Edith Cowan University

Research Online

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

2021

Educative power and the respectful curricular inclusion of

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music
Michael Webb

Clint Bracknell
Edith Cowan University

Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013

Part of the Australian Studies Commons, Education Commons, Music Commons, and the Sociology of
Culture Commons

10.1007/978-3-030-65617-1
Webb, M., & Bracknell, C. (2021). Educative power and the respectful curricular inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander music. In A. A. Kallio, H. Westerlund, S. Karlsen, K. Marsh & E. Sæther (Eds.), The Politics of Diversity
in Music Education (pp. 71-86). Springer, Cham. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-65617-1_6
This Book Chapter is posted at Research Online.
https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/10225
Educative Power and the Respectful
Curricular Inclusion of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Music

Michael Webb and Clint Bracknell

Abstract This chapter argues for the full, respectful curricular inclusion of Aborig-
inal and Torres Strait Islander music in order to promote a more balanced and
equitable social and cultural vision of the nation-state in Australian schools.
It challenges views that claim Indigenous cultures have been irretrievably lost or
are doomed to extinction, as well as the fixation on musical authenticity. We propose
that the gradual broadening of Indigenous musical expressions over time and the
musical renaissance of the new millennium have created an unprecedented oppor-
tunity for current music educators to experience the educative power of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander music. This means that culturally nonexposed music
teachers can employ familiar musical-technical approaches to the music even as
they begin to more fully investigate the music’s cultural-contextual meanings. The
chapter considers issues that impinge on the music’s educative power, especially
those relating to its definition, its intended audiences, and pedagogies. It aims to help
clear the way for the classroom to become an environment in which students can
sense the depth and vitality of contemporary Australian Indigenous music.

Keywords Indigenous music · Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music ·

Partnership pedagogy · Educative power

This essay is based on the authors’ experience in collaborating in the design and delivery of a
tertiary course on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music for pre-service music educators at the
Sydney Conservatorium of Music (The University of Sydney), 2016–2018. Thomas Fienberg,
whose work is mentioned in the chapter, taught the unit in 2019.

M. Webb (*)
Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
C. Bracknell
Kurongkurl Katitjin Centre for Indigenous Australian Education & Research, Western
Australian Academy of Performing Arts – WAAPA, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA,
Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2021 71

A. A. Kallio et al. (eds.), The Politics of Diversity in Music Education,
Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education 29,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65617-1_6
72 M. Webb and C. Bracknell

1 Introduction

In his memorable Redfern Park speech, to mark 1993 as the United Nations
International Year for the World’s Indigenous People, Australian Prime Minister
Paul Keating (1992) acknowledged that colonists “smashed the traditional way of
life” of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The British colonists’ assump-
tion of racial superiority drove their relentless assault on established Indigenous
customs that had been practiced over vast expanses of territory and time. The rapid
and prolonged endangerment of numerous unique languages and performance
traditions that followed was but one result of a denial of Indigenous sovereignty.
A politics of exclusion developed around two of the settler colonists’ founding
ideologies. First, “terra nullius”, the doctrine that no one was here when the settler
colonists arrived ensured that the autochthonous residents and their cultural expres-
sions were pushed to the margins of the national story. Second, the notion of the
“noble savage”, meant that Indigenous music created as a result of European
colonization was for decades overlooked on the grounds that it was derivative or
inauthentic (Guy 2015), just as Indigenous peoples with a non-Indigenous parent
were denigrated as ‘half-caste’, a supposed “contaminated version of a pristine and
primitive race” (Rowse 2017, p. 4).
This chapter challenges the long-term lack of engagement between Australia’s
mainstream music education system and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
musical cultures. Such persistent indifference and inertia in educational policy and
practice may be seen to perpetuate colonial logics and counter curricular ideals of
cultural respect and inclusion. For purposes of remediation, we trace this history of
educational neglect in an attempt to clear a path for corrective action on the grounds
that Australia’s Indigenous music possesses “educative power” (Boyea 1999, p. 32).
By this, following Boyea (1999), we argue that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
music can be “looked at from within the culture as part of the culture and from
outside the culture as music only, music in itself. It can be examined for its meanings
or simply for its musical traits” (p. 32). As Boyea elaborates, the music “can be
looked at functionally or aesthetically, spiritually or secularly, as an object for
observation and a process to be performed” (p. 32). This frees the non-Indigenous
“nonexposed” music teacher (Boyea 1999, p. 36), that is, the teacher who has little
experience of Australian Indigenous culture, from the pressure of having to authen-
tically present the music “within a cultural context” as the syllabus support docu-
ment requires (Board of Studies NSW 2004, p. 37). This, by the way, is a condition
that is placed on no other music form, style or genre.
We begin by confronting the deficit discourse that has been so detrimental to
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and their cultural expressions and remind
educators that Indigenous Australians, particularly through music and performance,
have “adapted and developed new ways of communicating the strength and histories
of their cultures” (Casey 2012, p. 1). We also discuss the epistemological disjuncture
Educative Power and the Respectful Curricular Inclusion of Aboriginal and. . . 73

