Shortlisted for the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History. Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970 offers a rethinking of recent Australian music history. In this open access book, Amanda Harris presents accounts of Aboriginal music and dance by Aboriginal performers on public stages. Harris also historicizes the practices of non-Indigenous art music composers evoking Aboriginal music in their works, placing this in the context of emerging cultural institutions and policy frameworks. Centralizing auditory worlds and audio-visual evidence, Harris shows the direct relationship between the limits on Aboriginal people’s mobility and non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture. This book seeks to listen to Aboriginal accounts of disruption and continuation of Aboriginal cultural practices and features contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson as personal interpretations of their family and community histories. Contextualizing recent music and dance practices in broader histories of policy, settler colonial structures, and postcolonizing efforts, the book offers a new lens on the development of Australian musical cultures. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Australian Research Council.
Shortlisted for the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History. Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970 offers a rethinking of recent Australian music history. In this open access book, Amanda Harris presents accounts of Aboriginal music and dance by Aboriginal performers on public stages. Harris also historicizes the practices of non-Indigenous art music composers evoking Aboriginal music in their works, placing this in the context of emerging cultural institutions and policy frameworks. Centralizing auditory worlds and audio-visual evidence, Harris shows the direct relationship between the limits on Aboriginal people’s mobility and non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture. This book seeks to listen to Aboriginal accounts of disruption and continuation of Aboriginal cultural practices and features contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson as personal interpretations of their family and community histories. Contextualizing recent music and dance practices in broader histories of policy, settler colonial structures, and postcolonizing efforts, the book offers a new lens on the development of Australian musical cultures. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Australian Research Council.
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1. Staging Assimilation: Too Many John Antills?
Prelude, Mungari Buldyan – Song for my Grandfather by Shannon
Foster
2. 1930s – Performing Cultures: Navigating Protection, Responding
to Assimilation
3. 1940s – Reclaiming an Indigenous Identity
4. 1950s – Jubilee Celebrations, Protest and National Cultural
Institutions
Interlude by Tiriki Onus
5. 1960-67 – Aboriginal Performance Takes the Main Stage
6. 1967-1970 – The End of Assimilation?
7. Disciplining Music: Too Many Peter Sculthorpes?
Coda by Nardi Simpson
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A new Australian music history seeking to understand disruption and continuation of Aboriginal music and dance and its representation in non-Indigenous performances.
Amanda Harris is a research fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Director of the Sydney Unit of digital archive PARADISEC. Her research focuses on gender, music and cross-cultural Australian histories. She is editor of Circulating Cultures: Exchanges of Australian Indigenous Music, Dance and Media (2014) and co-editor of Research, Records and Responsibility (2015) and Expeditionary Anthropology (2018).
Harris is a great storyteller and researcher. She eloquently tells
the hidden stories behind Australia’s historical events through the
lens of Aboriginal music and dance. In addition, she reveals the
complex relations between the settler Australians and the
Aboriginal people… studies presented in this book are not only
essential for those interested in Aboriginal performance studies
but also for history enthusiasts and general readers who want to
learn about Australian history in a more comprehensive way.
*Australian Historical Studies*
A most thoughtful, compelling study … Harris writes with such
empathy about all the diverse actors in these encounters.
*Stephen Jones Blog*
Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance is an exciting
and original book. Harris offers a richly textured and expansive
narrative of Aboriginal and Aboriginal-inspired music and dance
across the country, interwoven with the history and politics of
Indigenous rights in the twentieth century, and underpinned by a
deep knowledge of Australian musicology. Through meticulous
research, she has revealed unknown story after story of
performances in which Aboriginal people emerge as historical
individuals and assertive agents of profound social and political
change. From the powerful opening ‘Prelude’ contributed by
D’harawal scholar Shannon Foster, about her grandfather, the
activist and songman Tom Foster, Harris’s dialogic engagement with
Aboriginal voices is respectful and unforced, and drives the book’s
underlying message to recognise our shared humanity. Representing
Aboriginal Music and Dance is essential reading for those
interested in twentieth-century Aboriginal history or Indigenous
performance studies, but it will resonate with all who seek out
histories that inspire as well as inform us.
*Victoria K. Haskins, Director, Purai Global Indigenous History
Centre, University of Newcastle, Australia, and author of
Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific
(Bloomsbury, 2020)*
The book makes an important contribution to the ‘truth telling’ of
Australian history ... Harris has contributed significantly to
understandings of this history and of the performance events that
have shaped the development of Australian art music.
*Context*
Harris’s book offers an inclusive model of intercultural
collaborative research that makes space for Indigenous voices and
meaningful engagement with custodians. Brilliantly conceived and
written, it is a major contribution to the fields of history,
(ethno)musicology, Indigenous studies and performance studies.
*History Australia*
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