This detailed ethnographic study explores the intercultural crafting of contemporary forms of Aboriginal manhood in the world of country, rock and reggae music making in Central Australia. Focusing on four different musical contexts – an Aboriginal recording studio, remote Aboriginal settlements, small non-indigenous towns, and tours beyond the musicians’ homeland – the author challenges existing scholarly, political and popular understandings of Australian Aboriginal music, men, and related indigenous matters in terms of radical social, cultural and racial difference. Based on extensive anthropological field research among Aboriginal rock, country and reggae musicians in small towns and remote desert settlements in Central Australia, the book investigates how Aboriginal musicians experience and articulate various aspects of their male and indigenous sense of selves as they make music and engage with indigenous and non-indigenous people, practices, places, and sets of values.Making Aboriginal Men and Music is a highly original, intimate study which advances our understanding of contemporary indigenous and male identity formation within Aboriginal Australian society. Providing new analytical insights for scholars and students in fields such as social and cultural anthropology, cultural studies, popular music, and gender studies, this engaging text makes a significant contribution to the study of indigenous identity formation in remote Australia and beyond.

This volume showcases academic research into the rich diversity of music in Australia from colonial times to the present. Starting with an overview of developments during the past 50 years, the contributions discuss Western and non-western genres (opera, film, dance, choral, chamber); the history of music-making in particular cosmopolitan and regional centres (Canberra, Brisbane, the Hunter Valley, Alice Springs); old, new, and experimental compositions; and a variety of performers and ensembles active at particular points in time. In addition, cultural tropes and music as social practice are also explored, providing a rich tapestry of music and music-making in the country. The volume thus serves as a model for representing and approaching multicultural musical societies in an inclusive and comprehensive manner.

Some indigenous people, while remaining attached to their traditional homelands, leave them to make a new life for themselves in white towns and cities, thus constituting an “indigenous diaspora”. This innovative book is the first ethnographic account of one such indigenous diaspora, the Warlpiri, whose traditional hunter-gatherer life has been transformed through their dispossession and involvement with ranchers, missionaries, and successive government projects of recognition. By following several Warlpiri matriarchs into their new locations, far from their home settlements, this book explores how they sustained their independent lives, and examines their changing relationship with the traditional culture they represent.

This book demonstrates the processes of intercultural musical collaboration and how these processes contribute to facilitating positive relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia. Each of the chapters in this edited collection examines specific examples in diverse contexts, and reflects on key issues that underpin musical exchanges, including the benefits and challenges of intercultural music making. The collection demonstrates how these musical collaborations allow Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to work together, to learn from each other, and to improve and strengthen their relationships. The metaphor of the “third space” of intercultural music making is interwoven in different ways throughout this volume. While focusing on Indigenous Australian/non-Indigenous intercultural musical collaboration, the book will be of interest globally as a resource for scholars and postgraduate students exploring intercultural musical communication in countries with histories of colonisation, such as New Zealand and Canada.

Beginning in the early 1980s Aboriginal Australians found in music, radio, and filmic media a means to make themselves heard across the country and to insert themselves into the center of Australian political life. In The Voice and Its Doubles Daniel Fisher analyzes the great success of this endeavor, asking what is at stake in the sounds of such media for Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia, Fisher describes the close proximity of musical media, shifting forms of governmental intervention, and those public expressions of intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social life. Today’s Aboriginal media include genres of country music and hip-hop; radio requests and broadcast speech; visual graphs of a digital audio timeline; as well as the statistical media of audience research and the discursive and numerical figures of state audits and cultural policy formation. In each of these diverse instances the mediatized voice has become a site for overlapping and at times discordant forms of political, expressive, and institutional creativity.

A comprehensive book on contemporary Aboriginal music in Australia.

Real and imagined aboriginal music, men and place -- Desert musics -- Music and men in the aboriginal studio -- Men making the studio -- Playing aboriginal communities -- Blackfellas playing whitefella Towns -- Touring blackfellas -- Changing aboriginal men and musicians