Key points

• Melbourne’s Fitzroy area was once a bustling hub for First Nations People, known for its stories of community, creation and activism.
• Now, an audio app can take people through the streets sharing the stories as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival program.
• Te app’s developers are hoping to extend it to include Melbourne’s CBD – and perhaps even state- and nationwide.

Long before trendy cafes and fashion boutiques took over Gertrude Street, the Fitzroy area was a bustling hub for First Nations people, known for its stories of community, creation and activism.

Joining the Melbourne Fringe Festival program this year, Yalinguth Live offers an immersive journey into these stories, revealing the rich Indigenous histories behind Melbourne’s oldest suburb.

Yalinguth Live artists Donna Wright (left), Kutcha Edwards (centre-left), Denise McGinness (centre-right) and Jason Tamiru (right). Credit:Justin McManus

For one day only, festivalgoers will walk the streets of Aboriginal Fitzroy alongside Elders and community to hear personal stories – both in person and through an audio app – about Indigenous landmarks and the Aboriginal Rights Movement.

“It gives people the opportunity to share their experiences – politically and socially – in an environment that’s not oppressed through government or corporate expectations,” said Jason Tamiru, a proud Yorta Yorta man and director of Yalinguth Live.

“For too long people have walked around blind in their own backyards. They’ve walked into things and fallen into things because they were blind. But hearing our stories, you’re able to walk away and see things in a different light.”

From stories recorded by Elders, including Aunty Annie Young and Gary Murray, to the sounds of singer-songwriter Kutcha Edwards and musician Bart Willoughby, Tamiru said Yalinguth will be a sensory experience reflecting the oral traditions of Victoria’s First Peoples.

“We come from an oral culture and history,” Tamiru said. “What happens is we’re shaped by stories that come from our community and from our old people in particular.”

Tamiru emphasises that no one story is bigger or more significant than the other. “There are so many pages within a chapter, and so many chapters within this Fitzroy/Collingwood book.”

Fitzroy – or Ngár-go – was a gathering place for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people moving to Melbourne from the 1920s onwards. Many of the Stolen Generations saw the area as a safe space to find family and reconnect with their community.

Tamiru said the contemporary urban culture of the Fitzroy and Collingwood area has been imprinted with the actions and experiences of those that came before, even if not immediately obvious to the naked eye.

“The political movements, the civil rights movement that all happened in Fitzroy and Collingwood, our people were the ones that voiced that, that shaped that, that made that. It has an enormous history and our people are proud of that history,” Tamiru said.

Jason Tamiru, Denise McGunness, Kutcha Edwards and Donna Wright at the Builders Arms Hotel on Gertrude Street.Credit:Justin McManus

Kicking off at the historical Fig Tree in Exhibition Gardens, the audience will be welcomed to Country and take part in a Smoking Ceremony before allowing the app to guide them to various live pop-up performances.

After six years of development, Tamiru believed the union between the app’s technology and the Elders’ oral storytelling was a welcome development, working “hand-in-hand” to “enlighten” as vast an audience as possible.

“I think sometimes we get incorrectly anchored in the way we tell our stories, that there’s only one way of doing it and that falls in a sort of traditional way or a contemporary way,” Tamiru said. “But I’m not sure about that. I think we are a people that evolve.”

Yalinguth – meaning “yesterday” in the Woi Wurrung language – fits perfectly with this year’s Fringe Festival theme, “it’s about time”, echoing the sentiments of many Elders: that we need to go back before we can go forwards.

Melbourne Fringe creative director and chief executive Simon Abrahams said Yalinguth stood out within the program because of the way it offers respect for the passing of time.

“It tells 60,000 years of history,” Abrahams said. “It’s a work that celebrates the culture of that particular place and the people who’ve inhabited it for such a long time.”

Abrahams said the festival helps Melbourne express itself, placing diversity and representation as a top priority across the 450 events on offer. It will be the first in-person program in three years and the festival’s 40th anniversary, with events like Yalinguth acting as evidence behind the importance of art and its constant evolution.

On Yalinguth’s future, Tamiru said Gertrude Street would not be the app’s one-stop shop. The team is already in the midst of developing the app to extend to Melbourne’s CBD, with the hope of eventually going state- and nationwide.

Yalinguth Live will take place as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival on 8 October. The Yalinguth app is available to download now from Google Play and on Apple’s App Store.

The 2022 Melbourne Fringe Festival program will be launched on Friday night. All tickets will be on sale at melbournefringe.com.au.

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