The Rise of Free Settlement and the Establishment of a Concert Life in Colonial Towns

From their arrival in January 1788 on a fleet of eleven British ships, officers, governors and convicts attempted to establish a penal colony at a number of sites, first at Kamay (Botany Bay) and later at Warrane (Sydney Cove).¹² By 1800 the estimated non-Indigenous population was 1,024.¹³ This number rapidly increased as fares lowered, conditions improved and the total travel time for the journey to the colonies decreased. The number of free immigrants arriving grew exponentially as new arrivals took advantage of the land and employment being offered. Between 1815 and 1821, the colony’s newly migrated population had more than doubled – from 12,911 in 1815 to 29,783 in 1821.¹⁴ By 1846, the population of New South Wales would expand to 154,205.¹⁵

Prior to 1820, the class divide between convicts and those who ruled over them was particularly rigid. However, as the purpose of the local settlement became increasingly geared towards self-sufficiency, the proportion of the colonial population who were free settlers rose and the proportion of convicts shrank, and colonial society grew in complexity.¹⁶ This change in demographics saw a more ‘status-conscious elite’ begin to emerge throughout the 1820s.¹⁷

Linda Young explains that when convicts who were ‘immoral by definition’ were first sent to the colonies, ‘there was even less assurance of acceptable society’.¹⁸ In his comparative history of settler societies, Canadian historian Gérard Bouchard argues that colonial ‘cultural elites’ were ‘tormented by the idea of belonging to a make-shift society, of being culturally impoverished beside Europe, rootless and without tradition’.¹⁹ Writing about amateur theatre in Australia, Bill Dunstone notes that it ‘articulated and intensified often unconscious anxieties about colonial isolation from metropolitan centres of imperial culture’, a phenomenon we observe also in colonial music-making.²⁰ Penny Russell suggests that across a number of British colonies ‘insecurity was manifest in constant, anxious reference to the standards of the metropolis’.²¹ The colonies were seen as ‘mediocre, philistine, contemptible, forever doomed by location and distance by … fraught penal and colonial origins’²² so they attempted ‘to fill the void through literature, the arts and through the construction of a “collective imaginary” to affirm the nation’s existence’.²³ The pursuit of music for music’s sake represented ‘genteel skill’ and ‘personal refinement’.²⁴

Firmly focused on the priorities of the British Empire, European occasions for music-making were aloof from the Aboriginal Country on which they took place, its seasons, sounds and people. They looked instead to the far-away shores of England, using woodwind instruments, violins and singing in harmony to mark imperial milestones.²⁵ Those citizens who both endorsed and performed in the 1826 music concerts played a formative role in the development of musical taste in nineteenth-century colonial Australia.²⁶

The 1826 Sydney and Hobart Concert Series

The programming of both the 1826 Sydney and Hobart concerts capitalised on the players available, in arrangements that were opportunistic rather than fixed, across a series of twelve concerts in Sydney and two in Hobart. The less-than-ideal instrumental arrangements were a point of contention for one Sydney audience member who reported, ‘we regretted the absence of some instruments to fill out some of the harmonies’, though others suggested the concerts were ‘in various respects superior to many things of the kind in Europe’.²⁷

The concert organisers and players were often drawn from military bands. For instance, key organisers of the Sydney concerts – George Sippe and Thomas Kavanagh – were also bandmasters of the 57th and 3rd Regiments respectively.²⁸ Another leader of the Sydney Amateur Concerts, John Edwards, was according to Skinner ‘the first of Sydney’s leading professional musicians not to be a military bandsman’.²⁹ During the 1830s, Edwards – a violinist, bass vocalist and choirmaster at St James’ church – would go on to lead the orchestra at a new theatre established by another of the Amateur Concert performers, Barnett Levey, whose career has been documented by historians of the theatre.³⁰

As the Sydney concerts gained momentum, not only musicians but other artistic talents of colonial society were drawn in, with artist Augustus Earle directing concert three and improving the acoustics of the concert room in the courthouse building on Castlereagh Street, Sydney, by blocking the windows with a series of his paintings. The portraits depicted classical figures of music and poetry – Apollo, Minerva and Melpomene – but interspersed these with images that acknowledged the place on which the concerts were staged, featuring a kangaroo and emu.³¹ Apollo also featured in the programme of music, with Bishop’s ‘Hark Apollo’ sung before Thomas Kavanagh’s original composition, ‘The Trumpet Sounds Australia’s Fame’. The assemblage of Earle’s paintings would not mark a pathway to Australia’s fame, but another portrait Earle painted in this same year became one of the most circulated images in the colony. This work was the first lithograph portrait of its kind to be produced in New South Wales and depicted Kuringgai man Bungaree (Boongaree) (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Bungaree – King of the Aborigines of New South Wales. Hand-coloured lithograph by Augustus Earle (1826).

Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

Perhaps playing on Earle’s contributions to the concert, and a useful reminder of the presence of Aboriginal people in Sydney at the time, a letter to the editor published in The Monitor on 25 June 1826 made reference to King Bungaree, drawing attention to the absence of Aboriginal people and songs from the Sydney concert programme but also their presence in the town (Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2 ‘To the Editor of The Monitor’, The Monitor (7 July 1826), p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31757611.

Aboriginal intermediaries such as Bungaree often used singing as a mediation technique, as Tiffany Shellam has shown, and European musicians of Sydney also sought to grapple with communication across cultures by circulating arrangements of Aboriginal songs.³² Indeed, several of the 1826 subscription series performers would go on to make a piano arrangement of a song notated from the singing of Ngarigu people. Titled ‘Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe’, it would become the first printed musical work to be published in the colony in 1834. Sydney concert performers George Sippe and Joseph Josephson composed the piano part, and James Pearson arranged the melody.³³

The organiser of Van Diemen’s Land’s first public concerts in 1826, John Philip Deane, had migrated to Hobart with his wife and two children in 1822. Deane was an accomplished violinist and soon became organist of St David’s Church, where the first organ imported from London had been installed in 1824, paid for through public subscriptions.³⁴ Staged in the same year as the Sydney Amateur Concerts, the shorter Hobart concert series had repertoire in common, notably the glees (part-songs) ‘Glorious Apollo’ by Samuel Webbe and ‘The Witches’ by Matthew Peter King, as well as a ‘favourite’ song ‘The Wolf’ from a comic opera by William Shield and a Mozart overture.³⁵ Deane conducted and performed as singer, pianist and violinist for audiences of several hundred, including Governor Arthur.³⁶ As in Sydney, the concerts utilised the court house, and instrumentalists and singers were drawn from the current resident military band – the 40th Regiment, led by their bandmaster (and clarinettist) Joseph Reichenberg.³⁷ One commentator noted that in every way the musicians of Hobart were keeping up with developments in Sydney: ‘Concerts have for some months past been established in Sydney, and several gentlemen here of the first respectability conceiving that many inhabitants of Hobart Town possessed equal, if not superior musical talents, set on foot a plan for introducing the same source of enjoyment amongst us also; and in this, the first attempt, they have succeeded beyond expectation.’³⁸

Though evidence like that of Bungaree’s presence in Sydney was not part of descriptions of the Hobart concerts, we cannot look past the presence of Palawa Aboriginal people in the Hobart area at the time. One snippet of ‘Van Diemen’s Land News’ gives a strong sense of the concert taking place alongside ongoing conflict between Aboriginal people and settlers in what we as contemporary readers might now think of as the frontier wars.³⁹ In The Australian, either side of the concert description were reports of the killing of stock-keepers by local Aboriginal people and the subsequent execution of two Aboriginal men as punishment for a recent spearing (Figure 6.3).⁴⁰ The presence of military bands and use of the courthouse as concert venue are therefore reminders of the ongoing conflict between Europeans, who were establishing settlements and seeking also to transplant musical traditions onto the Australian colonies, and Aboriginal people whose presence and singing continued on the Country they had occupied for thousands of years.

Figure 6.3 Excerpt from page 2 of The Australian including the sections ‘Hobart Town Concerts’ and ‘Executions’ (18 October 1826), http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37071471.

Sydney Concert Culture, 1836–1840

Further documentary evidence confirms that the Sydney and Hobart concert series were not isolated efforts at shaping the cultural life of colonial towns. The year 1836 saw a series of instrumentalists and singers land in Sydney whose arrival signified a rise in the concert culture of New South Wales as they endeavoured to mimic Europe in the colonies.⁴¹ These newly arrived musicians would extend the existing concert culture established around 1826 by Sippe and others in Sydney, and Deane in Hobart. In particular, the Irish siblings violinist William Vincent Wallace and soprano Eliza Wallace (later Bushelle), and the married French musicians violinist Joseph Gautrot and soprano Madame Gautrot provide a window into the breadth of musical contexts for European music-making during this period.⁴²

The Deane and Wallace families both moved to Sydney in 1836, with the Gautrots following around three years later. Despite only remaining in the Australian colonies for about three years, William Vincent Wallace had a pronounced impact on colonial musical life.⁴³ Early reviews noted the potential for Wallace’s performances to usher in a new era of music in Sydney: ‘Mr. Wallace, we hear, is about becoming a resident among us, for his splendid and novel performance on Friday evening, has been hailed as the commencement of a new era in the chronology of music in this Colony.’⁴⁴ This shift was framed as offering a more ‘intellectual’ musical culture than the theatre, as an advertisement announcing Wallace’s first concert suggests: ‘His Excellency has signified his intention of being present, and we would recommend all the Haut ton to follow an example so laudable, which has for its object the creating in the people a taste for intellectual amusements, unalloyed by the vices and immoralities which are the inevitable attendants of a play-house.’⁴⁵

A key aspect of Wallace’s contribution to the music of the colonies was in bringing virtuosic concert culture from Europe; he was often referred to as the ‘Australian Paganini’, even if this showiness was also the basis of criticisms levelled against him.⁴⁶ After a year of Wallace’s presence in Sydney, the shape of musical life had changed, according to one commentator:

In 1838 a ‘grand musical festival’ took place at St Mary’s Cathedral, reportedly attended by upwards of 500 people. William Vincent Wallace, Eliza Wallace and John Philip Deane performed in the concert with several other notable musicians, including the full band of the 50th Regiment. The concert began with a sacred oratorio, followed by an overture and a series of shorter recitatives and arias.⁴⁸ Several detailed reviews of the concert appeared in the papers, celebrating its ‘intellectual’ contribution to the colony. Though the string section had to fill the gaps in tenor and alto lines left by the lack of male singers, ‘Domestic Intelligence’ suggested the music was not only appreciated by the critical press but was also popular with the audience:

Three months later, J. P. Deane held a concert in the saloon of the Royal Hotel under the patronage of Lady Gipps.⁵⁰ In attendance was ‘a galaxy of beauty and fashion’ including, among others, His Excellency Sir George Gipps, his wife, and Fijian Chief Prince Tubontutai, who ‘appeared highly delighted with the musical portion of the concert’.⁵¹ The concert began with the band of the 50th Regiment playing Weber’s overture to Der Freischütz, followed by several glees and arias.⁵²

Deane’s three children also appeared, with Miss Deane performing ‘masterfully’ on the piano and singing a vocal duet with her brother Master E. Deane. Master J. Deane performed his first public violin solo, after which the two brothers performed a violin and cello duet.⁵³ Despite some critical reviews of the sound properties of the venue, the repertoire and performers, the concert was praised for its successful display of transplanted European cultural practices: ‘We should think it must have been [a] matter of surprise to Sir George Gipps to have witnessed the arts of civilized and settled society, introduced and patronized in this Colony, within 50 years of its being dressed in nature’s wildest garb.’⁵⁴

The reception of another of Deane’s musical soirées illustrates a tension in the audience’s desire for melodious English language tunes rather than the complex German chamber and orchestral compositions promoted in Deane’s programming. At this soirée, repertoire included a Haydn ‘Quartett’ and ‘Quintetto’; six vocal songs; two glees; a vocal duet; a fantasie for piano; an air with variations for the violin; a duet for violin and piano; and a piano, violin and viola trio by Moscheles.⁵⁵

Word of Deane’s musical achievements in the colonies had reached the Scottish and English press, with one reviewer suggesting that ‘Messrs. Wallace and Deane … will raise young musicians to make a creditable colonial orchestra’.⁵⁷ In 1849, the year of his death, Deane would be celebrated as the ‘oldest musician in the southern hemisphere, and a colonist of twenty-eight years standing’.⁵⁸

The year 1839 saw French violinist Joseph Gautrot and soprano Madame Gautrot arrive in Sydney after travelling with the French Operatic Company.⁵⁹ When the company moved on after only a few weeks in Sydney, the Gautrots were the only members to remain, and their subsequent careers evidence the blurred lines between high art and theatrical vaudeville, virtuosity and music of broad appeal. Reports of the company’s run in Sydney indicate they had brought something novel to town:

A concert review from 1839 compared Madame Gautrot’s singing with Eliza Wallace’s and Joseph Gautrot’s playing with William Wallace’s, perhaps also readable as a critique of virtuosity over a more emotional approach to music performance:

The Gautrots moved between Sydney, Hobart and Melbourne, initially performing in concerts alongside the Wallaces, Deanes, Sippe and the military bands and later staging comic operas at Signor Luigi Dalle Case’s short-lived Australian Olympic Theatre – described by Mark St Leon as the colony’s ‘first real circus in the accepted sense’.⁶² In 1842, the Gautrots formed the ‘Foreign Operatic Company’ and gave a short winter season.⁶³ The Gautrots were thus part of a movement towards musical theatre in the early 1840s, when, as Richard Waterhouse shows, a divide developed between the class backgrounds of the audiences for opera and music halls, and also in the stated moral or recreational purposes of their entertainment.⁶⁴

Conclusion

Most of the performers detailed in this brief account of European music-making arrived from European centres or from tours of British and other colonies in the Pacific, bringing their concert practices to the towns of Sydney and Hobart between 1826 and the early 1840s. As contemporary readers, we get occasional glimpses of the musicians’ awareness that their efforts to import a European musical culture took place on Aboriginal land, but largely the musical practices of European settlers and Aboriginal people remained separate. We can trace this separation into the present day in institutions such as opera companies and orchestras, which have been the slowest of the creative arts industries to open their stages to Aboriginal musicians and composers.⁶⁵

The 1826 Sydney and Hobart concert series were the earliest subscription concerts of European music of which we still have evidence, and they were part of broader efforts to reimagine colonial towns in this transitional phase of Australian history. The notable musicians and cultural entrepreneurs that led these concerts, including Sippe, Kavanagh, Edwards, Deane, the Wallaces and the Gautrots, shaped these musical worlds, bringing European instruments, forms of opera and vocal music, chamber, orchestral and solo violin music that would continue to develop over the next two centuries in Australia’s urban centres. We see, in this early aspirational culture, the seeds of Australian music-making, which continued to look to the cultural practices of the British Isles and Continental Europe well into the twentieth century and which has only recently come to regard itself as part of its geographical and cultural region.

