Fitzroy – or Ngár-go – was a gathering place for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people moving to Melbourne from the 1920s onwards. Many of the Stolen Generations saw the area as a safe space to find family and reconnect with their community.

Tamiru said the contemporary urban culture of the Fitzroy and Collingwood area has been imprinted with the actions and experiences of those that came before, even if not immediately obvious to the naked eye.

“The political movements, the civil rights movement that all happened in Fitzroy and Collingwood, our people were the ones that voiced that, that shaped that, that made that. It has an enormous history and our people are proud of that history,” Tamiru said.

Kicking off at the historical Fig Tree in Exhibition Gardens, the audience will be welcomed to Country and take part in a Smoking Ceremony before allowing the app to guide them to various live pop-up performances.

After six years of development, Tamiru believed the union between the app’s technology and the Elders’ oral storytelling was a welcome development, working “hand-in-hand” to “enlighten” as vast an audience as possible.

“I think sometimes we get incorrectly anchored in the way we tell our stories, that there’s only one way of doing it and that falls in a sort of traditional way or a contemporary way,” Tamiru said. “But I’m not sure about that. I think we are a people that evolve.”

Yalinguth – meaning “yesterday” in the Woi Wurrung language – fits perfectly with this year’s Fringe Festival theme, “it’s about time”, echoing the sentiments of many Elders: that we need to go back before we can go forwards.

Melbourne Fringe creative director and chief executive Simon Abrahams said Yalinguth stood out within the program because of the way it offers respect for the passing of time.

“It tells 60,000 years of history,” Abrahams said. “It’s a work that celebrates the culture of that particular place and the people who’ve inhabited it for such a long time.”

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Abrahams said the festival helps Melbourne express itself, placing diversity and representation as a top priority across the 450 events on offer. It will be the first in-person program in three years and the festival’s 40th anniversary, with events like Yalinguth acting as evidence behind the importance of art and its constant evolution.

On Yalinguth’s future, Tamiru said Gertrude Street would not be the app’s one-stop shop. The team is already in the midst of developing the app to extend to Melbourne’s CBD, with the hope of eventually going state- and nationwide.

Yalinguth Live will take place as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival on 8 October. The Yalinguth app is available to download now from Google Play and on Apple’s App Store.

The 2022 Melbourne Fringe Festival program will be launched on Friday night. All tickets will be on sale at melbournefringe.com.au.