Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970

by Amanda Harris

Overview

Representing Aboriginal Music and Dance is a performance-centered history of the Australian “assimilation” era – broadly defined as 1930-1970. The book centralizes auditory worlds and audio-visual evidence of the representation of Aboriginal music and dance in this era. It offers new interpretations of this period that counterbalance the dominance of documentary texts in historical accounts. It also makes an intervention in Australian musicology and dance studies by the appropriation of Aboriginal music and dance by non-Indigenous composers and choreographers – practices which have not been firmly embedded in contemporary Aboriginal politics. Through contextualizing recent music and dance practices in broader histories of policy, settler colonial structures, and political change the book offers a new lens on the development of performing arts in Australia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501362934
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/03/2020
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Amanda Harris is a research fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, 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).

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"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)

From the Publisher