that impeded more widespread curricular inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander music by educationists until almost the end of the twentieth century.
We devote the remaining space to an exploration of issues that impinge on the
music’s educative power, especially those relating to definitions, the music’s
intended audiences and pedagogies.

2 Traditions and Curricula in Transition

The most detailed and sustained historical account to date of the music and dance of
an Aboriginal nation is Anna Haebich’s Dancing in the Shadows (2018), which
demonstrates how the Nyungar people of Western Australia have relied upon
performance culture “to survive” the catastrophic impact of colonization (p. 1).
Haebich (2018) challenges the fallacy that Indigenous Australians “lost” their
culture, which, she writes, “suggests a deliberate ignorance and forgetting on the
part of settler colonists that validated the many cruelties and injustices of coloniza-
tion” (p. 3). Related to this is what Jim Wafer (2017) terms the “doomed cosmology”
theory, which maintains that “even if Aboriginal people have, against all odds,
managed to survive, at least their cosmology is doomed to extinction, as they
come to terms with the consequences of colonial history”, another idea that has
proven to be false (p. 5). Music educationists have much to learn from studies such
as Dancing in the Shadows, which trace and draw out continuities – and, of course,
differences – between past and present expressive performance practices.
As Ottosson (2015) explains, “[p]rior to the 1960s, Indigenous Australian expres-
sive cultural forms were, in the main, categorized and evaluated by criteria for
‘primitive art’, and the lesser the ‘contamination’ by European contact, the higher
their ‘authentic’ value” (p. 7). For example, in the early 1960s, Aboriginal per-
formers from Bathurst Island and Yirrkala became involved with the Elizabethan
Theatre Trust in the creation of “new dynamic performances” that took their music
and dance traditions to enthusiastic audiences in Melbourne and Sydney (Harris
2017, n.p.). Such interest was based on particular assumptions about art and aes-
thetics that arose from an epistemology that was fundamentally foreign to Indige-
nous culture. One newspaper review of the work signalled at least a faint recognition
of the need to engage at a deeper level with Aboriginal cosmological foundations:
“Most of us have great goodwill towards Aborigines and their culture, without
having more than a superficial knowledge of their art [. . .] This remarkable stage
show is not to be missed” (Giese n.d.). At the same time, “non-Indigenous Australian
composers and choreographers were creating hybrid works that drew on barely
understood Aboriginal story, music, and dance traditions” (Harris 2017, n.p.).
For the last decades of the twentieth century, works by composers such as John
Antill, Margaret Sutherland, George Dreyfus, Peter Sculthorpe and Sarah Hopkins
74 M. Webb and C. Bracknell

