ABSTRACT
The songs of the dua nara include some of the most beautiful literary efforts of Aboriginal Australia. They are poems set to traditional tunes, outlining the activities of the Djanggawul. In essence, they represent the original songs sung by these Ancestral Beings in the Dreaming Times; but through the ages they must have undergone a certain amount of alteration, a process to which they are vulnerable on account of their length. This is not to suggest that their content has necessarily been distorted, but merely that, through the course of generations in a non-literate society, they have not come down to us with exactly the same form and content as when they were sung by the Djanggawul.
