Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir

Experience extraordinary choral singing from the outback as the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir kicks off its national tour at Concert Hall, QPAC on Sunday, December 11, 2022. 

In its QPAC debut, for one night only the choir will fill the Concert Hall with a musical confluence of Baroque and Romantic era choral arrangements and centuries-old sacred hymns, carried through time in ancient Aboriginal languages.

Singing in English alongside Western Arrarnta and Pitjantjatjara – two living languages of the Northern Territory and South Australia – and led by Choir Master Morris Stuart AM, this extraordinary vocal ensemble first came to popular attention following ABC TV’s Australian Story, and the feature documentary, The Song Keepers.

Their story is a testament to the resilience of Indigenous women in the Central Desert as they preserve and strengthen their identity, languages and culture through song.

The Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir contains 25 core members (including 4 men), who come from seven remote communities within a thousand- kilometre radius throughout Central Australia including Hermannsburg, Areyonga, Titjikala, Mutitjulu, Docker River, and Alice Springs. The choir was formed as an amalgamation of various individual community choirs, including the renowned choirs from Ntaria (Hermannsburg), Areyonga and Ernabella.

The choir’s charismatic Artistic Director and Conductor, Morris Stuart, is responsible for bringing Central Australia’s sacred sounds to the world.

Morris said, “I am deeply proud of this choir. When I started out little did I know that my work and this choir would become the stuff of legend in Central Australia and the subject of both a documentary and an ABC TV episode of Australian Story."

“The choir's greatest achievement so far has been a 12,000km trip to Germany to share some of the 53 hymns that German missionaries translated into local languages in the 19th century. The songs had all but vanished from use in Germany but had been preserved in the Central Australian desert for 140 years. The preserved German hymns are like an ‘outback secret."

Nowhere is this echoing of past voices into the present more evident than in the work of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir - Metro Magazine.

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