Rumbling thunder from the land down under: Destin kids didg it! (with PHOTOS and VIDEO)

As the low rumble spread through the gym at Destin Community Center, the toddlers and kids who’d been chattering a moment before fell silent.

“Edutainer” Darren Liebman’s lips quivered and twisted as he played his five-foot long didgeridoo, an Australian Aborigine instrument formed from hollowed-out logs, the sounds controlled entirely by the movement of Liebman’s lips.

As he struck a couple of sticks together beside his “didg,” kids’ hands clapped and their bodies shifted rhythmically, whether sitting on the floor or in their mothers’ laps.

Liebman’s Didgeridoo Down Under show, which arrived at the Community Center courtesy of the Destin Library, is a mix of didgeridoo music with a crash course in Australian life and Aborigine culture.

To see a video from the performance, click here.

To see photos from the event, click here.

“Imagine what this world would be like without books to read from,” Liebman said. “In Australia, they didn’t have libraries ... but they had four foundations of learning before they had books.”

The foundations of Aborigine learning, Liebman said, were music, art, dance and spoken language, which came together in a gathering called a corroboree.

He showed examples of Aborigine art with a painting of a kangaroo; the strange style, he said, is because they’re done X-ray style so what the kids were looking at was “kangaroo guts.” Groans erupted from the audience.

He talked about Australian animals such as the kangaroo, the platypus and the saltwater crocodile. A stuffed kangaroo proved quite a hit with one toddler, who rushed forward to give it a hug.

To create a didgeridoo, Liebman said, an Aborigine will tap along a eucalyptus tree to see if termites have hollowed out the branches enough to be usable. The didgeridoos in the collection he brought with him ranged from three to five feet long, some decorated with turtle paintings or multicolored patterns.

When time came for a didg-playing lesson, there weren’t enough hollow branches to go around, so Liebman brought out five-foot long stretches of PVC piping and handed them out. He instructed the kids to clean them off with a sterilizing wipe, then practice blowing raspberries.

“To play the didgeridoo you have to buzz the lips,” he said. “If you can place one inch of your buzzing lips inside the mouthpiece and keep buzzing, it’s going to sound like this.”

While the results were mixed, some definite didg-style buzzings rumbled from a few of the
pipes.