During the mid 2000s the distinct fields of the new modernist studies and Australian history experienced a global or transnational turn.¹ For modernist studies, the global turn was part of an expansionist move made to consider what alternative modernisms might emerge if spatial, temporal and stylistic horizons were broadened. Some Australian historians embraced the inherent transnationalism of modern Australia; for, apart from Indigenous Australians, it is a country of immigrants. A transnational framework offers rich possibilities of telling new stories and of retelling old stories in different ways. These various initiatives share a dynamic vocabulary of networks, circuits, circulation, flows, connectivity and exchange, all imbued with a sense of movement. Mobility is, as Anne Rees has argued, a defining characteristic of Antipodean settler modernity. For a ‘conspicuous minority’ (a privileged, white cultural elite) the geographical distance from Britain and Europe engendered a keen sense of isolation, even exile.² Notwithstanding the vibrant character of a colonial metropolis like Sydney, which produced an active and curious group of musicians, distance from what was understood to be the ‘fountainhead’ was felt keenly. For colonial cosmopolitans, distance elicited acute anxieties about their place in the world. From the early decades of the twentieth century, the now familiar tropes of cultural cringe and belatedness tinctured the pages of the musical press; they went on to shape perceptions of Australian culture more broadly and had a profound impact on the historiography of Australian musical modernism.

The study of musical modernism has also undergone an expansionist moment, offering important opportunities for scholars of early Australian modernist music. Students of twentieth-century British music in particular felt restrained by orthodox, restrictive accounts of modernism dominated by Continental Europe. Their attempts to redefine modernism, always a contested and unsettled concept, has allowed new readings of much twentieth-century British music.³ These more capacious understandings of modernism, considered alongside ideas of mobility, open up an expanded conceptual framework to retell an old story. This approach liberates events in Australia from the tropes of lag and derivation.

The story of Australian musical modernism is further complicated by its entanglement with the incipient cultural nationalism in the young federation and its demand for a distinctive Australian culture. This demand only intensified after World War I (WWI), and music closely connected to European modernism sat uneasily with the desire for a national music. Its subsequent marginalisation in a historiography centred on ‘Australian Music’ has meant that in his contribution to the Routledge Handbook on the modernist world published in 2015, Graeme Skinner characterised early Australian musical modernism as a ‘lost era’.⁴

Art music in interwar Australia – a crucial part of Skinner’s ‘lost era’ – is the focus for this chapter. My approach differs from his articulation of a first Australian modernism, in part perhaps because his contribution was for a volume dedicated to the modernist world whereas my subject is Australian music. The close attention to a more select group provided here necessarily excludes important areas covered by Skinner, and in that way our chapters are complementary. And there are, of course, other Indigenous and vernacular modernisms to consider in depth in an Australian context.⁵ After tracing the emergence of a modernist music discourse in the popular press, this chapter looks at the output of a group of composers – albeit partial and selective – before exploring various forms of modernist musicking. In so doing, it reveals a community of Australian musicians who were almost without exception transnational and who actively participated in what can be understood as a modernist music world. They constitute a group of protagonists who shared a particular disposition of curiosity and intellectual openness, and their position as part of a privileged white middle class afforded them the agency and international mobility to realise these interests.⁶

Early Australian musical modernism is a story about mobility: the movement of people, scores, recordings, news and ideas. It is a mobility made possible by the new technologies of transportation and communication including the ocean liner, the underwater telegraph cable, print media and the radio wave.⁷ Australia’s lively popular print culture long predates the advent of radio in 1923. As media scholars have identified, the press was ‘a powerful agent of transnational communication’ contributing to ‘global senses of community’ across distance. London, as the imperial ‘news hub’, was Australia’s main conduit for news about Continental musical modernism.⁸ The efflorescence of little magazines and periodicals in Australia from the 1890s was nourished by an ‘avalanche of reportage’ from international news agencies such as Reuters and the United Press Association which they printed and reprinted.⁹

A cursory glance at the press from before WWI reveals a rich body of musical news that tell us much about contemporary understandings of European musical modernism. General reports on ultramodernism and futurism were appearing from 1908, including a detailed report on the Italian futurist Marinetti’s 1911 London appearance in The Watchman.¹⁰ By 1912 Debussy and Ravel were generally considered ‘present-day modernists’.¹¹ Both metropolitan and regional newspapers interspersed their local news with the most up-to-date syndicated reports from Britain and Europe. In Queensland’s cane fields, the Maryborough Chronicle reprinted an article about Leo Ornstein that also identified Schoenberg, Busoni and Stravinsky as futurist composers. Deep in the heart of New South Wales’ main coal-mining district, the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miner’s Advocate published a long report on modern music, drawing the reader’s attention to the ingenious ‘harmonic twists and orchestral tricks’, not only of Debussy and Ravel, but also Strauss, Reger, Schoenberg and Busoni.¹² Skinner makes a powerful example of coverage in 1913. The hissing and uproar that interrupted performances of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Berlin and London made good copy, as did the ‘clashing discords’ heard in the London performance of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces.¹³ In the same year, Launceston’s Daily Telegraph informed its readers that Australian pianist Laurence Godfrey Smith had been present at a Schoenberg ‘Abend’ in Vienna. When asked about ‘futurist’ music in the Australian Town and Country Journal, Godfrey Smith spoke highly of Debussy, Cyril Scott and Schoenberg, acknowledging that the latter, although ‘absolutely unintelligible to the normal musician’ was nonetheless a ‘consummately great technician’.¹⁴ Schoenberg, Scriabin, and Stravinsky, or the ‘three S’s of ultramodern music’, were considered the leaders of the ‘advanced moderns’. They had ‘set the world agog’.¹⁵ Later in 1922, Sydney’s erudite music critic, George de Cairos Rego, wrote in detail on the ‘new phase’ of modern music for Art in Australia that extended the ‘advance guard’ to the new French, Italian and British schools who had ‘discovered a fresh field of harmonic idiom’ represented by Milhaud, Malipiero and Goossens.¹⁶ The following year the Forum’s Tomi cited Bax’s ‘Celtic modernism’, whereas 1924 saw reports on the London performance of Edgar Varèse’s Hyperprism.¹⁷

A transnational modernist discourse is revealed within a broader body of Australian music criticism that shared the terminology found in Europe and the United States. Aspects of this commentary can be distilled into a definition of modernism that does not lose utility through being overly capacious. Like their distant counterparts, some Australian critics bemoaned the incoherence and lack of melody. One understood that ‘the big modern movement … is an harmonic one’: ‘an adventure with tone colors and combinations’.¹⁸ Scriabin and his ‘restless craving for innovation’ and ‘entirely novel harmonic scheme’ looms large in this coverage.¹⁹ A short article in the Australasian from 1918 remarked on certain English composers’ efforts ‘in exploiting a new system of making scales from certain chordal combinations’, making note that it ‘originated in the experiments made by the recently deceased Russian composer, Scriabin’. The writer also acknowledged the influence of Debussy’s treatment of the whole tone scale, concluding that ‘modern musicians appear to be aiming for absolute freedom in the construction of scales and for all that can be achieved … in using all the resources of harmony’.²⁰ This summation, with its emphasis on harmonic innovation, synthetic chords and non-diatonic scales, captures key approaches that would preoccupy some Australian composers working during the 1920s and 1930s.

Australian Modernists Here and There

In 1920, Sydney experienced its own frisson of musical outrage akin to those reported earlier in Vienna and London. A concert of Roy Agnew’s music was denounced as ‘ultramodern extravagance’. The unresolved discords of Dance of the Wild Men were ‘excruciating’, the audience was ‘unable to determine the key’, one attendee was forced to put his fingers in his ears and the concert was deemed possibly harmful ‘to the cause of British music’.²¹ The unbridled rowdiness of Agnew’s Dance reminds us of the importance of extreme experience in understandings of modernism. I have argued elsewhere of its direct connections, in terms of scale and approach, to Ornstein’s Wild Men’s Dance.²² Agnew admitted to the Lone Hand in the same year that he had, ‘after much anxious consideration been forced to abandon the limitation of key and tonal relationship’.²³ Agnew’s Dance is one of several works written without key signature and working outside of functional tonality. As A. L. Kelly wrote for The Triad, they were ‘in no key and every key’; ‘pure music … coloured with daring and resource’.²⁴ The Dance, however, is stylistically an outlier; most of Agnew’s non-tonal works, as many contemporary commentators noted both in Australia and London, bear the strong stamp of late Scriabin both in compositional approach and sensibility. Before departing for London in 1923, Agnew was interviewed by the Australian Musical News (AMN). In the article, ‘Australia’s “Stravinsky”’, Agnew admitted a deep admiration for Stravinsky and described Scriabin’s ninth sonata as ‘wonderful’.²⁵ In pieces such as his Three Poems and Sonata 1929, complex harmonies become pitch collections from which motivic material is derived. Scriabin’s ninth sonata provided a compositional model for Sonata 1929. Its opening sonority bears a strong resemblance to the Russian’s ‘mystic chord’ (see Music Examples 7.1 and 7.2).²⁶

Music Example 7.1 Opening sonority from Agnew’s Sonata 1929 and Scriabin’s ‘mystic chord’.

Music Example 7.2 Openings of Agnew’s Sonata 1929 and Scriabin’s Sonata no. 9 compared.

Some of Agnew’s contemporaries were made uneasy by his engagement with this ‘unhealthy’ foreign influence. It must be noted here that this body of non-tonal work sits inside a larger oeuvre which includes his overtly Australian orchestral work, The Breaking of the Drought.²⁷

There is no evidence that Agnew’s interest in Scriabin’s late music was anything other than musical. This was a period, however, when many artists were attracted by forms of heterodox spirituality including theosophy and its schismatic offshoot, anthroposophy. Scriabin’s connection to theosophy is well known. His ‘mystic chord’ and synaesthetic experiments with colour and music detained many esoterically inclined musicians. Theosophist and composer Phyllis Campbell was no exception. Campbell was from London where she had trained as a pianist at the Royal College of Music (RCM) and established a friendship with Cyril Scott. Scott had already encouraged her turn to composition before she migrated. In Sydney, Campbell threw herself into theosophical life and a lively modern musical scene. She was active as a writer, lecturer and pioneer broadcaster for the early theosophical radio channel 2GB (an homage to Giordano Bruno), as well as a performer and composer. The 1920s were a fertile period for Campbell. She produced a large body of music between 1925 and 1932, mostly piano miniatures but also songs and chamber music. Her notebooks reveal sustained research into modern compositional techniques and non-diatonic scales. She promoted modern music, focusing on Scriabin’s ideas and music in various capacities. The ‘mystic chord’ and the overtone series were of powerful interest. Campbell, as a theosophist, believed that sonic vibrations and overtones had a ‘spiritual significance’.²⁸ Scriabin’s ‘mystic chord’ inspired her to experiment with aggregate chords in her own composing. The enharmonic spelling found in much of her writing suggests that she was thinking outside of conventional tonality. Melody took a back seat to harmony as Campbell explored the possibilities of creating resonant overtones by way of ‘slowly shifting harmonies’ (see Music Example 7.3).²⁹

Music Example 7.3 The opening of Campbell’s Nature Study no. 1, ‘Seaweed’ (1926), bb. 1–15. Phyllis Campbell Collection, University of Technology Sydney.

Elsie Hamilton, Australia’s earliest microtonalist, was one of the few Australian composers to bypass London for Paris. She left Adelaide in 1910 to study composition with André Gedalge at the Paris Conservatoire. Here she was introduced to Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, which led to her enduring collaboration with fellow anthroposophist and British music theorist Kathleen Schlesinger. Steiner’s teachings led them to explore in highly speculative ways the harmonic series, the scale systems of Ancient Greece and the production of what Hamilton called the ‘7 great Planetary modes’. Hamilton became a ‘habitual international traveller’ undertaking a vast body of research across the globe into theories of scales and modes. For her, engagement with the ancient world produced ‘a new language of music’ based on ‘natural’ or just intonation (see Music Example 7.4).

