Visitors to Australia are astounded to find that in Australia, First Nations cultures and musics are denigrated, neglected, tokenised and buried in a flood of foreign music shows. When they come to Australia they see foreign music prioritised, honoured, and generously funded in mainstream media, while Australian First Peoples musics are segregated, sporadically patronised, and illogically treated as exotic interlopers and outsiders. This peculiarly Australian insanity, a result of combining John Lennon’s utopian “Imagine” dream with Al Grassby’s egalitarian multiculturalism, churns out stultifying Groundhog Day repertoires of endlessly repeated, globalised foreign music repertoires. In the Australian media, and in most Australian cinemas, theatres, concert halls and festivals, tourists and locals are constantly fed non-Australian music. This imported music is of course beautiful, and expertly performed, but tourists don’t travel huge distances to Australia to hear and see foreign music shows, that they can hear and see at home. Having spent thousands of dollars to get here, tourists expect to hear and see the fascinating, uniquely Australian music and dance of this continent.

It seems that Australian arts officials who eagerly fund the thriving music economies of foreign countries are intent on competition, They are certsinly succeeding in depriving Australian artists of work opportunities. Building Australian national unity in a multicultural population confused by the external musical allegiances of these investors, is almost impossible. The theory that importing competitive foreign music cultures, and hoping that a global cultural synthesis will miraculously emerge, out of this chaos, has failed. The muddled authors of multicultural Chaos Theory have much to answer for. Building a national song economy takes generations of systematic, disciplined, cooperative teamwork that has a clear goal. For generations Australia’s First Peoples have formed and managed cooperative teams. We have proven our capacity to create and display Australia’s unique national cultural assets in trustworthy partnerships with immigrant peoples. Australia’s sovereign song economy should be honoured and appropriately funded, defended and protected, not disrespected or exploited by cultural piracy. And since such a project must be national, cooperation between States is essential.

PM Albanese’s recent claim that the rebranded Australia Council – Music Australia – will put “First Peoples First” holds little water in view of Music Australia’s delivery of a mere dribble of funding to Australian First Nations music. In its latest 2023 round, the neocolonial Arts Council Board rejected thousands of funding applications from Australian First Nations musicians and composers, and over funded a flood of pastiche and foreign genre musics. These mass audience urban shows are globally antilocalised, culturally impoverished, focused on foreign “star” cults, and anti-Australian. This misinformed pro-foreign music policy contradicts the government policy of reviving Australian First Nations languages and cultures. It allows the anti-national Australian pendulum to swing too far away from healthy community unity.

In recent years, awareness that sophisticated, intelligent pre-colonial Indigenous Australian music systems were, and are still, powerfully present in Australia, has increased slightly. However, much work remains to raise Australian immigrant awareness of, and engagement with, the expanding, foundational cultural presence of Australia’s First Peoples cultures and musics. Carefully managed, educative intercultural performances and exhibitions, cooperative ventures, and properly funded First Nations Festivals managed by local Elders would enable these music economies to flourish.

In Australian urban and rural centres, better media coordination could support the development of local community music repertoires. In today’s Australian shopping malls, fitness gyms, radio stations, TV channels, music studios, religious venues and even in hospitals, obtrusive musical censorship, buoyed by global AI codes and invasive Apps that preference imported music education and imported music repertoires over and above Australian First Peoples musics, still persists. There is no logical reason why this systematic foreign music brainwashing should be imposed on Australian hearts and minds, The Australian government, to be worthy of its name, is obliged to support and prioritise truly Australian musics above foreign musics. An aggressively marketed propaganda music overload is subtly depriving Australians of our inherited cultural song birthrights, by imposing passive global music fan consumerism on a nation of hugely talented, but greatly undervalued and underfunded, local Australian songmakers.

