ABSTRACT
The Lajamanu Teenage Band members, for instance, can return home to their remote Aboriginal community and Warlpiri sociality and tell stories of being part of famous Aboriginal Stompem Ground festival in Broome. In doing so, they narrate themselves into broader national blackfella professional musical brotherhood, which can improve their musical and male standing in the Aboriginal realm that their home community is part of. In their stage performances, they also made their local blackfella social and cultural experiences heard in a larger imagined and actual Aboriginal realm. They did have to leave for ‘sorry business’, but traditional business is a wholly valid reason for a no-show in this Aboriginal music scene, and it did not put a dent in their standing with the studio. The author think that his ethnographic explorations make clear how the making and remaking of Aboriginal men and music is better understood as continuum of intercultural engagements and relations, which, in essence, are processes of mediation.
