Going Over the Top: The Evolution of Indigenous Music Pedagogies and Educational Practices in Postcolonial Australasian Contexts

Abstract

In July 2003 the Northern Territory Chapter of the Australian Society for Music Education will host the society's fourteenth national conference in the territory capital, Darwin. This event is titled 'Over the Top', with due deference to Darwin's physical and geographical location at the 'top' of the continent. However, it is the subtitled focus of the conference, 'The impact of cultural learning in our own and neighbouring communities in the evolution of Australasian music education' which is of interest to this special focus issue of Research Studies in Music Education on music education in postcolonial and related contexts. A significant conference event will be the inauguration of an Australasian Centre for Collaborative Research in Indigenous Music Pedagogies and Practices . 'Indigenous' is applied here in the sense of Australian or New Zealand (and perhaps Asian) 'home-grown' pedagogies, not to indicate that this is necessarily exclusively related to the use of the word 'indigenous' in the sense of Aboriginal Australia or Mäori Aotearoa. This article introduces the notion of a research centre dedicated to such a focus in postcolonial Australasian contexts, and provides some background to the development of the concept. It raises questions critical to the evolution of appropriate Australasian music pedagogies and education practices to which the centre might provide responses.