Burranbala Yarning Circle

Join author, singer and composer Nardi Simpson in a Yarning Circle where she leads audience members on a journey through Yuwaalaraay language, story, culture and Country.

Simpson invites you to a unique celebration of community and the enduring power of storytelling. She will be joined by First Nations leaders Sonya Holowell and Nicole Smede.

Nardi Simpson is a Yuwaalaray writer, musician, composer and educator from NSW’s North West freshwater plains. A founding member of Indigenous folk duo Stiff Gins, Nardi has been performing nationally and internationally for the past twenty years. A participant of Ngarra-Burria since 2019, she writes about her experience: “Ngarra-Burria, put simply, has reinvigorated my ears, my mind and my spirit. It is not only a music program. It is a program about cultural responsibility, about land, story and country, and about what we Yuwaalaraay call the strengthening of dhuwi – our deepest breath, our essence – our soul.”

Nicole Smede is a Warrimay composer, vocalist and multidisciplinary artist based on Wodi Wodi Dharawal Country. Blending field recordings, voice and ensemble writing, her work explores the relationships between land, language and memory. Guided by ancestral knowledge, she composes immersive sound worlds that invite deep listening as a form of connection and return to Country.

Sonya Holowell is a Dharawal vocalist, improviser and writer. For over a decade Sonya’s expansive vocal practice has woven avant-garde world premieres with electro-acoustic experiments with medieval chant and spontaneous long-form composition. She explores the plural self in its network of relations, directed toward truth and emancipation. She enjoys bringing this mantle to collaboration, as artist, Board Director and consultant. Sonya performs regularly with modular synthesist Ben Carey in their duo Sumn Conduit, and is a PhD candidate in Indigenist Artistic Research. She has recently joined the ARC Laureate Program Resonant Earth: Music, Ecology and Climate Justice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.