Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970

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Shortlisted for the 2021 Prime Ministers Literary Award for Australian History. Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970 offers a rethinking of recent Australian music history. In this open access book, Amanda Harris presents accounts of Aboriginal music and dance by Aboriginal performers on public stages. Harris also historicizes the practices of non-Indigenous art music composers evoking Aboriginal music in their works, placing this in the context of emerging cultural institutions and policy frameworks. Centralizing auditory worlds and audio-visual evidence, Harris shows the direct relationship between the limits on Aboriginal peoples mobility and non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture. This book seeks to listen to Aboriginal accounts of disruption and continuation of Aboriginal cultural practices and features contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson as personal interpretations of their family and community histories. Contextualizing recent music and dance practices in broader histories of policy, settler colonial structures, and postcolonizing efforts, the book offers a new lens on the development of Australian musical cultures. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Australian Research Council.

Reviews

Harris is a great storyteller and researcher. She eloquently tells the hidden stories behind Australias 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 Dharawal scholar Shannon Foster, about her grandfather, the activist and songman Tom Foster, Harriss dialogic engagement with Aboriginal voices is respectful and unforced, and drives the books underlying message to recognise our shared humanity. Representing Aboriginal Music and Dance is essential reading for those interested in twentieth-century Aboriginal history or Indigenous performance studies, but it will resonate with all who seek out histories that inspire as well as inform us. * Victoria K. Haskins, Director, Purai Global Indigenous History Centre, University of Newcastle, Australia, and author of Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (Bloomsbury, 2020) *
The book makes an important contribution to the truth telling of Australian history ... Harris has contributed significantly to understandings of this history and of the performance events that have shaped the development of Australian art music. * Context *
Harriss book offers an inclusive model of intercultural collaborative research that makes space for Indigenous voices and meaningful engagement with custodians. Brilliantly conceived and written, it is a major contribution to the fields of history, (ethno)musicology, Indigenous studies and performance studies. * History Australia *

Author Bio

Amanda Harris is a research fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Director of the Sydney Unit of digital archive PARADISEC. Her research focuses on gender, music and cross-cultural Australian histories. She is editor of Circulating Cultures: Exchanges of Australian Indigenous Music, Dance and Media (2014) and co-editor of Research, Records and Responsibility (2015) and Expeditionary Anthropology (2018).