Ros Bandt: Kim's Song

Abstract

Kim's Song is based on a recording of a Vietnamese children's song I made in Springvale Victoria. This young Australian Vietnamese, little Kim, recently started school and now prefers to sing Australian rather than the Vietnamese songs she learnt at home from her Vietnamese parents. The Vietnamese song she sings is about animals in the food chain, being hunters, but also being hunted. It becomes overtaken by Kookaburra Sits on the Old Gum Tree, here representing the dominant English speaking culture in which she is living. The song comes in and out of various contexts. A landscape of place is created with the treated and untreated layer of Inanaya, an Indigenous song sung by my partner's Aboriginal grandchildren, also living in Melbourne. It will be up to little Kim to make the world and her place in Australia hers. Her identity and language patterns will ultimately be shaped with how she interprets being born of migrant parents in Australia, the prevailing peer groups and influences and the Indigenous Australian heritage. She will make it her world in her own time in her own way.