Redefining the tradition : the role of women in the evolution and transmission of Australian folk music

Abstract

This dissertation undertakes an examination of the truth of the assertion that Australian folk music represents a predominantly masculine, working class genre - the view expressed in the official Commonwealth Government description of Australian folk music, the publications of the academy and promoted by the media. In this thesis, the women who have played a key role in the history of Australian folk music are restored from obscurity, highlighting the need for a root - and - branch revision of the history of Australian folk music. I argue that the evidence of primary sources confirms the role of women as integral to the evolution and transmission of Australian folk music. The way in which oral and written traditions interact in the music of Australian women is explained; traditional boundaries of class which have been used in the past to delineate who owns folk music are challenged; and it is argued that the piano must be admitted into the category of bush instrument, thus expanding the range of the accepted Australian folk music repertoire. Australian women's folk music, as distinct from Australian indigenous women's music, has its origins in the social, political and economic upheavals of the eighteenth century. It embodies the dislocation experienced by pioneering women who travelled to Australia from the British Isles and other European countries, either as convicts or free settlers. Emergence of new post-industrial forms of folk music is also prominent. Songs and tunes preserved through oral transmission and the development of homegrown Australian songs represent the dichotomy of old world and new world cultural values. Published broadside ballad sheets and piano arrangements of folk songs and dance tunes were embraced by Australian women and shared widely through oral and hand-written transmission. Diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, archival music collections and field recordings provide evidence that women from a broad range of economic, educational and social backgrounds performed folk music from the earliest days of settlement in a way that was unique to Australia. Analysis in this thesis is structured by the chronological sequence of case studies spanning the 1840s to the present. Case studies covering this extended period demonstrate the diversity of women musician's lives, their place in the evolution of Australian folk music from early settlement to contemporary times and the changing manifestations of transmission affecting each generation. Both the items in the repertoires of the women studied and aspects of their identity (indicated in their choice of songs) are regenerated by performance of their music. Investigation of this process concludes with examination of the contemporary operation of transmission in the case study of my own participation in the evolving tradition of Australian women's folk music.