Journal articles on the topic 'Music Central Australia'

AbstractThis article examines some of the ways in which Australia's First Peoples have responded to serious community health concerns about alcohol through the medium of popular music. The writing, performing and recording of popular songs about alcohol provide an important example of community-led responses to health issues, and the effectiveness of music in communicating stories and messages about alcohol has been recognised through various government-funded recording projects. This article describes some of these issues in remote Australian Aboriginal communities, exploring a number of complexities that arise through arts-based ‘instrumentalist’ approaches to social and health issues. It draws on the author's own experience and collaborative work with Aboriginal musicians in Tennant Creek, a remote town in Australia's Northern Territory.

According to one newspaper report, Paradise Beach was initially marketed in the US as a ‘very hip, very cool’ Australian serial about three good-looking suburban kids finding romance and adventure in an endless summer. Here, in Australia, Channel 9 did something rather similar: PARADISE BEACH is where the perfect white sand stretches for miles; where the music is hot and the party just goes on and on. It's where teenagers from everywhere converge to cut loose, find the perfect wave, and fall hopelessly in love. And that's exactly what happens with our four young and passionate central characters and their friends.

For want of other secure evidence, the study of art in prehistoric societies normally amounts to looking at pictures, though there must have also been sound, and surely music. The long lithic tradition of central northern Australia permits a rare insight into another kind of prehistoric art, the meaning and aesthetic order that may lie behind a lithic industry.

This article explores the potential for music making activities such as jamming, song writing, and performance to act as a medium for intercultural connection and relationship building during service learning programs with Indigenous communities in Australia. To set the context, the paper begins with an overview of current international perspectives on service learning and then moves towards a theoretical and practical discussion of how these processes, politics, and learning outcomes arise when intercultural engagement is used in service learning programs. The paper then extends this discussion to consider the ways in which shared music making can bring a sense of intercultural “proximity” that has the potential to evoke deep learning experiences for all involved in the service learning activity. These learning experiences arise from three different “facings” in the process of making music together: facing others together; facing each other; facing ourselves. In order to flesh out how these theoretical ideas work in practice, the article draws on insights and data from Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University’s award winning Winanjjikari Service Learning Program, which has been running in partnership with Barkly Regional Arts and Winanjjikari Music Centre in Tennant Creek since 2009. This program involves annual service learning trips where university music students travel to Central Australia to work alongside Aboriginal and non-Indigenous musicians and artists on a range of community-led projects. By looking at the ways in which shared music making brings participants in this program “face to face”, we explore how this proximity leads to powerful learning experiences that foster mutual appreciation, relationship building, and intercultural reconciliation.

This article explores how concepts of love, in particular compassionate love, can provide a way of promoting empathy and conciliation in intercultural community music contexts. Drawing on the work of Deborah Bird Rose and bell hooks, it considers how love is first and foremost a verb, a participatory emotion and a social practice that can both inform and underpin efforts at building connections with others through music. The article then seeks to ask two thorny and critical questions that can arise when community musicians conceptualize their intercultural music-making through the lens of love. These questions point towards the oftentimes irreconcilable complexities, cultural politics and legacies of colonization that underpin peace-building and conciliation efforts. To illustrate and unpack these ideas, the article draws on stories and experiences of a ten-year intercultural music collaboration with Warumungu and Warlpiri musicians in Central Australia.

AbstractThe cultural turn in sociology and related fields of study has brought with it new understandings of the various ways social identities are formed. In a post-structural landscape, social identities must increasingly be regarded as reflexively derived ‘performative assemblages’ that incorporate elements of the local vernacular and global popular cultures. Building on the above reinterpretation of social identity, this paper takes as its central premise the notion that, in addition to its well-mapped cultural importance for youth, popular music retains a critical currency for the ageing audience as a key cultural resource of post-youth identification, lifestyle and associated cultural practices. In its examination of the relationship between popular music, ageing and identity, this paper uses illustrative examples drawn from ethnographic data collected by the authors between 2002 and 2009 in Australia and the UK.

Purpose Through a case study of J. Walter Thompson and Kraft’s efforts to market Vegemite in the USA in the late 1960s, this paper aims to explore transnational systems of cultural production and consumption, the US’s changing perception of Australia and the influence of culture on whether advertising fails or succeeds. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws from archival primary sources, including advertisements and newspapers, as well as secondary literatures from the fields of advertising history, food studies and transnational studies of popular culture. Findings Although J. Walter Thompson’s advertising contributed to Vegemite’s icon status in Australia, it failed to capture the American market in the late 1960s. In the 1980s, however, Vegemite did capture American interest when it was central to a wave of Australian popular culture that included films, sport and music, particularly Men at Work’s hit song, “Down Under”, whose lyrics mentioned Vegemite. As such, Vegemite’s moment of success stateside occurred without a national advertising campaign. Even when popular, however, Americans failed to like Vegemite’s taste, confirming it as a uniquely culturally specific product. Originality/value This paper analyzes a little-studied advertising campaign. The case study’s interdisciplinary findings will be of interest to scholars of advertising history, twentieth century USA and Australian history and food studies.

AbstractInsights into the knowledge, performance, and transmission of songs are pivotal in ensuring the survival of traditional Aboriginal songs. We present the first in-depth musical analysis of a Wapurtarli yawulyu song set sung by Warlpiri women from Yuendumu, Central Australia, recorded in December 2006 with a solo lead singer accompanied by a small group. Our musical analysis reveals that there are various interlocking parts of a song, and this can make it difficult for current generations to learn songs. The context of musical endangerment and the musical analyses presented in our study show that contemporary spaces for learning yawulyu must consider the complex components that come together for a song set to be properly performed.

Empire, imperialism and colonialism are all terms that defy easy definition. The variety of imperial regimes and colonial situations demonstrates a “patchwork quilt of ad hoc adaptations to particular circumstance” (Osterhammel, 1997, p. 4). However, this paper does not seek to define such phenomena but to explore their effects on the school music that existed within such regimes. Japanese and British imperialism evolved in distinct ways, but the enactment of imperialism in school music was, ultimately, similar. Two different examples of early twentieth century empires will be considered – Taiwan, a colony of Japan between 1895 and 1945, and the British colonies that were to become Australia with their Federation in 1901 (Parsons, 1999). Central to the notion of empire was the imperial ruler, either emperor or empress. Empire and ruler were celebrated by school children in song and pageant, demonstrating the use of music as a vehicle of messages to be inculcated in the young participants.

This study considers children’s informal musicking and online music teaching, learning, playing, and invention through an analysis of children’s clapping games on YouTube. We examined a body of 184 games from 103 separate YouTube postings drawn from North America, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Selected videos were analyzed according to video characteristics, participant attributes, purpose, and teaching and learning aspects. The results of this investigation indicated that pairs of little girls aged 3 to 12 constituted a majority of the participants in these videos, with other participant subcategories including mixed gender, teen, adult, and intergenerational examples. Seventy-one percent of the videos depicted playing episodes, and 40% were intended for pedagogical purposes; however, several categories overlapped. As of June 1, 2016, nearly 50 million individuals had viewed these YouTube postings.

