‘We don’t show our women’s breasts for nothing’: Shifting purposes for Warlpiri women’s public rituals – yawulyu – Central Australia, 1980s–2020s

Abstract

Warlpiri women from the Tanami Desert of Central Australia have across generations passed on their yawulyu ceremonies, which nurture kin, country and cosmological connections. Dussart has previously shown distinct shifts in purpose in the 1990s, as Warlpiri women first began to perform yawulyu for non-Indigenous audiences. In the past decade, a further shift has occurred, with yawulyu being held predominantly as part of community-development arts initiatives. These opportunities are now the primary contexts in which yawulyu are held, while redefining the values, power relations and types of capital central to these performances, be they surrounding prestige, monetary payment or cultural recognition, as well as providing ambiguous and elusive communitas of ‘contentment’ for the performers as they engage with their audiences. In this article, the authors present case studies that span from the 1980s, when Warlpiri women first considered how to present yawulyu to non-Indigenous audiences, through to the pan-Aboriginal Women’s Law and Culture meetings of the 1990s and 2000s, and the Warlpiri-led Southern Ngaliya dance camps of the 2010s, and up to the present day, where they are being invited to perform yawulyu as part of larger theatrical events. As the authors examine performative events during different periods in Australia since colonisation, they draw on Thomas Turino’s definitions of participatory and presentational genres of musical performances to analyse how and why the reasons to perform have shifted. The authors conclude by highlighting that such shifts shed light on how entangled politics of relatedness are also changing.