Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir Comes to Sydney

Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir will be embarking on a national tour across Australia in 2025. This will be their biggest tour since they last performed across the East Coast in 2022.  Ticket are on sale now. 

Their tour commences at WOMAD 2025 March 8, before proceeding to Tanunda South Australia, Bunbury Entertainment Centre and The Quarry Perth, Canerra Llewelyn Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre, Brunnswick Ballroom, Sydney Opera House, and finishing in Baremans Bay. 

The Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir contains thirty core members. The women come from six remote communities within a thousand-kilometre radius throughout central Australia - Hermannsburg, Areyonga, Titjikala, Mutitjulu, Docker River, and Alice Springs. The choir was formed as an amalgamation of various individual community choirs, including the renowned choirs from Ntaria (Hermannsburg), Areyonga and Ernabella

This is your opportunity to see this 30-member choral “tour de force” in a full concert. This extraordinary vocal ensemble first came to popular attention following ABC TV’s Australian Story, and the feature documentary, ‘The Song Keepers.’ The choir also featured in the ABC’s brand campaign for the celebration of the broadcasters 90th year. 

Be transported by this extraordinary meeting of cultures and an unforgettable evening of song and history. The Northern Territory is a robust crucible of living languages and vibrant cultures. The Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir will present a unique choral program that highlights the wisdom and culture of 60,000 years of human occupation of Central Australia. The choir’s repertoire represents a unique compendium comprising Early Romantic Era and Baroque musical arrangements, German sacred poetry(hymns) preserved and presented in Australin First Nations languages, a peerless cultural anthology and an Australian national treasure preserved by these extraordinary women from remote Central Desert Communities. 

Morris Stuart AM, the choir’s charismatic Artistic Director and Conductor, is the person who is responsible for bringing Central Australia’s sacred sounds to the world. Morris said, “I am once again  thrilled to doing another tour with this fine group of people. I am deeply proud of this choir, when I started out little did, I know that my work and this choir would become the stuff of legend in Central Australia and the subject of both a documentary and an ABCTV episode of Australian Story. There is something about music, especially singing, choral singing, which is powerful, transformative, therapeutic, that brings people together.” 

He added, “the choir's greatest achievement so far has been a 12,000km trip to Germany to share some of the fifty-three hymns that German missionaries translated into local languages in the 19th century. The songs had all but vanished from use in Germany but had been preserved in the Central Australian desert for 140 years.”

Morris says, “the preserved German hymns are like an "outback secret, it is a delight to be bringing the choir back for a tour in collaboration with my friend Andrew Kay, we have created quite a family.”

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