and a limited selection of folk and rock songs shaped secondary students’ under-
standing of Aboriginal musical ideas.1
By the middle of the twentieth century, ethnomusicologists were studying
Aboriginal music and attempted to understand it on its own terms (Ellis 1984).
As Catherine Ellis stated, “many of the values we accept as ‘normal’ in music,
products of our own middle-class culture, are seen by others as racist and elitist”
(Ellis 1974, p. 25). Ellis recognized a great need for a bridge between the expressive
cultural worlds of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. With Lila Rankine,
she established the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music (CASM) at the University
of Adelaide in 1972, where Aboriginal and Western ways of learning were merged to
form a bi-musical pedagogy.2 Nevertheless, from the late 1960s, even as attitudes,
policies and practices that largely excluded Indigenous people from public life were
being challenged, “monocultural understandings” that were “underpinned by spe-
cific notions of ‘traditional’ and ‘authenticity’” became entrenched (Ottosson 2015,
p. 6). During this same period, pioneering groundwork for a broader public aware-
ness of musical changes that were underway was being undertaken by prominent
Indigenous musicians including Jimmy Little (Yorta Yorta), Dulcie Pitt (whose
stage name was Georgia Lee) (Torres Strait Islander) and Vic Simms (Bidjigal).
Songmen such as the Yankunytjatjara songwriter Bob Randall, who composed the
country style lament “My Brown Skin Baby” in 1964, and Gurnu musician Dougie
Young, who around 1963 composed “Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards”,
began to sing of their experiences of deep loss under the colonial regime.
In the 1980s, scholars issued a call to mainstream music educators to teach
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music (Moyle 1981; Kartomi 1988), and
some even offered model teaching approaches. For example, by 1980 Alice Moyle
had created an extensive educational kit for primary school teachers, but all attempts
to have it published were unsuccessful until 1991. Moyle (2019) wished to “develop
understanding of the importance of music and dance in the culture that, traditionally,
has no writing, and to foster recognition of regional differences in Aboriginal songs
and dance” (p. 25). She proposed well-intended projects such as “class-created
corroborees” (Moyle 1981, p. 19), which arguably perpetuated a distorted view of
the traditions they set out to promote. For various reasons, teachers were halting in
their response to such initiatives, and the majority continued to exclude Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander music from their teaching repertoires.
As an overt politics of multiculturalism gained momentum in Australia,3
non-Western music was validated in the syllabus of at least one state in the early

1
For example, “Aborigine” by Gary Shearston (from the 1974 album Dingo), “Solid Rock”
released in 1982 by Shane Howard’s band Goanna and “Blackfella/Whitefella” by Neil Murray
and George Rrurrambu of Warumpi Band, released in 1985. This quickly began to change in the
mid-1980s as the discussion of pop, country, rock and reggae developments below indicates. On
Australian pop music and its appropriation of Aboriginal music from the 1950s to the 1970s, see
Casey (2018).
2
For subsequent innovations see Chadwick and Rrurrambu (2004).
3
For musical manifestations of this development, see Smith (2009).
Educative Power and the Respectful Curricular Inclusion of Aboriginal and. . . 75

1980s (Secondary Schools Board 1983, 8). At the same time, the exclusion of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music continued. Compounding this paradox,
in the lead up to the implementation of multiculturalist doctrines, “coincidental with
assimilation polices that sought to destroy Aboriginal identity, a growing interest in
Aboriginal art and culture captured the interest of Australians at large” (Kleinert
2010, pp. 176–177).
From 1980, Indigenous musicians had adopted rock and reggae to explore themes
relating to the impact of settler colonialism. Marcus Breen (1989/2007) notes that
such music “was a political statement that laid claim to a missing history” (p. xii).
Its sound was a “bricolage of new and emerging expressions of identity that took
tribal music, as well as Jimmy Little and rock and roll and cranked it up into a mish-
mash of cultural empowerment” (p. xi). The band No Fixed Address, formed by
students at CASM in 1979, fashioned a sound “that has since defined popular
Indigenous music in the country”, which, wrote Brent Clough (2012), is “an
assemblage of roots reggae, ska, country, rock ‘n’ roll and now hip-hop – allied to
the proclamation of contemporary black identity” (p. 269).
The emergence of the academic field of popular music studies, the reverberations
of which began to be felt in school music education in Great Britain and Australia in
the 1980s, led educationists to envision the instructional benefits of the newer music
forms:
The incorporation of Australian Indigenous popular music in school curricula may be
viewed as a means to cultural tolerance, as a role model for Indigenous community
members, as a source of musical knowledge, as current social comment or as emblematic
of cultural intricacies [. . .] Aligned with the immediacy of student youth, Australian
Indigenous popular music may then prove a potent mix essential to the ongoing process of
developing an Australian musical and cultural identity. (Wemyss 1999, p. 36)

