Wamin Songs
It’s in our DNA

Between 2022 and 2023, Ewamian Elder and musician worked with ethnomusicologist and other Ewamian and Aboriginal musicians to create the first Wamin songs in generations. The project, undertaken as part of Koumoulas’s doctoral research, marked the first time Wamin music had ever been recorded.

Wamin is the ancestral language of the Ewamian people of Far North Queensland’s Gulf Savannah region. It has not been spoken for three decades. The music created through this project formed part of a broader, community-led language revitalisation initiative that emerged following the Ewamian people’s Native Title determination in 2013, beginning in 2017 and continuing today.

The specific musical practices of Ewamian ancestors are unknown to living community members, much as the language itself was. Rather than attempting to reconstruct a lost musical tradition, the newly written songs take their direction from traditional Ewamian stories. They tell of particular locations and events in Ewamian Country, the history of the Ewamian people, and the trauma of displacement from Country. The songs were deliberately written in a traditional “classical Aboriginal” song style, providing a foundation for future Ewamian music-making.

This website is an interactive platform for exploring Wamin Songs through storytelling and art.

Wamin Songs belongs to the Ewamian people. The language and song content presented here were developed and shared in partnership with the Ewamian community.

A sandstone rock shelter on Ewamian Country: an overhanging rock face above a sandy floor.

Our songs and stories live in the rock art.
ClickTouch to listen.

Didjspeak

Teaching Wamin through the didjeridu

In Australia, traditional didjeridu playing is founded on language. Didjeridu players articulate rhythmic patterns through syllabic phrases that resemble the sounds of the spoken language of the region from which those rhythms originate. Consequently, each region is characterised by its own set of sounds and rhythms, giving its playing style a recognisable identity.

Unlike traditions in north-central Australia, no Ewamian playing style survived into living memory. As with the language, the playing practices of Ewamian ancestors are unknown to community members today. As part of the broader work of cultural revitalisation, we chose to create one.

Didjspeak is the system we created as part of this project, and the system from which the Ewamian playing style is built. Elsewhere, didjeridu rhythms are taught through vocables. These syllables have meaning within the music, since they stand for the rhythms themselves, but they are not words, and cannot be understood outside a musical context. In didjspeak, each rhythm is paired with a Wamin word, so the didjeridu can be used to teach the language.

Didjspeak comprises 11 rhythmic units. A word is paired with a rhythm when it has as many syllables as the rhythm has notes, and when its vowel sounds run in the same order as the rhythm is played. Wáraŋ (‘wind’), for example, is paired with the two-note rhythm two eighth notes : two syllables, wá-raŋ.

Vowels are central to this pairing. When a player articulates a rhythmic phrase, the vowels are formed much as they are in speech, by moving the tongue and shaping the mouth. Each vowel shape strengthens particular frequencies in the sound, known as formants, and it is these formants that let a listener tell one vowel from another. The same happens on the didjeridu. A phrase articulated with an i sounds different from the same phrase articulated with an a. Didjspeak groups Wamin vowels into three vowel classes according to their formants, and each word is paired with a rhythm through its vowel class sequence. For further detail, see How the words were chosen.

Because every rhythm is a word, rhythms played one after another create larger sequences of meaning. The rhythm for baya (‘sing’) followed by the rhythm for warrama (‘dance’) is baya warrama (‘sing and dance’). Across the 11 rhythmic units there are 19 words, chosen to be common enough to combine with one another and to cover a spread of nouns, verbs and describing words.

Didjspeak also has its own accompanying notation. Ewamian artist Jedess Hudson designed a symbol for each word, taking her inspiration from found on Country. Its purpose is not to transcribe sound, as in Western notation, but to indicate meaning. Each symbol is a visual representation of a word. Because every word is paired with a specific rhythm and vowel class sequence, the notation guides both pronunciation and sound production.

the 19 didjspeak words

How the words were chosen

Didjspeak groups Wamin vowels into three vowel classes by their second formant: Low (o, a, ə), Mid (u, e) and High (i). Each rhythmic unit is played with one or more vowel class sequences, and a word is paired with a rhythm when its syllables follow that sequence in order.

Take the rhythmic unit two eighth notes as an example. In our newly created Wamin songs, this rhythmic unit is played with three different vowel class sequences, and so has three words: for Low–Low, wáraŋ ‘wind’, two syllables with a in both; for Mid–Low, ndjuwa ‘go’; and for High–Low, minya ‘small’.

Where several Wamin words fitted a rhythm, we chose the one easier to remember and to play, and aimed for a spread of parts of speech so that words could be combined into meaningful phrases. For the rhythmic unit rhythmic unit for baya , for example, both baya (‘sing’) and alŋa:m (‘kidney’) have two syllables that follow its Low–Low vowel class sequence. baya was chosen because it is the more commonly used word, which makes it easier to remember and more useful to a learner.

Of note, word stress is not matched to the rhythm, because the stress pattern of Wamin is unknown.

In all, didjspeak comprises 11 rhythmic units, 18 rhythmic–vowel class units and 19 words.

The table below sets out all 11 rhythmic units, the vowel class sequences each is played with, and the Wamin word paired with every sequence.

Rhythmic unit	Vowel class sequence	Wamin didjspeak word
	Low	wə:r ‘rock wallaby’
	Low	ndhə ‘five, handful’
	Low · Low	baya ‘sing’
	Low · Low · Low	warrama ‘dance’
	Low · Low · Low	goborra ‘magpie’
	Low · Low · Low · Low	gábagaba ‘quickly’
	Low · LowMid · Low	dja:-dha ‘at camp’nyula ‘he, she, it’
	Low · Low · LowHigh · Low · Low	ŋal:-gamban ‘no boomerang’bi:-gamban ‘can't hear’
	LowMidMid	ŋgwa ‘there’yu ‘fish’ndem ‘arm’
	Low · LowMid · LowHigh · Low	wáraŋ ‘wind’ndjuwa ‘go’minya ‘small’
	Low · Low · LowLow · Mid · LowLow · High · Low	nhaŋgaya ‘see, look’ərreya ‘teeth’babila ‘boy’

For further details, see Markos Koumoulas (2025), The ancient voice of the future: reawakening Wamin song and language through the didjeridu, University of Sydney, Chapters 6 and 7.

an example: Goborra Warrama, ‘Magpie Dance’

An eight-bar excerpt of the didjeridu part recorded on the Wamin song Goborra Warrama (‘Magpie Dance’), transcribed using both Ewamian and Western notation.

Eight bars of didjeridu notation, Ewamian symbols above Western notation.

The same excerpt, shown with Ewamian didjeridu notation only. This is currently the preferred way of displaying notation when teaching new Ewamian students to play the didjeridu. It is a significant step away from standard Western representations of music notation, in the same way that Ewamian people are reclaiming and defining their own culture.

The same eight bars in Ewamian notation only.

Open savanna woodland on Ewamian Country: dry grass, scattered eucalypts, blue sky.

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the words

Given the few words in its lexicon, Wamin vocabulary requires broader interpretations to convey its meaning through connections to Ewamian Country.