Welcome to our website, dedicated to the exploration of the musical storytelling tradition of the New Guinea Highlands: the tom yaya kange. Here, we offer a curated collection of audio recordings, annotated translations, and plot summaries of performances by master performers, providing a wide-ranging insight into this rich cultural heritage.

With the assistance of Andrew Noma, John Onga, and Thomas Pai, I led the recording, transcription, and translation of the five tom yaya kange performances found in this website. Each performance is accompanied by a transcript, free translation, and a line-by-line translation which is aimed at capturing both the story line and the rhythmic nuances of the original Ku Waru text.
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In the Introduction to tom yaya tales on this site I describe a number of their compositional features, including the use of poetic lines with fixed number of beats throughout the performance. In order to carry over something of the effect of that regular, repeating rhythm from Ku Waru into English, in all the translations I have used lines with a fixed number of beats or strong syllables: three of them. This is exemplified by following the lines where the strong syllables are in boldface:
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As I watched he went on his way.
Where he smoked his tobacco and spat
Fields of tobacco plants sprouted
And the smoke that went up in the sky
Billowed like clouds 'round the mountain
Well done, my lad, well done!
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^{(These are lines 12-17 of the story of Ambukl Konts and Ayamb Tangapa by Paulus Konts published in this site.)
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In order to maintain the constant three-beat rhythm, I have used a translation style that is often not strictly literal. For example, in the original Ku Waru version the fourth line of the excerpt above includes a reference to the source of the smoke (tobacco), and does not include a reference to the sky. A more literal translation of it would be “The tobacco smoke that went up”. But given that the source of the smoke is clear from the previous lines, and given the fact that it later becomes relevant to the plot of the story that the smoke was seen from a great distance, it does not seem misleading to translate the line into the rhythmically regular one “And the smoke that went up in the sky.” While this translation style involves some loss of literal fidelity, I believe that it provides a truer impression the poetic form of tom yaya tales than would a more literal style.

I hope you enjoy these translations.

Alan Rumsey

Alan Rumsey
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‍Alan Rumsey is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific at Australian National University. He is currently leading a major collaborative research project on multimodal aspects of children's language socialization in cross-cultural perspective. Other recent projects have included an interdisciplinary comparative one on sung tales, in collaboration with Don Niles, which resulted in the volume Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands, and in this website. (For further details including a CV and most of Alan Rumsey's publications in downloadable form, search him on academia.edu)

Don Niles
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‍Don Niles is a Consultant at the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, where he previously served as Director and Senior Ethnomusicologist. He is also an honorary professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific at Australian National University. His research has focused on all types of music and dance in Papua New Guinea, including traditional, popular, and Christian forms; and onorganology, archiving, and historical recordings. He is a former vice president of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, and former editor of their journal, the Yearbook for Traditional Music.

Francesca Merlan
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‍Francesca Merlan is an Emerita Professor of Anthropology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University. Her research fields include Indigenous Australia and the highlands of Papua New Guinea, with particular focus on social change and linguistic anthropology. Since 1981, in collaboration with Alan Rumsey she has been doing field research in the Ku Waru region of the Western Highlands Province on a range of topics including the Ku Waru language, its use in oratoryand sung tales, and the position of women in tribal warfare.

Kep Aglima  
Kep Aglima was born around 1950, in the village of Karaip Pangi, in the upper Nebilyer Valley. When warfare broke out there, his mother Puksi fled to her home village among the Enguwal tribe in the Kaugel Valley to the west. There she raised Kep without his father Aglima, but with plenty of help from her mother’s people. Kep was very fond of his mother and stayed close to her to learn from her. He recalls learning much from the tom yaya tales that she would sing to him at bedtime, and enjoying them greatly. 
Explore his tale: The Story of Kupi Tagla and Kalkagla Tanga

‍Konga Nadia 
Konga was born around 1932 in the village of Palamoda, in the upper Nebilyer Valley. Palamoda was the home village of Konga’s mother. Konga’s father Nadia moved there from his home village near Alkena, in the upper Kaugel Valley, with his wife, shortly before Konga was born. Later, after the birth of two more children, the family moved back to Alkena. Konga recalls the tom yaya tales that were often sung to him there by his father, for entertainment and as lullabies.   
Explore his tale: The Story of Forest Man Nikindi and Randam

‍Paulus Konts
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Paulus Konts was born in the mid 1970s at Ambukl, near Kailge, in the western Nebilyer Valley, where he still lives. As described in our Introduction to the sung tales, Konts learned to compose and perform them, not by hearing them live, but by listening to recordings of a renowned performer, Paul Pepa, that were broadcast in the 1980s from the provincial capital Mount Hagen by the Radio Western Highlands service of PNG’s National Broadcasting Corporation. Konts learned the genre well, and himself became renowned as the most skilful young performer of tom yaya kange in Kailge area. It wasn’t until later, in 2004, that he actually met Paul Pepa, at a workshop on sung tales that was hosted by the University of Goroka in association with our project.
Explore his tale: The Story of Ambukl Konts and Ayamb Tangapa

‍Noma Guraiya
Noma was born in the early 1920s near Kailge, about ten years before the New Guinea highlands came into contact with the outside world. His father came from the local Kopia tribe, while his mother belonged to the larger Mokei tribe. During his youth around 1940, a war broke out in Kailge, leading Noma and his family to relocate to Palmuri, a Mokei settlement near what is now the provincial capital, Mt. Hagen. About 15 years later, after the conflict had been settled, Noma and his family moved back to Kailge, where he became a village leader, renowned for his skill at oratory and dispute-settlement and for composing and singing in a range of genres including sung tales. 
Explore his tale: The Story of a Small Boy

‍Philip Win 
Philip Win was born to Yaku, a young man who had two wives. Philip was the eldest child from Yaku’s first wife, Eltil. He was born around 1954 at Konjigil Village, in the upper Kaugel Valley, where his father was already a village leader. Philip recalls that Yaku loved him and stayed with him every night. One of Philip’s favourite nighttime activities was listening to Yaku’s renditions of tom yaya sung tales. He learned a lot from them, and it was also from Yaku that he learned to compose and perform such tales. 
Explore his tale: The Story of Telima Tiyl and His Dog Peant

Peter Kerua
Peter Kerua was born in 1964, near the limestone cliffs at the western edge of the Nebilyer Valley, and the Ukulu Waterfall that flows out of them. He has lived there for most of his life. When he was a boy his father Kowa would sing tom yaya tales to him at bedtime. Peter learned Kowa’s performance style and tom yaya melodies, as can be seen in the video on the home page of this site. Peter says it took him about three years to develop that skill, between the ages of about 8 and 11. He then went on to innovate by making up stories of his own and setting them to the melodies he had learned from his father.
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