Music Example 7.4 Natur-Stimmung [natural intonation] (n.d.), bb. 1–26, manuscript score, www.anaphoria.com/lee/hamiltonscores.pdf.

Hamilton produced a body of work experimenting with ‘detuned’ music and used her private wealth to organise public performances in London and establish orchestras in Britain and Germany. Like Campbell, almost none of her music has been published, and she remains virtually unknown.³⁰

Hamilton’s work received the public support of her friend and fellow Adelaide composer Hooper Brewster-Jones. After initial study at the Elder Conservatorium, Brewster-Jones’ temperament was formed in Edwardian London, where he went in 1906 to study with Charles Stanford at the RCM. After a disagreement with Stanford over aesthetic differences, Brewster-Jones turned to expatriate Australian composer George Clutsam for guidance. Apart from German successes with light opera, Clutsam contributed regularly to the Musical Times on modern musical matters such as Scriabin’s harmonic language and the whole-tone scale. At this time the Société des Concerts Français was introducing the latest French music, and much modern Russian music was being heard. In 1908, Debussy came to conduct L’après-midi d’un faune with Henry Wood’s orchestra. It was a formative moment for Brewster-Jones. On his return to Adelaide, he founded his own eponymous orchestra to perform the English, French and Russian moderns. Like Agnew, he produced a significant body of music, including the overtly national orchestral work, Australia Felix. Although recognised during his life as a modernist, his contribution to early Australian modernism was largely unknown. He was a profoundly curious musician who engaged with many contemporary approaches drawing on non-diatonic and synthetic scales. His large music library reveals a long-standing interest in a wide range of modern music. The 1920s was his decade of experimentation. He produced hundreds of piano miniatures – brief, aphoristic fragments – that often explored a particular musical idea or element. All were written in an almost illegible shorthand and remained (like the music of Campbell and Hamilton) unpublished during his lifetime. Of particular importance for this chapter, however, is a body of piano miniatures in which Brewster-Jones explored his idea of the ‘formula’. Formula implies abstraction, scientific rigor and interest in systematic construction. The direct engagement with the American acoustician Dayton Clarence Miller’s Science of Musical Sounds appears on the manuscript of his first Prelude on New Formula. The manuscript includes marginalia showing how the synthetic scale has been derived from a complex stacked chord, and how the overtone series has determined the chord’s voicing. (See Music Examples 7.5a and b.)

Music Example 7.5a Marginalia in top left-hand corner on manuscript of Prelude on New Formula.

Music Example 7.5b The overtone series and its relation to the opening chord.

Soon after, in 1922, Brewster-Jones produced the Formula Series. Each of the six preludes explores a particular music idea. In his Ten Etudes he isolates a particular scale, for example the octatonic or whole tone, or delves into polytonal excursions using popular dance forms to produce ironic music of quite a different sensibility to that of Agnew and Campbell and much closer to Les Six.³¹

Fritz Hart would have taken a dim view of this music. A student of Stanford and friend of Vaughan Williams and Holst, Hart came to Australia on tour in 1909 and stayed to become a major composer and teacher at Melbourne’s Albert Street Conservatorium. Hart made his views on Australian music clear in an article for Art in Australia published in 1922.³² Perhaps with some of the aforementioned individuals in mind (he is resolute about the inauthenticity of any ‘Australian Stravinsky’ or ‘Australian Scriabine’), Hart asserted that the foundations of any genuine Australian music must be British: ‘a new Britannia in another world’.³³ Europe was foreign and to be avoided. Hart’s considerable output contains one unpublished foray into an ‘advanced’ idiom – his Fourteen Experiments for Piano of 1917 – but his main contribution to the story of early Australian modernism is as the composition teacher of Margaret Sutherland and Peggy Glanville-Hicks.

Sutherland is an important figure in Australian music. Her multifaceted contribution is all the more impressive given that an abusive and controlling marriage virtually silenced her for almost twenty years. Consequently, the bulk of her work was written after the marriage ended in 1948. Much earlier in 1923 she had travelled to London, where she quickly decided ‘that her feeling was definitely not with any kind of Conservatorium’, and after careful consideration chose Arnold Bax as her private teacher.³⁴ In 1925 she premiered her Violin Sonata with fellow Australian, violinist Leila Doubleday, at a concert organised by the Society for Women Musicians. This work of ‘astonishing precocity’ reveals a composer already in full command of her craft.³⁵ Sutherland was exacting in her attitude to composition.³⁶ The Sonata’s rich complex harmonic language belongs in the sonic worlds of Bax and Scriabin. Her technical facility allowed her a command over large-scale musical form in which, as David Symons notes, ‘harmonic and tonal organisation is exceedingly free, in that harmonic centres continually fluctuate and are successively focused or superimposed in polytonal combination’. He identifies it as ‘one of the more strikingly “advanced” works written by an Australian composer at this time’.³⁷ Melbourne’s Australasian considered it ‘very intriguing’ as well as ‘elusive’ and ‘somewhat baffling’.³⁸ Also an accomplished pianist, Sutherland had trained in Melbourne with the Czech migrant Edward Goll. Goll was known for his interest in new music, introducing Melbourne audiences to repertoire such as ‘ultra-modern Bartok’ in the mid 1920s. His modern European sensibility was a counterpoint to Hart’s Anglocentrism. During her time in London, Sutherland also visited Vienna and Paris. This introduced her to ‘non-English [sic]’ music that she remembered as ‘tremendously’ interesting, an influence which was ongoing.³⁹ A programme she presented in 1936 in Adelaide, for example, included music by Florent Schmitt, Ravel, Manuel de Falla, Germaine Tailleferre, Bartok and Milhaud.⁴⁰

Glanville-Hicks followed Sutherland into Hart’s composition studio in the late 1920s. By 1932 she was at the RCM studying composition with Vaughan Williams and piano with Australian expatriate Arthur Benjamin. Six years later, in 1941, Glanville-Hicks was at the epicentre of modernist music-making in New York as a composer, critic for the New York Herald Tribune under Virgil Thomson, and musical director at the Museum for Modern Art. Her path from London to New York went by way of Vienna – where in 1936, determined to understand the twelve-tone system (which she immediately deemed unsuitable), she briefly studied with Egon Wellesz – and then on to Paris for more sustained tuition with Nadia Boulanger. This brought her directly into the world of Stravinsky and French neoclassicism, and her earlier pastoral style was now instilled with a neoclassical economy. This musical language is heard in her Chamber Suite selected for the 1938 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festival. Glanville-Hicks’ later music, including large-scale orchestral works, ballets and operas, was shaped by a persistent interest in musics across the world. Like Hamilton, Glanville-Hicks returned to Australia only briefly during World War II and again for the final years of her life. As Suzanne Robinson has recently observed, ‘Like many other modernist women, Glanville-Hicks was more at home abroad than she ever was in her birthplace.’⁴¹

Glanville-Hicks was not the first Australian modernist to pursue a career in New York. Percy Grainger was. Grainger was a musical phenomenon, constantly on the move both physically and intellectually. His multilayered identity, personal, musical and national, was in constant flux. Despite taking American citizenship in 1919, Grainger remained committed to Australia and an idiosyncratic conception of a young Australian democracy. His febrile mind and boundless energy took him in many directions looking for ways to innovate all elements of music. As his friend Sutherland observed, the ‘tragedy’ was that ‘the-all-too-well-known small pieces he tossed off in a vein of buoyancy and youthful exuberance were destined later to obscure the serious, controversial, experimental and far-sighted extended works of this maturity’.⁴² Sutherland was referring here in part to Grainger’s radical concept of ‘free music’ based on ‘gliding scaleless and non-metrical sounds’ that actually stem from around 1895.⁴³ There is a substantial body of research on Grainger, and much has been written about his modernism. In a Nutshell and The Warriors of 1916 are, as Dreyfus and Robinson suggest, ‘compendiums of Grainger’s experimentalism’.⁴⁴ Robinson’s rich description of Grainger’s 1934–35 Australian tour takes account of his deep involvement in American experimentalism and his productive relationship with fellow iconoclast Henry Cowell.⁴⁵ Grainger’s roving eye looked at music from all places and all times, a disposition that informed his tour hosted by the new Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). The ABC was established in 1932, the same year that the BBC launched its Empire Broadcast Service to connect Britons across the globe.

Modernist Musicking in Australia

Brewster-Jones was greatly interested in Grainger’s tour. During the 1930s, as his compositional output waned, Brewster-Jones contributed a large body of musical criticism to Adelaide’s Advertiser as well as the new periodicals Meanjin and Progress in Australia. The wireless transformed Australia’s musical world and Brewster-Jones was one of many who embraced its potential. In the three years before Grainger’s remarkable tour, Brewster-Jones had produced twenty broadcasts for Adelaide’s 5CL. Brewster-Jones’ broadcasts bore many resemblances to Grainger’s in terms of an insatiable curiosity about the world. Brewster-Jones’ broadcasts were similarly eclectic, ranging from ancient music to jazz to music from all points of the compass.⁴⁶ In this way Grainger and Brewster-Jones provide an Antipodean example of Simon Gikandi’s characterisation of modernism as ‘perhaps the most intense and unprecedented site of encounter between the institutions of European cultural production and the cultural practices of colonized peoples’.⁴⁷

After several difficult years in London during the 1930s, Agnew returned to Sydney in search of work. His exposure in London to the BBC’s Concerts of Contemporary Music series convinced him of the importance of wireless and its usefulness in the dissemination of modern music and as a way to mitigate ‘Australia’s complete isolation from the world of European thought’.⁴⁸ Fortuitously the ABC engaged Agnew to develop a series that would ‘present a comprehensive view of the trend of modern music’.⁴⁹ Modern and Contemporary Composers ran between 1937 and 1942. The music performed live over the first year shows Agnew had taken his brief seriously. In addition to music by Bartok, Milhaud, Schmitt, Scriabin, Delius, Goossens, Bax, Pijper, Ravel, Honegger and Szymanowski, Agnew also programmed Schoenberg’s piano works op. 11 and op. 16, his second string quartet and Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet. Agnew’s decision to broadcast the music of the Second Viennese School at this time is significant as it belies the flawed assumption that atonal and dodecaphonic music was not performed in Australia until much later, an assumption that has been used as evidence of Australia’s backwardness.⁵⁰

Modern and Contemporary Music drew upon Agnew’s personal network, which spread from Sydney to London to Europe and back again, a singular example of what Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren have described as ‘global circuits of exchange’.⁵¹ A summary view of the performers playing modernist music in Sydney reveals a mobile and transnational community comprising a mixture of travellers and migrants. London-trained Cyril Monk was long considered a champion of the moderns both as a soloist and as leader of the Austral String Quartet. Winifred Burston and the New Zealander Ernest Empson studied with Busoni in Berlin, a relationship reflected in their promotion of his music in Sydney. Burston was a powerful influence on key composers of the 1960s generation Larry Sitsky and Richard Meale. The Austral Quartet’s cellist, Carl Gotsch, trained in Dessau. Nigel Butterley’s teacher, Frank Warbrick, and violinist Patrick Moore MacMahon were particularly active introducing new music to Australian audiences. Warbrick trained in London, and MacMahon spent several years in Geneva studying with Szigeti. Benjamin, the creator of many jazz-inflected modern scores, donated his considerable pianistic skills during his visits home from London. Soprano Ila Turnbull, who had sung the vocal part of Schoenberg’s quartet, like so many others, trained in London. English pianist Henri Penn, a stalwart in this community, had arrived from London in the teens, bringing with him vivid memories of Diaghilev and Stravinksy and accounts of the outrage caused by London’s premiere of L’après-midi.⁵² Wilfred Arlom, a linchpin in the modern music scene, hailed from Yorkshire.

By drawing on his Sydney networks, Agnew took to air much of the repertoire that had previously been the domain of small societies and clubs. One of these was Gotsch’s Collegium Musicum. This endeavour focused on early and modern music. In addition to concerts, the Collegium broadcast at least two modern music programmes on ABC radio: one featuring modern Italian music and the other an entire programme of Hindemith’s music. Over a decade earlier in 1921, the music publisher Louise Hanson Dyer established a Melbourne branch of the British Music Society (BMS).⁵³ Under her energetic sponsorship, the BMS introduced a range of modern British and European music to Melbourne. Dyer made Paris her base from 1928, where she later founded her publishing and recording company, L’Oiseau Lyre. Although its main focus was early music, she was deeply embedded in the modern musical world of Paris and published works by Milhaud and Honneger among others. She also supported her fellow Melburnians, Sutherland and Glanville-Hicks. L’Oiseau Lyre’s catalogue includes Sutherland’s Violin Sonata and Glanville-Hicks’ Choral Suite. A Sydney branch of the BMS had its inaugural concert in December 1920. It responded to the establishment of the ISCM in 1922 by noting new ‘opportunities for the exchange of compositions of performers and musical information in general’ and expanded its programming accordingly.⁵⁴ In 1927 it officially affiliated with the ISCM. It should be noted here that Australians had a presence in the ISCM from its inception. Percy Grainger, although identified as an American, had a work performed in the inaugural Salzburg festival in 1922, and Roy Agnew’s close friend the mezzo soprano Dorothy Helmrich along with violinist Alma Moodie participated at Salzburg the following year. Later during the 1930s, Dyer became involved in the ISCM, attending several festivals and serving as its Australian delegate in 1938, the year Glanville-Hicks’ work was performed.

