Sorry we haven't had a chance to write a longer news update yet, as you can imagine we're flat out here! In the mean time please check out some of these fantastic reviews we've been getting for our now sold-out wonderfully successful Sydney Festival season.

Thanks to everyone who has volunteered, driven us to an airport, taken someone shopping, been backstage with grapes and helped us with this tour. There are 35 of us working on the tour and many more people supporting us to be here. 

Wiru mulapa! 

Thanks to Beth for keeping the news up to date in my absence. It was great to read this from the other side of the world and catch a glimpse of how the project looks from afar. It was quite a leap from Ernabella to Salzburg, not just across time zones and temperatures but into the culture of an international conference where English was the currency for trading information and ideas about creative projects and policies addressing local and global concerns.

The Salzburg Global Seminar, entitled ‘Cultural Institutions without Walls’, was essentially a think tank around questions of community engagement and cultural policy but, coming from such diverse situations, participants soon wanted to learn of the details of each others’ working praxis – the struggles and successes - and it was this which engaged and inspired me most deeply.

This is not Central Australia. View from the window, Salzburg, Austria. (click to enlarge)

Farewell to Pukatja! The last piece of music to be captured by the incredibly popular Kane Hall based recording studio was four hours of a live concert featuring many of the musicians who have been laying their tracks down over our three and a half week stay. Over a hundred Pukatja kids and adults shook their mana-s surrounded by the halls wonderous day-glow designs and the sweet desert reggae sounds. Thanks to all the musicians - Mervin, Chriswell, Winmati, Clarence, Sandy, Phillip, Jacob, Wanyima, Lachlin, Jamie, Mawatji, many more, and Joseph Tapaya, who also gave us a lovely thank-you speech.

Greetings from Pukatja in South Australia, home to many of the minyma (women) who have graced the stage for the Ngapartji Ngapartji show over the past year with their soulful harmonies as well as a number of young people who have taken part in video making for many of the movies you see on the website. For the past two weeks Ngapartji Ngapartji have set up camp here with a mobile recording studio running from the school hall, facilitated by audio engineer Steve Fraser from Melbourne and artsworker/Ngapartji Ngapartji Choir Coordinator Beth Sometimes who’ve been working long hours to cater to the enthusiasm of a community with a rich tradition of inma (song) and music that both young people and old are keen to record.