it so, and has ‘helped sustain both Yolgnu life and the balance of the natural world for thousands of years’ (Flanagan, 2023). In this understanding, stories, metaphors, and songs appear and ‘speak’ outside linear time; and the endangered Regent Honeyeater, who cannot learn his mating call due to noise pollution (Crate, 2021), is still singing and will always sing, and his mate is recognising him, as she always did.

These are my experiments with co-becoming with places and powers that have agency, and whose mystery reveals itself in its own time, if at all. In this way, with place, I sonically remake my world so that it becomes, once more, Earth-Centric; inspired by the Yolgnu women, whose songspirals (2020) remake the water that they sing with. In doing so, I find and create and begin to re-sing the songlines of my ancestry, so that the next generations in my family can follow them, as anchors across time-space, as they sing their own songlines.

‘Story of my Family’ offers a moment of ceremony, drawn from across space-time, intended to help heal the specific wounds of colonisation and loss of belonging.

Ria Jago, DPhil candidate in Law and Society, Australia.

Ria has a deep personal and professional investment in community development and international relations.
She is a community musician, and occasional pop-up choir conductor.