Given the rich, vibrant nature of the account above, how did this period become Skinner’s ‘lost era’? The lack of infrastructure was a serious impediment, especially for composers who were largely unsupported. Further development of the ABC, the university system and the establishment of cultural bodies such as the Australia Council and the Australian Music Centre were decades away. Much of the music was not published, and the ephemeral nature of music-making makes the picture harder to reconstruct. The central role of women may have contributed to the ease with which the story has been marginalised in the historiography of Australian music.⁵⁵ Some composers chose to work outside institutions, and they were widely dispersed within and beyond Australia. Moreover, the emerging discourse of belatedness and imitation, palpable from the mid-1920s in the commentary of influential figures such as the AMN’s editor, Thorold Water, has further obscured this small but important story.⁵⁶ Amnesia was helped by the disruption of World War II, from which emerged a younger generation with different sensibilities, new possibilities and scant interest in what had come before.

Interwar cosmopolitanism was increasingly inimical to a desire to develop a national music. From the late 1930s the nationalist project gained momentum. Although the relationship with Britain remained strong, if increasingly complex (British race patriotism persisted into the 1950s), Europe became increasingly problematic. The call for a distinctive national culture came from many directions, from Jindyworobaks, such as Ian Mudie and Rex Ingamells, and in the polemics penned by P. R Stephenson. An emerging trend – the co-option of Indigenous Australian culture to represent the Australian nation – was evident in John Antill’s ballet suite Corroboree. Its 1946 premiere was celebrated by Roger Covell as introducing Australian music ‘truly belonging to the twentieth century’, but it is perhaps better considered under the heading of what Rachel Campbell has called ‘settler primitivism’.⁵⁷ The 1930s also experienced the beginnings of the influx of refugees fleeing Europe. Critic Curt Prerauer (who had close connections to the Second Viennese School), who arrived in 1933, and violinist and founder of Musica Viva, Richard Goldner, who arrived in 1939, are only two individuals whose contributions transformed Australian music. Michael Hooper’s work on Australian modernism of the 1960s and 1970s looks beyond the ‘celebratory’ discourse of ‘Australian Music’, which he sees as having obscured other important aspects of the music and its context. Clearly, however, his assertion that ‘the 1960s were the first time [my italics] that a large number of composers living and writing in Australia were also keen to embrace a variety of modernist ideas, and to draw on musical modernism from Britain and Europe’ needs qualification.⁵⁸ Important here is the question of scale (the ‘large number’) and where they lived. There was an Australian modernism prior to 1945, but the number of women and men who composed and promulgated it was small, and some of them were expatriates. This earlier generation thus in many ways represents a prehistory from which threads of continuity can be pulled.

In a 2008 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, actor Nicole Kidman found herself having to explain Australian country music. Although she was there to promote the Baz Luhrmann directed historical epic Australia, Letterman seemed more interested in discussing the career of Kidman’s husband, the New Zealand born, Australian raised Keith Urban.¹ By 2008, Urban was one of Australia’s most recognisable country music stars and biggest musical export. Letterman was surprised that Australians had even heard much country music, let alone been inspired to play it. Urban had ‘an interesting background for a star in what I think of as more of an American genre!’ he guffawed. ‘Is American country music popular in Australia?’ to which Kidman answered emphatically, ‘No!’ As Kidman unpacked the career of her husband, however, it became apparent that there was, in fact, a country-music culture in Australia. For instance, Kidman told Letterman that Urban has won the Tamworth Star Maker contest. Finally, Kidman clarified with exasperation: ‘I know I said there was no country music in Australia … there is. It’s just not American country music … Please let’s talk about the film!’²

Yes, there is country music in Australia, and it is rich and varied. But running alongside this cultural richness has been a peculiarly Australian anxiety about what country music is, how authentic it is and how it differs from the American version. The Tamworth Country Music Festival and accompanying Golden Guitar Awards is the biggest event on the music calendar, and while the festival is full of a huge variety of music, it is often also the focus of debates about American styles diluting the ‘true blue’ Australian styles. In fact, purists often do not consider Keith Urban to be ‘true’ country.³ This has been exacerbated by American incredulity, or at least perceived incredulity, about the local Australian product. Despite that anxiety, however, country music in Australia is full of fascinating styles, delightful eccentricities, and powerful stories. At this point, some hundred years since the first recordings were made, country music in Australia has outgrown its Appalachian roots and has turned into a tree of large boughs and surprising flowerings.

Country music frequently positions itself as one of the quintessential American musical forms: working class, plain-speaking, concerned with family values, interconnected with mythic ideas of Manifest Destiny, bursting with the rich sounds of a particularly American multiculturalism, and clothed in the big hats, rhinestones and cowboy boots of big country and big business. On the other hand, country music has often positioned itself as Australia’s national music, and for similar, if not identical, reasons, working class, closely connected to the bush and the ‘bush myth’, influenced by British Isles folk music and balladry, plain-speaking, inclusive and dressed up in the utes, boots and roots of Australia’s big country.⁴ The fact that country music in Australia is derived from a quintessentially American tradition, yet has become, for many, authentically Australian, is one of the fascinating tensions at the heart of this music. For many fans and performers, this tension can be the source of much pleasure, enabling country music to simultaneously express local historical identities as well as fantastical glamorous cosmopolitan ones. For example, Gomeroi elder Uncle Roger Knox’s music is deeply imbued with the language of American honky-tonk, yet he sings of being ‘back in the dreamtime’.⁵

Country music is one of Australia’s longest-lasting popular music forms. It arrived in Australia via American recordings in the late 1920s and, by the mid 1930s, recordings of local singers began appearing, such as those by its first star, Tex Morton. These recordings, known until the 1950s as hillbilly music, were immediately popular, outselling local and international artists in other genres such as swing. Hillbilly was an exciting new culture straight out of America and appealed to young people around the country, while being frowned upon by cultural elites. Although recording technologies, fashion and singing styles have changed since then, its rhetorical concerns and musical structures have remained remarkably stable. Country music has been a consistently popular style of music. For instance, one of the biggest-selling artists in Australian musical history remains the iconic Slim Dusty, with many of his songs being written by his wife and collaborator, Joy McKean.

Country music, despite common assumptions that it is dying out or that it is a rural-historical curio, is growing in popularity. In 2019, it had a market share of 15 per cent, double that of 1997.⁶ This has been reflected in the growing incidence of festivals, touring circuits and radio programming. Alongside this growth, there has been a diversification of the genre, which has developed new sounds and audiences within tertiary-educated inner-city communities that traditionally have not been country’s audience. Indigenous people, having long played country music, have increasingly come to mainstream prominence in recent years. Country music in its deployment of memory and depiction of pre-modern idylls has always been a response to modernity, and it still offers much in a rapidly modernising world.

Defining what country music is is a slippery and often politically fraught business. However, it would be useful at this point to establish some broad characteristics. Country music in Australia has taken many of its cues from hillbilly styles that emerged from America in the early twentieth century. Those styles were themselves a blend of African American blues and jazz, Anglo-Celtic folk, string bands (white and Black), gospel and religious music, cowboy music, and Latin American and some Eastern European styles, such as the boom-cha polka beat. Much of the African American flavour of country music was lost on its journey across the Pacific. However, its Anglo-Celtic flavour was reinforced by absorbing already localised bush ballad and vaudeville traditions. Consequently, Australian country music is straighter and less syncopated than its American counterpart, with an even greater focus on narrative directness and plain-speaking storytelling, rather than expressivity. Since the 1960s, there has been an attempt to label a distinctive form of Australian country music as ‘bush ballads’, which claims writers Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson as its progenitors, as much as Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.⁷

Country music uses an elemental musical architecture that employs relatively standardized harmonic movement to house the stories of the songs and draw attention to the sound of the voice. Critics have sometimes labelled country music as simple, but such clichés do not acknowledge how the complexity of country music is often to be found in storytelling skills, specific musicianship and the relationship between performer and audience. Further, country music’s harmonic simplicity renders it a ready-made format for people without formal musical education. Like punk and hip hop, country music has been a style that has given voice to marginalised communities – rural, working class, Aboriginal – and to women. For many songwriters, country music has provided a space to talk about complex political and social issues central to life in Australia.

Black Country

One of the most profound ways in which country music has been Australianised, if indeed that term is even appropriate here, has been through its deployment by Indigenous people. Indigenous musicians and songwriters have used country’s robust forms to speak of issues important to their individual and community identities and have often cut through to wider and whiter audiences, although this has been easier for Indigenous artists who are men. Indigenous songwriters have written about almost every conceivable aspect of the Indigenous experience within settler-colonialism – land rights, connection to Country, removal from Country, institutional discrimination, the Stolen Generations, strength in community, resistance and survival – and have used country music’s rhetorical concerns with loss and lament to particular advantage.⁸ This history provides an alternative viewpoint to conventional ideas about who can play country music, what country music should be about and what kind of politics country music expresses.⁹ In Australia, country music has been used to voice Black stories and advocate a progressive political agenda.

Country music is not an exclusively white artform in America either. The roots of country are highly diverse; it has had notable African American performers such as Charley Pride, Rhiannon Giddens and most recently Beyoncé, and Native American artists such as Buddy Red Bow and Apache Spirit, and has a large following within Native American communities (for similar reasons to Indigenous communities in Australia).¹⁰ In Australia, the presence of Indigenous performers and their contribution to national debate has been pervasive and profound, especially in recent years. This is due to several factors, not least the way in which Indigenous issues have been central to political debate in Australia since the 1990s. Interestingly, while prominent American artists in the mid twentieth century, such as Hank Williams, claimed Indigenous heritage or, like Johnny Cash, allowed false rumours of their Indigeneity to circulate, in Australia pioneering artists from that period, such as Chad Morgan, have only recently ‘come out’ as Indigenous.¹¹

Indigenous people were highly active in vernacular musical forms from the prehistory of hillbilly music, playing waltzes, polkas and schottisches in string bands for social dances. Hero Black was a well-known piano-accordion player and composer who performed on river boats on the Murray and Darling Rivers in the early twentieth century.¹² Indigenous musicians swiftly took up hillbilly music. For instance, Billy Bargo often appeared at Tex Morton concerts in the 1930s. Bargo was not just a singer but also a rough rider, sharpshooter and whip cracker. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Bargo would also fill in for Morton when he was ‘indisposed’.¹³ No recordings exist of Bargo, unlike Morton, whose recording output was voluminous: a double standard the result of structural racism.

Inspired by hillbilly music on the radio and jukeboxes, touring acts such as Slim Dusty and community transmission, Indigenous people began using hillbilly song forms to write their stories from the mid twentieth century. Many of these songwriters were recorded by folklorists and anthropologists and never commercially released. Gamilaraay man Eric Craigie wrote vivid descriptions of life on government-run missions and townships around Moree such as ‘Middle Camp’.¹⁴ One songwriter whose recordings were eventually released in 1964 was Gunu man Dougie Young.¹⁵ His songs vividly depict life on Barkandji country in Wilcannia in the 1950s and 1960s, when Indigenous people still lived under the Aborigines’ Protection Act, which severely limited their rights to travel, work, socialise, and marry. Young’s songs are concerned with the fact that going into pubs was illegal for Indigenous people, the subsequent black-market trade in alcohol, the ‘clay pan dances’ held outside of town and the punishment if they were caught: ‘ten pounds or twenty days’, to quote Young’s lyrics.¹⁶ Young’s songs satirise well-known tropes of country music, such as songs about alcohol, and are written with an impish sense of humour and delivered in a nonchalant conversational style, indicating the way humour was used as a form of resistance and community-building by Indigenous people.¹⁷ Some of Young’s songs also depict the way that the pastoral industry relied on Indigenous labour and, as such, provide a racially charged perspective on another great subset of country music: cowboy songs.¹⁸ In ‘The Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards’, Young rebuffs ideas of racial hierarchies still in circulation in the 1960s, stating that he is just as good a stockman, or cowboy, as a white man:

The first star of Indigenous country music, Yorta Yorta and Yuin man Jimmy Little, also wrote pointed songs that exposed racial double standards. An early release from 1958, ‘The Coloured Lad’, describes the many rejections from employers based on the colour of his skin. However, it was Little’s cover version of the gospel song ‘Royal Telephone’ (to Jesus) that catapulted him to widespread fame. The song showcased his honeyed voice while his television appearances capitalised on his movie star looks. It also saw him move away from country music. However, gospel music was very much intertwined with his style as a staple part of the religious education mandated on the mission stations, where many Indigenous people in this period grew up. Many Indigenous performers also recorded Christian gospel albums, however other musicians have combined country styles with Indigenous languages and beliefs. Pitjantjatjara man, Frank Yamma, for instance, sings in several languages.²⁰

Indigenous country musicians achieved broader and more sustained success in the 1970s and 1980s, as a result of self-determination, changing government policies, funding opportunities and societal attitudes. Acts such as the Country Outcasts, led by the Wiradjuri and Gamilaraay husband-and-wife team of Harry and Wilga Williams, and the Euraba Band with Roger Knox made significant inroads into touring, recording and institutional recognition. This was reflected in industry developments, such as the establishment of Central Australian Media Association (CAAMA) in 1982, an Indigenous-run label and broadcaster, and events such as the annual Aboriginal and Country Music Festival in Canberra. While Indigenous performers faced, and still face, discrimination on many levels, these trailblazing efforts and broader cultural changes helped pave the way for artists in the twenty-first century. Gumbaynggirr/Bundjalung musician Troy Cassar-Daley is one of the genre’s most recognisable performers and, in 2022, won his fortieth Golden Guitar Award, the most won by any performer. The year before, Cassar-Daley performed ‘Shadows on the Hill’, about a massacre of Indigenous people in the nineteenth century on Bundjalung Country, with the Yorta Yorta hip hop MC Briggs, demonstrating country’s more overtly political side and its musical flexibility.²¹

Until recently, only very few Indigenous artists crossed over to mainstream success, and these were almost all men. Indigenous songwriters and performers such as Arrernte woman Auriel Andrews, Wilga Williams (Gamilaraay) and Wonghi woman Josie Boyle never found the same success as did Jimmy Little, for instance. In recent years, Aboriginal women who have found commercial success have tended not to be ‘hard core’ country artists, but rather cross genres. For instance Warnindilyakwa woman Emily Wurramara combines indie folk, R&B and country, and in 2021 did a strikingly original version of Bob Randall’s 1970s song about the Stolen Generations, the hillbilly lament ‘Brown Skin Baby’.²² Gumbaynggirr/Yamatji woman Emma Donovan draws in elements of rock and soul to mix with her country roots. This demonstrates not just that it is harder for Indigenous women artists to ‘break through’ but also the way in which genres are gendered with a more purist, ‘authentic’ approach to country being aligned with masculinity, while stylistic flexibility has been something acceptably feminine (themes we will return to later in this chapter).