Lockdowns were a central strategy for managing the outbreak of COVID-19, and Melbourne, Australia had some of the most extensive restrictions globally during 2021. As a result, university students were faced with isolated living and challenging learning experiences. This pilot study occurred during 2021, close to both university assignment due dates and end of semester examinations and some of the longest lockdowns. Seventy-one participants responded to recruitment materials describing using music playlists to manage anxiety and avoid negative thinking patterns during stressful times. They then participated in a 1-hour live, virtual workshop incorporating didactic teaching and practice activities. Pre and post measures of musical engagement, wellbeing and anxiety were used, with additional qualitative data collected at post regarding the workshop, application of ideas, and quantitative data measuring uses of music for emotion regulation. Analysis of quantitative data did not reveal significant findings, but convergent analysis suggested patterns linking degree of anxiety with changed uses of music for regulation for some individuals. Participants described more intentional and informed uses of music that were less repetitive and more targeted. This was particularly apparent when rumination appeared to be prominent. Based on the results, the intervention seems most helpful as a psycho-educational tool, but the 1-hour workshop did not result in measurable changes for highly anxious participants.

It could be argued that architecture has an inherent social responsibility to enrich the urban and spatial environments for the city’s occupants. However, how we define quality, and how ‘places’ can be designed to be fair and equitable, catering for individuals on a humanistic and psychological level, is often not clearly addressed. Lefebvre discusses the idea of the ‘right to the city’; the belief that public space design should facilitate freedom of expression and incite a sense of spatial ownership for its occupants in public/commercial precincts. Lefebvre also points out the importance of sensory experience in the urban environment. “Street-scape theatrics” are performative activities that summarise these two concepts, advocating the ‘right to the city’ by way of art as well as providing sensual engagement for city users. Literature discusses the importance of Street-scape Theatrics however few sources attempt to discuss this topic in terms of how to design these spaces/places to enhance the city on both a sensory and political level. This research, grounded in political theory, investigates the case of street music, in particular busking, in the city of Brisbane, Australia. Street culture is a notion that already exists in Brisbane, but it is heavily controlled especially in central locations. This study discusses how sensory experience of the urban environment in Brisbane can be enriched through the design for busking; multiple case studies, interviews, observations and thematic mappings provide data to gather an understanding of how street performers see and understand the built form. Results are sometime surprisingly incongruous with general assumptions in regards to street artist as well as the established political and ideological framework, supporting the idea that the best and most effective way of urban hacking is working within the system. Ultimately, it was found that the Central Business District in Brisbane, Australia, could adopt certain political and design tactics which attempt to reconcile systematic quality control with freedom of expression into the public/commercial sphere, realism upheld. This can bridge the gap between the micro scale of the body and the macro of the political economy through freedom of expression, thus celebrating the idiosyncratic nature of the city.

- Martin Baier, Sri Kuhnt-Saptodewo, Zum Seelengeliet bei den Ngaju am Kahayan; Auswertung eines Sakraltextes zur Manarung-Zeremonie beim totenfest. München: Akademischer Verlag,1993 (PhD thesis, Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitiy München). - H.J.M. Claessen, Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions; The paradox of keeping-while-giving. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 232 pp. Bibl. Index - Charles A. Coppel, Wang Gungwu, Community and Nation; China, Southeast Asia and Australia. Sydney: Asian studies of Australia in association with Allen & Unwin, 1992 (2nd revised edition), viii + 359 pp - Heleen Gall, W. J. Mommsen, European expansion and Law; the encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th- and 20th- century Africa and Asia. Oxford; Berg publishers, 1992, vi + 339 pp, J.A. de Moor (eds.) - Beatriz van der Goes, C. W. Watson, Kinship, Property and inheritance in Kerinci, Central Sumatra. Canterbury:University of Kent, Centre for Social Anthropology and computing Monographs no: 4. South-East Asian Series, 1992, ix + 255 pp - Kees Groeneboer, Tom van der Berge, Van Kenis tot kunst; Soendanese poezie in de koloniale tijd. Proefschrift Rijksuniversiteit Lieden, November 1993, 220 pp - Kees Groeneboer, J.E.A.M. Lelyveld, ‘... waarlijk geen overdaad, doch een dringende eisch..’’; Koloniaal onderwijs en onderwijsbeleid in Nederlands-Indië 1893-1942. Proefschrift Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, 1992. - Marleen Heins, R. Anderson Sutton, Variation in Central Javanese gamelan music; Dynamics of a steady state. Northern Illinois University: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Monograph series on Southeast Asia, (Special Report 28 ),1993. - Marleen Heins, E. Heins, Jaap Kunst, Indonesian music and dance; Traditional music and its interaction with the West. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute/Tropenmuseum, University of Amsterdam, Ethnomusicology Centre `Jaap Junst’, 1994, E. den Otter, F. van Lamsweerde (eds.) - David Henley, Harold Brookfield, South-East Asia’s environmental future; The search for sustainability. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1993, xxxii + 422 pp., maps, tables, figures, index., Yvonne Byron (eds.) - Antje van der Hoek, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, De emancipatie van Molukse vrouwen in Nederland. Utrecht: Van Arkel,1992, Francy Leatemia-Toma-tala (eds.) - Michael Hitchcock, Brita L. Miklouho-Maklai, Exposing Society’s Wounds; Some aspects of Indonesian Art since 1966. Adelaide: Flinders University Asian studies Monograph No.5, illustrations, 1991, iii + 125 pp - Nico Kaptein, Fred R. von der Mehden, Two Worlds of Islam; Interaction between Southeast Asia and the Middle East.Gainesville etc: University Press of Florida 1993, xiii + 128 pp - Nico Kaptein, Karel Steenbrink, Dutch Colonialism and Indonesian Islam; Contacts and Conflicts 1596-1950. Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1993. - Harry A. Poeze, Rudolf Mrázek, Sjahrir; Politics and exile in Indonesia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program, 1994. - W.G.J. Remmelink, Takao Fusayama, A Japanese memoir of Sumatra 1945-1946; Love and hatred in the liberation war. Ithaca: Cornell University (Cornell Modern Indonesia Project Monograph series 71), 1993, 151 pp., maps, illustrations. - Ratna Saptari, Diana Wolf, Factory Daughters; Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. - Ignatius Supriyanto, Ward Keeler, Javanese Shadow Puppets. Singapore (etc.): Oxford University Press, 1992, vii + 72 pp.,bibl., ills. (Images of Asia). - Brian Z. Tamanaha,S.J.D., Juliana Flinn, Review of diplomas and thatch houses; Asserting tradition in a changing Micronesia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. - Gerard Termorshuizen, Dorothée Buur, Indische jeugdliteratuur; Geannoteerde bibliografie van jeugdboeken over Nederlands-Indië en Indonesië, 1825-1991. Leiden, KITLV Uitgeverij, 1992, 470 pp., - Barbara Watson Andaya, Reinout Vos, Gentle Janus, merchant prince; The VOC and the tightrope of diplomacy in the Malay world, 1740-1800. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994, xii + 252 pp.

