ABSTRACT
James Cowan has pointed out that landscape for the Aboriginal peoples is 'a complex and luminous spiritual edifice reminiscent of an open-air cathedral'. Theirs is a landscape already richly inspirited from the Dreamtime, reaching back across some 50,000 years, inhabited by ancestral beings moving through the cycles of death and rebirth to emerge as conception spirits from totemic sites in the land itself to be reborn in human form. Spirits, intimately connected with land, are omnipresent. This creates a highly evolved living bond between country and its human inhabitants expressed actively in ceremony in which music and dance are central and intertwined as can be observed in the wangga song series researched and recorded by University of Sydney ethnomusicologist, Allan Marett. The style and atmosphere of this movement overall is somewhat akin to the 'colonial' music of Port Essington. In both works the structure of the 'European' music is more sectional and broken up than that of the Aboriginal music.