Indigenous country music is also strikingly intergenerational. Many of the artists mentioned in this section are part of extended families of music-makers. Emma Donovan started out singing with The Donovans, made up of her mother, uncles and grandparents. Frank Yamma began playing lead guitar for his father Isaac’s band. Roger Knox’s regular live band is made up of his son Buddy and his grandsons, and Cassar-Daley’s daughter Jem is an emerging country artist. While this phenomenon deserves more study, it seems reflective of the centrality of music-making to Indigenous communities and the fact that music, even popular music, in these communities is often learnt from elders, as much as from recordings or through formal music education.

Sound

As outlined earlier, country music in Australia was less informed by African American styles and more by Anglo-Irish folk and vaudeville.²³ The result was that early hillbilly recordings sound straighter and more mannered than their looser, swingier American progenitors. One of the key figures in early hillbilly music was the American ‘Blue Yodeller’ Jimmie Rodgers. Rodgers’ records from the late 1920s and early 1930s did big business in Australia, especially before the Great Depression curtailed Australian buying habits.²⁴ Rodgers was a large influence on Tex Morton, Australia’s Yodelling Boundary Rider, and Morton recorded several songs popularised by Rodgers.

However, while Rodgers’ singing style was deeply informed by the blues and minstrelsy, Morton’s was more firmly grounded in European singing traditions.²⁵ Rodgers’ yodelling was a lonesome sounding ‘blue’ yodel with small movements between head and chest voice that sounded like they emerged naturally from the rest of his singing. Morton’s yodelling on the other hand was a widely flamboyant sound in the Swiss/Austrian style, a virtuosic display of trilling, whooping and oo-dely-aying that had its roots in music-hall performances of exotic stereotypes. This was due to the different musical cultures of America and Australia, and Morton’s natural talent for yodelling. However, it was also due to the economics of country music recording practices.

For the first decade of country music recording, from the mid 1930s until just after World War II, there was one record label in Australia producing and releasing local product: Regal Zonophone, an imprint of the British owned EMI. EMI regarded hillbilly music as something that could be swiftly and cheaply recorded, cashing in on the latest craze before it disappeared. Unlike the other main form of popular music of the time, swing, which required large ensembles and orchestras to record, hillbilly was seen as cheap due to its minimalism and apparent simplicity. These attitudes were due to the economic conservatism of the recording industry, cultural hierarchies and the restrictions of the Great Depression. Stories abound of a single hillbilly singer in the 1930s and 1940s going into EMI’s studios in Homebush, Sydney, cutting several sides in a few hours, self-accompanied on guitar, and then being rushed out the door.²⁶

These economic and cultural considerations had a profound impact on the development of the sound of hillbilly music in Australia. In America, the size and diversity of the market meant that a huge variety of country music was recorded, often ensemble-based and rich in musical experimentation and expression: western swing, bluegrass, zydeco and honky-tonk. In Australia, however, recording artists in its first few decades were almost exclusively solo singers or duos in the cowboy/cowgirl mode.

Overall, this has meant that in Australia, there has been more focus on lyrics and melody than on other musical ingredients. While band recordings have become the most common form since the 1960s, they tend to be lean, linear and minimal with a focus on narrative rather than expressivity and emotion. One of the interesting by-products of the reliance on the solo performer was the longevity of the yodel. Given that performers had to be self-accompanied on acoustic guitars, the possibilities for instrumental breaks and solos were limited. Consequently, early Australian hillbilly singers included a yodel on every one of their records – a chance to show off their virtuosity and skill, and to provide a contrasting musical break from the narrative. Graeme Smith explains that in America only some performers yodelled, and it was well and truly out of fashion by the 1940s. However, in Australia, it continued well after World War II.²⁷ It also produced fascinating parodies, subversions and variations. Comic hillbilly performer Chad Morgan launched into his depiction of a deluded small-town Romeo ‘The Sheik from Scrubby Creek’ with a dog-howl yodel, while, in Bob Randall’s ‘Brown Skin Baby’, the yodel becomes a melancholy lament for stolen children: ‘Ya, oo, ow, oow, ee’.²⁸

Femininity and Masculinity

Many of Australia’s greatest yodellers have been women, often performing in duos. The music of the hillbilly duo the Schneider Sisters, Rita and Mary, featured close harmony singing, a rambunctious rhythmic attitude and an invented instrument of washboards, horns, bells and cymbals called the ‘Schneiderphone’. This instrument gave name to their song ‘Washboard Rock ’n’ Roll’, which is often regarded as the first rock ’n’ roll song recorded in Australia.²⁹ Mary Schneider went on to have a unique career ‘Yodelling the Classics’, including a memorable yodelled version of the William Tell Overture.³⁰ The McKean Sisters, Joy and Heather, shot to national prominence in the 1940s with songs that charmingly described the delights of rural life for young people in northern New South Wales, a place where ‘the frangipannis grow’ and where ‘gymkhana day’ is a cause for great excitement.³¹ The musical arrangements reflect this joy, with the McKean Sisters’ closely-woven harmonised yodels acting as a shout of glee. Joy McKean would go on to become one of Australian country music’s key songwriters, writing some of her husband Slim Dusty’s most beloved songs, including ‘Lights on the Hill’, about a fatal truck accident, which won a Golden Guitar Award at the inaugural ceremony in 1973.

(White) women have been a vital part of country music songwriting and performance in Australia since the very earliest days. Their contribution to the genre has been more visible than in other forms of popular music, especially rock music. Despite country music’s reputation for being socially conservative, women have written songs that address social concerns and gendered double standards. In fact, country music’s focus on the family and domestic sphere, an area traditionally gendered as feminine, has historically made country a legitimate genre for women to work in, unlike rock, pub rock and punk, where the focus on free living, experimentation and sexual freedom has meant that women performers have found it much harder to break through.³² Not only were many of the early women hillbilly performers duos, but they were often sister duos like the McKean Sisters and the Schneider Sisters, giving them a family structure that suggested respectability.

After Regal Zonophone’s huge success with its first local artist, Tex Morton, it began looking for other local hillbillies to sign up. Many of these were yodelling cowgirls, such as June Holms and ‘Australia’s Yodelling Sweetheart’ Shirley Thoms. These artists wrote and performed songs that spoke directly to the experience of being a young woman in 1940s Australia, full of joy and optimism about the future but also aware of societal limitations.³³ Thoms’ ‘Where the Golden Wattle Blooms’ is an affectionate and intimate portrayal of the Australian landscape and its flora, in particular the country around the Barron River near Cairns. It is a patriotic celebration of the ‘freedom’ of Australia compared to the authoritarian restrictions of other countries, presumably a reference to the countries Australia was fighting at the time: Germany, Italy and Japan.³⁴

In 1941, when she was just sixteen, Thoms wrote, recorded and released ‘A Cowgirl’s Life for Me’, which was a feminist anthem, although it wasn’t called that at the time. Here, the case is explicitly made that a cowgirl’s life is incompatible with romantic love:

Her yodel here is both a celebration of the freedom that cowgirl work brings and a kiss-off to the potential suitor. This song was written and released during World War II, a time in which many women were experiencing newfound social and labour freedoms. The bitter irony was that Thoms herself abandoned her career in 1958, a date that coincided with her marriage and motherhood, as was the case for so many women performers of this era.³⁶

Women songwriters and performers have continued to have a profound influence in country music. In 2002, Kasey Chambers had an elusive crossover hit with ‘Not Pretty Enough’ that proved hugely popular with country audiences and wider pop/rock fans. This song directly addressed the pressures for women to conform to stereotyped ideas of beauty. While Chambers was writing about her own reaction to life in the media spotlight, the song resonated with women from a broad range of social experiences.³⁷ The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen many notable women performers and songwriters sustain and modernise this feminist tradition, although they have sometimes resisted the ‘feminist’ label, lest they alienate a sometimes socially conservative fan base.³⁸

On the other hand, a local version of sentimental masculinity has had a particular potency in Australia. While men country music singers have always balanced the maudlin with the freewheeling, in Australia, it is the former that has been dominant. Jimmie Rodgers’ most well-known songs celebrated his ‘rough and rowdy ways’. However, Tex Morton’s most popular songs were sentimental tear-jerkers about dead parents and long-lost valley homes. His ‘You Only Have One Mother’, with B-side ‘The Black Sheep’, was by far his most popular release, selling 23,000 copies between 1937 and 1942.³⁹ Sentimentality has been a somewhat constant quality into the twenty-first century. Often the sentimental subject matter contrasts with the ultra-masculinist imagery of the utes, boots and hats seen, for instance, more recently in the persona and songs of Lee Kernaghan. America’s recent phenomenon of ‘Bro Country’ is similar, although that has a more modern take on masculinity.⁴⁰ The pervasiveness of sentimentality is further evidence of the hold that Victorian-era parlour songs and music-hall performance cultures had over Australian hillbilly music compared to blues/jazz forms. However, it also exemplifies how an Australian masculine identity and mateship has often been represented as ‘sentimental’, ‘lachrymose’ and ‘awash with self-pity’.⁴¹

Modernity and Rurality/The City and the Bush

Country music, both in Australia and America, was the product of a period of vast modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation. In both countries, the period between the wars saw large migration from country to city and an increasingly de-ruralised and industrialised labour force.⁴² In America, factory workers and their families in the Carolina Piedmont region began using vernacular forms to sing about their long-lost rural homes.⁴³ In Australia, early singers like Tex Morton, from his Sydney base, sung about sweet little homes in the valley. Hillbilly music was often based around a nostalgia for a lost rural paradise, rather than being rooted in it. For audiences, these songs spoke to a longing for a pre-modern, authentic existence; a longing that was itself a product of modernity.⁴⁴ One of the central reasons that hillbilly music caught on in Australia was not that its prairies were similar to America, but that its cities were.

Anxiety around modernity and a desire to escape were feelings exacerbated by seismic historical events of the time. The first hillbilly recordings in Australia coincided with the tail end of the Great Depression, and a significant minority of early hillbilly recordings dealt directly with this experience. Morton, in particular, had a slew of songs concerned with jumping trains, heading up to Queensland to look for work and the various escapades had along the way.⁴⁵ These songs spoke to the economic discontents of modernity and suggested a carefree escape from them. Similarly, hillbilly music’s expertise in expressing feelings of loss found a receptive audience on the frontline and the home front during World War II. Hillbilly music sold well during the war, and many artists found employment performing for troops in this period.

It was not until after the war that country music began to ground itself more firmly in the country. Many performers who had their start in the 1940s and 1950s came from the northern hinterland and coastal region of New South Wales. This region was predominantly dairy farming country, work which demands being inside cow sheds at milking time. Many hillbilly performers from this period talk about how a radio always hung on the milking shed wall tuned into country music.⁴⁶ The songs, both American and Australian in setting, spoke to a rural life, but also romanticised it, which was a powerful combination for the young and the yearning.

