Prose fiction’s infinite playlist : encountering music in fiction narrative

This paper will argue that reference to music in young-adult prose fiction stimulates movement across narrative and artistic boundaries in ways that facilitate a unique reading encounter. The inclusion of musical reference opens up a space for a multisensory experience that is beyond that of the reading experience devoid of musical association, even when the audio is not immediately available at the time of reading. This experience is bound to the role of the reader, however, be it through the remembered or imagined experience of the music that is signaled in-text, or even the reader’s pursuit of the audio in response to the reading. As ‘a threshold literature’ (Eaton 2010, np) that targets a young audience for whom ‘popular music is globally acknowledged as affectively and culturally central’ (Bloustien & Peters 2011, 4), young-adult fiction is an apt space for explorations into the potential that exists when a text includes musical reference. In particular, Gerard Genette’s paratexts (1997), J Hillis Miller’s ‘membranes’ (2005) and T Austin Graham’s ‘literary soundtrack’ (2009) will be used to examine how Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s young-adult fiction novel Nick and Norah’s infinite playlist (2006) functions as an ‘infinite playlist’ in itself via a series of paratextual and epitextual elements. Discussion of the latticework of music-narrative interaction that exists as a part of this text will facilitate an understanding of how musical reference can encourage movement within and beyond the narrative towards a potentially unique reading experience.

Community music making in Australia : creating, improvising and performing at the 2012 Lake Bolac Eel Festival

Lake Bolac is a freshwater lake, resulting from one of the volcanic eruptions in the Western district of regional Victoria (Australia). There is an annual migration of eels to it and they have been a local indigenous food source for very many years. Since 2004 there has been a festival to celebrate this event culminating at the Lake Bolac Eel Festival (LBEF). Since 2012, the festival included creative art works and a music workshop by academics from Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia) as a regional partnership with Lake Bolac. The opportunity to exhibit, workshop and perform works as academics and practitioners brought the community together where both contemporary and traditional arts can be preserved, protected and promoted. My paper forms part of a larger creative research project called Flows and Catchments at Deakin University which started in 2011. My study situates itself in creative music making and soundscape within the larger project.

School funding, public transport racism and the looming second-hand digital music battle

 SBS News radio interview with Amelia Johns about racism on public transport and the response of witnesses.

Spirit-music unbound: Romanticism and print politics in Australian women's poetry 1830-1905

This thesis presents a re-mapping of Australian poetic tradition to reflect the presence of colonial women poets. The research recovers a wide range of neglected poetry, offering a new way of reading these important poets as politic and transnational, particularly through the significance of newspaper authorship and international women’s poetry.

Tertiary educators' voices in Australia and South Africa: experiencing and engaging in African music and culture

Music tertiary educators can foster positive experiences that promote diversity, enhance intercultural and cross-cultural understanding through our teaching. Through findings of interview data of tertiary music educators’ understandings of multicultural music practice at two South African universities and at an Australia university, I used interpretative phenomenological analysis to analyse the data. Two major themes emerged: why is it important to teach multicultural music like that of Africa, and what are some of the effective ways of preparing students to best teach it? The data provides insights into an appreciation of and respect for music and cultural diversity. In multicultural societies educators cannot deliver courses based solely on one’s own identity and cultural perspective. I argue that music education may be seen as an agent of social change where music teaching and learning can occur through exploring, experiencing, expressing and engaging in the music of our own culture and that of others.

The end of the rainbow

The End of the Rainbow is a documentary film about music, about community and a very special place. When the live music venue “The Rainbow Hotel” in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy is forced to close down publican Chickk sets out to accommodate the many musicians and customers grieving its closure with a final week of musical activity in which there is organisational chaos, dancing, laughs, beer (lots of), and great music. It is a week of celebration as musicians pay homage to mark “the End of an Era”, but it is also a statement about community places and a protest against property development at the expense of cultural heritage, specifically Australian live music. It’s also a love story with a dramatic twist...

The site of 'becoming' - music and adolescence as liminal spaces in a selection of young adult fictions

Both the experience of music (Boyce-Tillman 2009, DeChaine 2002) and that of adolescence (Bettis and Adams 2005, Bradford 2013, Meyer and Land 2005) have been described as "liminal spaces" - that is, spaces in which transformation of those involved can occur. This paper will examine three texts with an implied young adult audience - Marion's Angels (K. M. Peyton, 1979, later republished as Falling Angels), The Bamboo Flute (Gary Disher, 1992), and The Carbon Diaries 2017 (Saci Lloyd, 2009) - to demonstrate how engagement with music assists the young adult protagonist with negotiating certain necessary developmental tasks of adolescence.