The large tranche of musicological and ethnomusicological research into Indigenous Australian music, has shown that many complex, sophisticated Indigenous Australian music repertoires and pedagogies existed and were taught throughout the Australian continent prior to the 1788 British colonial invasion at Gamay / Kamay / Warran. Grace Koch’s coomprehensive Bibliography of Australian Indigenous Music Literature, Graeme Skinner’s Austral Harmony database, and Canberra’s Ngurra Centre (AIATSIS) Collections, evidence the rich, living diversity and sophistication of Indigenous Australian music cultures. Miraculously, many Indigenous Australian musics have survived the two centuries of Anti-Aboriginal Wars that were waged in Australia. These First Peoples musics are still forced to battle underfunding, education curriculum exclusion, and many other over competitive and discriminatory practices. In this cultural chaos, children are often exposed to high decibel music that damages their hearing and sanctions abuse and violence. Government apartheid policies, and the lack of a Treaty, continue to impair intercultural trust and limit what should be a nationally supported, continental Australian music culture, with well supported inter-community collaboration networks.

In Australia, colonial campaigns intended to silence the songs of Aboriginal Australia have always met with strong, peaceful, intelligent, adaptive First Peoples songmaker and ally resistance. Yet widespread ignorance about, and misrepresentation of Australian First Peoples cultures as “pagan” and “immoral” still persists in Australia. This is partially due to the Australian media’s over-attachment to sensationalism, as with the propaganda film “Jedda.” This racist film is still shown today in Australia. It maliciously slanders Australian missionaries as white supremacists and bigoted racists – when in fact, many missionary allies of Aboriginal communities opposed and fought fiercely against racism. This film also depicted an Aboriginal leader as an uncivilized, crazy savage. Australian church people who know and work with Aboriginal Elders are still forced to contend with racist apartheid policies, administered by ignorant, secularised, anti-cultural racists in government and church offices. The secular racist policies they promote, together with Indigenous child removal, are often cited to disrupt and defund intercultural community programs that would otherwise promote cultural cooperation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

Despite this divisive factionalism, intercultural cooperation has preserved many First Peoples music repertoires and pedagogies, by forming and maintaining disciplined intercultural working relationships. Today, these collaborations are often conducted within government funded apartheid forums and digital radio station ghettoes, but recently these consultations have expanded into more public arenas. They were, and still are, established and grown by cooperative, responsible, well intentioned people who forge strong, lifelong Indigenous and non-Indigenous partnerships to oppose violent, unpunished racism, under great pressures. This Australian ally tradition has many precedents. People like Lt. William Dawes and his informant Patyegorang, Daisy Bates and her many Noongar informants, Carl Strehlow and the Pitjantjatjara Elders led by Moses, and Catherine Ellis and her Pitjantjatjara informants, were all forced to produce and publish their collections quietly. It should be remembered that these scholars, being funded by assimilative apartheid systems, were working within a restrictive system. In this system, two way cultural interaction and learning – e.g. speaking, translating and writing Aboriginal languages, and sharing country-based lifestyles with First Peoples tribes – was banned by colonial British government authorities. Inevitably, in these threatening scenarios, cultural mistakes and omissions were made on both sides, but the eventual outcome of these sustained intercultural learning efforts, over time, has been productive.

It has been claimed that the survival of Australia’s Indigenous musics is entirely due to the resilient nature of mnemonic oral Indigenous music systems, but this is only part of the story. Although Ellis, Barwick and other scholars have demonstrated the accuracy and longevity of Indigenous Australian song memories beyond doubt, it is reasonable to conclude that a combination of oral mnemonic and written / recorded music systems have made significant contributions to the survival of many Indigenous Australian languages and music cultures. For example, field research by Catherine Ellis, Alice Moyle, Alan Marrett, Stephen Wild, Margaret Sharpe, Myfany Turpin, Linda Barwick and Amanda Harris, that could not have been begun or been completed without significant, willing Aboriginal community input, shows the extent, duration and influence of collaborative intercultural music collection, preservation and restoration efforts in Australia. Identifying, documenting, naming and respectfully commemorating all past and present Australian First contributors to non-Aboriginal music research, is a task that is now coordinated by Australia’s Indigenous-managed AIATSIS, soon to be known as the Ngurra Centre.

