Breaching the Profession: The Musicians' Union of Australia, Immigrant Musicians and the Post-World War II Australian Music Industry

Abstract

For four decades of the twentieth century, the Musicians' Union of Australia sought to prevent any foreign musicians from working in Australia. In the years immediately following the Second World War, the Union found itself at odds with the government-sponsored mass immigration program that, for the first time, brought large numbers of non-British European immigrants to the country. This article documents the Union's efforts to secure government endorsement of restrictions on musician immigration and to impose nationality quotas on the Australian Broadcasting Commission's symphony orchestras. Local support for immigrant musicians and the eventual dismantling of forty-year discriminatory Union procedures is charted.