Koorinda Braia (arranged, “put into rhythm, harmonised”, by Isaac Nathan

(1792-1864), and first performed Sydney, 1842.

Words and melody Ngarigu people, collected by Henry Tingcombe (1809-1874) from Indigenous singers on the Monaro Plains, NSW, late 1830s.

 

Koorinda braia. Cooee.

 

Shortly after his arrival in the colony from England in 1841, the 50-year-old Isaac Nathan was shown some short examples of the songmaking of the Ngarigu people of NSW’s Monaro Plains, and was struck by what he imagined were the possibilities for making these artistic expressions better known among his fellow colonists. Even while adapting them to the common European musical scales, putting them into regular European rhythms and harmonizing them, he nevertheless hoped that they retained a genuine vestige of their original state. The first of his half-dozen attempts at doing so was this setting of a short song fragment Koorinda braia. Nathan’s informant, the Monaro pastoralist Henry Tingcombe, was unable to provide a translation for these two words, but was able to explain that it had something to do with the “the red and white chalk with which the [Ngarigu people] paint their faces on days of festivity”. The resulting arrangement was a uniquely original and quite unusual piece of music, completely atypical of any of the prevailing European musical styles of the 1840s.

 

In recent years, Ngarigu people have worked to reclaim their song practices and sing again in the style of their ancestors heard by Tingcombe. This song in its original form and in its arrangement by Nathan was often heard in Sydney in the 1840s. On the occasion of the British Queen Victoria’s birthday on 31 May 1845, seventeen Aboriginal men and women, including the “King and Queen of Berrima” performed the song. Elsewhere it was reported that ‘the ladies, of Sydney have all become infected with a mania for cooing: there in scarcely a party now given where the visitors are not greeted with a cooey or a "Koorinda Braia."

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Image Credit: Isaac Nathan, Koorinda Braia | 1842 | National Library of Australia.