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Another dusty update from the interior of Australia!
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The Dusty Update: Volume 4

 

Welcome to the fourth edition of Desert Feet Inc's online newsletter! If you've received this through someone else, you can subscribe here. If you don't wish to receive The Dusty Update, you can unsubscribe at end of the newsletter.

Our hope at Desert Feet Inc is that these updates will give our supporters and networks a clearer insight into what we do out on that dusty track for weeks on end. This newsletter is an effort to increase a positive awareness of our Indigenous Australian heritage. 

 

We would like to thank the Traditional Owners for sharing wisdom, stories and songs with us. These gifts are priceless cultural resources. Our team is humbled and grateful to be invited onto your land and into your communities, tour after tour. Thank you!


Table of Contents:

What's Been Happening?

In a Nutshell

We are now well into the new year and working on the first tour for 2016 up in Jigalong, there will be more from our current trip in the next Dusty Update, but for now let's have a look back at some of Desert Feet’s recent projects and tours.

In October 2015, Desert Feet ran a concert series at Warralong Community, as a part of Round 3 of the Ngurra Kujungka Western Desert League Festivals. Many bands, often made up of musicians from different communities played the four concerts well attended by surrounding communities.

During the afternoon on several days, Desert Feet ran music workshops using some of the newly purchased Warralong School classroom music equipment. In a Desert Feet first, Clare and Emily did a girls only music workshop and video clip which really helped to create an environment the girls could feel super comfortable recording and creating in. 

After the carnival Willy Kickett came by and asked to record some songs and with Alwyn on guitar and some extra Desert Feet musicians helping, we recorded a couple of great tracks, even filming a few cracking music videos on country (one in fact was based around Willy's love of football and his home team the Warralong Bombers). 

At the end of last year the brand new Truck Studio was booked out for a Perth event with a crowd of over 8000. The new sound system provided clear sound right to the back of the oval proving that the rig is capable of delivering high quality production to even larger format events. 

More recently, Desert Feet managed the appearance of Kankawa Nagarra (Olive Knight) for multiple shows at the high profile Nannup Music Festival. Her performances and workshops were very well received and large crowds gathered to hear her music and stories from her past set in remote Western Australia. We are also excited to announce that Kankawa has been booked to play at the Denmark Festival of Voice on the first weekend of June. 

As always, Desert Feet feels greatly privileged to be invited back to country time and again. The beautiful Traditional Lands in Australia, visiting exotic and hidden rivers, the sites of dreaming stories and ancient drawings, tens of thousands of years old, capturing just a very tiny slice of some of the oldest culture and language on this earth, here for you to enjoy.

Final System Setup

The Desert Feet Truck Stage 'The Lincoln' is ready to roll and will be at a festival near you shortly!

The Desert Feet Truck Stage dubbed 'The Lincoln' is up an running with successful shows in Punmu, Yandeyarra and Nullagine earlier in 2015. Around Perth the Desert Feet Truck was also hired two local events. With a custom designed fit-out, the total setup time is now drastically reduced which will make festivals and concerts much easier to run for future events. The truck is perfect for small festivals where closing streets limits stage set up time and with the onboard generator, the truck can be positioned almost anywhere.  

Thankyou to everyone who has helped in achieving this ambitious but impressive vision, especially for Lotterywest for supporting Desert Feet through to completion. We look forward to seeing you at a festival soon!  


Warralong Community

Desert Feet head off on the long journey north 


The Desert Feet Tour left early on Friday morning on the long 3 day journey to Warralong some 1600km away from Perth. The first day we decided to visit Walgahna, the second largest monolith in Australia (Second to Uluru), and the site of 17th century Aboriginal ochre paintings. All this in just under an hours drive west of Cue. The vibrant colours of the wildflowers surrounded us and we saw the beautiful rock art painted against the giant monolith. We later found out that rock art is also often resembling a kind of map of the surrounding area showing water resources, meeting places and other important features of the land. 

The next day saw us reach Nullagine where we stayed the night under an almost full moon enjoying camping in the outback on the edge of the desert. 

On Sunday we made an early start and headed up past Marble Bar (known to many as the hottest town in Australia) to Warralong Community, located a mere 60km away, and about an hour and a half from Port Hedland. We met the Ngurra Kujungka team and settled into the school where we were to stay for the next week for the final Ngurra Kujungka Western Desert League Festival for the year.