The positive reception nationally of the Arnhem Land, Northern Territory band, and
Yothu Yindi, whose music appealed to mainstream music educators seeking ways to
bring Aboriginal music into their classroom, promised to advance such agendas.
The band’s success coincided with the rise of the Internet; its website went live in
1995 and expanded the reach of the music, including into educational settings
(Neuenfeldt 1997). For lead singer Mandawuy Yunupingu, Yothu Yindi’s early
1990s breakout hit, Treaty, meant that:
we were able to take our music [. . .] to the world. But what ‘Treaty’ caused here, back in
Australia, was the young people, black and white, of different nationalities, understanding
our music – Aboriginal music, language, the thinking. When we went out and faced the
world, the world accepted our music.4

The group included Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members, and its songs com-
bined local language songs with rock and dance elements; thus it modelled a new
way to express cultural complementarity, that is, diverse components all equally
necessary to music’s impact. Aaron Corn calls the band’s song, Tribal Voice a “tour

4
Mandawuy Yunupingu from an interview by George Negus on ABC TV, 8 July 2004, quoted on
the ArtsEdge website: http://www.artsedge.dca.wa.gov.au/resources/Pages/Music.aspx.
76 M. Webb and C. Bracknell

de force [that . . .] set forth a vision for an Australia in which Indigenous peoples can
live in harmony and mutual respect with their fellow citizens, while continuing to
practice sacred laws and care for country in their traditions of their ancestors” (Corn
2017, n.p.).
Although Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island music began to be included in
school music offerings with greater enthusiasm after Yothu Yindi, it was still treated
as Other. Yothu Yindi was primarily considered a (Yolngu) Aboriginal band – it
certainly highlighted its Aboriginality – but it was heard predominantly through a
world music filter. Yothu Yindi’s music tended to be exoticized, and the contribu-
tions of the band’s white musicians as well as the elements of African diasporic
blackness in their sound were downplayed or ignored, and for the most part, so were
the subtler political messages of their songs (see Taylor 2007, pp. 156–159).
The new millennium witnessed an outpouring of creative musical expressions by
Indigenous musicians, following examples set in the previous two decades by
Warumpi Band, Coloured Stone, Yothu Yindi, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter,
Christine Anu, Troy Cassar-Daley and many others. This gained added impetus
following the National Apology to the Stolen Generations delivered in 2008 by the
then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, when it became evident that an Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander musical renaissance was underway. This was signalled by the
release in 2008 of both Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s self-titled solo album – the
first full-length popular music recording sung entirely in an Aboriginal language
(Yolngu) – and the first of Jessica Mauboy’s outpouring of mainstream pop hits.
Subsequently, music teachers became more aware of, and sensitive towards,
protocols and potential restrictions pertaining to the inclusion of certain Indige-
nous music forms in classroom practice, which was a welcome development.
However, many were deterred from programming Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander music for fear of committing cultural errors (Locke and Prentice 2016).
And so, the continuing absence of Indigenous music from classrooms perpetuated
a distorted social and cultural understanding of the nation-state and has conse-
quences for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students to this day. Encounter-
ing music of their own cultural heritage in school can affirm Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander students in their histories and world views and offer comfort and
validation (see Boyea 2000, p. 14). And, when handled judiciously, it can bene-
ficially “unsettle” those non-Indigenous students fixed in their own histories and
worldviews.
Music educators need to develop confidence and willingness to learn – then teach –
about how an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander politics of identity and survival has
been indispensable to Indigenous peoples’ resilience and recovery and how music has
been crucial to such initiatives. A meaningful first gesture would be for teachers to
commit to recognizing the country or local region of every Indigenous musician whose
music they bring into the classroom. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
“want to be known not just as [Indigenous] Peoples, but by their own distinct
inheritance, their unique and separate nations and tribes” (Boyea 1999, p. 46).
The Australian Indigenous musical landscape is more diverse and complex today
than it has been at any previous time. This gradual broadening of the music’s scope
Educative Power and the Respectful Curricular Inclusion of Aboriginal and. . . 77

