Doctoral Thesis
A Cultural History of Music and Musicking of the North-West Region of Western Australia (circa 1860s-2022): From " Music of the Midnight Cat" to "Bran Nue Dae"
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Murdoch University
2022
Abstract
This thesis focuses on a regional Australian example of the creative and performance arts of music and its corollary musicking. It explores the secular and sacred music and musicking informing the cultural and social lives of the multicultural inhabitants of the North-West region of Western Australia, including Aboriginal peoples and arrivants such as settlers, migrants, and economic sojourners. The historical North-West is now designated as the Pilbara and Kimberley regions.
The research and analysis is contextualised within the cultural, social, economic and political environments of the North-West. The interrelationships established by those factors reveal the range of pleasures, prejudices and precarity informing music and musicking. The focus on culture at macro and micro levels shows the influence and evolution of cultural practices, social aesthetics and performance cultures, reflecting the diversity of Australia's multicultural peoples in its remote regions.
This thesis is apposite to cultural and music historian John Rickard's recommendation "to [write] music into Australian history" and demonstrates how music and musicking can be accommodated within an historical narrative of regional Australia.
The time frame chosen reflects the archival documentation of music and musicking from the establishment of the pearling and pastoral industries in the regions to the efflorescence of the Aboriginal Broome-based 'music scene' in various iterations of Bran Nue Dae (1991-2020) as music theatre, documentary, feature film, revival, and as an "imaginative cultural narrative".
Two main objectives of the thesis are: 1. to increase the scholarly and community understanding of the cultural history (through music and musicking) of the region; and, 2. to address lacunae in the historical literature of the North-West region.
The research approaches used are qualitative and multi-disciplinary primarily based in History but including relevant paradigms and literatures from Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Ethnomusicology and Indigenous Studies. The data used are gathered from diverse sources, including the aforementioned scholarly literatures as well as archives, newspapers, memoires, journalism, novels, data bases and ethnographic oral histories.
Specific theoretical framing paradigms are those of: 1.) "music and musicking" as a collaborative and entwined activity (Small, 1998); 2.) "music and musicking" in the North-West as a "polyphonic assemblage" (Tsing, 2015) circulating in the soundscapes; 3.) "music and musicking" in the North-West as facilitated by "routes, conduits and mediums of influence" (Whiteoak, 2019); and, 4.) encompassing in the North-West an historical, multicultural, transregional Australian "Pearl Frontier" (Martínez and Vickers, 2015) and some of its Western Australian pastoral hinterlands.
Details
- Title
- A Cultural History of Music and Musicking of the North-West Region of Western Australia (circa 1860s-2022): From " Music of the Midnight Cat" to "Bran Nue Dae"
- Authors/Creators
- Karl W Neuenfeldt
- Contributors
- Dave Palmer (Supervisor) - Murdoch University, School of Humanities, Arts and Social SciencesCarol Warren (General Contributor) - Murdoch University, Centre for Biosecurity and One HealthJoseph Christensen (Supervisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Murdoch University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Identifiers
- 991005609163707891
- Murdoch Affiliation
- School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
- Resource Type
- Doctoral Thesis
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