‘The wind carries the seed, where the seed falls, there remains forever a vibration in the ground – it’s called djiva.’
Local indigenous artist Della Rae Morrison – who along with Jessie make up the award-winning band of Djiva (pronounced Jee-vah) – explains just what’s in a name and how she and Jessie live up to it…
OiP: Can you tell us about how you chose Djiva as your name?
Della Rae: The meaning that we have on our CD is ‘the wind carries the seed, where the seed falls, there remains forever a vibration in the ground – it’s called djiva.’ I saw that written in a dreamtime story on the internet. I saw the word djiva and it just made sense for me to go with that. I liked the sound of the meaning of it and I liked the sound of the word. I think it really represents us. People ask what it means and we tell them and they feel the energy that goes with it.
OiP: How do you go about crafting a song in the Noongar language?
Della Rae: My references are my grandmother, my mother and another lady, a friend of my grandmother’s, a Noongar aboriginal lady who is quite fluent in the language. So, I definitely have three very important references that I go to before I finalize anything. There is a lot of protocol involved, a lot of homework – you can’t just like a word, you have to follow protocol.
OiP: What do you think is the role of Djiva’s music in the indigenous community and the broader Australian community?
Della Rae: It’s a mediator. It’s the best way to get any message across, better than the news, better than anything because it’s so universal and it’s more accessible. Someone in Egypt who doesn’t even speak English might hear ‘Ngank Boodjak’ and be moved by it because it is a beautiful song about Mother Earth.
OiP: You bring up a lot of political issues in your songs…
Della Rae: I’ve never thought of us as political people… The general non-indigenous society don’t realize, they think that aboriginal people just harp on this and harp on that and make things negative. But aboriginal people, they have to live and breathe it, they have to live and breathe what’s happened. And it’s not just the actual Stolen Generation who are affected. It is generational; it is passed down. So, we have to live and breathe the issues of our history. We grow up in it. We all talk about it with each other all the time. It’s not just restless natives type of thing going on – it’s real, it’s in us.
OiP: What has been the reaction of audiences to your music?
Della Rae: The majority of responses from the people who have been to the gigs and bought the CD, they can’t wait to get back to us and tell us how much they love the CD. So, that’s very positive for us. The only negative we had was when we were on tour and a woman said, ‘I was expecting an indigenous band. I want to hear some didgeridoo. You should be more political.’ So, she came in expecting something else. She had an idea in her head of what indigenous music should be, and we’re just not that stereotype. We cover a lot of ground.
We did have a write up in Adelaide that we read the next day after our gig and it said, ‘These two sheilas from a rock n’ roll pub band, where the beer and the whiskey flows.’ I just didn’t know what to say or think about that one. We ‘These two sheilas,’ to me we are more than that, we are more than a pub band, we are more than a rock band. We’ve got rhythmical songs with fantastic messages.
Djiva will be a special guest at Murundak: Black Arm Band, a special Perth International Arts Festival concert on Feb. 23 at Fremantle Arts Centre. They can also be found the last Thursday of every month at the Bakery for Chocolate Martini.
