Through an analysis of Tiwi song composition techniques and comparison between performances recorded over the last hundred years, I give, for the first time in the literature, a comprehensive musical description of the Tiwi song repertory, showing that while it is primarily based on innovation, it forms a continuum of oral tradition, relying upon the acquisition of complex musical, linguistic and poetic composition skills. I place the Tiwi initiation ceremony, Kulama, as the centre-point of song creativity and instruction and suggest that its near-disappearance, along with social and linguistic change, have put the future of Tiwi extemporised song practice in jeopardy. The framework for this study is the repatriation to the Tiwi community of ethnographic field–recordings of Tiwi songs, made between 1912 and 1981, archived at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra. Drawing from the corpus of approximately 1300 recorded song items, I find that the fundamentally contemporary, topical and current nature of the Tiwi song culture has resulted in a rich social, cultural and historical oral record being preserved amongst the song texts. Documenting the physical, emotional and artistic journeys of a particular group of elders who travelled to Canberra to reclaim the recordings, I recount some of the outcomes of the reclamation and I discuss the impact the recordings’ return is having on the current performance practice, the future of song knowledge transmission and the future of improvisatory composition skills. In the context of Ngarukuruwala- we sing songs, a collaborative music project involving a group of song-women from the Tiwi Islands and jazz musicians from Sydney, I also report on new music projects instigated by a group of Tiwi women who are working to maintain and develop song and language skills in young Tiwi people, negotiating new forms of music while maintaining Tiwi song traditions
