Listening from/to the Antipodes: How Place and Time Inform Performance in Australia

Introduction

The land now known as Australia has always been Aboriginal land. When Aboriginal observers from some of the more than 250 language groups noted tall sailing ships on the horizon and watched pale-skinned figures clothed in unfamiliar fabrics come ashore, they sought to conceptualize the newcomers within existing systems of relationship and kinship.[1] Theorizing that the arrivals might be representatives of ancestors returning in ghostlike guise, they warily sent warnings up and down the coast to neighbouring Aboriginal nations, communicating across language groups to neighbours with deep long-term knowledge of the local ecology, cosmology and cultural practice.[2] The close relationship with ancestors is evident in songs, which often invoke those who have come before by singing about particular places and the singer’s relationship to them (see Tobin, Towers and Harris in this Special Issue). In an Indigenous worldview, those who are no longer alive continue to be incorporated into the present.

Whereas Aboriginal people had theorized relationship and continuity, the new arrivals from Europe saw opposites and difference. The landing of British explorers in the 1770s on the shores of what would become Australia followed centuries of European speculation about a counter-balancing Antipodean continent. Longstanding theories about the ocean and continents that must provide a counterpoise to those of Europe and Africa had, by the sixteenth century, crystallized into an idea of the Antipodes as an ‘opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets for us, and their feet are over against our feet’, as Portuguese explorer Duarte Pacheco Pereira postulated.[3] In the seventeenth century, English playwrights including William Shakespeare and Richard Brome wielded the Antipodes as metaphor for a topsy-turvy world, as ‘Europeans turned upside-down’.[4] Coinciding with an age of European exploration, these imaginary geographies were soon mapped onto newly encountered actual places. Oceanic historian Damon Salesa suggests:

the Antipodes as both a place and a people, at once reassured Europeans that they lived on the right side of the world, and unsettled them with a vision of a world upside-down and back-to-front. But always those in this wrongsided world, so distant and so different, were somehow imagined to be bound to those who stood ‘on top’ of them.[5]

By the late eighteenth century, notions of Europe’s Antipodean opposite had become jumbled and intermeshed with the enduring search for Terra Australis, a much conjectured, but ultimately fictional, great continent that was the south to Europe’s north, the bottom to its top, the feet to its head. This confusion of terms and concepts resulting from the non-existence of the long-imagined great continent is evident in the naming as ‘Australia’ of this linguistically rich and many-nationed land. Thinking about the the land-masses of the southern hemisphere, colonized by an array of European nations, as the Antipodes continues into the present day.[6] Hundreds of Aboriginal nations were coerced, coaxed, decimated and integrated into a series of British colonies, beginning with New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, then splitting and growing into states and territories of the British Commonwealth. As recently as 1788 the land was transformed into a British penal colony, and soon after into a settler colony that would be federated into a nation in 1901 – the European migrant population was here to stay.

In this Special Issue, prompted by relationships with ancestors from the past and by ideas of opposition and distance, we explore musical practices through relocations and transportations of time and place. The contemporary nation remains a place of unresolved tension between continuous and imported cultural practices, opposites and entangled stories, and populations who continue to seek harmonious modes of coexistence. For musicians, a relationship to Australia is inflected with the complexities of this place’s sonic worlds. Indigenous custodians have survived and maintained different degrees of continuous practice through this period, even with the interventions of colonial expansion.

Musical encounters across the colonial period might be characterized as the ‘rich points’ that Michael Agar describes in ethnographic encounters, or that Michael Walsh identifies in cross-cultural language communication failures.[7] These domains, in which communication across and between cultures is not always successful or mutually understood, invite reflections on the transnational nature of musical exchange, the transplanting and un-siloing of musical activity, and how localized stories can be opportunities for extrapolating our understanding of encounters in other places.

The Contents of this Special Issue

The articles we present in this collection detail a series of artistic research projects attuned to these kinds of entanglements. Jacinta Tobin, Ceane Towers, and Amanda Harris’ ‘Casting Our Nets: Singing a Fishing Song from the Past, in the Present, for the Future’ opens our collection with an account of how Indigenous ways of knowing and ‘methods of creative recuperation’ tap into historical soundworlds that have been rendered inaudible by generations of colonial violence. Tobin and her co-authors leverage Indigenous generational knowledge and embodied intuition – sources of knowledge often disregarded in Western research paradigms – to both reconstruct the sonic dimensions of a fishing song sung by the Original people of Warrane (Sydney Cove) and to sound again the ‘relationship between people and Country’ the song makes manifest.

Julia Russoniello’s ‘Fiddlers and Songbirds: The Fashionable Programming and Performing Traditions of Sydney’s Violin Recitals 1900–1950’ explores a concert era in Sydney in which vocalists and violinists regularly performed together. Engaged in ongoing transnational exchanges of practice and musical style, these performance duos were part of a booming Sydney concert scene. Examining the combination of vocal and violin items on concert programmes, Russoniello explores the ways that these combined programmes help make sense of the stylistic entanglements of violinists and vocalists, evident in the voice-like ‘sweeping portamento’ and pitch scoops adopted by violinists Cyril Monk and Patrick Moore MacMahon. ‘Reimagining’ this performance practice, for Russoniello, conjures out of the historical record ‘forgotten cultures of music making … barely recognizable to a modern-day recital enthusiast’.

Neal Peres Da Costa’s ‘De-“classicizing” The Canon: Reimagining Mozart’s K488 through Musical Dialogues across Time’ pursues a similarly forgotten performance practice. Postulating a continuum, rather than a break, between Classical and Romantic era pianism, Peres Da Costa uncovers, in archival and piano roll evidence, a nineteenth-century approach to Mozart’s K488 that embraced ‘arpeggiated textures, expressive delay of the melody notes, and alterations of rhythm (agogic accents) and tempo’. Peres Da Costa documents an iterative experiment with the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO) aimed at reconstructing this approach, and he considers the impact more widespread adoption might have on the creative agency of performers. In discussing the broader possibilities of his discovery, Peres Da Costa’s contribution to this Special Issue illuminates the ongoing situation of Australia’s global entanglements and the ways Australian musical activity both informs and is informed by global developments.

Global and local dimensions in turn frame Lolita Emmanuel’s ‘From the Fragments, We Make ‘Something Anew’: Assyrian resurgence in collaborative piano and visual-arts performance’. Emmanuel’s work documents an interdisciplinary and international collaboration with US-based Assyrian visual artist Dicky Bahto aimed at creatively reassembling fragmentions of Assyrian culture dispersed throughout the Assyrian diaspora. Focused specifically on the possibilities of reassembly in the digital realm, Emmanuel outlines how she worked with Bahto to produce a streamed work that creatively juxtaposed archival footage, testimony, and her recorded performances of piano works rooted in Assyrian content with the aim of sparking a fresh global conversation about the nature of Assyrian resiliency. Crucially, the web of stakeholders presented in this study flips the focus of our Special Issue from the ways artistic researchers in Australia have sought to invigorate or revive musical practices to the ways artistic research projects in Australia frequently contribute to international movements and global kinds of cultural work.

Nicole Cherry and Christopher Coady’s ‘Remembering George Polgreen Bridgetower in Performance: An Australian Case Study’, presents a final case in point. Cherry and Coady’s article documents how American poet Rita Dove’s commemoration of Bridgetower’s life in her monograph Sontata Mulattica has impacted Australian performances of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata – a work originally dedicated to Bridgetower. Specifically, Cherry and Coady argue that, since the publication of Dove’s book, efforts to commemorate Bridgetower’s connection to the Kreutzer Sonata in Australia have become more attuned to the colonial power imbalances responsible for whittling down the dimensions of Bridgetower’s legacy. They then document the curation of a Bridgetower commemoration programme delivered by Cherry at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in which Kreutzer Sonata excerpts were woven around American folk melodies, the melodic gestures of African American spirituals, and Afrofuturist imaginings of violin practice, releasing Bridgetower from his colonial bind to Beethoven by incorporating his memory into a ‘trajectory of Black musical achievement achieved in spite of, rather than as a result of, European colonial endeavour’.

Many of the projects described above have their roots in a recent Australian Research Council funded project: ‘Hearing the Music of Early NSW, 1788–1860’. The project pursued new archival research, oral history research, and experimental artistic research aimed at illuminating the rich sonic tapestry of musical practice in Australia during the late eighteenth century, and throughout much of the nineteenth. In the remainder of this introduction, we discuss the rationale for this project and its methods in order to help readers understand the ways in which the articles we have selected for inclusion in this Special Issue illuminate a trajectory of historically minded artistic research in Australia.

We begin by introducing the body of data that prompted this project. We then describe research-led interpretations of this data delivered in performances that were staged in historically significant locations. We end by discussing the team’s creative interventions in these performances that sought to bridge the past and the present. Finally we argue that the work undertaken in ‘Hearing the Music of Early NSW’ has launched transformational possibilities for utilizing historically minded artistic research to interrogate cultural entanglements in Australia – an impact that resonates broadly across this Special Issue.

