While Lullabies workshops are usually held face-to-face in a specific community, the CAN team devised a way to deliver the program while complying with social distancing restrictions.

Language lessons from Noongar language facilitator Charmaine Councillor form an integral part of the Lullabies program, so bringing the lessons online enabled the participants to familiarise themselves with the unique sounds of Noongar without having to leave their homes.

Over five months, the facilitators developed and recorded a series of videos that shared knowledge and provided instruction to reinforce the weekly online learning program.

From July to September, twelve participants from places as far as Cairns and Darwin logged in to learn the fundamentals of Noongar language and song writing during weekly online learning sessions with Charmaine and Phil.

Each participant then created their own lullaby, supported by two individual sessions with Charmaine and Phil to integrate and apply the skills and knowledge they’d learned during the online sessions.

This different way of creating an album of Noongar language songs enabled participants located in different locations to contribute to Lullabies, despite being thousands of kilometres apart.

“It’s just an amazing thing to be able to use an ancient language of our Noongar people and bring it to today’s era, and to teach people using song. I think the privilege for me was to have someone else put their own voice to a song, as a clear representation of their family, their country, their clan. Their voices are so different. It gives an opportunity for people to express themselves in their own dialect, or in their own language.”
– Charmaine Councillor, Noongar language facilitator.