Ngurra Kujungka Festival - Warralong

4 days of sport and music


For four days teams battled it out in the searing heat and raging dust storms in Warralong playing epic games of football and softball. Desert Feet Tour put on the usual concerts each night and ran a variety of music workshops during the day for any interested musicians.
Concert Time
Rock & Roll, Country, Patch-up Bands

As usual, night time saw a festive atmosphere, but this time we even saw community elders getting up onstage to crank out rock & roll classics and country ballads. The genres overshadowed the youthful Desert Reggae. It was a real cross-cultural exchange, with Trevor, Matt, Richard, Emily and Damien all getting up on supporting instruments throughout the nights, a valuable and unforgettable experience for everyone.

Wild Girls - First ever Martu Girl Band!

Warralong girls made their first song together "Weekend"


It is noticeably more of a challenge for girls to participate in workshops with boys around, who often dominate the scene, but given the right environment, the girls are as keen as ever to explore the world of music. This tour we were lucky to have Emily, Rosie and Clare who between them could help the girls write a song, record it, learn to play it, and make a music video. The all girls team!

After a few workshops, the Wild Girls as they called themselves had made their first song, "Weekend". Clare and Emily also met up with the girls the next day and when they heard their song starting to take shape, decided they wanted to film a little clip for it. They took charge of coming up with video ideas, and Clare filmed them in the school grounds as Emily directed the lyrics. They also wanted to film some shots at the river, to align with lyrics in the second verse. You can see the finished Wild Girls music video below. It was fantastic to see the girls emerge from such shyness they had at the beginning to take artistic control of the song and bring their ideas and talents to the process.
Learning the song
Recording the song
Wild Girls - Weekend album cover.

Wild Girls - Weekend: The Process

The girls' song and music video creation from start to finish

It started with one of the girls, Latara, approaching Emily at the back of the truck, we'd just arrived in Warralong and were setting up for the first concert. She sidled up quietly and shyly asked if we were doing a workshop. "Can we write a song?"  she asked. Of course the response was "Yes!" A short conversation followed and determined that she and a couple of the other girls wanted some help to make a song, but no boys and no little kids!

We asked them to come back the following day as we didn't have time while setting up for the show, and sure enough they did. We took the group into the school library where it was quiet and away from nosey boys and distractions. After a lot of coaxing, encouragement, and questions with whispered answers, the girls came out with a couple of good verses and a chorus. They chose a style after Clare gave a few demos of different genres, and decided on a chord progression that they liked the sound of.

They sang with confidence during the rehearsal and recording process, and had remembered the words within a couple of takes. Richard, Clare, and Matt overdubbed instruments to finish the track.

Wild Girls - On The Weekend
Wild Girls - On The Weekend

Drum Workshop Featuring 'Wipeout'

Kids can play all the drums

Every workshop we do, dozens of kids ask "Can I play drums?". Sometimes we can do it but with 50 kids fighting for a turn on the drums, it can quickly turn to mayhem. So we decided to close the side doors and let kids have a go one at a time for a minute each playing their favourite song which to our great surprise was Wipeout. Often the kids were too 'shame' to play on their own in front of the other kids, but gradually everyone had their chance at the drums. There was one real stand-out drummer, Mason, who played some very rockin' drums with Trev and Matt who were our session jammers for the day. 

Mason also helped out his friend during the workshop, and later that night he was asked to join one of the bands as their drummer and he nailed it! The onlooking kids were in awe that their peer was up on stage with the adults playing so well. I think he will inspire many more young musicians to give it a go and pass on some of his mad drumming skills to the other kids. Watch out for these deadly drummers over the coming years!

Recording Willy Kickett

Willy has new songs to record


We were really excited to see Willy on day three, keen as ever to record some new songs. We spent the afternoon with Willy, making a plan for recording, and work-shopping the last few versus of some unfinished songs. One song was an anthem he wrote for his footy team, the Warralong Bombers, and indeed all the footy teams in general, as sport is a big part of his life.

The second song he played was a song we recorded 2 years ago called Dreamtime, although Willy revealed that he was too nervous last time so wanted to redo the song and make a video for it. The third song was absolutely beautiful, written about his daughters.