One such youth from Nulla Nulla, near Kempsey, was Gordon Kirkpatrick, who became so enamoured with the romance of hillbilly songs that he developed a stage name before he had even recorded a song: Slim Dusty. Combining the Anglo-Irish folk music of his family and neighbours with the hot new hillbilly sound, Dusty penned ‘When the Rain Tumbles Down in July’ in 1946. This song is a line in the sand, signifying an important step in the development of country songwriting and, indeed, Australian songwriting in general. Instead of the more romanticised images of wandering cowboys and cowgirls, there is a sense of rootedness and connection to place. The song is about a flood and is replete with images that can only come from living on the land:

Country music since the 1940s has often described rural labour and the landscape. Natural disasters, and human responses to them, have also featured routinely in country lyrics, suggesting that the national settler-colonial image of Australia as being a place where pioneers and farmers have had to battle a harsh climate is well established in country music. Indeed, country lyrics are a major expression of this.⁴⁸ At the time of writing this chapter, eastern Australia is experiencing unprecedented floods and, recently, catastrophic fires. Both events have been made more frequent and more extreme by human-created climate change. Country music, while it deals with the personal cost of such events, very rarely engages directly with the politics of climate change. Country artists have preferred to simply report on events and their human cost without the polemics of rock/pop artists like Midnight Oil or even American country artists like Johnny Cash. This is reflective of both an Australian predilection for plain speaking rather than political rhetoric and the often-careful engagements performers have with more conservative audiences.⁴⁹

Class and Respectability

The push-and-pull between the country and the city has been a constant of country music in Australia. Intertwined with this has been a negotiation of class and status. From the moment it was born as a genre, hillbilly music was othered and marked as different from other forms of popular music: trashy, disrespectable, musically basic and even morally degenerate. Even its name ‘hillbilly’ was coined as a pejorative term, although it was quickly adopted by musicians and audiences as an ironic badge of pride.⁵⁰ As blues, jazz and R&B were othered along racial lines, hillbilly was othered along class lines. In Australia, this was compounded by the fact that it was American and thus, by definition, foreign and commercialised. Middlebrow media reporting and reviews of hillbilly music in the 1930s and 1940s regularly parodied the genre’s ‘yee-hah’ Appalachian flavour: for example, the swing magazine Australian Music Maker and Dance Band News announced in their review, ‘Hyer is good ole Tex Morton, our own hill billy boy from the wilds of them thar Blue Mountains.’⁵¹ Most of these reviews were light-hearted enough, yet the jokes betrayed deeply entrenched attitudes about cultural and class hierarchies.

These hierarchies were keenly felt by many in the burgeoning country music community who hoped to make their genre of music more respectable. By the 1950s, hillbilly music had an established sense of community and industry. It had several record labels, dedicated radio programming, and its first publications Spurs – founded by Slim Dusty and Joy McKean – and Country and Western Spotlight. These publications launched a concerted campaign to change the genre’s name. ‘Hillbilly’, they argued, ‘never sounded anything but cheap and common and degrading’ while ‘country and western’ sounded ‘dignified and respectable’.⁵² While there was no official name change, by the end of the 1950s, the genre was referred to as ‘country and western’ and, by the 1970s, just ‘country’. This name change also occurred in America at around the same time.

Nevertheless, anxieties and tensions around class and status have continued. Historically, country music audiences have been more likely to not have tertiary education than other popular music audiences. Also, audiences for other types of music usually put country music as their least-liked genre (although this may be changing, as the recent popularity of American artists Taylor Swift and Beyoncé’s country stylings amongst young Australians demonstrates).⁵³ But, more importantly, it is the attitudes to country music that illustrate the importance of class and status. While country music is certainly not considered ‘morally degenerate’ anymore, it is often stereotypically portrayed as musically simple, politically conservative and slavishly American. Such portrayals reveal middle-class and middlebrow anxieties about cultural value. In particular, they reveal a settler-colonial nation keen to point out a sense of national cultural identity distinct from those of larger imperial powers.

Ironically, in the twenty-first century, it is ‘alt country’, more recently known as ‘Americana’, that, in some ways, is the most respectable, or at least the most hip, of country music subcultures. This is a style that has defined itself in opposition to mainstream commercialised country music, whether that be Australian or American, taking its cues from pre-1970s musical forms. It is not afraid to wear its American influences on its sleeve. Deeply embedded in honky-tonk instrumentation and singing styles, while clothed in cowboy hats, rhinestones and fringed jackets, Americana styles have blossomed in inner-city venues over the last decade and found dedicated audiences with younger, inner-city, tertiary-educated professionals. Americanisms are often deployed knowingly, and in fact this scene might even be referred to as ‘post-country’. At the Tamworth Country Music Festival in the 2020s, there are mainstream events featuring the stars of country, many of whom – such as Kasey Chambers, Troy Cassar-Daley and Lee Kernaghan – I have discussed here. However, there are also performances, centred around the Tamworth Hotel, by city-based Americana artists, such as Caitlin Harnett, Henry Wagons and Andy Golledge, which constitute a virtual Tamworth fringe festival.⁵⁴

Conclusion

Anxieties around what is real, respectable or hip have characterised discussions around country music in Australia. In particular, to what degree Australian country music is American and to what degree it is local are questions that have vexed elements of the industry, media and audiences. Such anxieties point to bigger concerns around national identity in a settler-colonial nation, geographically in Asia, with cultural ties to Europe and an Indigenous history of more than 65,000 years.

In the meantime, musicians and songwriters have industriously been making music that speaks to Australian experiences of life in great variety. Songs have been written about the bush, the city, racism, colonial history, labour, family life, natural disasters and sexual double standards. In fact, despite its fear of being too American, Australian country music songwriting has engaged fulsomely, richly and poetically with the experience of living in Australia. It was the first recorded popular music form to do so, and it has continued in this vein for almost a hundred years. Country music songwriters have both responded to and critiqued modernity and its various forms of progress, and we can expect this to continue into the future.

The quest for a number one single has been part of pop music since the early days of rock ’n’ roll; the Beatles aimed for the ‘toppermost of the poppermost!’,¹ while AC/DC felt it was a ‘long way to the top if you want to rock and roll’.² Bob Stanley argues that for ‘over four decades the [pop charts] would be a national fixture in Britain, like the FA Cup, like Christmas’; this was also true in Australia.³ Beyond the musicians and fans, the recording industry relies on charts to measure success. Such charts play an important role in the decision-making of record companies, press, television, retail and online stores, and streaming platforms.

If we are trying to understand Australian music, it is useful to discuss not only music made by Australians but also the recordings that are the most popular among Australians in any particular week; the weekly pop chart is how the recording industry measures this popularity. The music at the top of the charts has often been dominated by American and British artists, rather than Australians. A weekly pop chart nonetheless reflects Australian tastes as they shape and are shaped by the Australian music industry ecosystem. In the 1960s, the Motown record company had much success in the United States, releasing fourteen top ten singles in 1967 alone. In contrast, according to the Australian national Go-Set charts, there was precisely one song released by Motown (‘The Happening’ by Diana Ross and the Supremes) that reached the top twenty in 1967 in Australia.⁴ Whether Australians found the Motown sound too ‘Black’ for its liking, or whether Motown had poor Australian distribution and promotion, it shows that Australian listening habits can differ from that of listeners elsewhere, even where Australian-made music is not involved.⁵

This chapter aims firstly to give an overview of the history of the pop chart, exploring how the charts began in an Australian context and the varying changes in the music industry that affect how charts are structured and calculated. Secondly, it will explore some of the factors that play a role in a recording reaching number one in Australia in the last decade, discussing three distinct ways in which a song may reach the top of the charts: audience awareness, audience engagement and continued listening. In discussing these factors, we hope to give a sense of the most popular songs that Australian audiences listened to in the last decade and how these songs may have achieved success.

A Short History of the Australian Charts

Before 1966, singles charts in Australia were collated individually by radio stations (for example, Sydney’s 2SM or Melbourne’s 3AW). As such, these charts represented the tastes of specific capital cities, rather than the whole of Australia’s national music taste. The first Australian national pop music chart appeared in October 1966 inside Go-Set magazine, Australia’s first successful pop music newspaper for young people. This chart was topped by the Beatles’ double A-side ‘Yellow Submarine’/‘Eleanor Rigby’.⁶ Go-Set began in Melbourne but rapidly expanded to having offices in most capital cities, printing both local news in these areas (such as gig guides) and more general national music news across Australia. The move from a local Melbourne paper to a national publication ‘gave readers the opportunity to compare and contrast between the states and witness music tastes across Australia’.⁷ Beyond just the capturing of this data as a historical record, the publication of a national Top 40 chart also signified that Australia had a national music industry and a national musical identity that was worth representing.

Arrow situates the advent of Go-Set – and by extension the first national Australian charts – within the post-war rise of a philosophy of consumerism and the associated rise of a ‘baby boomer’ youth culture.⁸ In Australia, the rise of consumerism picked up speed in the 1950s, as post-war rationing ended and wages rose, giving the middle class significant amounts of disposable income and allowing the proliferation of electrical appliances and cars, among other items. Increased leisure time and disposable income also meant that sales of music recordings increased. In the 1950s, Australia saw the rise of the ‘teenager’ as a marketing category, amid a demographic ‘teenager explosion’;⁹ nonetheless, youth culture only very slowly gained a foothold in mainstream cultural outlets, with significant repression of youth culture by disapproving adults. When Beatlemania hit Australia during their 1964 tour, a national youth culture became less threatening to older Australians.¹⁰ It is likely no coincidence that a successful youth music-oriented magazine with a national chart occurred relatively soon after the Beatlemania of 1964 and the ‘Easyfever’ surrounding the Australian-based rock band the Easybeats in 1965.

As Stratton notes, ‘the 1970s saw the beginning of a shift in importance away from state identities to a sense of Australia as having an over-determining, single Australian cultural identity’.¹¹ One part of creating this cultural identity in relation to music was Countdown, a music television programme which was broadcast on the ABC between 1974 and 1987.¹² Designed for family viewing, Countdown featured weekly chart updates, along with interviews and performances by charting artists. So popular was the programme that appearances on it became part of the feedback loop of success, which also played a role in developing ‘the sense of Australia as having a nationally identifiable popular music tradition’.¹³ After Countdown ended in 1987, other music television programmes on Australian television – in particular Video Hits (Channel 10) and rage (ABC) – continued to influence the mainstream of Australian popular music.¹⁴

After the demise of Go-Set in 1974, the Kent Music Report emerged, prepared by journalist David Kent. In 1983, a Countdown-branded version of the Kent Music Report began to be published by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA). By 1988, after the end of Countdown, ARIA made the decision to calculate the charts ‘in-house’ and this saw the end of the prominence of the Kent Music Report and the rise of the ARIA charts. ARIA now calculates Top 50 singles and albums charts, along with charts for genres including jazz and blues, classical, dance, hip hop/R&B, and country.

Over the last decade, the ARIA charts have progressively transitioned from measuring sales to measuring plays on streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.¹⁵ According to a March 2023 ARIA press release, streaming audio and video together account for 78.1 per cent of recording-industry revenue, which as we argue is reflected in the makeup of the charts.¹⁶ With this historical background in mind, we next move on to a discussion of the meaning of a number one single, and the way that the changes in the charts have altered that meaning.

What Is a Number One Single?

While there might be hard numbers – streaming numbers and sales – behind a single reaching number one, the national number one single is also based on decisions made by the chart’s collators. Decisions have been made (a) to issue the chart weekly, rather than daily or fortnightly; (b) to count from a particular day of the week; and (c) about what data to include and how much weight to give each data source (for example, streaming versus physical sales). All of these choices affect what song may reach number one.

Even the idea of a ‘single’ is somewhat amorphous, especially in the age of downloads and streaming services. Take the ARIA singles charts of the 19 March 2017, when the English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran had the #1, #2, #5, #6, #10, #11, #16, #19, #20, #24, #31, #32, #36, #37 and #39 singles in the ARIA charts.¹⁷ Ed Sheeran’s appeal to Australian consumers here accentuates a recent change in how a single is conceptualised.

Before the internet age, singles were mass produced and distributed physical products – whether 7” singles, ‘cassingles’ on cassette or CDs. In 1966, the 7” vinyl singles appearing in the Go-Set chart usually included two songs, with the more commercially viable song considered the ‘A-side’. The Beatles single that topped the first Go-Set chart was considered a ‘double A-side’ as both songs were thought to have commercial potential. Record companies would typically focus on promoting and distributing one single by an artist at a time, often ceasing production of that single to encourage the promotion of the next one. In this situation, the existence of a single was clearly the product of a set of commercial decisions about the production, promotion and distribution of a physical product.

However, in the current era, the streaming of individual songs on streaming services counts towards the charts, regardless of whether those songs have been officially released as singles. Thus, when a highly successful pop musician like Sheeran releases a new album, each album track potentially may enter the singles chart. The singles on the charts are therefore no longer required to be released separately from the context of an album but are simply whichever songs are most listened to and/or downloaded.

This change in what the charts are measuring – from sales of a physical product to listens to a song on a digital streaming service – means that the charts now measure engagement rather than sales.¹⁸ Data based on what consumers buy leads to different patterns of song popularity compared to data based on what consumers listen to. Buying a physical 7” single once and putting the same song on a streaming service playlist might result in the same amount of listening to the song, but the 7” single will only contribute to the charts once, while the streaming service plays might contribute to the charts for months or even years.

This has led to songs often spending longer in the charts. On 11 April 2022, for example, six of the top ten songs in the ARIA charts had previously spent more than half a year – twenty-six weeks – in the charts. The number two single in that week, ‘Heat Waves’ by Glass Animals, was in its seventieth week in the charts. The ‘new normal’ here did not occur in the days of physical singles. In the ARIA singles chart of 25 August 1991, the song that had spent longest in the charts was ‘Rhythm of My Heart’ by Rod Stewart, which had spent eighteen weeks in the charts. Only two songs in the Top 10 that week had been in the charts for longer than ten weeks.

