This year’s Stanner Prize has gone to University of Sydney musicologist Allan Marrett for his study of the wangga – an Indigenous musical and ceremonial performance that seeks to link the living to the dead.

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), which awards the annual prize, praised the professor’s “outstanding contribution to our knowledge of traditional Aboriginal culture.”

“Music and ceremony are the basis of traditional Aboriginal culture and Professor Marett has portrayed these so well by developing a meaningful and respectful relationship with Aboriginal people from these communities over 20 years,” said AIATSIS Chairperson Professor Mick Dodson.

An expert reader for the award was even more effusive, describing Songs, Dreamings and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia as “contemporary in its attitudes, forward-looking, respectful, trenchant, cerebral, artistic, poetic and passionate.”

“Marett is awed by what he has seen. He communicates clearly his wonder and admiration for the Indigenous achievement, without losing sight of the technical needs of the analysis,” the reader said.

Practised by the Wadeye and Belyuen people in the Daly region of the Northern Territory, wangga is performed at ceremonies marking profound change in a person's life - including their death. Musicians “receive” songs from an eternal realm known as The Dreaming and from the ghosts of deceased ancestors, and use them to facilitate the deceased’s entry into the society of the dead.

“The melodies are extraordinarily beautiful and probably the most elaborate you have in any traditional Aboriginal songs,” Professor Marett said. The fully illustrated book is accompanied by a music CD.

Awarded annually to the best scholarly published contribution to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Stanner Prize is named for one of AIATSIS’s founders, Emeritus Professor Bill Stanner (1905-1981).

A distinguished anthropologist, Stanner coined the term “the Great Australian Silence” to describe public consciousness of Indigenous Australians since settlement.