The following day we hit the studio early and despite some teething technical issues, managed to get some vocals and guitar recording. The next day the recordings really started to come together with local musical whiz Alwyn laying some guitar riffs and even his daughters dubbed some whispers at the end of Willie's Dreamtime song.

Rosie, Ben, Matt and Trevor did an amazing job in recording the tracks, and mixing the concerts!. 

Dreamtime - Willy Kickett

 
Once we had a few songs recorded, Willy was keen to make some film clips so we headed down to the oval for sunset to film for both the Bombers anthem Flying High and Dreamtime. The first shots were done in front of the footy goals, capturing the unforgiving red dirt oval often at the heart of remote desert communities.

Bruce arrived with his boomerangs, so we filmed some shots for Dreamtime around a campfire. Bruce tapped boomerangs and danced on the dusty red oval. Our smoke machine quickly became the dusty red mist created by kicking up the red sand. 
 

Bombers Music Video

 
Willy is passionate about footy, and so when he came to us with a mostly finished song about his football team, we knew how much he would want to record it. Some of the Desert Feet crew worked with Willy on his song helping to nut out the final verse and tighten up the song structure, a true rocking anthem ready for the studio. 

Some strong takes allowed the song to take shape, however we needed drums, and reached out to any Perth drummers who would be able to bash out a backing. Drum teacher Josh Ellis kindly obliged and we had a solid drum track to go with the song. Willy ended up getting a day extra with us and added in his own drum fills and Alwyn recorded some guitar licks to finish up a powerful song about the Warralong Bombers and the game of footy as it is in the desert.
Bombers Flying High - Willy Kickett

Desert Feet Cultural Activities

 
One of the things our desert feet team love is being invited out on country to be shown culturally significant sites, often by community elders. Clarry was our host on this occasion, and we were privileged to learn some of the local ancient history. This set of rock formations, easily seen from the road as a nondescript pile of rocks to the uninformed eye, is of great importance, and rock paintings (which we were asked not to photograph) serve as a map of the surrounding landscape and food throughout the year. Afterwards we were taken to the local waterhole to cool down, swimming among fresh water bull sharks.

Kankawa wins National ICTV Award

Congratulations to Kankawa Nagarra (Olive Knight) for taking out the Best Spiritual Way Video award at the National 2015 ICTV awards!
 

Pain O Pain from the album Heroes & Laments features wonderful sounds from a number of WA musicians including Stephen Pigram, Lucky Oceans, Dave Mann, Rob Findlay, Jiri Mil and Richard Watson all beautifully engineered by James Newhouse.

It was a combined effort of the Desert Feet Tour media team with Josh, Joel and Richard doing a fantastic job working under the direction of Kankawa to film and edit this clip, a real team effort, and a big thank you to everyone who pulled it together.

Pain O Pain - Heroes & Laments

Nannup Music Festival

Kankawa Nagarra (Olive Knight) performed twice and ran workshops at the popular Nannup Music Festival in March 2016, to large crowds who eagerly gathered for the rare opportunity to see truly unique and powerful Walmatjarri Blues in the picturesque surrounds of the south west.

Kankawa has also just been booked for the Denmark Festival of Voice on the first weekend of June 2016. 


Desert Feet Outcomes

 
In 2015 Desert Feet has made considerable progress in achieving long term objectives. Firstly, the recording and launch of a wonderful new album by Kankawa Nagarra (Olive Knight) has already gained significant exposure Australia-wide. In fact, Tell You A Story was the 3rd most requested song on community radio soon after its launch.

The Lotterywest-funded Desert Feet truck is complete and ready for hire. State-of-the-art sound equipment and skilled engineers provides clean and versatile sound for more than 5000 people.

2016 promises to be another great year already kicked off by Kankawa Nagarra's performance at Nannup Music Festival in front of hundreds of local musicians, punters and supporters. 

It is a privilege and honour to assist in the development of musical talent in communities across remote Western Australia. We have a rare opportunity to help preserve some of the world's oldest languages and heritage through the power of music. Every recording on Desert Feet Tour assists in that preservation through our vast collection of archival media. Check out some of our featured artists over at Desert Feet Records and of course you can support artists by buying their music!

Desert Feet Tour holds a vital role in bringing together Western and Indigenous cultures by providing musical equipment, skills and a voice to remote communities. Desert Feet enables the telling of stories, language and wisdom with a wider audience. Shared experiences through cultural exchange, workshops and music creation all create close bonds between the Desert Feet team and remote aboriginal communities, facilitating shared learning and appreciation of our collective culture.