has in certain ways enhanced its educative power, by, for example, offering the
teacher a broader range of musical repertoire options. In other words, more potential
points of entry into the world of Australian Indigenous music now exist. This is
helpful for the nonexposed non-Indigenous music teacher who may have “a hard
time hearing [Indigenous] music as music, a hard time noticing its complexity,
variation, and range of styles, a hard time grasping its principles or organization”
(Boyea 1999, 36). It is crucial to have a clear understanding of what comprises
contemporary Indigenous music and to be able to discern its intended audiences.
These matters have implications for pedagogy, although we are unable to discuss
them in detail here. We will however briefly refer to recent innovative classroom
work being undertaken in Western Sydney by our colleague Thomas Fienberg (see
also Locke and Prentice 2016, pp. 145–148).

3 Identify, Don’t Define

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)
website states that it is better “to identify rather than define Indigenous peoples [. . .]
based on the fundamental criterion of self-identification as underlined in a number of
human rights documents”.5 Indigenous music has been seen to include a wide array
of “types and styles [. . .] such as traditional, ethnic, national, regional and folk” and
“incorporate[s] song, dance, storytelling, instrumental music, games and drama”
(Locke and Prentice 2016, p. 140). It is clear that definitions of what constitutes
Indigenous music risk essentializing the music and culture, a situation that educa-
tionists have more recently been striving to overcome. As Bracknell has pointed out
elsewhere, since both Indigenous and non-Indigenous musicians in Australia now
commonly operate within the same broad range of globally established musical style
conventions, “it is counterintuitive to cast ‘Indigenous music’ as a separate genre”
(Bracknell 2019, p. 102). For example, country music created and performed by
Aboriginal musicians for a worldwide market need not be classified as Aboriginal
country music, that is, it need not be marked as an unusual or divergent form of
country music. Further, “Indigenous music” as a coverall term is often reliant on
“outsider-perceived notions of authenticity and [it] pigeonholes Indigenous artists as
exotic” (p. 103). Hence, Bracknell (2019) proposes a baseline description of Indig-
enous music whereby it is distinguishable both by its “inclusion of musical or lyrical
content derived from Indigenous people” (p. 100), and the “Indigenous status of the
artists involved in its production” (p. 100).
Bracknell’s (2019) approach further clears the way for classroom engagement
with the educative power of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music in that it
places the music on an equal footing with other music proposed and prescribed by

5
See Indigenous Australians: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people: https://aiatsis.gov.au/
explore/articles/indigenous-australians-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-people.
78 M. Webb and C. Bracknell