The case of ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac encapsulates the changes in what the Australian charts represent. In 1977, ‘Dreams’ spent only two weeks in the Top 20 of the Kent Music Report singles chart, indicating that sales of the ‘Dreams’ single were respectable but not among the highest of the year. However, Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 Rumours album, featuring ‘Dreams’, was a big hit on the Kent Music Report album charts; Rumours stayed in the Top 10 of the album charts between February 1977 and April 1978, and was often at #1. As a result, many more listeners in 1977 would have heard ‘Dreams’ than its place in the singles chart represents. In contrast, in 2020, ‘Dreams’ was featured in a viral TikTok video, which led to the song spending ten weeks in the Top 10 and eighty-six weeks in the Top 50 as of 23 March 2023.

Was ‘Dreams’ bigger in 1977–1978 or 2020–2022? Despite the singles chart performance in 2020–2022 being numerically superior, it is not easy to tell in which time period the song was biggest. ‘Dreams’ was likely one of the most listened-to songs in 1977–1978. However, the singles charts in 1977 ultimately measured sales, as record companies made money from sales, not from people listening to albums they already owned. This makes direct comparisons difficult, as the charts of different eras measure different things.

To summarise, sales in 1977 are a different form of measurement to listens in 2022. To buy a physical product to listen to a particular song requires a monetary investment, which likely occurs because a listener has relatively strong feelings about the music. In contrast, streaming-service listeners pay a flat fee to hear however much music they feel like listening to in a month; this likely means that what is represented on the charts often represents songs that the listener is only mildly passionate about, but which they nonetheless keep on playlists. As we will subsequently discuss, this changes the musician’s path to a number one single.

Factors That Play a Role in a Song Becoming a Number One Single in Australia

Through an analysis of number one singles from 2013 to 2022, there appear to be three main underlying contributing factors to an Australian number one single: (a) many people need to become aware that the song exists; (b) many people need to choose to listen to the song; (c) many people need to continue to choose to listen to the song. The following section highlights some of the factors that currently influence a song reaching number one on the Australian charts.

Audience Awareness

The easiest and most straightforward route to making audiences aware that a musician has released a new pop single is for that musician to already be internationally famous.¹⁹ Interiano et al. argue that there is a ‘winner-takes-all effect’ whereby audiences minimise the ‘cost of search’ by sticking with artists they know.²⁰ For example, a new song by former One Direction member Harry Styles, ‘As It Was’, debuted at #1 on the charts on 11 April 2022. There are effective hooks in ‘As It Was’ that play some role in its success, but Harry Styles’ dedicated fanbase means that he is usually a ‘winner’ in the pop marketplace .²¹ Number ones in 2021–2022 also include songs by Ed Sheeran, Adele, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber – like Styles, all artists with dedicated fanbases and a decade of prior chart success, which justifies the expensive promotional push needed to make people aware of the music.

If an artist is not already a highly successful pop star, they will most likely need a well-organised and sustained international promotional push from an international ‘major label’ record company – Sony, Warner or Universal – to become successful. Given the popularity of international streaming services run by multinational corporations, such as Spotify, Apple and YouTube Music, there has been a massive centralisation of the global pop market. Australian audiences focused on mainstream pop find out about new music via a variety of different forums such as ‘subreddits’ such as /r/popheads, Twitter hashtags, YouTube reaction videos and viral Tiktoks – and few of these avenues will be Australia-centric. As such, many Australian pop audiences listen to much the same music as the international Anglophone community. Workers in the Australian music industry interviewed by Morrow and Beckett relate their uncertainty about how best to influence Australian consumers in this climate.²²

It appears that mainstream commercial radio is not as influential as it was before the advent of streaming services; only two of the songs in the RadioInfo Airplay Chart Top 10 on 6 April 2022 were also in the equivalent ARIA chart on 11 April 2022. Additionally, radio station playlists are increasingly conservative; six of those Top 10 most played songs on Australian radio had been in the airplay charts for twenty weeks or more. Nonetheless, radio airplay still plays some role in the success of new songs.

Commercial radio station playlists in Australia are dominated by international acts on major labels. All but five of the songs in the Top 40 radio airplay chart on 6 April 2022 were from the three major labels or their subsidiaries. The only Australian act to have a song in the Top 20 of the airplay charts at this time was 5 Seconds of Summer, on BMG, despite content laws suggesting 25 per cent of content should be Australian. Research suggests that most commercial pop-music-focused broadcasters ignore content laws, preferring international hits.²³

While the Australian charts often reflect international popularity, international artists can achieve success in Australia without being internationally successful. Examples include (a) Blondie’s 1977 #2 Australian hit ‘In the Flesh’, which occurred before the band became successful in the US and UK; (b) Sonia Dada’s 1993 Australian #1 ‘You Don’t Treat Me No Good’, a song that never charted in either the UK or US; and (c) Wynter Gordon’s 2011 Australian #1 ‘Dirty Talk’, which did not enter the Billboard Hot 100 and only reached #25 in the UK. In the early 2010s, it sometimes appeared that record companies were using Australia as a test market, placing a song on the smaller Australian market as a test of whether it would be worth investing in a more expensive US or international promo push for that song. One Billboard article in 2015 suggested that Australia is a ‘popular test market for international brands looking to expand’.²⁴ For example, ‘Blurred Lines’ by Robin Thicke (featuring T.I. & Pharrell) hit the #1 spot in Australia on 19 May 2013; at that stage the song was at #54 on the US charts and had not yet appeared on the UK charts. It appears likely that, after the song hit #1 in Australia, a larger international promotional push led to the song’s international success. However, more recently, the increasing internationalisation of the Australian pop market appears to make such test-market strategies less effective.

Streaming services often direct listeners to playlists; getting a song on these playlists has become an important part of achieving a number one single, both in Australia and elsewhere in the world. The major streaming services available in Australia – Spotify, YouTube Music and Apple Music – all have widespread global reach and an international focus. The most prominent streaming service in Australia is Spotify, which promotes playlists curated by Spotify staff, by users themselves and by algorithms that create personalised playlists based on previous listening preferences.²⁵ Many Australians on Spotify appear to listen to music via international playlists, a practice that plays a role in the decreasing quantity of number ones by Australian artists in the ARIA charts. The flow-on effect of this is outlined by Morrow and Beckett, whose research shows a decline in singles by Australian artists reaching the singles charts from 2016 onwards.²⁶

Artist collaboration is another method of achieving a number one single in Australia, as it is a way to reach multiple demographics at the same time, some who may be unfamiliar with the artist or with pop music in general. An illustrative example of this is Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’ which hit #1 in Australia on 1 June 2015, remaining there for three weeks. This song had a crossover appeal due to the addition of Kendrick Lamar as a featured rapper. Ordanini et al. note that songs with ‘featured’ artists have increased exponentially in recent years, and these collaborations reflect a ‘deliberate decision by two artists to combine their talents to create a conspicuously hybridised product’.²⁷ Further, their research suggests that songs that contain ‘feature’ artists from different genres are more likely to achieve success on the charts by ‘bringing together omnivores, those who like variety and listen to different genres of music, and loyalists, those dedicated to one or other genre – hybrid songs can increase the potential audience size significantly’.²⁸

The video clip to ‘Bad Blood’ takes this collaborative power to the extreme, with a long list of prominent co-stars alongside Swift including actresses, singers and models. This attracted both Swift fans as well as fans of the co-stars, creating an overlapping Venn diagram of interests. The success of collaborations can be seen in Figure 9.1.

Figure 9.1 Australian number one singles between 2013 and 2021 divided into singles performed by solo artists/bands and singles that use a featured artist/collaboration.

Audience Awareness of Australian-Made Pop Music

One ramification of the rise of international streaming services is that Australian music is not as likely to be competitive on the Australian charts compared to when Australia had more of a closed, national media market – an issue which has seemingly intensified in the last five years. Australian artists now have comparatively little advantage on the Australian charts compared to international acts, where previously they had more chance of appearing in front of larger interested audiences on television variety shows and the radio. With younger Australian audiences now consuming television via international streaming services such as Netflix, Apple TV or Disney Plus, there is less scope for Australian-oriented content that promotes Australian music unless it has potential international appeal. Similarly, pop consumers in the past would be more likely to consume Australian versions of magazines such as Smash Hits or Rolling Stone, rather than magazines that needed to be shipped from the UK and US physically. In contrast, international news websites can be instantly accessed at the click of a button.

As a result of such changes, most Australian artists that have recently had number one hits in Australia, especially in the last five years (for example, Tones And I or The Kid Laroi; see Table 9.1), have also been successful elsewhere in the world, illustrating the extent to which Australia is part of a global market. In Table 9.1, it is noted if there are specific reasons for the success of each number one from an Australian artist from 2013 to 2023, most of which are connected to TV talent shows, synchronisation in TV and advertisements, working with an internationally established artist or already being well established themselves.

While there are social and technological factors that may influence a song in reaching number one, the song itself still needs to be something that people will choose to listen to, something shaped by musical factors such as hooks and lyrical concerns.²⁹

Continuous Listening

As the charts change to reflect not just sales numbers but continuous engagement, remaining in the number one spot depends on listeners continuing to play the song over and over for an extended period of time. It is for this reason that we see songs linger in the charts for longer than in previous decades. Part of this is due to the way streaming allows listeners to ‘use’ music in their everyday lives. Rarely is listening to music a focused exercise without distraction. More often, it is played during a commute, while doing exercise or household activities, or in the background to create a feeling or mood. As an experience-sampling study of British undergraduate students demonstrates, listeners only listened attentively to music as a sole activity 2.3 per cent of the time.³⁰ The utilisation of music in this way is often referred to as ‘passive’ or ‘lean-back’ listening, and this behaviour is supported by the vast array of mood and activity-themed playlists available on streaming platforms as background ambience to life’s everyday events – chill-out playlists, study-music playlists, driving playlists, fitness playlists and so forth.³¹

As such, chart phenomena like the return of ‘Heat Waves’ by Glass Animals to the top of the charts in 2022 after first being released in 2020 are likely strongly influenced by the long-term appropriateness of the song to the ways that Australian audiences use the music; for a plurality of listeners at that time, this song created appropriate atmospheres, evoked specific moods and enhanced their activities as people went about their everyday lives.

Conclusion

The singles charts that determine number one singles are a site of constant weekly change, which in part makes it a difficult area of study with many considerations. Huber suggests that Top 40 songs ‘might operate, both together and separately, as an index to the present, as a way of understanding a moment in time’.³² Each chart is a snapshot of Australia’s musical taste and trends in any given week, and within it there may be fleeting successes that would be forgotten were it not for the chart capturing their presence.

The widespread upheaval in the data that is used to calculate a number one single has a flow-on effect on many areas of the industry, particularly Australian artists who seek chart success in the current climate. Data from international streaming services gives much more detailed information on who is listening to a number one single, where they are listening and how many times they are listening. Ultimately, this signals a shift in what the charts represent and what it means to reach the top.

I’m a proud Kalkadunga descendant of the Mount Isa area up in North-West Queensland, some 1,800 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. I grew up there with the inspiration of the land, travelling with Mum and Dad out to this particular cattle property called Calton Hills Station, which took in a lot of Kalkadunga land and cultural sites of significance for our people. So I had the very good fortune of having access to that canvas as a young child living in a modern day and still having the lineage there from some of the elders who have that special power of significant cultural Lore, the old Lore of the land and how that translates from the songlines of our mother Country. That’s something that I’ll always continue to be part of, and I want to pay tribute to that always, because I’m here in a position now, not just because of hard work but because of the hardships of those before me, leading the way to open up opportunity for Indigenous Australians.

My mum Aunty Delmae Barton used to listen to Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso and sing to the birds among the bush land of her Country, her mother Country around Springsure and Emerald in the Carnarvon Gorge area in Central Queensland. My Country, my Kalkadunga Country resonates in and through my works. Little signature tunes that I’ve been inspired by have come out of the earth. Now, we are becoming more in tune with our own interpretation of Australian classical music, along with Western instruments and the didjeridu (the yidaki), the clapsticks, boomerangs and other traditional instruments from the Torres Strait and the surrounding Islands, and with the language, the tonality of the way our ancestors and our elders sing the song of the landscape, and how it is captured on the canvas with the stroke of a brush or twig or hand and fingers.

My vision from over twenty years ago was always to take it to the next level where it didn’t seem tokenistic, not just ticking the government or organisational box for funding. I have been very clear that I let the music and the culture of the land speak through me. I have had that opportunity to listen to my elders and to gather those thoughts over the last ten to twenty years. I am very grateful for the learnings from my Uncle Arthur Petersen. Hearing my uncle play, I wanted to be a part of that mystery. I use that word mystery because it’s a feeling of something that’s greater than us, greater than humanity, than what music is to the Western ear. Uncle Arthur was a Lore man, so he was very special and very powerful. He knew several languages and was a healer, a part of that old school mob.

Making the didjeridu, I really remember the smell of the beeswax – after you’ve cut it down, you get the sandpaper, and you can smooth off the mouthpiece. The beeswax smell makes me think of my dad, Uncle Alf Barton, who would explain to the tourists about a pack saddle, how you can thread the sinew of the kangaroo through leather. You would put beeswax through the sinew because that would help make it watertight. The Aboriginal people of that land taught a lot of the white settlers techniques about how to read the land around there. I was born in that era where there were still elders who had strong cultural ties, and I was given the gift of the didjeridu through my uncle to pass on those stories through. Having that cultural centre gave me and gave the community something to be proud of.