Hearing the Music of Early NSW

Music historian Graeme Skinner has, over a number of years, compiled an exhaustive online resource listing documentary evidence of music in the earliest Australian colonial records.[8] Skinner’s Australharmony assembles dozens of partial transcripts of Aboriginal songs, hundreds of locally printed musical scores of music composed in Europe and distributed in colonial towns, imported musical scores, and a body of original compositions by European settlers, some of whom simply continued their musical practice in their new home, while others aimed to build a foundation for a new musical tradition distinct from Europe, as the colony became entrenched. Building on Skinner’s documentary research, the ‘Hearing the Music’ project sought to bring this plethora of documentation back into an acoustic realm. We asked not just what music was performed, heard, and consumed in early colonial NSW, but how could we hear the musical sounds of the past in the present day? How were the sounds of music making shaped by people and by place – by Aboriginal Country in its changing seasons and by the Aboriginal singers who passed down knowledge across generations, and in newly constructed spaces, the living rooms, halls, churches or synagogues, pubs, theatres, streets or parks built by colonial settlers? As the project has progressed, we have also considered how the specific temporal and local context of colonial Sydney might be instructive of larger contexts for music in settler colonial history.

In an analogous study of the settler colony of Edmonton, Canada, David Gramit writes that:

Edmontonians were quite clear about their participation not only, and perhaps not even primarily, in the nation of Canada, but also in the worldwide entity that was the British Empire. And they were also quite conscious of participating in a colonial process in which the formation of a new community required the displacement of an existing one.[9]

In Sydney, as in Edmonton, conscious acts of displacement have left a legacy that confronts and disproportionately impacts Indigenous people on a daily basis, and this means that the work of rebalancing historical accounts of music making is often painful, contentious and fraught with emotion and divergences of opinion. We address these aspects of the process in our description of three concerts staged by the project team, with the view that illuminating not just the finished products, but also the processes that shaped them is crucial to the scholarly work.

Gramit asserts that ‘One of the tasks of a history of music in settler colonization is to recover the memory of that [Indigenous] soundscape and of the processes by which it was obscured’.[10] This task was at the forefront of our team’s approach to hearing the music of colonial NSW from the outset. We continually revisit the challenges of uncovering Indigenous histories that tend to be less well documented than imperial agendas and their outcomes for British history. In the ‘Hearing the Music’ project, we have confronted this challenge in two key ways: 1) by inserting into recreated programmes the sounds of Aboriginal singing, even if they are absent from the documentary evidence of printed programmes,[11] and; 2) creating extra-colonial contexts[12] for bringing song back to Country. This was possible because Indigenous researchers were embedded in the team, which included both non-Indigenous performers, historians and musicologists: Neal Peres Da Costa, Amanda Harris, Toby Martin, Graeme Skinner, Matthew Stephens and Julia Russoniello, and Indigenous scholars and songwomen Jakelin Troy (Ngarigu woman and linguist) and Jacinta Tobin (Darug woman and linguist), and drew in dozens of further performers and culture-bearers across the course of the four-year project.

The recreated concerts we describe below were collaboratively programmed between members of the team, and were only part of the team’s activities. That is, more time was spent working with records of Aboriginal song outside of the colonial institutions of the university and historical buildings, than went into including these in the concerts. This work included taking songs back to Country, connecting them with other community members and fostering new practice contexts that have had their own life beyond any of the project activities or research team.[13] In these activities, we have sought to generate the conditions for Shino Konishi’s ‘extra-colonial’ contexts for working with Indigenous song, even if we do not claim to have resolved Dylan Robinson’s critique of art music institutions and their ‘inclusionary efforts … guided by an interest in – and often fixation upon – Indigenous content but not Indigenous structure’.[14]

To interrogate colonial-era histories of music making, our team delved into the historical record, collaborating to stage concerts, drawing on evidence of historical performance practices for the interpretations (see Peres Da Costa; Russoniello; and Tobin, Towers and Harris in this Special Issue). The concerts aimed both to illuminate how that music might have sounded in the past and to experiment with how it might be re-sounded in the present-day. In the final section, we outline a methodology of ‘interventions’, and its role in shaping one of the three concerts discussed.

Reimagined Concert 1: The 1826 Sydney Amateur Concerts

The first of these concerts converged in 2021 with one of Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Orchestral Studies curriculum concerts by the Early Music Ensemble (EME),[15] providing a special laboratory to trial novel ways of presenting, performing and hearing historical music in the Australian context. The concert sought to reimagine the sound worlds of Sydney’s first subscription concert series – the Sydney Amateur Concerts – begun in 1826.[16] Skinner had drawn on evidence of the concert series (chiefly from newspaper advertisements, reports and reviews) to reconstruct the programmes performed in twelve concerts across 1826 and 1827.[17] In re-sounding the musical worlds of these concerts, we considered what participants and audiences would likely have heard in Sydney Town of 1826. We engaged with some key elements including the size and make-up of ensembles, the styles of playing, and the kinds of instrument technologies in use at the time, as well as the mixed programming that saw orchestral music, serious and comic songs, and unusual instrumental duo, trio and quartet combinations side by side on a single programme (see Figure 1).[18] The programming was considered by a commentator in 1826 to be crucial to its success:

The management and selection of the music reflect considerable credit on the conductors, Messrs. Edwards and Sippe. Interspersing vocal and instrumental performances of different measure and expression, the great secret of making a musical meeting productive of pleasure, not only to the visitors, but to the performers themselves, and not by going on playing one piece after another in the same style and time, give those who hate music an opportunity of rejoicing over the tortures of those who presume to think that they admire it.[19]

To this mixed programming, we added songs sung by Aboriginal singers, certainly present around the town at the time (if not visible on concert programmes).[20] The concert was located at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The historic site on which the Conservatorium is built was, according to early colonial records, adjacent to corroboree grounds for ceremonial music and dance.[21] The State Library of NSW’s record of the building suggests that:

This grand, castellated stable in the Gothic style was commissioned by Macquarie and designed by Greenway to harmonise with a proposed new government house that was never built. Begun in 1817, the stable was condemned by Macquarie’s critics as a costly, self-indulgent folly. It is now the New South Wales [State] Conservatorium of Music’.[22]

Opening our concert, Darug singer and scholar Jacinta Tobin introduced the programme in the Dharug dalang (language of Country), sharing a song passed down to her through oral transmission that brought to the hall the sounds of place and people (see Tobin, Towers and Harris in this Special Issue for a more detailed discussion of songs that Tobin is working with in this project). The concert then featured comic songs, orchestral works of different instrumental combinations, vocal trios, and two versions of a Ngarigo song – one set with piano accompaniment, and one sung by a group of women with clapstick accompaniment. We explore the approach to performing each of these now in turn.

To recreate comic or popular songs included in the programmes of 1826, Toby Martin and Neal Peres Da Costa experimented with the unusual combination of electric guitar and nineteenth-century square piano to bring a sense of the past into the contemporary sound worlds of the present. The song by Barnett Levey was characterized as part of a genre ‘where ludicrous incidents belonging to low life, and the eccentricities of unusual characters are brought into view, coupled with a good strain of merry melody’.[23] The humour of the song was a challenge for audiences in 1826, as it is for performers in the twenty-first century. While Levey was known for his performances of ‘irresistible drollery’, most reviews of the 1826 concert did not regard his performance as droll at all, but as in quite bad taste. The Beautiful Boy is a farcical song about disfiguring a baby in order to make it look more attractive, with the end result a man apparently irresistible to women. The Monitor described the song as ‘vulgar and grotesque’ with ‘a chattering kind of melody’ and suggested that ‘as moralists, we find it an injudicious deployment of time’.[24] This review was reflective of debates in the press about whether such songs were appropriate for concerts that were supposed to be uplifting, reflecting anxieties at the time. Bowan and Pickering have shown that the British Empire of the nineteenth century saw an increasing preference for music that created ‘spiritual uplift’.[25] This problem was made more acute in the fledgling colony of NSW, which was striving to appear mature enough to be considered at once a new England but at the same time autonomous. Upside-down, perhaps, but morally the right way up.

The British notion that theatre was an instrument of ‘rational recreation’ was intensified in the colonies because of anxiety that the convict stain made the population ‘more ignorant than England’.[26] Nevertheless, in the 1820s in Sydney one could find vulgar songs alongside spiritually uplifting ones. By the 1840s, a bifurcation of culture meant highbrow and lowbrow were more likely to be programmed separately and in different venues.[27] The humour of The Beautiful Boy also made it a challenge to perform at our re-staged concert. While much of the programme – Mozart for instance – is of course still widely performed and understood today, so-called ‘comic songs’ have remained stuck in the past. The challenge was to perform the song in such a way that it was not just a historical relic, but somehow spoke to a twenty-first century audience. How could we translate this strange tale of rudimentary baby plastic surgery into something that works today? Our approach was the use of electric guitar, tuned to an open C tuning, which hinted at more dirgy styles of post-punk and brought a dark tension to the song. Another was in the vocal delivery to emphasize the satire of the song. The Beautiful Boy is part of a tradition of comic song – upheld well into the twentieth century by hillbilly performers like Chad Morgan, or even comic characters like Sir Les Paterson – which satirizes the sexual ego of men, contrasting their vulgar presence with a pretence of beauty.

