I Heard the Old Fellas Play: Sustaining the Ecology of Gumleaf Sounds in Koori Community Culture and Beyond

The practice of gumleaf playing bridges art and activism as a whimsical musical thread in Australia's national imagination. This article pursues a gumleaf sound-culture system that embraces environmental, physical, and musical qualities remote from mainstream music. In scoping meanings and modalities for gumleaf sounds within the Indigenous Koori lifeworlds of New South Wales, this collaborative reflection features the voice of senior custodian of the tradition Yuin-Monaro Elder Uncle Ossie Cruse (b. 1933). The coauthors' ecocritical stance portrays a fringe musical tradition at the intersection between colonial domination and environmental degradation. They base a phenomenology of gumleaf sounds around Uncle Ossie's memories, lived experiences, performativity, and approaches to preserving Indigenous sonic space in environmental, political, pedagogical, and spiritual settings. Uncle Ossie's 'soundmark' enhances his endorsements of environmental and social justice. A commissioned curation of an early twentieth-century gumleaf band at Eden's 2022 Giiyong Festival underscored a decolonial turn in Australian music as it reconnected gumleaf sounds to community and country. The gumleaf is an explicitly green instrument that subtly references the universal threat of bioextinction. Its sounds implicitly undergird the environmental thematic, pointing us back to ways of 'playing the land' instead of destroying it.