‘Gunditjmara Bundiya | Gunditjmara Alive’ is a community engagement program that aims to help reclaim, maintain and reinforce Gunditjmara languages and dialects through song. Cultural strengthening sits at its forefront. The project will culminate in the creation of the first ever Gunditjmara language album sung, by Gunditjmara people. It brings together a small but diverse group of Gunditjmara people who, with the assistance of Vicki Couzens and the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, will translate their song into language. Songwriters will learn how to sing their songs in language and then through a series of workshops we will teach these songs to community, including students at Heywood & District Secondary College. The performance and professional recording of the songs will draw on the skills of VCA staff, graduates and students. A key component of the project will be a series of short interviews with participants where we ask them to reflect on their experience of writing and singing in language and what this means to them as individuals as well as for their families and communities.

This project is made possible by the Indigenous Languages and Arts Project run by the Department of Communications and the Arts with the support of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and Victorian Corporation for Aboriginal Languages. Our draft Gunditjmara Alive Language Protocols are here.

Project team:

Richard J. Frankland, Project Lead, University of Melbourne

Vicki Couzens, Language advisor, Keerray Wooroong Language Learning and Research Centre

Sophie Couchman, Project manager, University of Melbourne

Rosales Martinez, CEO, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages

Lachlan Wooden, Sound engineer, University of Melbourne

Daniel King, First Person Films

Colleen Hughson, First Ladies Productions

Jason Kanoa, Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporation

Stephanie Tashkoff, Heywood & District Secondary College

We would also like to thank Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporation, Gunditjmara Aboriginal Corporation, Heywood & District Secondary College, Emily Kersing and Jonathan Laskovsky for their support and assistance with the project.