Ngarluma man Patrick Churnside is on a journey to reawaken a traditional Pilbara song and his performance which has been a decade in the making is coming to Melville for the first time.
Tjaabi-Flood country will premiere at the City of Melville’s Main Hall on June 19 in what Churnside says is a portrayal of the cultural and environmental pressures burdening Aboriginal communities in the Pilbara.
Central to the performance — a mixture of song, theatre and digital projections — is the tjaabi melody, which hails from First Nations people in WA’s northern region.
The performance is a collaboration between Churnside and writer and director Scott Rankin, with musical arrangements by Aaron Hopper.
The play features powerful storytelling covering current pressures facing Aboriginal people in the Pilbara, such as the race for new minerals and more ore.
While the idea was born out of Roeburne about 10 years ago, it was toured with Aboriginal communities first in other parts of Australia.
“The tour has been more so an intercultural exchange and the touring of the practice of tjaabi,” Churnside said.
“Whilst there’s been a few public shows in the community, most of them have been small community exchanges.”
Each tjaabi is handed down to generations of singers and Churnside’s own great-grandfather was known in the Pilbara as a revered songman.
Churnside said his passion for research and understanding of cultural knowledge led him to find archives of his great-grandfather’s song recordings in the 1960s.
“I got to a point of saying I want to practice, I can no longer research and read them,” he said.
Churnside said tjaabi had been a long-held way of telling stories through song, covering deeply cultural themes from creation and Dreamtime stories to colonisation.
He said bringing the performance in front of an audience was also a deeply personal move.
“Sometimes I find it overwhelming but I sort of feed from the energy of audiences at times when performing,” he said.
“(It helps) seeing their reactions to a deep story that means so much to me.”
City of Melville acting creative producer of arts Jana Braddock said she was thrilled to welcome Tjaabi for its first Perth performance.
“Tjaabi is more than just music; it’s a reflection of stories, dreams and moments encapsulated in crisp poetic language,” she said.
Churnside said its creation had become his “passions and life’s work”.
“I pour my heart into it, researching, learning and performing,” he said.
Tjaabi will run between June 19 and June 21 and is a $15 ticketed event.