From 'Navajo' to 'Taba Naba' : unravelling the travels and metamorphosis of a popular Torres Strait Islander song

"Similar to other social 'things' (Appadurai 1986), songs have a social life; similar to other symbolic goods they circulate in a global cultural economy (Appadurai 1990). Although globalisation (Robertson 1992) and 'world music' (Taylor 1997) are sometimes presented as processes unique to the late twentieth century, there have been many antecedents for extensive global movements of cultural 'things' such as music, expecially during the eras of extensive European colonial expansion in the eighteenth century, Australia has been intimately linked to the circulation of European and North American popular culture forms (MacKenzie 1992; Waterhouse 1990) including music (Whiteoak 1999). This process reached into non-metropolitan, geographically isolated areas of Australia such as the Torres Strait region of far northern Queensland (Neuenfeldt & Mullins 2001).