the syllabus. Hence, an integrative approach to Indigenous music can be taken,

whereby its sonic properties can be studied alongside music from any other
historical-cultural tradition “to teach concepts, principles, generalizations, and the-
ories” (Howard and Kelley 2018, p. 18). This goes hand in hand with creating
opportunities for students to interact and create music with culture bearers, as
discussed later in the chapter, “therefore”, as one music education text announces
optimistically, “debunking the thinking that one cannot understand another culture”
(Howard and Kelley 2018, p. 18).
Versions of the NSW syllabus and supporting documents issued in the new
millennium allow for this kind of development, although they still do not reflect
the most recent developments in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music.
For example, for the compulsory topic “Australian Music”, the Stages 4 and
5 (Years 7–10) syllabus recommends – in addition to Australian art music –
“traditional and contemporary music of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peo-
ples within a cultural context” (Board of Studies NSW 2003, p. 37). Here the
inference is that Indigenous Australian musicians do not participate in the creation
or performance of art music, yet this is a musical context which has evolved rapidly
over the past decade, as can heard in the work of such Aboriginal composers as
William Barton, Deborah Cheetham and Christopher Sainsbury (see Macarthur
2019, p. 212; Sainsbury 2019).6 Neither the Board of Studies (BOS) nor the New
South Wales Educational Standards Authority (NESA) which superseded it has
brought the documents into line with current musical reality, despite the fact that
the Australian Music Centre (AMC) has released a secondary school educational
resource kit relating to the developments (AMC n.d.).
The recognition that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music should – or
could – be taught “in a cultural context” (Board of Studies NSW 2003, p. 37) opens
the way for fuller exploration of the music’s educative power. This reflection of the
influence of ethnomusicology in music education is a gateway through which
Indigenous musicians and community members could – or should – participate in
the teaching-learning process, thus pointing to the need for pedagogical expansion.
Of the current ideas about Australian Indigenous music and education in circulation,
the online Western Australian arts-in-education resource, ArtsEdge, perhaps comes
closest to envisioning the music’s educative power:
Contemporary Aboriginal music has a multi layered connection to both contemporary
Western popular [and now, art] music and to traditional culture, song lines, dreaming,
language, country and the spiritual. Like other art forms it has the power to simultaneously
transform our understanding of history and culture and to communicate the authentic
experience of what it is to be an Indigenous Australian today. (ArtsEdge n.d.)

Contemporary Indigenous music is not merely a hybrid or fusion of Indigenous

and non-Indigenous elements but rather a much more nuanced set of musical
convergences. Wafer’s (2017) important discussion of the traditional-modern

6
See Ngarra-burria: First Peoples Composers in Australia, an Australian Indigenous composers’
initiative led by Christopher Sainsbury (Sainsbury n.d.) and Sainsbury (2019).
Educative Power and the Respectful Curricular Inclusion of Aboriginal and. . . 79

song continuum is apposite here, which, helpfully and critically for music educa-
tion, he extends to encompass the entire field of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander music making.

4 Respectful Inclusion

We began this chapter by referring to the respectful inclusion of Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander music in teaching and learning schedules. Among ideas that
have already been mentioned, respectful inclusion would involve acting upon an
understanding that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music is generally created
with a specific audience in mind (see Fig. 1). Teachers should bear this in mind when
selecting music for study. Graeme Smith explained in a 1991 school music resource
booklet:
Though many Aboriginal [popular] musicians perform for and aim to please a general
market, they also often feel that they are singing especially for an Aboriginal audience and
want to express their ideas to that audience in terms and styles that it understands (p. 82).

Casey (2012) makes this point too, stating, “Contemporary Indigenous theatre
[broadly understood] is produced for multiple and various audiences; sometimes
for specific and general Indigenous communities, and sometimes for both Indige-
nous and non-Indigenous communities” (p. 3). Teachers must learn to discern the
intended audience for specific items of Indigenous music, as well as the music’s key
purpose.
Figure 1 conceptualizes the potential audiences and functions of Indigenous
music. The most general audience domain, nation-state/world, includes music that

Fig. 1 Schema indicating the nested intended audience(s) for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
music, as well as its key function(s)
80 M. Webb and C. Bracknell

communicates Australian Indigenous peoples’ perspectives, an informed awareness

of which we would consider to be a necessary part of respectful inclusion. Twenty-
five years ago, the celebrated Aboriginal musician Archie Roach explained that
despite having written songs that dealt with “a lot of things that affected Aboriginal
people, [. . .] I am a separate person from my race.” (p. 139). He continued:
So, a lot of my songs I write now, I’d rather be seen as a singer-songwriter. Because you’re
an Aboriginal person, people think that you must have a statement or an opinion on
everything. I think that slowly they’re starting to see the music as being just good music.
(Quoted in Coolwell 1993, p. 140)

Here Roach implied that he would rather have his songs considered “good music”
than be singled out as “Indigenous”. This significant point, that Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander people have both an individual and a group identity, carries a
reminder that educators must guard against essentializing their perspectives.
Aboriginal rock singer Dan Sultan echoed Roach’s sentiment two decades later
and even wrote a song about it: “No More Explanations” from his 2014 album,
Blackbird (Sultan 2014). “As Aboriginal artists”, Sultan explained, “we find it hard
to just be allowed to be artists” (Watt n.d., n.p.). He is grateful to those popular
musicians who came before, since their accomplishments allowed him to explore
other topics in his song writing:
It used to be that you had to sing about land rights, you had to sing about children being
taken away, which I’ve done [. . .] but thanks to No Fixed Address and uncle Archie [Roach]
I can just be in a rock‘n’roll band. I don’t have to be a martyr.’ (Mathieson 2014, n.p.)