We endeavoured similarly to make the unfamiliar past recognizable in interpreting the larger instrumental works (overtures and a concerto grosso), glees (part-songs), songs with piano accompaniment, and smaller instrumental works (duos and quartet) by European composers. We also sought to guide student performers and guest artists in the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Early Music Ensemble in recreating performance conventions and practices common in Sydney during the first decades of the nineteenth century, but less familiar to classically trained musicians today. Instruments from the era included an original English square piano by Collard and Collard (London, ca. 1835–40), and a range of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century style string, woodwind and brass instruments (originals or replicas), all of which produce substantially different tonal colours and timbres to their modern counterparts. For example, the essentially wooden-framed square piano with shorter and lighter strings (and consequently less string tension), smaller sound board and smaller hammers compared with a modern piano (upright or grand), produces sounds that are clear and penetrating and which decay relatively quickly without the tonal heft of a modern piano; gut strings (predominantly in use until the early twentieth century) on the stringed instruments produce arguably warmer (richer) and more complex sounds that are nevertheless lighter and more transparent than steel strings; and, early nineteenth-century woodwind instruments with narrow bores and few keys, and valveless brass instruments produce earthy and grainy sounds across the compass that are noticeably varied in tone and tuning than the efficiently homogenous sounds of modern instruments.

To add an additional layer to that sound world, the performers were guided during rehearsals in the use of era-specific improvisational (un-notated) expressive practices that stemmed from a long-established continuum of practice.[28] These included, for example: flexibility of tempo; modifications to notated rhythms; sliding (portamento) and trembling (vibrato) effects; articulations, dynamics, accents, and ornaments; bowing patterns and strokes; and, for pianists, various methods of arpeggiation to enhance the expression of melody notes, texture and timbre.[29] Such practices helped nineteenth-century performers to craft a ‘beautiful’ delivery style, vivifying the inexpressive notation to underscore emotional content and to characterize the music’s narrative (whether explicit or implicit).[30] The expressive dynamism – the quality (sound and effect) and quantity (frequency) of these expressive practices – is evident in early sound recordings of nineteenth-century trained musicians (some born as early as the 1820s and 30s),[31] which provided an appropriate starting point from which to extrapolate the colonial Sydney soundworld.[32]

Our extrapolative process was further influenced by consideration of factors that shaped the Sydney Amateur Concerts, for example: mix of musicians (amateur and professional); voice types and instruments; ensemble size and direction; rehearsal techniques and goals; and music arrangement. The Sydney Amateur Concerts were performed by a small core of well-trained professionals supplemented with amateurs,[33] as well as military regimental bandsman (many of whom played both wind and string instruments)[34] for the larger orchestral works. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser reported that: ‘A commodious orchestra was erected at the far end of the room, and presented, together with the amateurs, some of the best performers from the Bands of the 3rd and 57th Regiments’.[35] And that ‘the concert commenced with a highly effective overture by Hook, to which ample justice was rendered by the full orchestra’.[36] As to numbers of orchestral players, The Australian reported: ‘Mr. Sippe has, we understand, the far famed overture to Der Freischutz under rehearsal, between twenty and thirty performers are to be employed in it’.[37]

Despite the numbers available, the larger orchestral works would sometimes have to be arranged to suit the availability of instrumentalists. For example, The Monitor reported that ‘We regretted the absence of some instruments to fill out some of the harmonies’.[38] While The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser explained that Weber’s Overture to Der Freischütz had to make do with ‘the limited extent of the band’, and even if the work ‘was performed in a very creditable style; a band, numerous and complete in all its parts, however, is a sine qua non when such a piece is to be performed’.[39] In our concert we took this as a cue to solving a similar issue in restaging Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute which was performed in the third of the Sydney Amateur Concerts on 19 July 1826. Our Early Music Ensemble did not have all the period wind instrumentalists necessary to cover Mozart’s original wind section of 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets and 3 trombones. So, Graeme Skinner made an arrangement that to our ears nevertheless preserved the effect of a full wind section.

To judge from the press reviews, the standard of performance of the Sydney Amateur Concerts ranged from very high to occasionally far less successful, but was nevertheless deemed praiseworthy by some:

Taking every circumstance into consideration, it must be allowed, that the Sydney Amateur Concerts, present a considerable degree of excellence both vocal and instrumental, and their continued success cannot fail to be a desideratum with the inhabitants of Sydney, who, notwithstanding so small a beginning, may yet consider them as the germ of an Australian School of Music.[40]

The violinist leader John Edwards was a stand out among the professional musicians: The Monitor reported that ‘Mr. Edwards always led off in grand style. It does us good to witness this gentleman’s fire, worthy of the minstrels of old’.[41] While The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser explained that Edwards ‘betrays considerable science and judgment. He appears to have a perfect command of his instrument. His tones are full and harmonious, and the precision of his fingering, combined with rapidity of execution, decidedly rank him as a first rate performer on the violin’.[42] Similarly, the two military band masters George Sippe and Thomas Kavanagh were also reportedly fine musicians: ‘The taste and judgment displayed by Messrs. Sippy [sic] and Kavenagh, on the violoncello and tenor, contributed greatly to the fine effect of the delightful overture’.[43] Other reports attested to the generally successful musical and technical capabilities of the aformentioned musicians and a few others: ‘All the performers, but more particularly, Messrs. Edwards, Sippe, Clark, and Cavenagh, got through their parts very creditably’,[44] and ‘Master Josephson performed but little – but that little was excellent. Mr. Levey sung the comic song with great address, and real good-nature’, and ‘It would not be just to pass over in silence the merits of Mr. Sippe, who performed on the latter instrument [cello], as well as the piano forte and second violin, in a very masterly manner’.[45] The Early Music Ensemble replicated some of these conditions. For example, the students were mentored by academic staff who are specialists in historically informed performance and top professionals in Australia, who also played in the ensemble. Some of the student cohort also specialized in historical performance, while others who were relatively new to this discipline, picked up elements of style and technique through observation of their more experienced peers.[46]

We also considered the general atmosphere of the Sydney Amateur Concerts, which, reading between the lines of press reports, was motivated by social as well as musical objectives, and rather less rehearsed and less formal than present-day concert etiquette. More soberingly, the dominance of military bandsmen in these ensembles and the use of venues including the Court House are a reminder that the context for these concerts was a colonial and carceral one, in which the military band playing music in the evenings were members of the same military regiments using violence to enforce the compliance of Aboriginal people to colonial rule, and who were overseeing the convict labour of transported and incarcerated prisoners.[47]

Other venues for the 1826 concerts included rooms with both administrative and social functions. The first concert, on 7 June 1826, took place in the Large Room, Freemason’s Tavern (James Hankinson’s rooms), George Street, Sydney. From an acoustic point of view, the venue was less than favourable, the Australian reporting: ‘From its quadrangular form, and the ceiling not being sufficiently lofty, it is not so well calculated for the purposes of a concert room, as might be wished’,[48] and ‘The size of the room, however, was found extremely inconvenient, both because the company [audience] had to place themselves too near the orchestra, and because there really was not sufficient space to admit with comfort all who attended’.[49] For the second concert, on 21 June 1826, and for subsequent concerts in the series, the new venue was the Court House, Castlereagh Street, Sydney. But this venue also proved problematic. According to the Monitor: ‘The great drawback was its want of height, and consequent inadequacy, when filled with company, to convey the sound. We felt for the performers in this respect – they must have experienced the deadening effect of the walls and ceilings’.[50] Similarly, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser reported that ‘the ceiling is rather too low to allow a free circulation of sound, no place could have been chosen better adapted for the purpose’.[51] While, the Australian gave a more detailed description of the problem, suggesting the room did not have ‘The lofty concave ceiling, and sounding board, and the other arcana which are found to contribute so essentially towards collecting and reflecting vocal or instrumental sounds, and conveying them in a full and improved strain of harmony’.[52]

Bearing in mind both the type of rooms and their acoustics, we presented our reimagined concert in one of the Conservatorium’s Recital Halls, a space which flows from raked seating to stage with no perceivable structural barrier between performers and audience. The presence on stage of both the full orchestra and other musicians with a full audience created a similarly crowded situation to the Sydney Amateur Concerts and a resultant, noticeable deadening of the acoustic compared to one of the Conservatorium’s more spacious venues. Our intention was also to bring performers and audience in close contact and performers were encouraged to sit amongst the audience members or else to sit on stage as observers when not performing. This contributed to a more casual atmosphere than usual, in which the audience seemed willing to express their appreciation whenever the urge took them, including clapping and verbal comments, occasionally extending to questions to the musicians. There was also a spontaneous question and answer session at the end of the performance which added to the sense of informality.

