Kaalassic Moments · Writing
The Professor
Founder of the Laughter Percussion Academy. Two doctorates, four published books, an NDIS-registered program built from lived experience. He's a marker for where this work can go.
He walked in carrying the kind of quiet that only comes from someone who has nothing left to prove.
Professor Ras Banamungu — founder of the Laughter Percussion Academy, two doctorates, four published books, an NDIS-registered program built from lived experience. We met at a community gathering in Kalgoorlie, and within minutes it was clear: this wasn't a chance encounter.
He's been doing the work long before it had a name. Laughter as medicine. Percussion as language. Community as curriculum. His program sits inside schools, aged care facilities, and disability support settings — and it works because he built it from the inside out, not from a textbook.
We talked for a long time. About Kalgoorlie, about what it means to serve a community that doesn't always have the words for what it needs, about the gap between credential and credibility. He has both — but he wears neither like armour.
What stays with me is how he described the moment a room full of people stops performing wellness and starts actually feeling it. That shift — he said — never gets old. After decades of doing this, it still catches him off guard.
He's a marker for where this work can go. Not because he's exceptional — though he is — but because he chose to stay, to build something real in a place that needed it, and to keep showing up long after the funding dried up and the headlines moved on.
That's the standard. And it's one worth meeting.