Do you like our dances?
Do you like our music and songs?
The sound of the didgeridoo frightens me
You shouldn't be afraid of the didgeridoo.
It's our sacred instrument. With its sound, the great god Baiame created the stars in the Dreamtime.
The men who know how to play it are very important in our culture.
With the didgeridoo they communicate our wishes to the spirits.
And they call on them to come to our aid when tragedy befalls us.
This sacred instrument brings us closer to the world of our ancestors.
It awakens the Rainbow Serpent without making it angry, and allows us to speak with the god of creation
It is difficult to play, because you have to blow constantly, using the technique of circular breathing.
You expel the air using the cheeks and tongue, at the same time inhaling through the nose.
Good musicians can keep the sound going without stopping for ten minutes.
Yakar- how do you make a didgeridoo?
The didgeridoo is not made by man, like other musical instruments.
We simply look for them, clean them and decorate them.
The didgeridoos are made by the ants.
Our land, here in northern Australia, is the kingdom of the ants.
There are hundreds of thousands of termite hills of many different forms.
In some areas, experts have calculated there could by up to 20 million termites per hectare.
The termite hills are like living beings.
Inside them, thousands of termites are busy digging intricate tunnels which protect them from their enemies
and ensure that the temperature always remains the same and the atmosphere very humid.
They build their termite hills from soil and clay mixed with their own saliva and excrement.
With this material they make small balls the size of a grain of rice,
which they pile up to create mounds which can be up to six metres high.
The termites also invade the trees, especially the eucalyptuses.
They hollow them out from the inside, but never kill them.
To collect the didgeridoos, the men go into the forest and observe the eucalyptuses.
From the hollow sound, they know that the termites have completed their work.
When they find a trunk of the right length and thickness,
they cut the piece that the will be the didgeridoo.
Then, in a comfortable place to work, they prepare the hollow trunk
First they clean it and remove the bark.
Normally, it is the musicians themselves that prepare these instruments.
With a metal bar, which has been heated in the fire,
they burn the pieces of wood and excrement that the termites have left, and empty it
And the didgeridoo is ready.
Later, each musician will get an artist to decorate it with designs that are normally related to the Dreamtime or totemic animals.