Nebinyan's songs: an Aboriginal whaler of south-west Western Australia

Abstract

Nebinyan was in his seventies when he met the ethnographer Daisy Bates in 1908. A renowned Nyungar songman of the Mineng people, whose country included the shores of Two Peoples Bay on the south coast of Western Australia, he had been moved in old age to the Government Settlement at Katanning, where their meeting took place. Their conversations ranged over the various details of traditional life in which Bates was most interested, but as night fell Nebinyan chose to recall his youth and perform for Bates a song cycle based on his work as a whaler on the south coast of Western Australia, in the 1860s.