Amanda Harris

Food, Feeding and Consumption (or the Cook, the Wife and the Nutritionist): The Politics of Gender and Class in a 1948 Australian Expedition

The field diaries of John Bray, Bessie Mountford and Margaret McArthur are important first-person accounts of the social dynamics within the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. This article explores the ways in which representations of self and others in the diaries, particularly in relation to food, illuminate the gendered and class-based politics of the expeditions group from the perspectives of participants on the margins of the groups power structures. Although the focus of the expedition was on increasing knowledge about the Aboriginal cultures of Arnhem Land, it is the nuances of post-war non-Indigenous Australian class and gender relationships which are most vividly illuminated in the diaries.

The Spectacle of Woman as Creator: representation of women composers in the French, German and English feminist press 1880–1930

The period 1880–1930 saw women composers achieve unprecedented prominence as composers of large-scale works. This success coincided with the first wave of feminist movements in England, France and Germany. This article views the junctions where these two groups of women met through the vehicle of the feminist press, documenting the tensions and misunderstandings that occurred between emerging women composers attempting to be taken seriously as creative entities and feminists seeking to improve the political, social and professional lot of women. The pervasive aesthetic of male musical genius remained unquestioned by many feminists in spite of examples of female creative brilliance.

Pan-Indigenous Encounter in the 1950s: ‘Ethnic Dancer’ Beth Dean

From 1950, ‘ethnic dancer’ Beth Dean made her living on a lecture-demonstration touring circuit of the dance traditions of Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and North America. To assert her expertise, she claimed to have studied Māori and Australian Aboriginal cultures for a number of years. This article investigates how Dean’s didactic performances drew on American traditions of ethnic dance to present apparently authoritative representations of Indigenous cultures, supported by Adult Education Boards in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia and national arts organisations. I argue that Dean exploited the symbolic potential of ‘corroboree’ as a performance of intercultural communication to establish her authority to speak about and perform Australian Aboriginal dance.

Hearing Aboriginal Music Making in Non-Indigenous Accounts of the Bush from the Mid-Twentieth Century

Mid-century non-Indigenous travellers in the Australian bush found themselves confronted with a new auditory world, one in which the sounds of the city were absent, and the sounds of the bush unfamiliar. The reckonings of these travellers with aural encounters of people, place and animals often came to stand for a complex set of reactions to being in the bush. The way they listened to Aboriginal music being sung and played around them crystallised perceptions held about Aboriginal people and how they might be located in the Australian landscape. How non-Indigenous authors heard and performed culturally familiar music also reflected ways that they viewed themselves and was a means of bringing the familiar to alien surroundings. In this chapter, I combine accounts from diaries of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land with depictions from novels written within two decades of the expedition to give examples of the way Aboriginal music was heard by non-Indigenous travellers. In the process I tease out some of the perceptions of a range of commentators on Aboriginal culture that are revealed in these musical encounters. I also consider how this sound world was brought to bear on a musical composition by Peter Sculthorpe from a slightly later period and reflect on how the musical setting of Aboriginal song themes reveals similar preoccupations to these literary descriptions.

Archival Objects and the Circulation of Culture

Exchanges of cultural capital facilitated cross-cultural communication in a variety of Australian contexts, both before and after the arrival of Europeans in Australia at the end of the eighteenth century. In the absence of common languages on the colonial frontier, exchanges of music, dance, and painting can become tangible means of communication between people seeking to understand the culture of others. This book explores the circulation of ephemeral, physical and spiritual media across the lines that separate cultures from one another. Objects of cultural capital are transformed across landscapes and media through technology, people and their relationships with each other and with the otherworldly space beyond.

Recomposing Her History: the Memoirs and Diaries of Ethel Smyth

The published memoirs and unpublished diaries of English composer, writer and feminist Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) can be seen as sites for dissent from public portrayals of her life and career. Smyths prolific autobiographical writing, appearing across nine published volumes (1919–1940) produced a narrative of rebellion against the male culture of musical life from which she was excluded as a female composer. Her diaries (1918–1941) show a development from early private reflections on personal and emotional experiences to later documents which appear to be written with an audience in mind. I argue that the diaries come to present an important form of life writing for Smyth, painting a controlled portrait of her as creative entity. They further act as a historical record which might outlast her and provide an authoritative account of her life for future researchers. In combination, the memoirs and diaries can be seen as Smyths project of dissent against the musical presss representation of her as a ‘lady composer’ rather than a ‘composer amongst composers’.

The nature of nordicism: Grainger's ‘blue-gold-rosy-race’ and his music

Abstract Graingers racial views and obsession with Nordic culture were an important part of his outlook on life and art. Both Grainger, and scholars commenting since his death, have made conclusions about the strong influence of these views on his music. However little attempt has been made to substantiate these claims. While such an influence is usually difficult if not impossible to quantify, Grainger has left a list of criteria with which to identify traces of Nordicism in his music. It is therefore possible to conduct a musical analysis based on this criteria, to assess the true Nordic influence in Graingers music.