I think song and song lyrics have always
held a fascination for me. I remember
having your LPs of Madonna in the
1980s and reading the song texts
over and over and learning the songs and
looking at how things fit together. I did
once have an experience where a child
grabbed CD liner notes out of my hand
and said 'Stop reading that it's not a
book' and that's already always stuck
with me because I always have paid so
much attention to the details inside
recordings. You know, the notes that go
along with the recordings have always
been very important to me. So my name is
Dr Kirsty Gillespie. I'm senior curator
in Anthropology, which is part of the
Cultures and Histories program in the
Queensland Museum. My position here is a
joint position with James Cook
University, so I spend a lot of my time
here at the Museum and some of my time
at the Townsville campus of James Cook
University. So this is one of the angklung
that we have here in the collection.
So angklung come in different sizes and
different tones. I got into working
museums and collections through my
work with music. I had studied the music
of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.
When I came to the end of my doctoral
research I realised that I'd really
focused on only one part of a country.
Papua New Guinea is a very diverse
country with more than 800 indigenous
languages and, with that, a great
diversity in musical practice as well. So
I had the opportunity to go to the other
end of the country to New Island
Province where the
Lihir island group are located.
When I first started researching the
music of Lihir I was doing my own
recordings of contemporary musical
practice but I was also reading the
historical documents about Lihir and
I came across some documents that talked
about recordings that had been made by
Otto Schlaginhaufen in 1908 when he
visited the Lihir islands and became
very excited about the idea of getting
those recordings and
taking them to the Lihir people and
playing them to them so they could be
reconnected with their past. I've always
been interested in community and working
with community so it's been fantastic
over the last 10 or so years to be
working with the Lihir Cultural
Heritage Association. So I think in the
past Anthropology in a sense it was the
colonial gaze so it was about the
European looking at 'the other', you know
that's the history of Anthropology. In
contemporary times we're really
conscious of that and we're really
looking at understanding culture in a
different way. The collaborative approach
is really the way to go. I'm engaged in
looking at sound in Queensland now,
particularly the sounds of the Torres
Strait. There's been a lot of research
and recordings on music in the Torres
Strait and we've been able to
incorporate some of that into our Museum
of Tropical Queensland display Pearling in
the Torres Strait. I've curated an eight-song
playlist of Torres Strait songs that
express the role and the history of
pearling for Torres Strait Islanders.
I think working with community, doing
collaborative projects, is really the way
forward. It's important to me because
it's my ethical approach. I'd like to see
the Museum become a place where
everybody feels welcome and included and
where everybody feels that their culture
is represented in some kind of way. We
can somehow, sort of, tell a collective
history or people can feel, you know, this
is a history of who we are and what we
do and this... not only the history that
this is the kind of... these are
the possibilities of who we can be.