Each Desert Feet Tour supports the development of a future generation of Australian Indigenous cultural ambassadors.

Desert Feet Tour Supporters

Touring professional personnel and equipment across some of the remotest parts of Australia is no easy task. It is made possible with the generous backing of our supporters.

Desert Feet Inc would like to sincerely thank our sponsors BHP Billiton Iron Ore, Healthway, Newcrest Mining Limited, Lotterywest, and Creative Legal for their support of the October tour.

We also wish to thank our partners, Ngurra Kujungka (Inc).
 

           


                                

      
        


Meet the October Desert Feet Crew

The October tour crew are a talented bunch, each with different skills and expertise.

New to the team was Clare, musician and masterchef. We were also lucky to have TAFE trained sound engineers Rosie, Matt, Ben and Trevor who worked together impeccably on their first trip to the desert to do live sound at the concerts and record Willy's music.

We also welcomed back tour veteran Richard Watson helping out as a truck driver, musician and videographer.

Emily Minchin and Damien Thornber (DFI founders) were tour managers for this trip, accompanied as always by sidekick, Bella the Dog (Tour Mascot and Executive cuddler).


Desert Feet Productions Update

Ready to go!

The Desert Feet Truck continues to improve its arsenal with a new lighting system to complement an already cranking new sound system. Each new addition continues to make this state-of-the-art mobile concert stage and recording studio truly unique. A one-of-a-kind resource for concerts, festivals, and music recording across Western Australia!

The brand new Presonus StudioLive RM Series mixer is a 32-channel powerhouse controlled via iPads. This wireless system eliminates the need for a front of house mixer, freeing up space on the dance floor. More space to boogie! It also gives our sound engineers a lot of mobility - they can hop on stage to adjust monitor levels and wander around to listen to the mix and adjust on the fly. After getting everything dialled in and streamlining the set-up process, the new system is performing like a dream.  

Our new lighting system is also controlled wirelessly via iPads. This gives us dynamic lighting during live sets and gets the kids involved in the production side of things too!

Desert Feet - Mobile Studio and Concert Stage - 'The Lincoln'

Mobile Recording Studio and Concert Stage - 'The Lincoln'


Make A Difference


Have you considered the difference a personal or business contribution towards Australian Indigenous culture can make?

Desert Feet Inc is a Not-For-Profit Charity with the ACNC and holds Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status at the Register of Cultural Organisations, offering tax deductible receipts on all donations over $2.

Every donation goes towards valuable work creating and promoting original, contemporary Indigenous Australian music through on-location workshops, professional recording in remote areas, and fully equipped and staffed performance venue, to directly aid remote Indigenous talent.

Feel free to get in touch for further information;
email emily@desertfeettour.com
or call +61 437 151 646
 
Also, follow us on all our social media!
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About Desert Feet Tour

Desert Feet Tour is a Western Australian based music project, using the arts to create educational and musical opportunities in remote communities, encouraging cultural expression and awareness. 


Music Opportunities:

  • Staging events in remote/isolated communities, performance opportunities for musicians in remote areas.
  • Bringing musicians, performers and talent together to perform for the communities.
  • Staging events with national level acts, to create exposure for the artists we discover.
  • Recording, producing and promoting musicians from remote Indigenous communities. Desert Feet Records (DFR) is an Australian not-for-profit record label for musicians in remote areas. http://www.desertfeetrecords.org.au
  • All concerts are inclusive, alcohol and smoke free family events.

Educational Opportunities:

  • Teaching basic sight-reading, song writing and music theory classes.
  • Delivering healthy lifestyle messages through song writing.
  • Assist existing artists to develop their performance skills.
  • Producing recordings/demos of songs created in workshops.
  • All workshops are optional, non-intrusive and highly customisable.
  • Making music videos of workshop, studio, and live recordings.

"We dream of a day when all Australians recognise, revere and respect Indigenous culture. A day when children have forgotten the slang and racist prejudice of our forefathers, and our education curriculum includes Indigenous history with all the injustices and atrocities included - for it is not until we know what has been done that we can say sorry, and really mean it."

Desert Feet Inc.

Copyright © 2015 Desert Feet Incorporated, All rights reserved.

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