All of these practices contributed to loosening the hold of entrenched attitudes among the ensemble players, especially the preoccupation with rendering the score notation meticulously, technical perfection above all other parameters of musicality, and formal concert etiquette that tends to create separation between performers and listeners.[53] It created space for the diverse and spontaneous sounds and expressions of the kind that are likely to have featured in the Sydney Amateur Concerts, and that were part and parcel of nineteeth-century aesthetics in ensemble playing, but which are not considered desirable today from the viewpoint of musicality, technique or etiquette. For us, this helped to re-establish a thread between the past and the present.

Though most programme items were selected from works actually performed at the time, we included a further work not programmed, but widely circulated in the 1830s – The Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe – in two contrasting versions. The first musical score to be published in the New South Wales colony, the song was written down in 1834 by the Polish explorer John Lhotsky based on the singing of Ngarigu women of the high country of southeastern NSW, with the assistance of ‘several musical gentlemen’. Two of the musical gentlemen – Joseph Josephson and George Sippe – were key performers in the 1826 Amateur concert series, and James Pearson had been music master at St James Church in Sydney during the same period.[54] Though not programmed for any of the 1826 concerts, the song was a good fit with our project’s aims to hear the sounds of colonial Sydney, indicating as it does the entanglement of the sonic worlds of Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people in the early decades of colonization. While earlier colonial documenters had sought to transcribe words, or roughly notate melodies (see Tobin, Towers and Harris in this Special Issue), Lhotsky and his musical gentlemen’s efforts could be viewed as an attempt to bring the foreign strains of Aboriginal singing into relationship with known sound worlds. Anna Johnston has suggested that the bewildering number of different Aboriginal languages defeated even those colonists who made earnest efforts to learn the local language. For many, Johnston asserts, ‘the opacity of Indigenous languages became a synecdoche of the culture’.[55] Efforts by Lhotsky, Josephson and Sippe were perhaps attempts to bring the unknowableness of Aboriginal language and song into known frameworks.[56]

We performed the Ngarigu song, both in its colonial parlour song arrangement, and in a meticulously reconstructed version by Ngarigu linguist Jakelin Troy and non-Indigenous musicologist Linda Barwick. For Troy and Barwick, the arrangement of the song into piano-accompanied notation leaves us with important traces of the song as it might have been sung at the time.[57] For the colonial arrangement, Troy’s daughter Lara rehearsed the song with Amanda Harris in the weeks leading to the concert, and then Troy asked Harris to sing it in the concert, accompanied by Neal Peres Da Costa on the square piano, to demonstrate the particularities of that arrangement. Troy’s and Harris’ longstanding familial relationship was important to this decision, even though Harris is not a Ngarigu person. To recreate the group setting of the women’s singing heard on Ngarigu Country and to bring the intercultural spaces of early colonial Sydney to the attention of the participating students, women instrumentalists in the ensemble were also invited to sing the reworked version of the ‘Snow Song’, in which Troy and Barwick had stripped off the piano accompaniment and vocal flourishes to reimagine this as a Ngarigu song, with the singers producing the percussive beat by hitting their laps, as Ngarigu women did in the 1830s.[58]

Reimagined Concert 2: Music of the 1840s at Warrane and Government House

More recently, we staged a concert in NSW Government House, a building completed in 1845. In this concert, music heard in Sydney in the 1840s was the focus. Here again, we brought past and present, Indigenous and non-Indigenous into dialogue. Many aspects of the concert were successful, but the difficulties and tensions of its preparation and the experiences of many of the Indigenous musicians and collaborators involved was a strong reminder that seeking to recreate the sounds of a colonial town is always weighted with the conflict, destruction, attempts at reconciliation and negotiation that characterized the past and that continue to inflect the present.

An early point of contention when planning the programme in negotiation with Government House was the inclusion of the National Anthem.[59] During the nineteenth century all musical programmes staged by English settler colonizers opened with a performance of the anthem (‘God Save the King/Queen’). At our concert, this proved to be a point of contention from two directions – from the staff of Government House and from Indigenous participants in the concert and those collaborating with them. According to protocol, at Government House, the Australian anthem ‘Australians All Let Us Rejoice’ is to be played on certain occasions to mark the entry of the Governor of NSW. ‘God Save the King/Queen’ is reserved for occasions when members of the British Royal family are present. This highlighted to our research and creative team the idiosyncrasies of tradition and ceremony. Historical accuracy would suggest inclusion of the British Anthem, but the ongoing exigencies of colonial rule in a nation that is not yet a republic have replaced traditions of the nineteenth century with different ones.

The second point of contention came from our team, especially from its Indigenous members. By happenstance, rather than design, the concert was scheduled for 31 October 2023. When this date was set, we did not yet know that the long-planned referendum for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament would be scheduled for 14 October, just two weeks before the concert. While we planned the concert, we could not know what the referendum’s outcome would be, though we were very much aware of the turmoil that had already been generated by public debates about Aboriginal rights and colonial history; debates with a particularly personal and devastating impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. By the time of the concert date, we knew the outcome of the referendum – fewer than 50 per cent of the Australian population had voted in favour of the Voice to Parliament, and Australian citizens had thus rejected one of the three pillars of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, calling for Voice, Treaty and Truth.[60]

Our activities organizing and preparing this concert became implicated in these processes in ways we had not anticipated. It was not lost on us that we planned the concert on the exact part of Country where the colonial city was first established, where first contact between Gadigal and surrounding tribes and Europeans took place, where the earliest Aboriginal songs were notated by Europeans, and where some scholars estimate up to 80 per cent of the Indigenous population of Sydney were killed within two years of European arrival through infectious disease and violent dispossession.[61] We stood on land where government seats of power were built over the top of initiation sites, where roads were built over trade routes, where conservatoria were built over corroboree grounds. We could not separate these things from one another – the pain of colonization in the past, the pain of rejection of constitutional recognition in the present. With our community engagement and song workshops taking place as the referendum approached, and in its aftermath, these processes were grieved in real time. We grappled with the instinct to cancel everything, to refuse to engage, to withdraw, to destroy. As a group, we finally settled on proceeding with the concert and the act of diplomacy it would represent. Not everyone was in agreement, some who had participated in workshops in the weeks before decided not to attend the concert. Some Indigenous colleagues attended as audience members and wished they had not, repelled by the formal protocols of Government House and what they represented. Some persisted through the difficulty and came away with a new feeling of having been part of something consequential – a moment of recognition and important diplomacy, where the songs of Country filled the halls of colonial power and bookended a concert of colonial music. Darug singer and team member Jacinta Tobin reported that her mother’s experience of the concert and of her treatment as an honoured guest and Darug Elder meant she had ‘felt like a Queen’.[62]

The concert’s final programmed item illustrates how we sought to both reconstruct the sound worlds of concerts in Government House, and to bring the sounds of Aboriginal singing into that space.[63] Following on from Troy’s and Barwick’s work on the Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe, we turned to another song inspired by the singing of Ngarigu people. ‘Koorinda Braia’ had been notated and arranged by the recently arrived composer Isaac Nathan in 1842, built around the ‘coo-ee’ call.[64] In the 1840s, it was reported that the song was equally at home in a concert directed by the composer at the Sydney College, and in private drawing rooms: ‘the ladies, of Sydney have all become infected with a mania for cooing: there in scarcely a party now given where the visitors are not greeted with a cooey or a ‘Koorinda Braia’’.[65] The song may also have had a wider performance tradition among Aboriginal people across the region, another newspaper reporting that on the occasion of the British Queen Victoria’s birthday on 31 May 1845, seventeen Aboriginal men and women, including the ‘King and Queen of Berrima’, had gathered in a pub in the Southern Highlands town of Berrima and after dinner had begun to sing, ‘keeping good time with their several instruments, and equally good time with their voices. Koorinda Braia, and several national airs, were sung with much spirit’.[66] Around 100 kilometers away in Sydney on that same May evening, the NSW Governor Gipps held a celebration of the British Queen in the new Government House, where he and his wife had taken up residence; the guest list included H. Tingcombe – the grazier and musician who had heard and communicated the Ngarigu songs to Lhotsky and Nathan for their arrangements.[67] These concurrent celebratory events bring into focus the close proximity of Aboriginal people, who were adapting and negotiating the terms of the colonial regime, with the colonial residents seeking to keep English ceremonial practices alive.