Australian Aboriginal Elders often work quietly with non-Indigenous scholars in all fields, to document threatened Indigenous Australian cultures. This intercultural work intersects with Australian First Peoples music traditions, that are defined more broadly and wholistically than European coloniser musics. The goodwill and personal sacrifice of many non-Indigenous Australian allies of Aboriginal communities, who opposed unfair colonial policies and as a result suffered extreme social ostracism, should be recognised and properly assessed, not disrespectfully denigrated or ostracised. Many of today’s Aboriginal Elders remember these allies with gratitude.

Australia’s priceless collection of musicological and ethnomusicological literature includes many Indigenous Australian song recordings, written music scores, and written descriptions. Through the diligent work of Linda Barwick and many other scholars, this music heritage has been made available to Indigenous Australian community members, and to authorised scholars, through AIATSIS and the PARADISEC Database. Methods of reviving threatened and archived Indigenous Australian song cultures have been discussed with First Peoples Elders and successfully applied by researchers such as Zuckermann (2021), Sainsbury (2017), Randall (2015) and Cheetham Fraillon (2020), among many others. All these research outcomes have been achieved through close cooperation with First Peoples Elders, however Australian journalists have refrained from publicising them, because much of this Indigenous Intellectual Property is stored under restricted cultural access conditions. Since Aboriginal communities governed by Elders and Lawmen / Law Women now have self-determined Indigenous management control of these resources, they also have power to decide the extent to which these cultural / musical materials may be developed and shared.

My maternal Noongar music culture, from which my compositions arise, is one of the Indigenous Australian music cultures that survived the colonial era through collaborative intercultural cooperation. Many Noongar Elders and colleagues, such as Aunty Rose Whitehurst (dec.) Aunty Mary Taylor, Aunty Josie Boyle (dec.), Aunty Sylvia Nelson, Kaya Nelson, Gina Williams, Phil Walley-Stack, Della Rae Morrison, Kobi Morrison and Dr. Clint Bracknell, have, together with non-Indigenous partners such as Fr. Bernard Rooney, patiently sustained and revived Noongar music, culture and language through testing times, We encourage each other by singing together – as when Aunty Sylvia Nelson and Kaya Nelson sang one of my first Noongar yorga language songs, Moombaki, with me, at the Tranby Aboriginal College / Yorta Yorta Yenbena Centre conference, in 2008.

As discriminatory British legislation was enacted into colonial law, the culturally destructive policies of Aboriginal Protection, Assimilation and Integration were progressively implemented throughout Australia. This colonial legislation, presented as benevolent goodwill, was actually a misguided attempt to erase Australia’s unique Indigenous languages, spiritual beliefs, and education systems. Aboriginal Australians who were unwilling and unable to assimilate into imported cultures, were deprived of paid work, land, property, kinship, culture, music, identity and dignified citizenship. These supposedly “protective” policies imposed extreme cultural, social, psychological and physical suffering on all Australian First Peoples until 1967. Some of these inhumane deprivations have been re-imposed on remote area Indigenous Australian communities in recent years. The impact of Indigenous Australian language deprivation was made much worse by song deprivation, in Australian First Peoples cultures, songs contain the encyclopaedic memories of communities. Depriving First Nations Australians of songs, and in in more recent times discouraging full Indigenous participation in the local, regional and global music market, has unjustly silenced or muted many of Australia’s unique Indigenous musics.