Indeed, the lyrical content in much of the music by contemporary Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander musicians such as Sultan, Jessica Mauboy, Busby Marou and
Thelma Plum addresses themes common in global pop and rock music.
The 2017 song “In Between” by the Aboriginal duo, Apakatjah, from Central
Australia was composed with the intention of maintaining Indigenous group soli-
darity through shared experience and perspectives, as illustrated by the middle
“Indigenous” domain in Fig. 1. The lyrics of its first chorus contain the lines, “In a
world that sees just black and white/What about me, where is it I fit in?” (Apakatjah
2017). The 2018 rap song “My People” by Aboriginal musician J-Milla (Jacob
Nichaloff) opens with these lines: “People forget that I’m half white/But now, I’m
speaking out for my black side” (J-Milla 2019). These songs – and others like them –
pick up where rock band Coloured Stone’s 1984 hit “Black Boy” left off, with its
message of pride in one’s cultural heritage (Coloured Stone 1997). They also
thematically echo the mid-twentieth century country song “Outcast Halfcaste”
recently revived by Emma Donovan and Jessie Lloyd (Mission Songs Project
2017). Like “Black Boy” and “Outcast Halfcaste”, “In Between” and “My People”
primarily address Indigenous people who might identify with their lyrical
exploration of Indigenous identity and belonging.
Educative Power and the Respectful Curricular Inclusion of Aboriginal and. . . 81

At the most specific level is music created by and for a Local Mob,7 which may or
may not be restricted in audience terms to members of that community. In parts of
the country where Aboriginal “land-based cosmologies have survived down to the
present day”, the related singing practices that form part of an “unbroken tradition”
may be specifically intended for a very particular local audience (Wafer 2017, p. 5).
Still, one Aboriginal traveling song known by various names including “Wanji
Wanji” was performed throughout the last century across half of the continent
(Turpin et al. 2019).
Discerning the intended audience for a particular piece of music could, and in
many cases should, involve consulting with representatives of Aboriginal or Torres
Strait Islander communities. Students in our university class have successfully
contacted musicians through social media, by which means they have gained
insights into song meanings and have secured permission to perform certain songs.
Music created for nation-state/world audiences is generally well suited for school
study, although since each domain includes music that is commercially available,
educators could explore such music for its educational potential as well.

5 A Pedagogy of Partnership

Dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous music educators is of paramount

importance when developing curricula involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander music. Since the new millennium “non-Indigenous composers have
engaged in collaborative projects with Indigenous musicians” (Macarthur 2019,
p. 212), resulting in works such as Paul Stanhope’s 2014 dramatic cantata,
Jandamarra: Sing for the Country. For a number of years our colleague Thomas
Fienberg has been developing and trialling new approaches to teaching Indigenous
music derived from his study of such collaborative performance and composition
processes. His PhD study tracked over several years the attitudes and levels of
engagement of a cohort of non-Indigenous Sydney secondary school elective
music students of diverse cultural backgrounds as he taught them about Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander music (Fienberg 2019a). The students’ learning culmi-
nated in a project that involved the “collaborative reworking of two songs that had
been shared with the class by Ngiyampaa composer and dancer Peter Williams”
(Fienberg 2019a, p. iii).
Since 2017, Fienberg has participated in an ongoing school-based artistic out-
reach programme that “make[s] space for Indigenous voices to guide instruction and
share knowledge” (Fienberg 2019b, n.p.). His recent working processes can be
glimpsed in a video produced in 2020 as part of an artist-in-residence programme
run at the Western Sydney secondary school where he teaches, which involved the

7
The Aboriginal term “mob” is an English loan word that refers to a cohesive group such as a
specific extended family, or more broadly, a linguistic community.
82 M. Webb and C. Bracknell

Fig. 2 Screenshot from the “Bapa” collaborative performance video involving student singers and
dancers, Evie J. Willie (bottom right), Neville Williams-Boney (bottom centre) and teacher
instrumentalists. (Source: NSW Department of Education 2020b, Used with permission of the
NSW Department of Education)

Wiradjuri/Ni-Vanuatu singer Evie J. Willie (NSW Department of Education 2020a).