Like the musicians who had assisted Lhotsky in notating the song, composer Isaac Nathan had likely never heard the original Ngarigu singers. Nevertheless, as with the Menero women’s song, the evidence of Ngarigu singing that ‘Koorinda Braia’ records remains valuable to Ngarigu people seeking to revitalize their cultural practices in the present day. Over several years, our team, led by Ngarigu team member Jakelin Troy, has met and corresponded with other Ngarigu people seeking to bring these songs back into a wider cultural practice. At workshops on Country in 2022 (Figure 2), the non-Indigenous members of the team had the experience of hearing the song anew as it was chanted by a group near Jindabyne on Ngarigu Country, seemingly taking on wholly different rhythmic and melodic resonances as it was removed from its setting for four-part vocal ensemble and chamber orchestra, and returned to voices accompanied by clapstick and body percussion, sung outdoors and in relationship with that specific place.

Working with these fragments of songs has been a profoundly meaningful experience for Ngarigu people. Troy asserts:

Music has been such a binding force – the intergenerational nature of music, of performative works – it brings people together in a way that takes a lot longer when you’re doing language analysis, writing grammatical descriptions or creating dictionaries. The intergenerationality leads to culturality and performativity that you just you don’t get with more static forms of renewal revitalization.

Historical sources have their limitations, but they are neither the beginning nor the end of a song renewal process, rather they are a prompt that needs to be embodied and integrated with people and practice to be realized.[68] In re-creation, there is always both an attention to historical accuracy and a necessary element of imagination and creativity required to bring historical sources back into practice.[69]

Troy explains:

Through working with these historical sources, groups of people who aren’t musicians but want to connect with their language and culture have now gained a sense of how to use music, how to sing in language, to perform themselves as Darug people or, as Ngarigu people. There’s a strong understanding that we have a style in Southeastern Australia that’s different to elsewhere in Australia, and is very different to imported colonial stuff, and working with the historical sources allows us to find our way to that distinctive style, even in places where this revitalization work didn’t have that kind of momentum before. There’s a real energy around being Ngarigu in the High Country, and a lot of it centres around performance and singing songs, which is still unusual in language renewal projects. Learning songs together also allows us to adopt a participatory model where the interpretation is group-devised, in contrast to the teacher-student model often adopted in language classes.

For the ‘Warrane’ concert at Government House, we endeavoured to juxtapose Nathan’s arrangement of ‘Koorinda Braia’ performed by students in the Early Music Ensemble and four guest singers with a newly reconstructed version performed by the Ngarigu singers. Members of the research team and the Ngarigu singers collaboratively rehearsed ‘Koorinda Braia’ for the Government House concert drawing on the On Country performance from 2022.[70] This included deciding on roughly how many repetitions of the melody would take place, who would sing the repetitions, and how these would be accompanied with clap sticks. This was intended as a loose structure which could change in the moment of performance. The research group devised a system of hand gestures that could be seen by the Ngarigu group during the concert from the back of the room, and which they agreed would assist them in remembering the pitch changes in the melody. The Ngarigu group also asked that members of the research team join in the singing during the performance. The act of singing together may have played a role of bolstering the confidence of singers not used to performing in public, but there were also deeper interventions in the concert’s attempts to involve members of the research team in all of the protocols and repertoire taking place. Non-Indigenous members of the team accepting the invitation to sing the Ngarigu song brought the different members of the team into closer relation and blurred the separation between works scored for European instruments and the songs learned through participatory oral practice. This had happened repeatedly in rehearsals, with the different groups demonstrating their practices for one another and joining in each others’ rehearsals, but performative work was also done in the concert context. That is, non-Indigenous musicians were not separate from Aboriginal singers, but collaborated with them on taking the notated song off the page and into practice. Even so, discussions among performers and audience members highlighted imbalances in the concert programme, where colonial music was given more programme time. In this sense, even though the Aboriginal performers had been satisfied with their part in the concert, perhaps in the end, our efforts were read by some attendees as what Sara Ahmed calls ‘non-performatives’ – declarations that fail to do the performative work that they proclaim.[71]

Reflections and robust discussions between members of the research team, the audience and performers suggest that the intentions were successful and unsuccessful to varying degrees. Though from the point of view of the Darug and Ngarigu performers, the enactment of the protocols was a more important part of the ‘performance’ than the manner in which the songs were sung, most peripheral attendees may not have understood that protocols were being enacted at all. One example of this misunderstanding can be seen in the official MC’s speech following Darug songwoman Jacinta Tobin’s opening to the concert, in which he suggested that the concert would now be beginning, failing to understand that it had already been underway for some time. Tobin designed her concert opening both to enact protocols by acknowledging the Country on which the concert took place and the Elders (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) in the audience and by speaking and singing in the language of the place. When staff technicians subsequently edited the footage to provide it to the research team, they also made this mistake, editing out not only the formal speeches that the Government House staff had declined permission to include in the online version of the concert, but also editing out Tobin’s opening words and songs. The research team were repeatedly engaged in correcting these errors and negotiating the terms of what constituted the concert and the acts of diplomacy within it.[72]

The other works on the programme (see Figure 3) were chosen from repertoire performed either at Government House or in the local environs in the 1840s. This included Stephen Hale Marsh’s Australian valse brillante composed for the opening of Government House in 1843; Vincent Wallace’s Overture to Maritana, a popular work for full orchestra; two vocal quartets; a popular song arrangement for tenor, cornet and piano; a Nocturne in the style of Chopin for solo piano, the famous Australian quadrille Currency Lasses and other quadrilles by William Ellard – a music publisher in Sydney; the famous aria ‘Una voce poco fa’ from Rossini’s opera Il Barbier di Siviglia based on a vocal score owned by the soprano Emma Chapman with annotations of florid ornamentation;[73] and Henry Bishop’s ‘Home, Sweet Home’. As in the previous concert, the use of the acoustic space, instrumentation and performance conventions all referenced the sound worlds of Sydney in the 1840s.

In addition, Toby Martin and Kathryn Roberts-Parker with a newly formed student folk group at Sydney Conservatorium also performed two popular songs of the early nineteenth century, ‘Bold Jack Donohue’ and ‘Paddy Malone’. The students came from both the contemporary music and classical music performance degrees, and were led by performers with backgrounds in rock and folk music respectively, and thus there was a wide variety of performance styles to corral into something meaningful. ‘Bold Jack Donohue’ was also a much-performed song of the folk revival of the 1960s and 70s, so finding a style that was not simply an imitation of that previous re-imagining was important. Graeme Skinner located a version of the melody that had been collected in Darug Country (near Sydney) in the 1820s but had not previously been recorded by revivalists. This melody was based on the Irish tune ‘The Hermit of Killarney’. ‘Bold Jack Donohue’ is a celebration of a real-life bushranger. It was performed in ‘all the low public houses through Sydney, but was at length prohibited in public houses on pain of loss of license’.[74] Our programming of it in a concert at the centre of colonial power was therefore an intervention in engaging with both the well-documented, and the more obscure, aspects of Sydney sound worlds, rather than a faithful rendering of documented concerts at Government House. This song romanticizes anti-authoritarian, and anti-British violence, with Donohue himself ‘the gallant hero’ who ‘received a ball [bullet], and died’, however it does not mention the most devastating form of violence being enacted at the time in Darug country: the one being perpetrated by colonialists on Aboriginal people.

As a venue, the Ball Room of Government House certainly provided a more formal setting than the Conservatorium’s Recital Hall, especially (but not only) because of the presence of the Governor and other dignitaries. Its rich period decoration influenced the musicians already thinking about more florid and expressive performing styles, who were able to draw inspiration also from place. Importantly for our understanding of how concerts might have sounded in Government House in the 1840s, the Ball Room’s ceiling height, shoe-box shape, wooden and plaster decorative features and stage area positioned underneath an overhanging gallery supported a ringingly resonant acoustic which helped project sound at the audience and instill confidence in the performers despite the room brimming with people. At the same time, the space was quite different to a concert hall setting, allowing for a feeling of intermingling between musicians on stage, the honoured guests of Indigenous and other dignatories and the general audience including members of the Ngarigu clan who joined the stage only during their own performance.

Interventions

History is a dialogue between past and present, not the recreation of the past in the present. As historians we bring our values and judgement to an assessment of the past. As historically informed musicians, we bring our musical language and cultural taste to the music of the past. Present musical performances can never be facsimiles of past musical performance, but they can help us to think critically and creatively. When the musical material in question is from a past marked by violent dispossession of Indigenous people, then that sense of dialogue becomes even more critical.

