Creating 'My Town'

One of the many highlights of the Stories and Songs from the Inala Yarning Place Project has been the creation of the 'My Town' song.

It was on one of the days with a quite a lot of participants attending especially people from the Vietnamese community. While we were talking about the things we liked about Inala, a number of people talked about the trees and birds and about the streets that were named after flowers and how important these things were to people across all cultures.

So we set to work creating a verse of a song about this. First of all we worked in English and came up with:-

My town has many streets,
Named from flowers and birds,
These things lift my heart
And purify my soul.

Then our Vietnamese participants, led by Marie Dao, translated this into Vietnamese and paid a lot of attention to making sure it was suitably poetic and sounded authentically Vietnamese.

Then we were able to practice singing with English and Vietnamese versions.

The next stage is to create an Indigenous language version. Watch this space or, better still, come along to the concert and be entranced.