2015.107 THOMPSON

In this video, Dr Christian Thompson sings a song he composed in Bidjara, a critically endangered Aboriginal language spoken in south-west Queensland, Australia. He recorded Refuge in Oxford while completing his PhD, collaborating with British musician James Edward Young. Thompson’s adaptation of a popular Western tune with piano and percussive accompaniment speaks to the hybridisation and revitalisation of languages and cultures, and the often-subversive strategies their speakers need to adopt to maintain them. Purposefully untranslated, Refuge is about kinship and connectedness, brotherhood and humanity, and finding refuge in those connections.