The idea of re-staging old music has received sceptical appraisals since at least the 1980s. Following on from Nicholas Kenyon, Richard Taruskin noted that historical performance practices say more about the time they are being performed in than the time they claim to represent, and that rather than being historically accurate, early music performances ‘embodied a whole wish list of modern(ist) values’. Taruskin also discussed the value of early music performances creating something clearly new, rather than restoring something old, ‘because it truly reflects our times and our tastes and gives us a sense not only of who we truly are but of how we have come to be that way – and how we might be changed’.[75]

Discussing the role of music in historic reenactments (especially in relation to histories of genocide), Vanessa Agnew has argued for the work that reeanctment can do in ‘interrogating and commemorating the traumatic past’ and in doing so contribute to a new form of public history that ‘generalizes empathy and contributes to a more capacious public sphere’. Agnew warns, however, that reenactment is able to make a useful contribution to historical understanding not through ‘perfecting the historical mise-en-scène’ but rather through a ‘fragmentary, aleatoric’ approach that stimulates audience imagination.[76] In a settler-colonial context, reenactment often seeks to ‘manage’ history, and in a specifically Australian context reenactment is frequently part of a colonial defending project, with ‘the usual official practices of performances of the past as didactic history lesson’.[77]

We regard our musical interventions as responding to this scholarship in a number of ways. We self-consciously embrace ‘modern’ (or ‘anti-colonial’) values in our approach to the musical material, seeking to provide a point of difference between past and present. We seek to use historical music performance as a way of rupturing ideas of the past, rather than defending accepted, hegemonic ones. And we aim to use music as a way to talk about overlapping and complicated settler-Indigenous histories. We also acknowledge that one of the special contributions reenactment can make as a form of history is its connection to place. Reenactments very often occur in the place that they represent and thus invite the audience to reflect on the ways in which the land they stand on is implicated in, and overladen with history.

We have already discussed our inclusion of performances of Ngarigu and Dharug songs in our concert programming in an attempt to draw attention to Aboriginal people’s presence and visibility at the time, and their silencing in historical concert programming. This type of inclusion can be usefully thought of as an intervention: as a rupture of the past that enables us to see it critically. But there are other ways we did this, which we now examine through describing a performance by Jacinta Tobin and Toby Martin at the Blackheath History Forum on Darug Country in 2022.

Concert 3: Listening to the Past

In this concert, the first intervention was in the musical material itself, for example, the song ‘Plains of Emu’. The lyrics were written by the Reverend John McGarvie and published in the Sydney Gazette in 1829, under a pseudonym ‘Anambaba’. They were to be sung to the traditional Irish tune of ‘Savourneen Deelish, The Exile of Erin’, a lovely lilting melody, and a fitting choice given the subject matter. The song is from the point of view of an Irish convict, sentenced and transported to Australia for a crime he didn’t commit, undertaking forced labour ‘felling the tall gums’ of the forest of the Emu Plains (a convict settlement outside Sydney). The narrator of the song compares the landscapes of home – the ‘heath-covered mountains’ and the ‘glens, lakes, and rivers, Loch-Con and Kilkerran’ to this strange new landscape of ‘iron-bark, wattle, and gum trees extending’ and the colours ‘black-butted and blue’.[78] However, while the new landscape is strange and presents huge physical challenges, it is also described with wonder and awe, a sense of being alive to its beauty. While the narrator is exiled from his native shore, he is also noticing the charms of the new place. It paints a picture of what the Emu Plains looked like – a deeply wooded forest, which is interesting to those who know it in more recent times as cleared farming land, and then later as an outer suburb of Sydney.

Despite McGarvie’s well-known interest in Dharug words and place names, there is no sense of Aboriginal presence in the ‘Plains of Emu’. The only occupation of the place seems to be by kangaroo and cockatoo – with its ‘wattle-scrub echo’ lingering hauntingly in the otherwise empty valleys and plains. This song was written immediately following the particularly violent years of the early-nineteenth century in which hundreds of Aboriginal people were killed in the Cumberland Plains and Hawkesbury River region. McGarvie may also have been aware that Aboriginal people themselves were forced into labour in the forestry industry. The history of the forest clearing of the colony of NSW is also the history of enforced Aboriginal labour – Aboriginal men forced to cut timber, strip bark and in general clear ancestral and spiritual spaces.[79] Clearing the land was also driven by military agendas – from the earliest days of the NSW colony, land was cleared of timber ‘so the natives could find no shelter’ which would impede their guerrilla style warfare.[80]

The violent intervention into sacred landscapes was represented in our 2022 performances of the ‘Plains of Emu’ through a musical intervention. The ‘bridge’ section is new and reproduces phrases and images from an 1827 newspaper article about a convict ‘clearing party’ working on the Cumberland plain.[81] The musical material of this section is less lilting and beautiful, and more ugly and dramatic, helping reinforce the dissonance between colonial flights of fancy and violent reality. The guitar is de-tuned to open C and the riff here is an allusion to modern heavy metal music. It is not as the song would have been performed in the 1820s, but it helps to remind modern audiences of what the song left out and to provide a living connection between the knowledge and concerns of the twenty-first century and those 200 years earlier.

The second intervention was the juxtaposition of new songs with old ones. Martin performed a selection of 1820s/1830s songs alongside Tobin’s performances of new songs she had written, creating a kind of interweaving musical call and response. Tobin’s songs deal with her Darug and Irish heritage, the ruptures that have taken place amongst her people and in the landscape, and the ongoing nurturing connection she and her family have to Country. For instance, the song ‘Yarramundi’ is about Tobin’s ancestor of the same name, who gave the name to Yarramundi’s Lagoon, a place of great spiritual importance to Darug people, a place of popular recreation amongst settlers, and a focal point of colonial violence.[82] Another song ‘White and Aboriginal’ wonders why there are no restaurants selling traditional Aboriginal foods in the area, while another ‘Generational Scars’ is a lament for the intergenerational trauma of her family.

Songs like ‘Plains of Emu’, and other popular culture of the nineteenth century, depict a place empty of Aboriginal occupation and culture. As the century wore on this became a popular colonial myth – even amongst well-meaning colonists– that Aboriginal people had lost the battle against English imperialism and were fading into history. The songs often hint at the sentiment and nostalgic regret that characterized this narrative.[83] Juxtaposing these colonial songs with those by Tobin illustrates the ways in which Aboriginal culture and people not only survived but created new and meaningful ways to stay connected to Country.

Conclusion

In this extended introduction to this Special Issue, we have demonstrated how the reimagining of historical musical performance in the ‘Hearing the Music of NSW’ project engaged with the operation of music in colonial history, using the localized context of early colonial Sydney to illuminate a bigger story about settler colonial cultural negotiations. To produce current musical performances that are informed by history and by historical practice, we aimed to hold in balance obscured histories and meticulously documented ones. Drawing on historic programmes and supplementing them with items that were not programmed, we sought to restore Aboriginal presence in colonial Sydney to the programmes. Colonial settlements were installed with force that went hand in hand with cultural work to transplant musical traditions and adapt them in a new place.[84] This is evident in the predominance of military bands attached to regiments carrying out raids on Indigenous camps and engaging in battle with organized Aboriginal resistance. Military bands were routinely attached to these regiments and travelled between imperial sites – many of those stationed in Sydney in the 1820s, 30s and 40s came directly from postings fighting First Nations people in north America, and would go on to serve the imperial project in India. The dissemination of musical practices was therefore a key part of the colonial playbook wherever European imperial forces ventured. We are left with reminders of the devastation of those encounters, but also with fragments that can inform current Indigenous song revitalization practices, and therefore can be the basis for hopeful engagements into the future.[85]

David Gramit points to the potential for localized studies to illuminate bigger histories, suggesting that we must consider ‘the local in a way that looks well beyond it’. Studying the local, Gramit states, can move us ‘beyond the nation and, specifically, beyond conventional narratives of national development to the field of transnational studies’.[86] For our project team, the parallels with other settler colony sites, such as Edmonton, are not the limit of the transnational resonances that have emerged. Rather, we suggest that the project’s combination of archival research, community engagement, embodied artistic research and collaboration can provide a model for methods that can be used in other global contexts.

Our selection of articles for this Special Issue showcases what the road ahead might look like in Australia. Georgina Born suggests that the practice of performance and listening produces social relations and imagined communities, while being bound up in social, cultural and gendered hierarchies and in the power structures that produce the economic, political or imperial contexts for music making.[87] On the Australian continent, these performing and listening practices are inseparable from the enduring relationships between song and place that have shaped the Aboriginal Country we all stand on now. They are also shaped by ‘Antipodean’ lenses that brought European performance practices to that land and sought to hear them anew through a conceptualization of opposites. This distance and difference has produced the conditions for new negotiations of musical practice that are both freed from the strictures of conforming practice and are entangled in continuity and tradition. The historically minded artistic research projects that make up the remainder of this Special Issue grapple with these complexities as they seek out new ways to collaborate and sound our histories together, holding the past while moving into the future.

Endnotes

[1] Ian McLean, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 10–11; Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: An Australian History of Place (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), 26–35.

[2] Darren Rix and Craig Cormick, Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians Discovered Captain Cook, and What They Tell of the Coming of the Ghost People (Mile End: Simon & Schuster Australia, 2024); Lisa Chandler, ‘Cook Reconsidered: Re-Envisaging James Cook’s 1770 Voyage and Its Impact’, in The First Wave: Exploring Early Coastal Contact History in Australia, ed. Gillian Dooley and Danielle Clode (Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2019), 273–95.

[3] Avan Judd Stallard, Antipodes: In Search of the Southern Continent (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2016), 51.