With Fienberg himself on guitar and a fellow teacher on double bass, Willie and
several students perform the song “Bapa” by the late Geoffrey Gurrumul, singing in
the Yolngu language of the Northern Territory. The Wiradjuri dancer-choreographer
Neville Williams-Boney created dance movements inspired by the song lyrics,
excerpts of which can be seen being rehearsed in an inset in the video (Fig. 2).
Not only is the approach collaborative and culturally inclusive; it also reunites song
and dance in ways previously untried in the suburban school setting.
Such projects have the potential for expansion and broader application and
indicate the educative power of Indigenous music and dance forms and practices,
where the cultural aspects of language, song, dance and story can be explored from
various mutually enriching perspectives. As Boyea (1999) convincingly argues, in
the classroom, Indigenous music “provides, more powerfully than other media,
opportunity for [non-Indigenous people] to sense the depth and power and intensity
of [Indigenous] life, to experience its difference, and yet to feel a closeness to
[Indigenous] ways that cannot be spoken, fully understood, or retained” (p. 36).

6 Conclusion

In this chapter we have argued for the full, respectful curricular inclusion of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music, in order to promote in schools a more
balanced and equitable social and cultural vision of the nation-state. Strategies we
have proposed towards this end include avoiding making a binary distinction
Educative Power and the Respectful Curricular Inclusion of Aboriginal and. . . 83

between traditional and contemporary music, learning to discern the intended audi-
ence for specific items of Indigenous music as well as the music’s key purpose and
guarding against essentializing Indigenous perspectives – the first step being to
acknowledge the country of musicians studied, out of an awareness of Indigenous
linguistic and cultural diversity.
A hopeful sign of changing attitudes in Australian society and musical culture is
the recent upsurge in collaborations between non-Indigenous and Indigenous musi-
cians. “The Campfire Song” by Kasey Chambers (2018) featuring Yawuru elder and
musician Alan Pigram, “Someone” by William Crighton (2018) featuring Arnhem
Land singer Stanley Gawurra Gaykamangu and Jaara Nyilamum by Yorta/Dja
Wurrung composer Lou Bennett AM (2020) with the Australian String Quartet are
but three recent examples of a trend that relates to aspects of Australia’s often
troubled national politics of reconciliation between Indigenous and
non-Indigenous people. As we have shown, these kinds of inclusionary musical
expressions point to the potential of pedagogies involving partnership.
By drawing on the notion of educative power, it has been our intention to
encourage – empower even – teachers of all backgrounds to explore ways to
respectfully incorporate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music in their teaching
repertoires and place it on an equal footing with other music they teach. Given the
considerable diversity of Indigenous musical expressions now readily accessible,
they can employ familiar musical-technical approaches even as they begin to more
fully investigate the music’s cultural-contextual meanings. The latter will entail
consultation and partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural
representatives – musicians, community members and Indigenous fellow teachers.
This will help clear the way for the classroom to become an environment in which
students can glimpse the vitality of contemporary Australian Indigenous musical
expressions.

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86 M. Webb and C. Bracknell

Michael Webb lectures in music education and ethnomusicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of
Music, The University of Sydney, where he is an Associate Professor. He specializes in historical
and contemporary music of Melanesia and recently created for online delivery the unit of study,
Australian Indigenous Music.

Clint Bracknell is a Noongar musician and researcher from the south coast region of Western
Australia and Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University. He writes, performs and produces
music for stage and screen while leading a programme of research on enhancing connections
between song, language, culture and nature.

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