Music on Tubowgule | Mungangga Garlagula
26 June, 2026, Sydney Opera House – The Studio, Sydney, NSW
A Tura Production by Mark Atkins and Erkki Veltheim
The Gadigal name for the land on which the Sydney Opera House stands is Tubowgule, a place where people have gathered to share stories, connect and listen for thousands of years. It is hard to imagine a more fitting setting for Mungangga Garlagula, Tura’s remarkable collaboration between Yamatji storyteller and didjeridu virtuoso Mark Atkins and composer-performer Erkki Veltheim.
We entered the Studio to the gentle croaking of frogs. Before a note had been played, I already felt a long way from Circular Quay.
Set designer Emily Barrie transformed the intimate theatre into a campfire clearing. Several Didjeridus stood sentinel like silent trees, light bulbs perched atop slender poles glowing softly in the darkness. It was both an enticing and an inviting space. Mark Atkins sat illuminated by what felt like firelight while Erkki Veltheim remained almost invisible, shaping an ever-changing sonic landscape from the shadows.
It took me a little while to tune in to Mark’s voice. His accent is broad Australian and I realised very quickly how far removed my own world has become from his. As he spoke of blackberries, spud farms, bull ants, Christmas trees and the swamp behind the house where stories were shared around the fire, I found myself slowing down, listening more carefully. I suspect that was the point.
The performance unfolded somewhere between spoken word, theatre and contemporary chamber music. At times it carried the immediacy of improvised jazz poetry, with stories floating over electronic textures that shimmered and breathed beneath them. Yet its roots lay in something far older: the oral traditions of gathering, listening and passing stories from one generation to the next. Music became impossible to separate from landscape. Wind was music. Frogs were music. Snapping branches, insects, stones scraped together, breath through the didjeridu and the gentle sigh of a harmonica all became part of the same living sound world. Veltheim’s electronics never drew attention to themselves but quietly blurred the line between the natural and the created. Often I simply couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
Atkins’ didjeridu playing was astonishing. Sometimes impossibly deep and resonant, sometimes startlingly percussive, its breath seemed to rise directly from the earth. Around it, Veltheim’s layered electronics expanded the sound into something immense, humming like insects, whispering like spirits; while Niklas Pajanti’s stunning lighting transformed the space into shifting memories of campfires, ocean, bush and spirits. We arrived at the sea without seeing it, guided there entirely by sound.
The stories themselves ranged from humorous recollections of station life to eerie encounters with the Min Min and the Hairy Man. They were funny, and sometimes unsettling. One poem about colonisation landed with particular force, its emotional weight amplified by the surrounding soundscape and a lighthouse-like beam that briefly swept across the audience before plunging us back into darkness.
Atkins is a natural raconteur. He never rushes. Every pause has purpose, every silence says as much as the words that follow. As he described an ancestor scraping ochre on rock, Veltheim answered with the real sound of stone on stone. Tap tap tap, scrape scrape. And suddenly we weren’t listening to a story anymore, we were hearing what Mark was hearing. After travelling beside him through memory, Country and story, the final words “You’re not lost. You’re home,” landed with big emotion. The final eerie viola harmonics dissolved into looping electronics and smoke drifted gently through the theatre like the remnants of the campfire.
For just over an hour I was transported somewhere else entirely, listening deeply across time and Country – such that walking back over the Studio threshold into the crowded Opera House foyer was genuinely disorienting.
Thank you, Mark Atkins, for your generosity. Thank you for sharing your stories. They have stayed with me long after the frogs stopped singing.