[4] Alfred Hiatt, ‘Terra Australis and the Idea of the Antipodes’, in European Perceptions of Terra Australis, ed. Anne M. Scott, Claire McIlroy, Alfred Hiatt and Christopher Wortham (London: Routledge, 2016), 9–43.

[5] Damon Salesa, ‘Afterword: Opposite Footers’, in The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kate Fullagar (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 243.

[6] See for example any number of concert series, ensembles and publications named for the Antipodes, including The Orchestra of the Antipodes; the Camerata Academica of the Antipodes; the Theatre of the Antipodes; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s music label Antipodes devoted to the historically informed performance of music from the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical periods; folk band Sirocco’s 1992 album A Celtic Breeze in the Antipodes; the 2018 French release Rock des Antipodes featuring iconic Australian artists including Nick Cave, Crowded House, Split Enz, The Easybeats, Hoodoo Gurus, Divinyls, The Angels and others; and books on opera and ethnomusicology including Alison Gyger, Opera for the Antipodes: Opera in Australia 1881–1939 (Sydney: Currency Press and Pellinor, 1990); the recent two volume set edited by Jane Davidson, Michael Halliwell and Stephanie Rocket, Opera, Emotion and the Antipodes  (London: Routledge 2021), and Kirsty Gillespie, Don Niles, and Sally Treloyn, eds., A Distinctive Voice in the Antipodes: Essays in Honour of Stephen A. Wild (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017).

[7] Thank you to Myfany Turpin for drawing our attention to the potential relevance of this ‘rich points’ theorization. See Michael Agar, ‘Culture blends’, in A Cultural Approach To Interpersonal Communication: Essential Readings, ed. Leila Monaghan and Jane E. Goodman (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 13–24; Michael Walsh, Cross Cultural Communciation Problems in Aboriginal Australia (Brinkin, NT: The Australian National University, North Australia Research Unit (NARU), 1997), open access at http://hdl.handle.net/1885/47329.

[8] Graeme Skinner, ‘Australharmony: An Online Resource Toward the Early History of Music in Colonial Australia’, www.sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/, accessed 22 November 2024.

[9] David Gramit, ‘What Does a City Sound Like? The Musical Dynamics of a Colonial Settler City’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 11/2 (2014), 278.

[10] Gramit, ‘What Does a City Sound Like?’, 290.

[11] In suggesting this, we draw on other kinds of documentation that evidence the presence of Aboriginal people and their singing in town, even if concert programmes obscure it. Here, too, there are parallels with Gramit’s analysis of Edmonton: ‘programmes, souvenirs and newspaper accounts make no mention of performance by the area’s original inhabitants’. Gramit, ‘What Does a City Sound Like?’, 279.

[12] Shino Konishi, ‘First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History’, Australian Historical Studies 50/3 (2019), 285–304.

[13] For more on this work beyond the concerts and institutions, see Jacinta Tobin, Ceane Towers and Amanda Harris, ‘Casting our Nets: Singing a Fishing Song from the Past, in the Present, for the Future’, in this Special Issue; Jakelin Troy, ‘Singing from the mountains: When Things Really Go Right in Indigenous Research: A Story of Creative Collaboration and Ngarigu Cultural Renewal’ in Keeping Time: Dialogues on Music and Archives in Honour of Linda Barwick, ed. Nick Thieberger, Amanda Harris, Sally Treloyn and Myfany Turpin (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2024), 313–24, and Amanda Harris, Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy, ‘Embodied Culture and the Limits of the Archive’, in Music, Dance and the Archive, ed. Amanda Harris, Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy (Sydney University Press, 2022), 1–14.

[14] Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 6.

[15] The Early Music Ensemble is dedicated to the experimental application of historical performing practices using period-specific instruments. It is one of several ensembles supported within the Conservatorium’s Orchestral Studies curriculum. Players circulate through these ensembles to gain vital experience in multiple modes of music making in preparation for entry into the profession.

[16] On this series and its place in emerging concert practices in colonial Sydney, see Laura Case and Amanda Harris, ‘Cultivating European Concert Culture in Early Colonial Towns’, in The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia, ed. Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 93–110.

[17] Graeme Skinner, ‘The Sydney Amateur Concerts of 1826–27’, Australharmony, https://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/sydney-amateur-concerts-1826–27.php; accessed 24 May 2024. These have now been curated on a new site created by the project team: www.hearingthemusic.info/amateur-concerts, accessed 22 November 2024.

[18] On miscellaneous programming, see William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[19] ‘Amateur Concert’, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 30 September 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2186634.

[20] The audible and visible presence of Aboriginal people is made clear in an apparently parodic account of one of the concerts, which highlighted the presence of Kuringgai man Bungaree around Sydney, but his absence from the concert. Though the article’s reference to Bungaree having been barred is unlikely to have actually occurred, the author’s reference to the royal status of Bungaree and the calls for the British anthem ‘God Save the King’ points to an awareness that one societal structure was being replaced by another in colonists’ promotion of the cultural practice of formal concerts.  ‘To the Editor of The Monitor’, The Monitor, 7 July 1826, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31757611. See also Grace Karskens’ suggestion that ‘It is time to shake off the idea that Sydney was a ‘white’ city, that Aboriginal people simply faded out of the picture and off the “stage of history”: it is simply untrue’. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009), 12.

[21] One such ceremony at Farm Cove is described in early sources including David Collins, An account of the English colony in New South Wales: with remarks on the dispositions, customs, manners, &c. of the native inhabitants of that country. (Printed for T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1798), 564. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=eRZcAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA564.

[22] Note to a 2010 exhibit of the plans for the stables by Greenway, State Library of NSW Archive, www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/archive/events/exhibitions/2010/governor/07_building/image04.html, accessed 24 May 2024. The Conservatorium was renamed Sydney Conservatorium of Music (SCM) in 1990 when it was amalgamated with the University of Sydney.

[23] ‘The Amateur Concert’, The Monitor, 21 July 1826, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31757663.

[24] ‘The Amateur Concert’.

[25] Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering, Sounds of Liberty (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

[26] Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1990), 24.

[27] Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville, 26.

[28] Neal Peres Da Costa, ‘Performance Practices for Romantic and Modern Repertoire’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance, ed. Gary E. McPherson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 354.

[29] Peres Da Costa, ‘Performance Practices’, 361–83. These practices were largely abandoned during the modernist upsurge of the first half twentieth century: See Neal Peres Da Costa, Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xxviii–xxx; see also Robert Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

[30] Peres Da Costa, ‘Performance Practices’, 356–57.

[31] Take for instance the celebrated German pianist Carl Reinecke’s (b. 1824) transcription of Larghetto from Mozart’s Piano Concerto K537 which he recorded in 1905 on a Welte reproducing piano roll, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADxuDONsguY; or the English baritone Sir Charles Santley’s (b. 1834) rendition of The Vicar of Bray recorded in 1903, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EC9KCL9_cY; or the first known recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1910 by Friederich Kark (b. 1869) and the Grosses Odeon-Streich-Orchester, Berlin, https://youtu.be/OrWL3AgqdUU accessed 18 December 2024. The musicians on this last recording were trained in the second half of the nineteenth-century. The frequent un-notated changes to rhythm and tempo amongst other practices which underline the music’s ever-changing characters convey an improvisational spirit (including ensemble asynchrony) that is very different to present-day conceptions of interpreting this work. These practices were well documented in nineteenth-century written sources.

[32] For further details about this extrapolation process see Neal Peres Da Costa, ‘De-‘classicizing’ the Canon: Reimagining Mozart’s K488 through Musical Dialogues Across Time’, in this Special Issue.

[33] In this sense amateur is to be understood in the turn of the nineteenth century sense, of a musician who was skilled but did not necessarily rely on performance for their livelihood.

[34] See Graeme Skinner, ‘A Chronological Register of British Military Bands and Bandsmen in Australia, 1788–1870’, www.sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/register-british-military-bands-in-australia.php#Band-of-the-3rd-Regiment, accessed 7 September 2024.

[35] ‘Sydney Amateur Concert’, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 24 June 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2186054.

[36] ‘Amateur Concert’, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 9 September 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2186506.

[37] ‘The Concert’, The Australian, 9 September 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37072479.

[38] ‘The Second Concert’, The Monitor, 23 June 1826, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31757575.

[39] ‘The Concert’, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser 6 December 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2187054.

[40] ‘Sydney Amateur Concert’, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser 22 July 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2186232.

[41] ‘The Second Concert’, The Monitor 23 June 1826, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31757575.

[42] ‘Sydney Amateur Concert’, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (24 June 1826), 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2186054.

[43] ‘Sydney Amateur Concert’.

[44] ‘Amateur Concert’, The Australian 24 June 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37074782.

[45] ‘The Second Concert’, The Monitor 23 June 1826, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31757575.

