For the Butchulla people of the Fraser Coast region of south-east Queensland, the word yirinda means “now”. It is derived from the endangered Badjala language, spoken by fewer than 25 people. Yirinda is also the name given to a Brisbane-based project between Fred Leone – one of just three Butchulla songmen – and renowned contrabass player and producer Samuel Pankhurst. Their first, self-titled album has just been released.

But “now” has been a long time coming. An earlier version of the album, recorded late in 2020, was scrapped. “You put on a piece of music that’s an iconic recording, then you put on your music and go, is this giving me the same thing? And it wasn’t,” Pankhurst says.

It’s been worth the wait. After improvisational beginnings, Yirinda presents nine taut, tightly written songs, superficially similar to Gurrumul’s final experimental fusion with classical minimalist composition before his death in 2017.

“It’s taking a minimum 65,000 years of language, song, melodies, and marrying it with this style of music that’s been around for not very long,” Leone says. “It’s acknowledging the past, but living in the now and leaving something for the future.”

The colonisation of the Fraser Coast was particularly harsh for the Butchulla people, whose population was reduced to a few hundred; their language was rendered functionally extinct.

In conversation, Leone frequently slips into song, including startlingly accurate birdsong mimicry, from which many traditional songs are drawn. “It’s just putting those living memories in the songs, much like what we do with the songlines,” he says.
He tells a story about the coastal migration of the diamond-scaled mullet, subject of the song Guyu (Fish).

“When the black wattle goes into flower, that’s when you can go down to the water, and you look for wuruma, the brahminy kite-hawk. You watch for them to drop, and it’s telling you where you can hunt the fish. But if you don’t listen to the song properly and hunt correctly, then you’re going to go hungry for a few seasons.”

One of Leone’s childhood neighbours was Boy Swallows Universe author Trent Dalton, who says Leone’s place was “a chip kick from my front yard growing up”, on a housing commission estate in the northern Brisbane suburb of Bracken Ridge.

For Dalton, Leone’s optimism was a beacon. They played in the same local rugby league team, the Brighton Roosters. “His wit was as sharp as his sidestep and his heart was bigger than the Steeden [football] under his arm,” he says.

I remember walking past his house and he’d give me the most heartening, hopeful look.

Trent Dalton

“I distinctly remember walking past his house on more than one occasion feeling genuinely miserable about some dark and painful shit that might have been happening in my house, and he’d look out his front window and give me the most heartening, hopeful look.”

Pankhurst, who among other things is the dialogue editor for the ABC’s runaway hit Bluey, has worked with an array of composers and musicians including Paul Grabowsky, the Sun Ra Arkestra and the Brodsky Quartet. He is synaesthetic, and says he needed to “see” songs such as Guyu in order to find the music for them. “Not everybody’s going to be speaking Butchulla language, so we thought we had to put some more stuff around the music to fill out the visual experience.”

The pair were introduced by Mona Foma curator (and Violent Femmes bassist) Brian Ritchie in 2018 for a performance at the Bleach festival on the Gold Coast, as part of the city’s Commonwealth Games arts program that year.

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“They decided to start playing as a duo, which I thought was very interesting,” Ritchie says. “I’ve always been interested in the combination of Aboriginal music and improvised music, because to me that seems like a natural combination.

“A lot of Aboriginal musicians do rap, country music, basically grafting some of their themes and maybe some of the vocalisation or language onto foreign forms of music, whereas improvisation is universal. It’s not a genre, it’s a practice.”

One of their early gigs was with improvisational masters the Necks at Hamer Hall at the Supersense festival in 2019 – a performance that stretched out for three hours, with musicians from both ensembles wandering on and off stage.

Slowly they evolved, creating a fusion of fully scored new and traditional songs. After the first failed attempt at making the album, they reached for the stars, enlisting mixer Jake Miller (Björk; Frank Ocean), with mastering by Alex Wharton (the Beatles, My Bloody Valentine).

“The metric was how many goosebumps you get, so we had to find the goosebumps key, the goosebumps tempos,” Pankhurst says. “If people hear this, it should bring them to tears with how beautiful it is.”

For Leone, Yirinda is a way of keeping his language alive. His aunt, Jeanie Bell, is an Indigenous linguist. In a brutal irony, she is now in care with Alzheimer’s disease: Yirinda is a way of preserving the language she ensured would not be forgotten.

Her legacy, Leone says, has rippled down. “I’ve noticed up at Maryborough, they’re talking a mix of 30 per cent lingo, 70 per cent English, compared to when I was a kid, where you’d hear maybe three or four words every now and again.”

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Leone, too, is a teacher, passing on the language and the songs. “I’ll ask someone in a couple of months – remember that song, remember that story? And if they’re able to tell it back to me as close as I told them, then I’ll give them a bit more info.”

Yirinda had cultural sensitivities to consider too – an issue Yothu Yindi dealt with in their inclusions of traditional songs on their early recordings. Leone consulted with elders, including Aunty Joyce Bonner, another linguist from the Butchulla Aboriginal Corporation.

“They’re just happy for [the language] to be alive and doing something,” Leone says. “A couple of songs are old recordings – Yuangan [Dugong] was first recorded in 1959 by an anthropologist. I think I’m the only person that sings it now.”

Yirinda is out now. A promotional tour includes Melbourne Recital Centre on March 2; Brunswick Music Festival on March 3; Sydney Biennale on March 10; Byron Bay on March 23 and Brisbane on April 30.

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