At the very moment when Australian art music composers were incorporating Aboriginal culture into their music as a way of fashioning a distinctive national identity on the world stage, the performance of culture by First Nations people in Australia was being actively suppressed through policies of assimilation. In her recently-published book Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970 (Bloomsbury, 2020), Amanda Harris traces the parallel history of non-indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture with the simultaneous assertion of presence by Aboriginal performers appearing on stages around Australia.
In this conversation, Amanda describes her findings and shares stories of her research, describing her process of trawling through archives chasing traces of familiar names of Aboriginal performers here and there, and supplementing the patchy documentation with oral history accounts provided by relatives of these performers. Tiriki Onus, who provides one of the first-person accounts in the book, describes the activities of his grandfather William ‘Bill’ Onus, first Indigenous president of the Aborigines Advancement League in 1967, who joined showmanship with film-making and political activism. The conversation concludes with a discussion of the ways and which we can incorporate Aboriginal music, culture, and knowledges into our teaching and research in culturally appropriate ways, taking these stories forward in classrooms and conversations into the future.