Since its revival in the 1980s, Lindy hop along with other swing dances has become increasingly popular with middle class youth throughout the developed world. Social dancing plays a central part in local swing dance communities, and DJing recorded music has become an essential part of social dancing. Marked by class and gender, DJing in swing dance communities is also shaped by digital technology, from the CDs, computers and portable media devices which DJs use to play digital musical files to the discussion boards and websites where they research and discuss DJing and the online music stores where they buy CDs and download music. This brief discussion of the preponderance of digital technology in swing dance DJing is part of a larger project considering the mediation of embodied practice in swing dance culture, and it pays particular attention to the ways in which mediated discourse in swing culture reflects wider social forces, yet is also subordinated by the embodied discourse of the dance floor.

A parsimony analysis of recently collected species sharing several features such as scalpellate acrostichals, often setae apically on the wing membrane and often strongly extended costa, together with 38 genera show that the collected species can be assigned to Antillocladius S ther, 1981, Compterosmittia S ther, 1981, and one new genus, Litocladius. Nine new species of Antillocladius are described and figured as male imagines: A. calakmulensis, A. herradurus and A. zempoalensis from Mexico; A. venequatoriensis from Ecuador and Venezuela; A. ubatuba from Brazil and Venezuela; and A. biota, A. folius, A. musci, and A. sooretama from Brazil. The female of A. musci, the pupae of A. antecalvus S ther, A. folius, and A. musci, and the larvae of A. folius and A. musci are also described and figured. New records of A. antecalvus S ther from Brazil and Venezuela; of A. arcuatus S ther from Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela; A. pluspilalus S ther from Ecuador and Mexico and of A. zhengi Wang and S ther from Thailand are given. The genus Antillocladius S ther, 1981, originally described from the British West Indies, now includes 15 species from North, Central and South America, Russia, China and Thailand. Keys to all known males, females, pupae and larvae are given. Four new species of Compterosmittia are described and figured as male imagines: C. aberrans from Costa Rica; C. croizati from Brazil and Venezuela; C. pittieri from Venezuela; and C. berui from Brazil. The genus Compterosmittia S ther, 1981, originally described from the British West Indies, now includes 8 to 10 species from North, Central and South America, Australia, Oceania and Southeast Asia. A key to male imagines is given. The new genus, Litocladius, includes a single species, L. mateusi, described as male, female and pupa. The immatures of all three genera are terrestrial or associated with phytotelmata, and notes on their biology and larval habitats are included.

Australian governments have introduced legislation to detain or supervise sex offenders whose sentences have expired but who are still considered to be dangerous. In the enactment of these controversial laws, governments largely overlooked a significant body of empirical knowledge on sexual offending and risk prediction. Consequently, these schemes are based on unexamined assumptions. Accordingly, an evaluation of the compatibility between these assumptions and the available science is warranted. To this end, the article will submit the central provisions of the legislation to a psycho-legal analysis whereby the assumptions underpinning the laws will be weighed against the empirical evidence. The article reveals that there is considerable disconnect between the laws' assumptions and the existing literature on sexual offending and risk prediction, such that the evidence suggests that the legislation will not achieve its aims in any meaningful and sustainable way. Future criminal justice policy in the area of sex offending needs to be collaboratively developed between policymakers and the relevant scientific communities and experts. It must be founded on cost-effective and empirically defensible approaches based on what we understand, rather than what we fear, about sex offenders.

AbstractWhile Moulin Rouge! (2001) riffs on and even exaggerates conventions from classic Hollywood backstage musicals, it owes a clear debt to an even earlier musico-dramatic genre – the opera. Combining operatic and film musical elements with those of pop videos, contemporary cinema and the rave scene, Baz Luhrmann's film engages with many of the thorny issues that have concerned opera critics of late, such as power, gender, exoticism, authorship, and identity construction and performance. The spotlight on the central love triangle of a consumptive courtesan, a writer and a wealthy patron makes possible a deeper scrutiny of traditional gender roles in the production and reception of Western art. The film's formulaic plot and the backstage musical format render transparent the commercial impetus behind the creative process and demystify the role of the Romantic artist-genius. Finally, the transnational and transhistorical elements of the film – a mostly Australian production team and crew, American and British pop songs, a Parisian backdrop, the Bollywood-inspired show-within-a-show, numerous anachronisms that refuse to stay confined within the specified time setting of the late nineteenth century – disrupt the Classical ideals of artistic unity and integrity and suggest new postmodern geographies and temporalities. This article considers how Luhrmann, by simultaneously paying homage to and critiquing operatic practices in Moulin Rouge!, deconstructs and reinvents opera for the postmodern age.

The wind is our universal musician and has been recognized as such for millennia. If the wind can play a fence as an aeolian harp, then a violinist armed with a bow could also cause these gigantic structures to sing. Thus, an American woman and an Australian man set out to explore and perform on the giant musical instruments covering the continent of Australia: fences. This presentation excerpts highlights from the voyage, illuminating the range of sounds to be drawn out of a five-wire fence. Playing fences reveals a sound world that is embedded in the physical reality and the psyche of the culture. In pursuit of their instruments, including the Rabbit-Proof Fence and the 5300-kilometre–long Dingo Fence, the duo travels 40,000 kilometres, engaging with a singing dingo, an auctioneer, an Aboriginal gumleaf virtuoso, bush musicians, the first (now ruined) piano in Central Australia, and the School of the Air’s distorted, modulating, phasing white and pink electronic noise. PLEASE NOTE: there are four supplementary files that accompany this contribution. Click on the tab 'Supplementary Files' on the right hand side of the screen when accessing the pdf of the article.

Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisements – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circumstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London: Routledge, 2003. Dufty, Rae. Rethinking the politics of distribution: the geographies and governmentalities of housing assistance in rural New South Wales, Australia, PhD thesis, UNSW, 2008. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997. George-Warren, Holly and Freedman, Michelle. How the West was Worn: a History of Western Wear, New York: Abrams, 2000. Fitzgerald, Jon and Hayward, Phil. “At the confluence: Slim Dusty and Australian country music.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Phil Hayward. Gympie: Australian Institute of Country Music Press, 2003. 29-54. Gibson, Chris and Davidson, Deborah. “Tamworth, Australia’s ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rural narratives and resident reactions.” Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004): 387-404. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Darian-Smith, Kate and Gibson, Chris. “Scaling the rural: reflections on rural cultural studies.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): in press. Hemphill, Paul. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Holt, Douglas B. and Thompson, Craig J. “Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004). Johnson, Corey W. “‘The first step is the two-step’: hegemonic masculinity and dancing in a country western gay bar.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (2004): 445-464. Lehr, John C. “‘Texas (When I die)’: national identity and images of place in Canadian country music broadcasts.” The Canadian Geographer 27 (1983): 361-370. Lewis, George H. “Lap dancer or hillbilly deluxe? The cultural construction of modern country music.” Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (1997): 163-173. McCarthy, James. “Rural geography: globalizing the countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 132-137. McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. Eds. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. UP of Mississippi, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Saucier, Karen A. “Healers and heartbreakers: images of women and men in country music.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 147-166. Smith, Graeme. “Australian country music and the hillbilly yodel.” Popular Music 13 (1994): 297-311. Tichi, Cecelia. Readin’ Country Music. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. truewesternmusic.com “True western music.”, Sept 3, 2008, http://truewesternmusic.com/. Watson, Eric. Country Music in Australia. Sydney: Rodeo Publications, 1984. Whiteoak, John. “Two frontiers: early cowboy music and Australian popular culture.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. P. Hayward. Gympie: AICMP: 2003. 1-28.

