Strangely, Australian media music curators rarely promote uniquely Australian music. Pieces of new Australian music are presented once only, as if they are exotic curiosities, and are soon forgotten. New Australian composers are classified as “emerging” – a gatekeeping bubble that’s almost impossible to burst. Many talented Australian musicians flee overseas to escape this stultifying judgementalism. Supplying gatekept imitations of foreign music repertoires, performed according to gatekept music curriculum criteria, for crowds of adoring gatekept genre fans, is the norm here. In fact, Australia is currently hosting a plague of gatekeeper investors and media presenters who invest in and curate only regurgitations of non-Australian music, most of it from dead white male composers. These music market gatekeepers pour funds into promoting only foreign music, while diligently stifling today’s real, dynamic, developing Australian local music genres. They seem pathologically unaware that Australian music or Australia itself even exists. Driven by profits, they promote only foreign music economies, by funding music festivals and conferences with minimal Australian music content and maximal foreign music content, that regularly flood Australian airwaves with aggressively promoted foreign music. However, the tide may be turning. A few brave Australian concert curators and performers, such as Dr. Christopher Sainsbury, Ensemble Offspring, Dr. Sarah Penicka Smith, River City Voices, Dr. Sally Walker, Dr. Christina Wilson and Dr. Alan Hicks, have braved the flood to bring new Australian music to Australian audiences. But they are still in the minority, and Australia is possibly the only country in the world that imposes restrictive quotas on the percentage of Australian musical content heard on Australian music outlets.

The Australian government and its national broadcaster, the ABC, have done little to deter this smothering foreign sonic invasion. Wealthy investors and middle men (and women) who have no allegiance to Australia are amassing huge profits from it. The National Arts Board that manages Music Australia and funds Australia’s First Nations music has made it abdundantly clear to the whole world that funding, curation, recording and marketing of uniquely Australian music is not its priority, since it almost totally excludes uniquely Australian music pedagogies and repertoires from Australian schools. Instead, it has corralled Australia’s First Nations music in apartheid TV and radio channels, apartheid studios, apartheid festivals, apartheid demographic ghettoes, and archived apartheid repositories.. The Australian government’s globally visible (and glaringly audible) neglect of uniquely Australian music, signals its green light endorsement of foreign music market piracy within the Australian media.

By continuing this neocolonial global music policy, the Australian government has illogically (and apparently intentionally) divested itself, its First Nations communities and many Australian allies, of hugely valuable opportunities to market Australian Indigenous musics globally. The new Australian National Cultural Policy promotes low quality popular music performances of foreign music genres as a pacifying strategy designed to unify diverse cultures, but it has provided no wholehearted, uniquely Australian, nationally unifying aspirational focus for Australians to gather around. It lacks a vivifying soul, and it continues to smother Australian songmaking spirituality by funding imported music education pedagogies.

The neocolonial “experts” who wrote this policy simply assume that the status quo will continue: i.e. that “Australian music” education will continue to be based on imported Western coloniser music pedagogies and taught by music teachers trained in Western music systems, and that immigrant musics are entitled to prioritised funding. The policy assumes that First Nations musicians are necessarily incompetent in Western music, so while they may be temporarily mentored as token performers, they are ineligible to apply for music teaching positions in Australian schools. If by any chance they acquire competence in Western music, and wish to apply to teach music, they must assimilate into a Western music practice and Western society, and subordinate their Indigenous Australian music heritage and identity to Western music industry values and ptactices.

This coercively racist music policy mirrors the enforced, but now completely discredited, culturally assimilative policies of the Western Australian Protector of Aborigines A. O. Neville. It imposes imported immigrant musics on all Australians, and thereby prevents the development of a valid national musical repertoire. From an Indigenous Australian perspective, these immigrant musics have been deployed in all Australian schools, by this neocolonial government, as a racist weapon that is intended to genocidally erase, mute or engulf all Indigenous Australian music cultures.

