In 1788 the British arrived in Australia, bringing European music with them. Attempts were made – in bungling, unsuccessful ways – to connect with the Dharug speaking tribes they encountered. As Aboriginal hunting grounds were stolen, and disease decimated the clans, coloniser documentation of Indigenous music and languages was not encouraged by the colonisers. The work of a few colonial scholars who wrote about Aboriginal languages and musics was archived and forgotten for centuries. The colonisers soon began to think of their imported music, as “Australian music.” This musical cuckoo in the nest, joined over the years by waves of immigrant cuckoo-in-the-nest musics, and also by globalised, genre coded internet music, developed a vast, popular nostalgic repertoire of the faraway “music of home” that attempted to overwhelm, replace and erase all of the Indigenous music cultures of the Australian continent.

The Australian Music Centre inherited a culturally non-Australian immigrant music collection that was, until very recently, devoid of written Australian Indigenous music. Early transcriptions of Indigenous music made by colonial soldiers and settlers are still consigned to The Australian Museum, as if they are not Australian Music, but quaint exotic curiosities of a past age. They have been forgotten for so long, they were considered unlikely to be revived. But recently the sacred voices of revered ancestral witnesses such as Bennelong were heard again in a recent Australian Museum exhibition called Songs of Home, and the land stirred and burst into life.

John Davis, CEO of the Australian Music Centre, agreed with Dharug composer Dr. Christopher Sainsbury and Bunuba dramaturge Frederick Copperwaite of Mooghalin Arts, that this massive sidelining and silencing of Indigenous Australian music is fundamentally unjust, a reflection of outdated colonial racist prejudice. So they formed an alliance to provide opportunities for contemporary Australian Aboriginal composers to reassert long silenced Indigenous music and languages, as equal with the avalanche of immigrant music that has usurped their rightful place in Australian concert halls and the media.

The pilot Indigenous Composers Initiative program, launched in October 2016, produced twenty new ABC recorded pieces by five Aboriginal composers in 2017, and continued until 2018. As a DipMus Graduate of Eora Aboriginal College, with a lifetime of solo and choral singing performance experience in opera, large choirs and churches, I was selected by Dr. Sainsbury for this program. The 2018 ICI Composers Concert at the 2018 ANU School of Music Studio Concert, that premiered five of my pieces (Burradowi, Wonthaggi, Warangka Makialo, Kaya Mary (The Blue Pool) and Mary Moorditj Ngaangk,, was presented at the ABC’s Eugene Goossens Hall, after a downpour flooded the Eora Aboriginal College Theatre. Ali Murphy-Oates videoed Ensemble Offspring’s performance of my piece Wonthaggi, that was sung by Sonya Holowell, accompanied by Roland Peelman (piano) and Anna McMichael (violin),

I completed my ICI internship in 2018, and was elected to Associate Composer Membership of the Australian Music Centre in 2019. In 2020 the ICI program, now known as the Ngarra Burria Indigenous Composers course, has eight active members, five of whom are Associate Members of the Australian Music Centre. Ngarra Burria means “to listen, to sing” in the Dharug Aboriginal language. Virtuoso vibraphonist Claire Edwardes and her group Ensemble Offspring have partnered with Ngarra Burria, to workshop and record this unique new repertoire of notated, professionally performed Australian Indigenous music.