Getting the Family Together: A Fieldwork Account The final gig of Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band’s 2013 tour is a hometown show at New Lambton Community Hall in Newcastle on the coast of New South Wales, Australia. The tour had already covered Newcastle and surrounds at various locations within 50 to 100km of the Newcastle CBD. In addition to lead singer and guitarist Bob Corbett, there are three main members of the Roo Grass Band, Sue Carson on fiddle and mandolin, Dave Carter on banjo, bass and bagpipes and Robbie Long on guitar, mandolin and bass. I enter the building and at the top of the stairs a tall, slim woman with a shock of red hair rushes to greet me with a hug, “It is so good to see you!”This is Veronica, Bob Corbett’s Mum. She’s been busy setting up the merchandise desk, taking tickets, and greeting almost every member of the audience by name. Veronica has functioned as de facto tour manager throughout the band’s Lucky Country Hall Tour. As well as running the merchandise desk and ticketing, she’s occasionally acted as roadie, and has supervised the packing of cars and trailers. These day-to-day jobs on the tour have been done with help from either her sister Roberta or, for most of the tour, a close friend of the band, Jenny. I deposit home-made chocolate brownies and biscuits in the kitchen, setting them up alongside fruit brownies made by Veronica for the audience. Bob’s wife, Kirrily, comes and says hello, followed by their son Marley, who heads straight for the goodies. Their daughter Matilda is running around with her best friend and next-door neighbour, Sophie. Dave, who plays banjo, bass and bagpipes in the band, greets his wife Karen as she arrives with their kids. The band’s fiddle player, Sue, is pacing around, looking fractious. I ask if she’s okay. “Yeah, it is just that my family is meant to be here already and they’re running late. They’re going to miss it.”Not long after, Sue’s partner, Michael (who is also Veronica’s brother, Bob’s uncle) arrives with their son Elijah and his son Gabe, in time for the show. This final gig of the tour seemed to have been largely arranged for the families of the band, and there was little advertising for it. In the way of family get-togethers a mix of tension and excitement fill the room. But once the band starts playing things calm down, a group of kids occupy the dance floor, twirling, swaying, skipping and running along with the music. Family, Authenticity, and Commercial Practices in Australian Country MusicI open with this fieldwork account to illuminate how the presence and involvement of family, through parents, spouses, aunts, uncles, children and even close friends are central to the experience of what it is to be a country music artist in Australia. In the case of Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band, for example, band members make choices to involve family in the activity of “being” a band—touring, performing, engaging with fans—and these choices have emotional value for them, but are also yoked to broader discourses of family which circulate in the field of Australian country music. This field story reveals that “family” is not something carved off from artists’ public engagement with the field of Australian country music but is central to it. Discourses of and around “family” are implicit in the practices of Australian country music artists and are strategically used by artists to define what country music is and what is valued in the field. Crucially, the discourse of family is used to support claims to authenticity within country music culture. Ideas about and associated practices concerning, “authenticity” permeate the culture of country music. The discourse reaches across all aspects of the field, and all participants in the scene are compelled to at least turn their minds to questions of authenticity, and develop strategies for dealing with them. Value is conferred on artists seen to convey so-called “true” and “genuine” personas. Indeed the country music community demands something referred to as “honesty” from performers. It needs to be noted that country music is a commercial popular music form and culture. Many agents in the scene have an uneasy symbolic relationship with the commercial aspects of country music, but it is a basic premise within the field: the music exists to make money. This is not to say that financial and popular success (in their quantifiable forms: money made, units sold, crowd sizes, radio spins) is the only thing valued in country music. As a form of cultural capital, authenticity is also valued. But within Australian country music a tension exists between the part of field underpinned by commercial logic and the idea of the popular and those underpinned by notions of creativity, independence and musical integrity. Authenticity is deployed to distinguish country music from other styles of music in a number of keys ways. Authenticity can be taken as an essential quality of music, which “honestly” reflects or expresses an identity or experience (e.g., Australian national identity, rural experience, heartbreak) (Watson, Volume 1; Watson, Volume 2; Sanjek); as a proper way of relating music, artist and audience (Smith); as a ideological watchword which tempers commerciality (Sanjek); or as something “fabricated” or constructed in the codification of the genre (Akenson; Peterson; Carriage and Hayward). I am not positing authenticity as a feature unique to Australian country music. A number of authors have highlighted the role authenticity plays in many forms of popular music to navigate, understand or obfuscate the functions of the commercial music industry and shape its output (Frith; Sanjek; Barker and Taylor). The scholarship on country music and popular music in general often explores how authenticity is inscribed in the products of country music, rather than the processes and practices behind those products: the everyday, extra-musical activities of participants in the scene. This article is concerned then with how discourses of authenticity are sutured to business, musical and promotional practices, and how such tropes function alongside discourses and practices concerning “family” in the negotiation of commercial realities in Australian country music. Rather than looking at end products, my research takes a ground-up approach, exploring what people are doing and how they talk about their practices and decisions. Discourses of “family”, and practices around kin, provide one of many possible entry points for this exploration. MethodologyThis article is based on ethnographic research on Australian country music. Between 2012-2014 I spent many months of focused immersion with Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band at festivals and on tour. This research was part of broader participant observation I conducted which included attending more than 150 country music events across New South Wales and Queensland. I also conducted hundreds of informal interviews at these events, as well as in-depth, semi-structured interviews with key informants, including band members Bob Corbett, Sue Carson, Robbie Long, and Michael Carpenter (sometimes drummer).Bob Corbett was recognised by the “mainstream” Australian country music scene in 2012 after winning the Star Maker competition. Since the win Bob and the band’s success within the field has increased—higher album sales, larger crowds, more airplay, recognition, sponsorships and nomination for Golden Guitar Awards (the main Australian country music industry awards). They play a mercurial mix of styles including bluegrass, Western swing, pop folk, and rock. At the core is a concern with storytelling and live, acoustic based performance is central. Bob and the band are primarily engaging with the field of Australian country music (through festivals, media, and self-identification), rather than the folk or bluegrass scenes, which, while related, are distinct fields with different logics, rules and relations.The conceptual framework for this article is indebted to Pierre Bourdieu. In using the term “field” to talk about Australian country music, I understand it as a discrete, relatively autonomous social microcosm, which is located within the social space of Australian society and the broader music industry, yet it is ruled by logics which are “specific and irreducible to those that regulate other fields” (Bourdieu in Bourdieu and Wacquant 97). Australian country music consists of systems of relations, which define the occupants of the field—country musicians, country music stars, or country music fans (to name but a few)—and shape the products and practices of the field. Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band are participants in the field of Australian country music, and work to differentiate their position, and gain a monopoly over authority and influence within the field—to be recognised as successful, authentic country music artists (Bourdieu and Wacquant 100). This framework allows analytic space for exploring and understanding a tension between authenticity, as a form of cultural capital, and the commercial imperatives of country music as a popular music form.Family Bands and the Family BusinessThe significance and foregrounded presence of “family” within Australian country music is a result of the history of the field in which family bands have been prominent. The practice of touring with your spouse, children or other kin has been connected to a discourse of the “Family Band” in Australian country music. Slim Dusty and his family, as pioneers in the Australian country music industry, and arguably the most commercially and culturally successful artists in the scene’s history, are held up as an example par excellence of the country music canon, and provide the model for how country music should or could be done as a family. Slim, his wife Joy, daughter Anne Kirkpatrick and other extended family worked as a “family band” touring, performing, songwriting, recording, and being country music artists. As the “first family” Australian country music band (Baker; Ellis) they dominate the social and cultural imaginary of Australian country music. They represent a tradition of family involvement in the business of country music as a way of dealing with the practical realities of touring, providing emotional support and enjoyment, and as a part of a relatively conservative set of values drawn from country life­. These features work together to discursively distance the “family band” from the commercial music industry and imbue integrity and naturalness in those artists’ engagement with the music business. Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band is a family band: fiddle player Sue is Bob’s aunty; her partner Michael Stove, Bob’s uncle, was an original member of the Roo Grass Band. But more than that, the band understands themselves as a “family”. Sometimes-drummer in the band, Michael Carpenter, talked at length about the “Roo Grass Family” when I interviewed him, including the affective value he places on those relationships:I love it when Bob says… ‘Michael’s been a part of the Roo Grass family for a long time’ … it’s a very country music thing to say … when Bob says it, it actually means something, there’s a certain level of weight to it, because I know the way he treats his bands, I know the way he treats the people who are involved ... it does make them feel like they are a part of something special and so, and that’s beyond just doing a gig … it kind of creates this sense of loyalty that is important to me.The other members of the band also understand and value their involvement with the band in a similar way, and it spills into the chemistry the band has on stage, and the enjoyment they derive from playing together. The idea of the family band opens out beyond the actual band as well: the “Roo Grass Family” includes friends, fans and others with strong ties and involvement with the band.Practical, on the ground support (both on tour and also at home) offered by family to artists in Australian country music is a significant source of capital for those artists. However, participants also talk about this family help as a chance to spend time together, and couch it within discourses of loyalty, love, fun and commitment. Practices and discourses of small, DIY business are also sutured to discourse of family, as a way of reinforcing the fierce independence from big business and record companies. The fieldwork account at the beginning of this article reveals some of the work done by family on tour for Bob and the band, mainly through the presence of Bob’s mum, Veronica, as defacto tour manager. During the gig Bob offered a series of acknowledgments for the tour. After thanking the audiences and tour sponsors, he moved on to family:Bob: I’d like to thank my aunty Roberta, she came along and helped us on a tour leg … Ah, I’m going to forget people, I’m going to leave the special ones to last … I would like to thank Kirrily personally, but as Sue said, all partners and stuff, so I love you Kiz. But the most special one of all: Mrs Veronica Corbett [loud applause and cheers]. She’s the backbone! Of the tour, so thanks mum, thanks for everything.Veronica: Absolute pleasure Bobby.Bob: It’s been, it’s been a pleasure. You love doing it.Veronica: I love it.Bob: Yeah, you do love doing it, it’s been great, you know. I don’t want to get too, too sentimental, but, um just before dad died, he turned to me and said ‘look after mum’, and I don’t, I don’t look after mum, but in a way, just sharing all these experiences, like, we’re looking after each other, so, thank you for doing that.In this account, I am interested in the ways in which Bob, Veronica and Sue talk about the labour provided by family. There are a number of ways that participants talk about the practice of getting family to help do the work of touring and performing country music, which emerge here, and are consistently used by Bob and the band. It is spoken of in terms of “spending time” with each other, and of loving that time. Discourses of enjoyment and sociality permeate Bob, Veronica, and others’ discussions of the practical reality of people giving up their time to help. This is part of the cultural capital of authenticity: being a professional country music band out on the road is about more than hard slog, making money and cold business; it is an enjoyable experience, underpinned with love. To be authentic, it should be about more than the dollars.While the involvement of family in the activities of the band is discussed and understood as a chance to spend time together, an enjoyable experience, there are also discourses of support and help tied to these practices by those in and around the band. It is often acknowledged as a practical reality that family members are involved in the activities of the band (or in maintaining the home front) as a source of free or cheap labour which makes touring and performing possible. Sue acknowledged the importance of family support to the band, particularly as an independent band, in the interview: Main sources of support? … the management from Toyota and everything … after winning Star Maker, that was really great, so they’ve really helped … and also family … you certainly need that support, because you can’t, you’ve got to get out there and do it, that’s the only way to do it … it’s very personal support in a lot of ways … we’re not at that stage where, we’re not at a bigger level where there’s plenty of money being thrown around by record companies, that sort of support.In acknowledging the role of family at home while the band tours, as well as the “personal support” given to the band, Sue binds the practices of individuals staying at home, minding kids and maintaining home life, to the discourse of family. She is also linking the practices to the band’s “independent” status and the lack of “money being thrown around by record companies” as the reason this support and other on the road, tour based work, is essential. Within Sue’s account here, and at other times during my fieldwork, there was a sense that she saw the need for family support as a sign of inadequacy, a sign that the band had not yet “made it” to the level where the support comes from record companies, and there will be money thrown around to support the activities of the band. This touches on a broader set of discourses that circulate in the country music community about professionalism and amateurism, which are also linked to ideas about family. While the foregrounding of family has value within the field of country music, there is something else going on here. A division is often drawn between “commercial” and “creative” endeavours in Australian country music. By linking practices involving kin and discourses of family, Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band position themselves as authentic, or real, grass roots, and with creative freedom, in contrast to being creatively constrained or selling out. Within this division, a reliance on one’s family can be understood in some ways as a rejection of the commercial, business networks of country music. In the case of Sue’s account above there is a sense that it is also a way of negotiating success when you do not have access to a record label or other big business support, which may seem the easier route. Sue’s view differs somewhat from Bob’s in this respect. Bob often expressed pride in the fact that they are “doing it on their own” and boasting an independent DIY model of music business (for example through ticketing, tour organisation and production); a business model that relies on the support of their family, but which is respected and valued within Australian country music. ConclusionArtists such as Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band all occupy “positions” in the field of Australian country music, and the discourses of “commercial”, “creative”, and “authentic” all work to categorise artists, and their position in the field. Economic and material circumstances limit, enable or influence the decisions to involve families or not: for Bob, a desire to remain in control of his creative output and career, and the need to maximise income to feed his family makes DIY ticketing, and taking his mum and friends on the road a good choice. But these material factors work with symbolic and cultural factors, in the game of cultural legitimisation about what it is to be a country music artist. The way in which Bob and the band invoked particular discourses of family, loyalty, fun and enjoyment, to talk about the on-the-ground practices of having family involved (or not) in their working lives as musicians is part of the work these bands and artists are doing to represent themselves to the country music community; they are attempting to establish themselves as adequately, legitimately and authentically “country”. In the process they are also shaping what it is to be a country music artist and what is valued within the field—in this case “family”. The constant struggles over what country music is, what is “authentic” country and what represents success, are struggles over the “schemata of classification … which construct social reality” (Bourdieu 20). Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band are using strategies in this struggle, in this case the strategies link practices involving kin to discourses of honesty and openness by collapsing public and private, heritage and tradition through the family band, and authenticity, professionalism, and success in the way family support can limit the need to rely on record labels and big business. ReferencesAkenson, James E. “Australia, The United States and Authenticity.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Philip Hayward. Gympie, QLD: aicmPress for the Australian Institute of Country Music, 2003. 187–206. Baker, Glen A. “Liner Notes - Annethology: The Best of Anne Kirkpatrick.” July 2010.Barker, Hugh, and Yuval Taylor. Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7.1 (1989): 14–25. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, eds. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992. Carriage, Leigh, and Philip Hayward. “Heartlands: Kasey Chambers, Australian Country Music and Americana.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Philip Hayward. Gympie, QLD: aicmPress for the Australian Institute of Country Music, 2003. 113–143. Ellis, Max. “Liner Notes: The Slim Dusty Family Reunion CD.” 2008.Frith, Simon. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. Oxford: Polity Press, 1988.Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.Sanjek, David. “Pleasures and Principles: Issues of Authenticity in the Analysis of Rock’n’Roll.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 4.2 (1992): 12-21.Sanjek, David. “Blue Moon of Kentucky Rising Over the Mystery Train: The Complex Construction of Country Music.” In Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-tonk Bars. Ed. Cecelia Tichi. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 22–44. Smith, Graeme. Singing Australian: The History of Folk and Country Music. North Melbourne, VIC: Pluto Press Australia, 2005. Watson, Eric. Eric Watson’s Country Music in Australia, Volume 1. Pennsylvania: Rodeo Publications, 1982. Watson, Eric. Eric Watson’s Country Music in Australia, Volume 2. Pennsylvania: Rodeo Publications, 1983.

