parakeelya
“To young children… nature is full of doors – is nothing but doors, really – and they swing open at every step. A hollow in a tree is a gateway to a castle. An ant hole in dry soil leads to the other side of the world.”
One sleepless night last week I picked up my phone and started looking through a writing app that I go to when I want to jot down ideas for poems and songs. One entry from last year caught my eye: Animal Counting Song. In bed, lying beside my three year old and trying to be quiet, I had a play with singing the words, but nothing stuck.
The next day I remembered that I had recently recorded a little riff on ukulele that I wanted to use in a song one day. So I picked up my uke, and after some time of playing around with the riff and the words, the beginning of a melody fell into place. But the lyrics still needed work.
The original lyrics included elephant calves playing in the rain and zebra foals with stripes zigzagging through the plains. I love these images! But I soon realised that I wanted to write a song for kids living here, in the red centre of Australia, with the unique, incredible wildlife that is at our doorstep. And so I replaced elephant calves with spinifex hopping mice (equally as cute) and zebra foals with zebra finches, with a reference to their Pitjantjatjara name nyii-nyii.
I have spent the last ten years working on a project that, at its heart is about revitalising emotional literacy in local Indigenous languages. The wonderful Pitjantjatara and Ngaanyatjarra dictionaries have never been far from reach and I have endless buckets of awe and gratitude to the people (Indigenous and non-Indigenous together, side by side) who have worked hard to make these dictionaries and keep these words alive.
“We live in an era of diminishing childhood contact with nature… Screen-time has increased dramatically. Environmental literacy has plummeted. Nine out of ten children can identify a Dalek; three out of ten a magpie.”
In recent times I have thought a lot about the changing vocabulary for children growing up in these fast-changing times. Aware that my children spend a lot more time in front of a screen than I did as a child, I think it’s important that we still find ways to keep local, place-based language alive. Even in small ways like rewriting an Animal Counting Song.
Parakeelya (Creatures Big and Small)
One cosy joey
In it’s mum’s pouch fast asleep
Two frilled-neck lizards
Puffing out their cheeks
See the spinifex hopping mice
Let’s count them one, two, three
Four dancing emu chicks
Shaking feathers, in the hot summer breeze
Five red-tailed black cockatoos
Hear them screech, what a sound!
Ten golden honeyants
Let’s go digging, find their home
In the ground
Twenty caterpillars in a line
A train of furry stripes, itchy!
Fifty noisy zebra finches
By the waterhole, busy, singing nyii-nyii
All these creatures big and small
Of the water, earth and sky
All these creatures wild and wonderful
I couldn’t dream them up if I tried
One hundred rainbow desert fish
Iridescent, splashing through the creeks
Finding water where they can
One thousand parakeelya
Pink blooms after the rain
Running wild and running free
Wildflowers of the red desert plains
All these creatures big and small
Of the water, earth and sky
All these creatures wild and wonderful
I couldn’t dream them up if I tried
