“Something special and really spiritual happens when we sing our languages. It comes from deep within us. It's the voices of our ancestors.”
Mudjingaal Yangamba | Spirit Singing
Learning our languages back through song
Mudjingaal Yangamba means Spirit Singing in Dhurga, one of the original languages spoken on the South Coast of NSW. Formed in 2022, the choir has grown into a powerful collective of Koori women, many of them acclaimed artists in their own right. Through the creation and celebration of song, they bring together Elders, Aunties and sisters to revitalise their traditional languages, sharing their stories with community for healing, growth and joy. As the women put it: "We gather as community, with community and for community."
Their original songs speak of truth telling and their experiences as Aboriginal women, deeply embedded in connection to Country, family, community and cultural pride.
Every song starts the same way: the women gather, share a meal and yarn, sometimes for hours, about what the song is going to hold. The words arrive, then the language for them. Each year they write a song together for the NAIDOC theme, and two of those songs are on the album.
Mudjingaal Yangamba have performed with Uncle Kev Carmody, Uncle Kutcha Edwards, Shellie Morris, Emma Donovan, Nooky, Mark Atkins and Kirli Saunders, and feature on Cooee's single Daisies and debut album Messengers. They have sung at the Canberra International Music Festival, Kangaroo Valley Folk Festival (four years in the Koori Tent), Milton Folk, Jazz and Blues Festival, Open Field Arts Festival, the Songs for Freedom Concert at Barangaroo and the NSW Aboriginal Languages Festival at Carriageworks. Their work has also been showcased in major installations, including Healing Truth (Lazy Mountain Music and Arts Festival), Bangandha Yangamba-nga by Nicole Smede (Shoalhaven Regional Art Gallery) and Our Laughter Will Become the Waterfall by Jazz Money (JOY, Immigration Museum, 2024).
“we are reclaiming and relearning languages that our families, our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents weren't able to speak. We might not get everything right, but that joy, you can feel it. It's palpable”
bulwal, mabera, wana badju-dha | Strength, Vision, Legacy
Single, out Oct 16, 2026
A promise to the next generation, bulwal mabera wana badju-dha (Strength, Vision, Legacy) is the debut single from Mudjingaal Yangamba and the first song from their album Spirit Singing. Eleven women wrote it together for the NAIDOC 2025 theme, The Next Generation: Strength, Vision, Legacy: a call to honour the wisdom of their old people, follow the footsteps they left, and pass that wisdom on to the bubs.
A Dhurga chorus rises over English verses, carried by acoustic guitar, clapsticks, shakers and melodica, until the band drops away and leaves eleven voices and a tambourine. It's a song made to be sung back, by community, at NAIDOC gatherings, and by the next generation it was written for.
Out Friday 16 October 2026. Recorded and mixed by Syd Green (The Stiff Gins, Kasey Chambers), mastered by Jeff McCormack at Benchmark.
Mudjingaal Yangamba | Spirit Singing
Debut Album, out Survival Day, Jan 26, 2027
A joyful and healing album of homecoming, Spirit Singing is the sound of languages coming back to Country. Sung in Dhurga and Gumea Dharawal, the languages of Bungali (the Shoalhaven River), its eleven tracks carry words that the women's parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were not able to speak. Recorded on Country at Sanctuary Point and in a hall in Berry, with salt water, earth and yidaki woven between the songs, it is a choir of Koori women singing their languages home.
Spirit Singing is both celebration and truth telling. Songs grown from NAIDOC themes, like dhan ngarranggal (Because of Her We Can), ganji yuna ganamamba (Keep the Fire Burning) and bulwal mabera wana badju-dha (Strength, Vision, Legacy), honour the Elders and women who kept culture strong, and the album closes on yawa bulwal (Truth Telling).
Released on Survival Day, 26 January 2027, with a launch performance in Nowra, Spirit Singing aims to inspire community-led language revival across the South Coast and beyond: proof that languages that were silenced were never lost, and that every song sung in language brings them closer to home.
Press photos