The Whitlams live in Newtown, Australia” is a byline that has appeared on each of the Sydney band’s albums since their beginnings in 1992. During this time the band has progressed from being on a small, independent label with a local audience to achieving national coverage and recognition, culminating with 8 ARIA award nominations in 1998. Of these they won three for Best Group, Song of the Year and Best Independent Release. Following this The Whitlams were signed to Warner Music (as it incorporated Festival Music), and have continued to make albums that still use inner city Sydney as a focus, but are pitched at a less localised audience. The Whitlams have used Sydney as a setting for major local events during this time, (the Sydney Olympics, State Government policies), but also just as a setting to express more personal issues (songs about relationships, aging). This paper will compare The Whitlams’ early releases to the music made after the band gained national attention, looking at how and why Sydney has remained a central theme, but has been expressed in different terms.

In 1999 The Whitlams, a popular ‘indie’ band named after a former Australian prime minister whose government was controversially sacked in 1975 by the Governor-General, released a single titled ‘Blow up the Pokies’. Written about a former band member’s fatal attraction to electronic gaming machines (henceforth referred to as ‘pokies’), the song was mixed by a top LA producer, a decision that its writer and The Whitlam’s front-man, Tim Freedman, describes as calculated to ‘get it on big, bombastic commercial radio’. The investment paid off and the song not only became a big hit for the band, it developed a legacy beyond the popular music scene, with Freedman invited to write the foreword of a ‘self-help manual for giving up gambling’ as well as appearing on public affairs television shows to discuss the issue of problem gambling. The lyrics of ‘Blow up the Pokies’ frame the central themes of this article: spaces, technologies and governmentality of gambling. It then explores what cultural articulations of resistance to the pokie lounge tell us about broader social and cultural dynamics of neoliberal governmentality in Australia.

Singing is a universal human activity. Across the vast range of song traditions throughout the world, native speakers have consistent intuitions about how the syllables in a given line of song text should be set to the tunes and/or rhythms within their various song traditions. This paper presents an Optimality Theoretic analysis of text-setting in a set of ceremonial songs traditionally sung and passed on orally by groups of Kaytetye-speaking women in Central Australia. Australian Aboriginal songs are renowned for the degree to which they diverge from speech. For our analysis, we use a computational method to exhaustively generate all permitted ways sung forms may diverge from their spoken equivalents along with all possible ways each form may be set to rhythm. We show that the seemingly idiosyncratic nature of text-setting strategies in this song set can be accounted for through a relatively generic set of constraints (even when thousands of competing candidates are considered), reflecting many of the fundamental processes that govern the interaction of language, meter, and music.

The development of contemporary, post-disco dance music and its associated culture, as representative of a (supposedly) underground, radical subculture, has been given extensive consideration within popular music studies. Significantly less attention has been given to the commercial, mainstream manifestations of this music. Furthermore, demonstrating the influence of subculture theory, existing studies of dance culture focus largely on youth-based audience participation, and as such, those who engage with dance music on a professional level have been somewhat overlooked. In an attempt to rectify these imbalances, this paper examines the contemporary commercial dance music scene in Sydney, Australia, incorporating an analytical framework that revolves mainly around the work of DJs and the commercial scene they operate within. Given the increasingly global and corporate nature of the dance music scene, there is a sense that the music and culture are becoming less ‘local’ and more ‘international’, with this global movement affecting the identity and development of local scenes, the understandings and practices of those who are involved with these scenes, and the very definition of a ‘scene’ itself. The ideas, opinions and interpretations of a selection of local DJs and other music industry practitioners who work in Sydney are central to the paper’s analysis of DJ culture within the city. It is my intention to place the local scene in Sydney into some sort of wider cultural and global context, but at the same time to highlight what aspects of the scene give it a unique local identity. Being a scene that relies quite heavily on overseas dance culture, and indeed places a certain emphasis on the cultural value of overseas music and international DJs, it can be somewhat difficult for local DJs and producers to establish themselves, and thus a certain tension exists between the local and the global.

For many music students, the transition to university-level studies can be a time characterized by high levels of stress as they adjust to academic standards and the challenges of demanding performance assessments. Given this context, this study investigated the impact of stress on students’ well-being, specifically the facet of subjective vitality, defined in the literature as a feeling of energy and aliveness. Our focus was to explore whether certain psychosocial traits would moderate the negative effects of stress on vitality. Working from an empirically derived conceptual model, our central hypotheses were: (a) that stress and self-oriented perfectionism would be negatively related to vitality, whereas adaptability and quality of peer relationships would be positively related to vitality; and (b) that the relationship between stress and vitality would be moderated by students’ self-oriented perfectionism, adaptability, and quality of peer relationships. Participants were 293 undergraduate and graduate music majors from university schools of music and conservatoires in the United States and Australia. Findings revealed that stress was a significant negative predictor of vitality, but self-oriented perfectionism was not. In addition, both adaptability and quality of peer relationships were significant positive predictors of vitality. However, neither self-oriented perfectionism, adaptability, nor quality of peer relationships moderated the effects of stress on vitality. These findings are discussed with regard to practical recommendations for helping students deal with the stressors in their environments and potential theoretical avenues to explore through future research.

