Buskers and Busking in Australia in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The history of buskers and busking is a relatively new field of musicological research: recent scholarship has mainly been concerned with studies of street musicians in nineteenth-century London and Paris. This article, however, focuses on Australia and draws on a wide variety of articles in the daily and weekly press including interviews, law reports, letters to newspaper editors, and reprints and summaries of international news of busking in Europe and North America. The article charts busking culture principally from 1860 to 1920, when the Australian newspaper industry was at its zenith. Utilizing recent methodologies derived from newspaper research in a digital environment, the article documents the plight of buskers, the instruments they played, the repertory they performed, the money they earned, and the moral codes they were thought to subvert. The article provides an account of the profession of busking in nineteenth-century Australia and the types of social, musical, and moral issues that arose from debates over the value of the busking profession.