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.

Carnaby Street undressed

Carnaby Street Undressed is a story of fashion, music and eye opening insights into London's Carnaby Street in its 1960s heyday, told by the owners of the fashion shops that defined the iconic Street, and the popular musicians who were part of the “the scene”. This includes The Who lead sing Roger Daltrey, Donovan, Frank Allen from the Searchers, Gary Leeds from The Walker Brothers, and Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits. The film is the story of a generation that rebelled against the grey conformity of the 1950s with a cultural revolution emanating from Carnaby Street from where it spread across the globe changing fashion and music forever. This a story about a street of firsts: the first time music was played in a shop, the first time men and women's clothes were sold in the same shop, the first time there was fashion for children, the first time the national flag was used as a fashion item, and the first time clothes had colour - lots of bright colours. The film reveals the cultural, philosophical and practical background and responses to these innovations.

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.