In Australia, music performance and music teaching accreditation is conferred after practical and theoretical examinations in a Western music genre such as jazz or classical music. These examinable Western music genres are all notated and published in music examination texts. Many of the examination pieces offered to Australian singing candidates, require the student to learn to sing in a foreign language. Written and performance music examinations are usually conducted in English, but interpreters may be provided for immigrant students. No Indigenous Australian interpreters are provided to Indigenous Australian music candidates by Australian music schools or universities. The music history, philosophy and theory curricula taught in Australian University Faculties and Schools of Music are all derived from non-Australian, coloniser or immigrant music pedagogies and traditions.

At the time of writing, there are only two fully accredited, practising Indigenous Australian teachers of Western classical and contemporary Indigenous Australian music, in the whole of Australia. Several prominent Australian Indigenous musicians and composers who have been awarded honorary degrees in music have chosen not to teach music in Australia, because immigrant music pedagogies prioritised by the Australian government, still dominate Australian music teaching curricula. To teach music in Australia, they would be required to mute or completely erase their sophisticated, ancient Indigenous music pedagogical heritage by subordinating it to Western pedagogies. Indigenous Australian music is effectively excluded from most “Australian music” classes, that are actually devoted to teaching immigrant music theories and methods, and studying foreign music repertoires. So several well qualified Indigenous Australian musicians have found lucrative employment with foreign film companies and orchestras, which deprives Australia of their music.

Many non-Indigenous Australian jazz music teachers work with Indigenous Australian musicians on a regular basis, but none of these accredited non-Indigenous jazz teachers have recommended or assisted their mentored Indigenous Australian protegees to obtain entry to permanent, secure music teacher or music lecturer positions in Australia.

Since the turn of the century in 2000, the number of experienced, capable, practising Indigenous Australian musicians has grown exponentially with access to computer music systems and grant funding. But there is still no independently funded Indigenous Australian music curriculum, school, or music accreditation system. The Australian government has refused to fully fund development of such a system. It costs money to develop and publish a notated Indigenous Australian music repertoire to enable Australia wide Indigenous music teaching, and no funding has yet been allocated for this. Australia now has an expert Indigenous Australian music teaching cohort, but these musicians have not been employed to teach Australian music to Australian music students.

Australian music lovers, whether they make music, or just listen to music, or both, are usually attached to particular music genres, with famous, well promoted repertoires. Music industry playlists promote consumer music genre attachment, by assigning simplified worldwide marketing codes to the most popular genres. The music genre tribalism this system has spawned, undervalues and underpromotes musics that don’t match its codes. The culturally dampening effect of worldwide music industry coding is so general, that the unique musics of Indigenous cultures can scarcely be heard over the ever present, aggressive presence of coded music industry genres such as rock, pop, R&B, house, jazz, folk, world, classical and contemporary classical.

Despite diligent efforts to work with this unbalanced, unrealistic system, many Indigenous Australian musicians have found that the global music system of the 2020s is not prepared to promote or even name our local Indigenous musics and musicians properly. This global music system, dominated as it is by profit making and non-Australian music genres, has persistently refused to introduce music consumers to our ancient Australian Indigenous music genres respectfully. Instead, it has harvested a few of our talented young musicians and is teaching them to present our music as if it is part of a coded, cultureless, artificial “world music” genre. The world music genre wrongly assumes that our communities cultures will die out or be absorbed into coloniser musics, but our cultures and communities have survived and are flourishing. World music coding does not support our traditional tribal cultures or our ancient music traditions. Some of our senior Indigenous Songmen have died of despair, while trying to make the authentic sound of their priceless traditional music heard within this unjust system. There are better ways to amplify our music.

So our Australian Indigenous music industry is now developing self determined, independent ways of confronting this unrepresentative, discriminatory global music industry, that are gradually making our culture based local community songs, heard and understood on world stages, in their authentic forms. Australian investors are supporting our efforts. Australian Indigenous choirs such as the Ntaria Songkeepers from Pitjantjatjara Country, the Gay’wu Women’s Group from Yolgnu Country, the Tiwi Strong Women from the Tiwi Islands, and the Madjitil Moorna Choir from Noongar Country, are the leaders of this community based movement.