Writing and performing new Indigenous Australian compositions, and reforming Australian music education curricula, can help to redress these injustices. Since 2010, Indigenous Australian music and art, that survived the worst that colonial Aboriginal Wars and violent racism could deliver, has been internationally honored overseas, and acknowledged as uniquely, recognisably Australian. But as this occurred – most notably with the music of the renowned Yolgnu Songman Dr. G., Kalkadoon didjeridu virtuoso William Barton, and Yorta Yorta opera singer and composer Deborah Cheetham Fraillon. Yet government funded music apartheid, supported by racist censorship of media playlists recommended by some music journalists, have continued to trouble and divide the Australian populace. Composing and performing Indigenous Australian music in this oppressive scenario, has become increasingly challenging. Lasting success in this field is not determined by talent or public acclamation, but by token government approval and ongoing funding of a few favoured stars. Failure to attract regular government funding has proven deadly for many superbly talented Indigenous Australian musicians. Gurrumul, the beloved Yolgnu Songman, died tragically in Darwin of kidney disease, neglected by hospital staff who mistakenly classified him as an impoverished alcoholic.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic intervened, Australian concert halls and churches were still packed with nostalgic immigrant origin Australians, time warped into perpetually performing only immigrant music from distant “home.” Yet immigrant origin Australians were not wholly to blame for this cultural nightmare. The whole immigrant Australian population has, in effect, been banned by government and corporate policies, from attaching themselves to any uniquely Australian First Peoples music, since it is not taught in Australian schools and colleges, and is rarely sung in religious gathering places. Perhaps this is about to change.

Goodbye to Australia’s dispiriting Musical Groundhog Day

The way Australian teachers assess musical prowess is a barrier to inclusion of First Nations musuc. Graded Australian Music Examinations Board syllabuses, and other generously funded imported syllabuses of European, American, French, German, Asian, Polynesian and Italian music, predominate in music shops and schools, ensuring that Australian Indigenous music is kept firmly out of sight, and does not appear to be part of any musically literate scenario. Australian church worship and civic ceremonies, including ANZAC Day, overflow with imported immigrant music. Even the current Australian National Anthem mimics an imported song genre, and proudly boasts an immigrant identity. In Australian schools, music written by immigrant or overseas composers still predominates. Global music industry systems do not promote Indigenous Australian music regularly, and Indigenous Australian composers and singer songwriters are instructed to register songs as “world” music in databanks. When I tried to register one of my Noongar language songs, with a Noongar language title, on iTunes, the system told me my Noongar language does not exist. I persisted, but it took me, and some other Noongar Elders, three months to get our language recognized by iTunes.

Each year in Australia, a token Indigenous Australian song is “collected” from an Indigenous community, licensed to a government organization, and printed as a simple melody in a school songbook. Indigenous Australians are often told that since they come from an oral culture, they should never write or publish their own music, and so the myth that Australian Indigenous people are unmusical, because they never write or publish notated music, is perpetuated. Yet only one generation ago, Australian Indigenous singers Tom Foster and Jimmy Little Snr. performed, notated, published and marketed their own Australian Indigenous songs, with piano accompaniments.3 These songs, largely forgotten, were hits in their time. Commercially successful Indigenous musics, including African and Afro-Caribbean music, and Afro-American music, have unhesitatingly hopped on to the music publishing bandwagon, by learning how to notate their own music. And of course, recording music is only another form of musical notation, done by a machine. Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s recent Dhungala Choir song research has demonstrated that the quickest way to revive any hard pressed Indigenous music and culture, is through notated Indigenous language song revival. It is undeniable, that no imported immigrant music pedagogy or repertoire, however excellent, can ever adequately represent the Indigenous Spirit and Heart of Australia, that truly validates Australian identity and statehood, without adequate culturally affirmed musical input from Indigenous Australian communities, musicians and composers. Indigenous Australian Composition research as a catalyst for Music Curriculum Reform My Yoora Tattoo composition research will demonstrate how Indigenous Australian composition can be used, at grass roots level, to promote intercultural communication, educate immigrant communities, and enable Australian music curriculum reform by building a performable, teachable Indigenous music repertoire at grass roots community level. I contend that culturally competent Indigenous Australian Songmen and Songwomen should be employed to compose and teach Indigenous Australian music songs and instrumental music to immigrant Australians in Australian schools and Universities. By working with choirs, ensembles, orchestras to compose and perform Australian Indigenous music in mixed groups in concert halls, at civic functions, and in church services, these Indigenous musicians could affirm Australian identity and statehood, and heal harmful social divisions, caused by long term suppression of Indigenous Australian music. Since most Indigenous Australian musicians are expert at integrating immigrant music into their own musics, while retaining the Indigenous Australian character of each culture, their teaching would also affirm the music of immigrant Australians in a healthy, truly Australian way. In my Indigenous Composition Portfolio, I provide examples of how to share and teach Indigenous Australian music cross culturally in multicultural urban communities, through vocal and instrumental song making. My composition research refutes arguments against employing culturally skilled Indigenous Australian musicians, by miscategorising them as unqualified ethnic music specialists. This argument is promoted in Australian music systems based on imported music repertoires. Currently, the only Australian government endorsed music training pedagogies, curricula, and examination systems deemed to be Australian, are imported foreign pedagogies.