Performance has always been a way of communicating across cultures, it’s expanding the vocabulary of the musical landscape, your mix of paints, your mix of ochres. I can add a bit of this colour and now that colour, and musically speaking, playing across different genres opens up your language gateway. My dad worked in the Postmaster General, and in his later life after his retirement, he also wanted to make sure that the cultural sites of significance small or large were looked after by the mining companies as much as possible. So, Mum and Dad worked with other elders and members of the community to establish site clearance workers – Indigenous walkers to walk ahead of the mining rigs and clear the area to make sure there weren’t any stone axes or fireplaces in the path. And if there were cultural artefacts, appropriate action would be taken. If there were, they had to halt the operation and go around. Through that work, we had a connection with Mick Roach from BHP Cannington, and that connection led to my first performance of Philip Bracanin’s Dance Gundah for didjeridu and orchestra with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra (QSO) in 1998.¹ After Dad died, Mick Roach called up to say there was an opportunity to perform with the QSO. The reason Mick called this one particular day out on the Cannington site (which is 300 kilometres or so out from Mount Isa, where they make the silver) was that there was this engineer there, who asked Mick Roach if he happened to know a didjeridu player, because his son was a conductor.² As a fourteen-year-old, I had actually played at the mine site’s opening.

This would lead to opportunities to play at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, where I performed Peter Sculthorpe’s music for the first time, and then to again perform with the QSO, this time in Sculthorpe’s orchestral work Earth Cry.³ Playing with the Goldner String Quartet was a stepping stone, in terms of musicality level, but also because high-art music and a high-art crowd was blending with a sophisticated sort of Indigenous landscape music. If the two are equal in terms of the space given, that’s when true meaning, true honesty and musicality collide in a good way. And that’s when people go ‘Wow!’; that’s the moment! And performing Sculthorpe’s orchestral music with the QSO was the next stepping stone, the big footprint of this chapter in life.

I still remember the day I met Sculthorpe, when Dale, the stage manager from the QSO told me, ‘Sculthorpe is coming.’ Sculthorpe said, ‘I hear you’re a good didjeridu player, we’ll soon see about that!’ That night was the magic of thousands of years of my Indigenous culture and me as a teenager expanding my musicality – just trusting those moments growing up in Mount Isa, and in working with Mum as an improviser – all coming to that one moment. So that night we did Earth Cry, and the raw energy, it was pretty special.⁴ In those moments the trust of my musical landscape or my cultural side, which is already within me, that took over. I visualise the landscape and that helps me memorise the pieces. I go in with the pure innocence of equality and strength of the landscape you know, and so I go in with a vision, I’ve got this weight on my shoulders of a significant cultural landscape behind me and all the turbulence and wonderful things that go with it as well, and I will listen to others in that space. I think none of us knew how impactful that was at the time. We are a part of a greater legacy; it wasn’t tokenistic; it wasn’t fake; it was me as an artist, as a part of this legacy.

It was extraordinary doing the Sculthorpe – that was a very special moment in history. Straight away that night, the Queensland Teachers Health Union put up their hands to fund me to be the QSO’s first didjeridu artist in residence. And then of course the friendship with Sculthorpe developed. As I played more of his works, Sculthorpe could understand that I had a musical sense of the landscape and that I was a good improviser, because I’m not just improvising, it’s constructed improvisation. Improvisation is actually methodical; if you’re doing it right, it should be done naturally. Two performances ten years apart demonstrate how I construct my improvisation – Michael Christie conducting the Queensland Symphony in 2002 and a recording with the Australian Youth Orchestra in 2012.⁵ Listening to my build-up on the A didjeridu in the middle section, they’re almost identical, they’re the same sort of vibe.

I knew I had a voice, but I knew it would still take time to get through to the engine room of orchestras so that it wasn’t just tokenistic or a tacky thing to have Indigenous music in the way that it has been sometimes in the past. It comes back to me wanting to be a part of the mystery of the Uncles. That culture was always my grounding. And so, if people say, ‘You’re going to get a lot out of this,’ really, it’s about not what am I going to get out of it, but can I give to it from my uncles? That voice, in this world. It took time for people to realise that was a serious position, that I was someone who had this instrument that could speak in a virtuosic sense. It turned into a collaboration where Sculthorpe felt that I could speak for him through the music. I felt that from the initial work with the Goldner Quartet. That this is what Australian music is – the chaos colliding, an ancient history of Australian culture, the sophistication of Indigenous culture and music and sophisticated Western European classical instruments. When you find the right leaders of the two, they can come together.

Sculthorpe’s Requiem is the first piece that Sculthorpe wrote for me, from beginning to end with me in mind.⁶ He jokes in a couple of interviews that he would have had it finished months or weeks earlier if it hadn’t been for me, because he had to work out different keys and stuff. So we premiered it at Adelaide Festival of Arts in 2004, which was quite special because it was the first time that the old Aboriginal ladies from the choir were allowed onto the festival programme, because the last time they were on tour there, they weren’t included in the festival – so very powerful.⁷ They sang the ‘Maranoa Lullaby’ in the Requiem.⁸

On Intellectual Property and Improvisation versus Composition

The concept of intellectual property twigged for me around the age of fifteen. In Mount Isa, I called up the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) to get Kalkadunga language on a tape. They sent me a quote via post, stating that for a tape of my own language the cost would be hundreds of dollars. Entering the classical realm, I had to navigate the intellectual property aspects of what I felt was right in my heart and the legacy of cultural appropriation in a Western system. In those early days BHP agreed to fund a second and a third movement of Dance Gundah in my first ever orchestral experience as soloist. I walked in to that first rehearsal and performance with the legacy of thousands of years with me in the spirit of the didjeridu/yidaki. I recorded a tape and sent that to Philip Bracanin and put my copyright on it. He went ahead with developing the new movements, and the full work is recognised as his composition, with a later performance with Matthew Doyle as didjeridu soloist.⁹ This was the beginning of finding my voice as a composer in the classical world, creating the musical element on my instrument that made Dance Gundah what it was. Western intellectual property deems that I have to pay for a recording of language that belongs to our people, but a composer can use the music I create with no acknowledgement, let alone payment.

In the programme for the 2002 QSO gig, I did a didjeridu solo first and then Sculthorpe’s Earth Cry. And alongside ‘didjeridu solo’, it said ‘traditional’ instead of ‘William Barton’. As my friendship with Sculthorpe grew, the prospect of doing more and more concerts around the world also grew; with Earth Cry, as well as with the possibility of adding didjeridu to his other works, there was a point where it was clear to me that I should get, not the royalties, but at least an acknowledgement in the score, though I didn’t necessarily talk to anyone about it at that point. That’s all changed, because I’m well known (because of my portfolio of twenty works) now, and so it just happens automatically with the assistance of my management team and publishers. It’s not always about the royalties; sometimes it’s just about acknowledgement, that’s all.

I wanted to earn my stripes as a composer in the classical world, not a songwriter in the pop world; I felt I had more power and respect to do things in the right way and amplify my vision, from being a young kid doing things with Mum and Dad on cultural site-clearance work with the mines. My first official commission was from Lyndon Terracini. When Lyndon was artistic director for Queensland Music Festival around 2002, he commissioned me to write a new work for the community of Mackay. Because there are three mobs there: Aboriginal mob, Torres Strait Islander mob and Australian South Sea Islander mob. I went up there and met with community and said, ‘I’m from Mount Isa, Kalkadunga Country’; I paid my respects to the elders there, and they welcomed me in, the members across the three communities, this sort of committee, and some of them knew my uncle, mum, dad, so it was my DNA passport that gave me an entry point. That was quite special, the songlines of the mother Country, and for that performance we had the Mornington Island dancers come down.

It’s very important to collaborate, it keeps on expanding your level of musicianship and humanity and the way you find a middle ground. Important collaborations for me have been across so many genres, from Uncle Peter Sculthorpe and Uncle Ross Edwards to more contemporary avant-garde composers like Liza Lim, Matthew Hindson; collaborations with the Doonooch Dancers, my mum Aunty Delmae Barton and Veronique Serret, with Iva Davies and Shane Howard, Uncle Roger Knox, with Herbie Hancock, James Morrison and Yo Yo Ma. An important collaboration was on the Liza Lim piece The Compass, performed here with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) and toured to Europe on a Sydney Symphony tour.¹⁰ Another was with Matthew Hindson, that was my first co-commission for the SSO – we worked out who was going to do what, we came up with the theme which was the main thing, the important thing, so I said let’s write about Kalkadunga Country, about battle mountain, and I’ll sing my signature song, which is Kalkadunga Yurdu.¹¹ Kalkadungu Yurdu kalkadunug marabi is something I wrote when Dad was still alive, when I was about fifteen years old, and I think I first performed it in front of Mum and Dad and some others out at the mining site Mount Monument, just outside of Mount Isa as a young teenager. And so even though there’s an orchestral version with Matthew Hindson, it’s a language song, and I get up on stage with the orchestra and I sing for my people, and you know, I don’t bring the didjeridu in until the last few powerful, or monumental, moments after the big battle, and that’s to give joy. In other collaborations with various mixed ensembles in Australia, I have been always looking beyond where I was standing, the expansiveness of what musicality should be, going back to my uncle, that magic – how can I walk out on stage and connect with people.

Kalkadungu has been performed on a tour of the US in Royce Hall in Los Angeles and Carnegie Hall in New York, and I’m proud because I’m resonating my language on the stage and I’m thinking about my people. In 2019, I composed a piece for solo didjeridu and called it the Spirit of Kalkadungu – at Westminster Abbey, all the Royal Family was present. I called it that because I wanted the presenter on the BBC to say, ‘William Barton is playing the Spirit of Kalkadungu.’ It keeps on creating the space, slowly, bit by bit those ripples in the sand just keep on getting bigger. Every time someone says a language word, or learns language, it just keeps on rippling out, slowly, slowly. In that moment of playing for the Queen of England and the Royal Family, I tilted my didjeridu up towards the sky represented by the ceiling of Westminster and paid homage to the four winds of language and cultural identity. That’s the meaningful spirit of the performance that I do.

In my recent work Apii Thatini Mu Murtu Kalkadungu, I want members of the orchestra to sing in language.¹² So, at the end of Apii, I’ve got the orchestra singing ‘Apii Thatini Mu Murtu Kalkadungu’, and that’s just so simple but simultaneously really powerful, to sing to Country together. My most recent commission is for Simone Young, she’s conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’, which is one of her flagship pieces because she feels the in-tuneness of the land. I asked the SSO for some floorboards from the old Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, which I made into clapsticks.¹³ That’s part of that resurrection.

In this chapter of my career, I’m moving into roles as an adviser and creative consultant, such as with Australia Day Live, and now joining the Board of Directors of both the SSO and the Australian Music Centre.¹⁴ I’m a part of that engine room of change. And it’s my intention in these roles to bring my experience to enhance cultural awareness and create more opportunity for outreach programmes and making music accessible, and for opportunities within the art music community. At the same time, I want to create a platform for a high standard of musicality to come through, making sure across all levels of the musical landscape that people have the appropriate platform to express themselves at whatever level they’re at in their career, to amplify their learning process. If non-Indigenous composers are invited to write a work with an Indigenous theme, there are protocols that should be in place. For example, I always get permission from the elders in the areas I’m entering into, so these things are in the contract, and I’m engaged at that level. In earlier times, the whole journey with Sculthorpe and other composers, you can look at that and say, well that was then, and this is now, and we’ve got the chance to make things right now. We’ve got the chance to credit that person right or give them 10 per cent royalties, and it keeps on getting better and ‘righter’ every time.

When I think about our legacy and what Australia’s national music is, I think about what can bring us together as one multicultural humanity in this modern day and age, in 2024 and beyond. What are the significant elements that are important? The foundational wisdom of our ancestors, of our elders, who are still here with us and those who have passed. What does that leave us exactly to take to the next generation of story tellers and Indigenous leaders as well as non-Indigenous leaders who can walk hand in hand and create a better future through understanding and awareness? What’s culturally right and what’s wrong? But how can we also be on the edge to explore the voided space? Because, you know, if we don’t do that, we won’t know what’s there. In a photo of the Australian bush land, there’s nothing there but there’s so much there. Sometimes it is a feeling and a sense of weariness, you know, because that’s a place of solitude, the bush, even if you’re with a group of people; and when you take that with you to the city or to a larger group or community, you feel like you’re part of something because you’re sharing that knowledge, and that history, and that space, and that memory, and that landscape.

If we think about something, we start to create that universe. The more expansiveness of the landscape and the mind through turmoil, sadness, anger, happiness. I think we do what’s right in that moment, and if it’s wrong down the track, we rectify it. We have enough resources now and commitment from enough people in positions, in academic positions, people who are in power, politically, and as long as the acknowledgement is there, where it’s all come from and where it’s going to go, that’s what makes it interesting. That’s what makes the opportunity for a kid from Mount Isa, to be playing the didjeridu with local community, to be playing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages like Carnegie Hall, and then to come back again to our own beautiful sacred lands, our own amphitheatres in our own backyards.