← Return to Living in the Mainstream
Djatpangarri means ‘fun, humorous, amusing, clowning around’. It’s a style of singing and dancing that originated among young Yolŋu men living at the Yirrkala mission in the late 1930s in the Northern Territory. Djatpangarri continued to develop until the 1970s when mission life ended.
Unlike the more formal religious and ceremonial Yolŋu songs, it's a purely recreational style. Djatpangarri songs deal with everyday subjects such as cricket matches, the tides, and cartoons (one well-known song is about Donald Duck). The first songs were composed to be performed at impromptu concerts at the beach camp near Yirrkala. The lyrics are often interwoven with references to skin-names and relationships between the subjects of the song, reinforcing bonds within the community.
The Gumatj clan are considered masters of the djatpangarri style, and songs are sung in the Gumatj language. Several members of Yothu Yindi are from the Gumatj clan, so it’s not surprising that the band performs a number of traditional djatpangarri-style songs.
The song Treaty takes musical ideas from an old djatpangarri song and places them in a rock ’n’ roll context, bringing this traditional form to a global audience.
As Mandawuy Yunupingu says on the Yothu Yindi website:
Though it borrows from rock ’n’ roll, the whole structure of ‘Treaty’ is driven by the beat of the djatpangarri that I’ve incorporated in it. It was an old recording of this historic djatpangarri that triggered the song’s composition. The man who originally created it was my gurruŋ (maternal great-grandmother’s husband) and he passed away a long time ago in 1978. He was a real master of the djatpangarri style.
For younger Yolŋu audiences, Treaty exposes them to a fun form of song and dance that their parents and grandparents enjoyed in their youths. For older Yolŋu listeners it's a reminder of a time before the advent of mining on the Gove Peninsula.
Treaty appeared on the Yothu Yindi album Tribal Voice along with another historic djatpangarri song, Gapu (Water), which shares a similar melodic structure but is performed in a more traditional style.