[46] The pedagogical value of EME has been explored by Daniel Yeadon in ‘Historically Informed Performance and Group-Learning Pedagogy in a Tertiary Music Ensemble’, in Creative Research in Music: Informed Practice, Innovation and Transcendence, ed. Anna Reid, Neal Peres Da Costa and Jeanell Carrigan (London: Routledge, 2021).

[47] Peter Richardson found that 21 British Regiments were stationed in NSW between 1788 and 1950, and that the regiments were ‘sent out for a two-fold purpose: firstly to police and protect the Colony and secondly as a toughening-up campaign to prepare the soldiers for Indian Service’; Peter Richardson, ‘Military Music in the Colony of New South Wales, 1788–1850’. Musicology Australia 1/1 (1964), 5. We can triangulate the activities of regiments to which bands were attached – for example the 40th – Richardson confirms that Reichenberg was Master of the regiment’s band in 1825. Members of the 40th were dispatched on a revenge mission in 1824 to Bathurst, resulting in the murder of 6 Wiradjuri people. See Lyndall Ryan, Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1930, https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/detail.php?r=1090; accessed 8 April 2025. This was one event among what Ryan characterizes as a ‘cluster of military-led massacres’ on Wiradjuri Country up until 1827. Lyndall Ryan, ‘Establishing a Code of Silence: Civilian and State Complicity in Genocidal Massacres on the New South Wales Frontier, 1788–1859’, in Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Oxford: Routledge, 2019), 126. Stephen Gapps describes 1824 as ‘the most violent since the British arrived at Port Jackson in 1788 … with more and killings and conflict than at the height of the Sydney Wars’, Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance – the Bathurst War, 1822–1824 (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2021), 4.

[48] ‘The Concert’, The Australian, 10 June 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37074154.

[49] ‘The Sydney Amateur Concert’, The Australian, 21 June 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37073597.

[50] ‘The Second Concert’, The Monitor, 23 June 1826, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31757575.

[51] ‘Sydney Amateur Concert’, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 24 June 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2186054.

[52] ‘Amateur Concert’, The Australian, 24 June 1826, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37074782.

[53] Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them (2020) Version 28 March 2024, https://challengingperformance.com/the-book/.

[54] John Lhotsky, A Journey from Sydney to the Australian Alps, Undertaken in the Months of January, February and March, 1834 (Innes, 1835); Jakelin Troy and Linda Barwick. ‘Claiming the “Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe”’, Musicology Australia, 42/2 (2020), 85–107; Case and Harris, ‘Cultivating European Concert Culture’.

[55] Anna Johnston, The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 70.

[56] For an analogous discussion of notation of non-European songs, see Nicholas Cook’s discussion of the ‘Hindostannie Air’ published ca.1800–05 in London, in which he suggests that rendering songs heard during foreign musical encounters using European notation could be thought of as ‘allowing the other to disrupt their musical world, to make a hole in it’, in Chapter 4 of Music, Encounter, Togetherness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024); and Olivia A. Bloechl’s discussion of four-part settings of Mi’kmaq songs in the seventeenth century as didactic and complicit with colonial expansion, ‘The Pedagogy of Polyphony in Gabriel Sagard’s Histoire Du Canada’, The Journal of Musicology 22/3 (2005), 407.

[57] Troy and Barwick, ‘Claiming the “Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe”’.

[58] Troy and Barwick, ‘Claiming the ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe”’, 96.

[59] See also Gramit’s discussion of patriotic music in ‘What Does a City Sound Like?’.

[60] Uluru Statement from the Heart, https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/view-the-statement/, accessed 18 June 2024.

[61] Karskens, The Colony, 377; Stephen Gapps, Sydney Wars (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2018), 40.

[62] Personal communication from Jacinta Tobin to other members of the research team, 3 November 2023.

[63] ‘The New Government House’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 1843, 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12424524; ‘The Queen’s Birthday’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 1843, 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12424511.

[64] Ngarigu songs, Australharmony, https://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/checklist-indigenous-music-1.php#010, accessed 18 June 2024; Roger Covell, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1967), 68–70; Richard White, ‘Cooees across the Strand: Australian Travellers in London and the Performance of National Identity’, Australian Historical Studies 32/116 (2001), 109–27.

[65] ‘Supreme Court’, The Australian, 8 August 1842, 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37118235.

[66] ‘Country News’, The Australian 31 May 1845, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37157263.

[67] ‘The Queen’s Birthday’, The Weekly Register of Politics, Facts and General Literature, 31 May 1845, 256, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article228134644. On Tingcombe, see also ‘Tingcombe, Henry’, Australharmony, https://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/register-T-2.php#TINGCOMBE-Henry, accessed 1 July 2024.

[68] Harris, Barwick and Troy, ‘Embodied Culture and the Limits of the Archive’.

[69] On the necessity of creative engagement with historic fragments of song, see Clint Bracknell, ‘Reanimating 1830s Nyungar Songs of Miago’, in Music, Dance and the Archive, ed. Amanda Harris, Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy. (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2022), 93–115.

[70] This process is documented on the project website: www.hearingthemusic.info/koorinda-braia, accessed 18 December 2024.

[71] Sara Ahmed, ‘The Nonperformativity of Antiracism’. Meridians 7/1 (2006), 104–26.

[72] We reflect on these negotiations in light of Dylan Robinson’s provocations about how audience misunderstandings of attempts to place protocols into relation side-by-side on a concert programme and to actually enact the protocols at the same time can fail to communicate the ‘ontological comparison’ being enacted through this kind of work that attempts to juxtapose cultural practices without integrating them. We can identify this failure in our own efforts to negotiate this terrain. See Robinson, Hungry Listening, 134–36.

[73] This ornamentation is consistent with annotations of ornaments in the Dowling Songbook that was the subject of a previous project by several team members, see Neal Peres Da Costa, Helen F. Mitchell and Matthew Stephens, ‘The Dowling Songbook Project’, in Creative Research in Music: Informed Practice, Innovation and Transcendence, ed. Anna Reid, Neal Peres Da Costa and Jeanell Carrigan (London: Routledge, 2021), 53–66. See also Matthew Stephens, Neal Peres Da Costa and Helen Mitchell, ‘Case study: The Dowling Songbook Project’, in Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses, ed. by Jeanice Brooks, Matthew Stephens and Wiebke Thormählen (London: Routledge, 2022), 171–80. The process of preparing and performing music from the Dowling Songbook by Sydney Conservatorium of Music students can be viewed in Songs of Home: Exploring the Past Through Music, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaYcgQsbct8&t=15s accessed 18 December 2024.

[74] James T Ryan (under the cognomen of ‘Toby’), Reminiscences of Australia (Sydney: George Robertson and Company, 1894).

[75] Nicholas Kenyon, ed., Authenticity and Early Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Richard Taruskin, ‘Introduction: Last Notes First’ in Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5 and 8.

[76] Vanessa Agnew, ‘Songs of Flight, War and Genocide: Reenactment on the Refugee Route’ in Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma, ed. Annegret Fauser and Michael A. Figueroa (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 169, 171 and 185.

[77] Jonathan Lamb, ‘Introduction to Settlers, Creoles and Historical Reenactment’, in Settler and Creole Reenactment, ed. Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1; Stephen Gapps, ‘“Blacking Up” for the Explorers of 1951’, in Settler and Creole Reenactment, 212 and 220.

[78] ‘Original Poetry’, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 26 May 1829, 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2192509.

[79] Robert Castle and Jim Hagan, ‘Settlers and the State: The Creation of an Aboriginal Workforce in Australia’ Aboriginal History, 22 (1998), 28; Sue Feary, ‘Forests to Forestry: An Overview of Indigenous Involvement in Forest Management in Australia’, in Forestry for Indigenous People, ed. Sue Feary (Canberra: ANU, 2005), 2.

[80] Gapps, Sydney Wars, 97.

[81] ‘Scene in New South Wales’, The Monitor, 5 July 1827, 7 (EVENING). http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31758569.

[82] Karskens, People of the River, 25, 154, 397, 414.

[83] Renato Rosaldo, ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’, in Representations, 26 (Spring, 1989), 107–22; Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory 1880–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997).

[84] On transplanted musics, see also Helen English, ‘Music-Making in the Colonial City: Benefit Concerts in Newcastle, NSW in the 1870s’, Musicology Australia, 36/1 (2014), 53.

[85] There are many such active projects, for just a few examples, see Jessie Hodgetts, ‘Ngiyampaa ngiya guthigu ngiyali (Ngiyampaa Words for Talking About Songs): Creating Mayi (Aboriginal) Language for Musicology in a Language Revitalization Context’, Musicology Australia, 46/1 (2020), 47–66; Bracknell, ‘Reanimating 1830s Nyungar Songs of Miago’; Clint Bracknell and Lou Bennett, ‘Singing Country in the Land Now Known as Australia’ in The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia, ed. Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 56–71.

[86] David Gramit, ‘The Transnational History of Settler Colonialism and the Music of the Urban West: Resituating a Local Music History’, American Music 32/3 (2014), 274.

[87] Georgina Born, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135/2 (2010), 232.