There are many ways to construct, shape and frame a history of popular music. From a focus on performers to a stress on cities, from theories of modernity to reveling in ‘the post,’ innovative music has been matched by evocative writing about it. One arc of analysis in popular music studies focuses on the record label. Much has been written about Sun, Motown, Factory and Apple, but there are many labels that have not reached this level of notoriety and fame but offer much to our contemporary understanding of music, identity and capitalism. The aim of this article is to capture an underwritten history of 21st century music, capturing and tracking moments of collaboration, movement and contact. Through investigating a specific record label, we explore the interconnectiveness of electronica and city-based creative industries’ initiatives. While urban dance culture is still pathologised through drug scares and law and order concerns, clubbing studies and emerging theories of sonic media and auditory cultures offer a significant trigger and frame for this current research. The focus on Off World Sounds (OWS) traces a meta-independent label that summons, critiques, reinscribes and provokes the conventional narratives of capitalism in music. We show how OWS has remade and remixed the collaborations of punk to forge innovative ways of thinking about creativity, policy and popular culture. While commencing with a review of the origin, ideology and intent of OWS, the final part of the paper shows where the experiment went wrong and what can be learnt from this sonic label laboratory. Moving Off World Popular cultural studies evoke and explore discursive formations and texts that activate dissent, conflict and struggle. This strategy is particularly potent when exploring how immigration narratives fray the borders of the nation state. At its most direct, this analysis provides a case study to assess and answer some of Nabeel Zuberi’s questions about sonic topography that he raises in Sounds English. I’m concerned less with music as a reflection of national history and geography than how the practices of popular music culture themselves construct the spaces of the local, national, and transnational. How does the music imagine the past and place? How does it function as a memory-machine, a technology for the production of subjective and collective versions of location and identity? How do the techniques of sounds, images, and activities centered on popular music create landscapes with figures? (3) Dance music is mashed between creativity, consumerism and capitalism. Picking up on Zuberi’s challenge, the story of OWS is also a history of what happens to English migrants who travel to Australia, and how they negotiate the boundaries of the Australian nation. Immigration is important to any understanding of contemporary music. The two proprietors of OWS are Pete Carroll and, one of the two writers of this current article, Stephen Mallinder. Both English proprietors immigrated to Perth in Australia. They used their contacts to sign electronica performers from beyond this single city. They encouraged the tracks to move freely through lymphatic digital networks for remixing—‘lymphatic’ signalling a secondary pathway for commerce and creativity where new musical relationships were being formed outside the influence of major record companies. Performers signed to OWS form independent networks with other performers. This mobility of sound has operated in parallel with the immigration policies of the Howard government that have encouraged insularity and xenophobia. In other eras of racial inequality and discrimination, the independent record label has been not only an integral part of the music industry, but a springboard for political dissent. The histories of jazz and rhythm and blues capture a pivotal moment of independent entrepreneurialism that transformed new and strange sounds/noises into popular music. In monitoring and researching this complex process of musical movement and translation, the independent label has remained the home of the peripheral, the misunderstood, and the uncompromising. Soul music in the United States of America is an example of a sonic form that sustained independence while corporate labels made a profit. Labels like Atlantic Records became synonymous with the success of black vocal music in the 1960s and 1970s, while the smaller independent labels like Chess and Invicta constructed a brand identity. While the division between the majors and the independents increasingly dissolves, particularly at the level of distribution, the independent label remains significant as innovator and instigator. It retains its status and pedagogic function in teaching an audience about new sounds and developing aural literacies. OWS inked its well from an idealistic and collaborative period of label evolution. The punk aesthetic of the late 1970s not only triggered wide-ranging implications for youth culture, but also opened spaces for alternative record labels and label identity. Rough Trade was instrumental in imbuing a spirit of cooperation and a benign mode of competition. A shift in the distribution of records and associated merchandizing to strengthen product association—such as magazines, fanzines and T-Shirts—enabled Rough Trade to deal directly with pivotal stores and outlets and then later establish cartels with stores to provide market security and a workable infrastructure. Links were built with ancillary agents such as concert promoters, press, booking agents, record producers and sleeve designers, to create a national, then European and international, network to produce an (under the counter) culture. Such methods can also be traced in the history of Postcard Records from Edinburgh, Zoo Records from Liverpool, Warp in Sheffield, Pork Recordings in Hull, Hospital Records in London, and both Grand Central and Factory in Manchester. From the ashes of the post-1976 punk blitzkrieg, independent labels bloomed with varying impact, effect and success, but they held an economic and political agenda. The desire was to create a strong brand identity by forming a tight collaboration between artists and distributors. Perceptions of a label’s size and significance was enhanced and enlarged through this collaborative relationship. OWS acknowledged and rewrote this history of the independent label. There was a desire to fuse the branding of the label with the artists signed, released and distributed. No long term obligations on behalf of the artists were required. A 50/50 split after costs was shared. While such an ‘agreement’ appeared anachronistic, it was also a respectful nod to the initial label/artist split offered by Rough Trade. Collaboration with artists throughout the process offered clear statements of intent, with idealism undercut by pragmatism. From track selection, sleeve design, promotion strategy and interview schedule, the level of communication created a sense of joint ownership and dialogue between label and artist. This reinscription of independent record history is complex because OWS’ stable of performers and producers is an amalgamation of dub, trance, hip hop, soul and house genres. Much of trans-localism of OWS was encouraged by its base in Perth. Metaphorically ‘off world’, Perth is a pad for international music to land, be remixed, recut and re-released. Just as Wellington is the capital of Tolkien’s Middle Earth as well as New Zealand, Perth is a remix capital for Paris or New York-based performers. The brand name ‘Off World Sounds’ was designed to emphasise isolation: to capture the negativity of isolation but rewrite separation and distinctiveness with a positive inflection. The title was poached from Ridley Scott’s 1980s film Bladerunner, which was in turn based on Philip K. Dick’s story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Affirming this isolation summoned an ironic commentary on Perth’s geographical location, while also mocking the 1980s discourses of modernity and the near future. The key was to align punk’s history of collaboration with this narrative of isolation and independence, to explore mobility, collaboration, and immigration. Spaces in the Music Discussions of place dictate a particular methodology to researching music. Dreams of escape and, concurrently, intense desires for home pepper the history of popular music. What makes OWS important to theories of musical collaboration is that not only was there a global spread of musicians, producers and designers, but they worked together in a series of strategic trans-localisms. There were precedents for disconnecting place and label, although not of the scale instigated by OWS. Fast Products, although based in Glasgow, signed The Human League from Sheffield and Gang of Four from Leeds. OWS was unique in signing artists disconnected on a global scale, with the goal of building collaborations in remixing and design. Gripper, from the north east of England, Little Egypt from New York, The Bone Idle from Vienna, Hull and Los Angeles, Looped for Pleasure from Sheffield, Barney Mullhouse from Australia and the United Kingdom, Ooblo from Manchester, Attache from Adelaide, Crackpot from Melbourne and DB Chills from Sydney are also joined by artists resident in Perth, such as Soundlab, the Ku-Ling Bros and Blue Jay. Compact Disc mastering is completed in Sydney, London, and Perth. The artwork for vinyl and CD sleeves, alongside flyers, press advertising and posters, is derived from Manchester, England. These movements in the music flattened geographical hierarchies, where European and American tracks were implicitly valued over Australian-derived material. Through pop music history, the primary music markets of the United Kingdom and United States made success for Australian artists difficult. Off World emphasised that the product was not licensed. It was previously unreleased material specifically recorded for the label and an exclusive Australian first territory release. Importantly, this licensing agreement also broadened definitions and interpretations of ‘Australian music’. Such a critique and initiative was important. For example, Paul Bodlovich, Director of the West Australian Music Industry (WAM), believed he was extending the brief of his organisation during his tenure. Once more though, rock was the framework, structure and genre of interest. Explaining the difference from his predecessor, he stated that: [James Nagy] very much saw the music industry as being only bands who were playing all original music—to him they were the only people who actually constituted the music industry. I have a much broader view on that, that all those other people who are around the band—the manager, the promoters, the labels, the audio guys, the whole shebang—that they are part of the music industry too. (33) Much was absent from his ‘whole shebang,’ including the fans who actually buy the music and attend the pubs and clubs. A diversity of genres was also not acknowledged. If hip hop, and urban music generally, is added to his list of new interests, then clubs, graf galleries, dance instructors and fashion and jewelry designers could extend the network of musical collaborations. A parody of corporate culture and a pastiche of the post-punk aesthetic, OWS networked and franchised itself into existence. It was a cottage industry superimposed onto a corporate infrastructure. Attempting to make inroads into an insular Perth arts community and build creative industries’ networks without state government policy support, Off World offered an optimistic perspective on the city’s status and value in a national and global electronic market. Yet in commercial terms, OWS failed. What OWS captures through its failures conveys more about music policy in Australia than any success. The label has been able to catalogue the lack of changes to Perth’s music policy. The proprietors, performers and designers were not approached in 2002 by the Western Australian Contemporary Music Taskforce to offer comment. Yet Matthew Benson and Poppy Wise, researchers for that report, stated that “the solution lies in the industry becoming more outwardly focused, and to do this, it must seek the input of successful professionals who have proven track records in the marketing of music nationally and globally” (9). The resultant document argued that the industry needed to the look to Sydney and Melbourne for knowledge of “international” markets. Yet Paul Bodlovich, the Director of WAM, singled out the insularity of ‘England,’ not Britain, and ‘America’ in comparison to the ‘outward’ Perth music industry: To us, they’re all centre of the universe, but they don’t look past their walls, they don’t have a clue what goes in other parts of the world … All they see say in England is English TV, or in America it’s American TV. Whereas we sit in a very isolated part of the world and we absorb culture from everywhere because we think we have to just to be on an equal arc with everyone else. We think we have to absorb stuff from other cultures because unless we do then we really are isolated … It’s a similar belief to the ongoing issue of women in the workplace, where there’s a belief that to be seen on equal footing you have to be better. (33) This knight’s move affiliation of Perth’s musicians with women in the workplace is bizarre and inappropriate. This unfortunate connection is made worse when recognizing that Perth’s music institutions and organisations, such as WAM, are dominated by white, Australian-born men. To promote the outwardness of Perth culture while not mentioning the role and function of immigration is not addressing how mobility, creativity and commerce is activated. To unify ‘England’ and ‘America,’ without recognizing the crucial differences between Manchester and Bristol, New York and New Orleans, is conservative, arrogant, and wrong. National models of music, administered by Australian-born white men and funded through grants-oriented peer review models rather than creative industries’ infrastructural initiatives, still punctuate Western Australian music. Off World Sounds has been caught in non-collaborative, nationalist models for organising culture and economics. It is always easy to affirm the specialness and difference of a city’s sound or music. While affirming the nation and rock, outsiders appear threatening to the social order. When pondering cities and electronica, collaboration, movement and meaning dance through the margins. References Benson, Matthew, and Poppy Wise. A Study into the Current State of the Western Australian Contemporary Music Industry and Its Potential for Economic Growth. Department of Culture and the Arts, Government of Western Australia, December 2002. Bodlovich, Paul. “Director’s Report.” X-Press 940 (17 Feb. 2005): 33. Zuberi, Nabeel. Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brabazon, Tara, and Stephen Mallinder. "Off World Sounds: Building a Collaborative Soundscape." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/13-brabazonmallinder.php>. APA Style Brabazon, T., and S. Mallinder. (May 2006) "Off World Sounds: Building a Collaborative Soundscape," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/13-brabazonmallinder.php>.