3 Jimmy Little Snr.’s song Give the Coloured Boy a Chance, that he composed, notated and published, was an instant hit, and it made his son Jimmy Little, famous. Tom Foster composed, notated and published two popular church choruses (recently re-performed by Kevin Hunt and Amanda Harris) My Thoughts and I’m Happy Today. They were sung in churches across New South Wales.

This policy is illogical and un-Australian, especially if an imported pedagogy starts to depict itself as the only legitimate Australian music tradition, and excludes Indigenous Australian music from its curriculum. Australia has an ancient, traditional music pedagogy of its very own, and I am one of many Indigenous Australian composers who express and evidence this surviving pedagogy, in my compositions. No imported music pedagogy or repertoire has the right to completely suppress, supplant or erase our Australian Indigenous music pedagogies or repertoires. Australian Indigenous musicians have successfully preserved the authentic content of our uniquely Australian Indigenous cultural identity, and because we have done this, we are more worthy of adequate Australian government funding and promotion, than any immigrant pedagogy or musician, however excellent. This argument may seem xenophobic, but we do not fear immigrants, we welcome them to our countries, as long as they come in peace. We do not claim to be better than them musically, and we honor their music. We are only saying that we, and our Indigenous musics, are fully and uniquely Australian, and that we claim our rightful musical places, and intend to occupy them, in our own countries. To do this, Indigenous musicians from many Australian tribal groups are documenting the way we make public songs, and teach them. Sacred / secret songs are reserved to non-public forums, they are not part of our public song pedagogies. Using these public cultural resources, culturally competent Indigenous Australian musicians can be employed as teachers, and work as respected practitioners within, not outside, Australian music education systems. This basic teaching method has the potential to open the way to anyone who wishes to engage at a more advanced level with Indigenous Australian music, through mentoring by skilled Elders. Many Indigenous Australian Elders and other prominent Australians have called for “meaningful access to cultural heritage” and “education that is culturally affirming” to be supplied to young Australians of all backgrounds. They include Dharug Composer Dr. Christopher Sainsbury, Noongar musicologist and composer Dr. Clint Bracknell, Dr. Patrick Dodson, Dr. Tom Calma, the 250 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart Aboriginal Delegates, and Dhunghutti Elder Dr. Ray Kelly. These calls have fallen on deaf ears in regard to Australian government music education and performance policies. For 233 years, apartheid music education and media policies that overwhelmingly preference immigrant music pedagogies and repertoires have obstructed healthy Australian identity maintenance and development, endorsed discriminatory racism, and blocked peaceful reconciliation with Indigenous Australians. Many Indigenous musicians are now preparing for a musically healthy future in which Indigenous Australian music will take its rightful, leading place in Australian music education and performance systems. Hopefully, a cooperative way can be found to affirm our rightful place in Australian music practice and education systems. With this affirmation, we can raise a new generation of Indigenous Australian musicians, through peaceful non-racist collaboration.

Copyright © Elizabeth Sheppard 2020. All Rights Reserved.