IntroductionMusicians and critics regard Australian jazz as vibrant and creative (Shand; Chessher; Rechniewski). From its tentative beginnings in the early twentieth century (Whiteoak), jazz has become a major aspect of Australia’s music and performance. Due to the large distances separating cities and towns, its development has been influenced by geographical isolation (Nikolsky; Chessher; Clare; Johnson; Stevens; McGuiness). While major cities have been the central hubs, it is increasingly acknowledged that regional centres also provide avenues for jazz performance (Curtis).This article discusses findings relating to transient musical populations shaped by geographical conditions, venue issues that are peculiar to the Northern region, and finally the challenges of cultural and parochial mindsets that North Queensland jazz musicians encounter in performance.Cairns and MackayCairns and Mackay are regional centres on the coast of Queensland, Australia. Cairns – population 156,901 in 2016 (ABS) – is a world famous tourist destination situated on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef (Thorp). Mackay – population 114,969 in 2016 (ABS) – is a lesser-known community with an economy largely underpinned by the sugar cane and coal mining industries (Rolfe et al. 138). Both communities lie North of the capital city Brisbane – Mackay in the heart of Central Queensland, and Cairns as the unofficial capital of Far North Queensland. Mackay and Cairns were selected for this study, not on representational grounds, but because they provide an opportunity to learn through case studies. Stake notes that “potential for learning is a different and sometimes superior criterion to representativeness,” adding, “that may mean taking the one most accessible or the one we can spend the most time with (451).”Musically, both regional centres have a number of venues that promote live music, however, only Cairns has a dedicated jazz club, the Cairns Jazz Club (CJC). Each has a community convention centre that brings high-calibre touring musicians to the region, including jazz musicians.Mackay is home to the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music (CQCM) a part of the Central Queensland University that has offered conservatoire-style degree programs in jazz, contemporary music and theatre for over twenty-five years. Cairns does not have any providers of tertiary jazz qualifications.MethodologySemi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-two significant individuals associated with the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns over a twelve-month period from 2015 to 2016. Twelve of the interviewees were living in Cairns at the time, and ten were living in Mackay. The selection of interviewees was influenced by personal knowledge of key individuals, historical records located at the CQCM, and from a study by (Mitchell), who identified important figures in the Cairns jazz scene. The study participants included members of professional jazz ensembles, dedicated jazz audience members and jazz educators. None of the participants who were interviewed relied solely on the performance of jazz as their main occupation. All of the musicians combined teaching duties with music-making in several genres including rock, jazz, Latin and funk, as well as work in the recording and producing of recorded music. Combining the performance of jazz and commercial musical styles is a common and often crucial part of being a musician in a regional centre due to the low demand for any one specific genre (Luckman et al. 630). The interview data that was gathered during the study’s data collection phase was analysed for themes using the grounded theory research method (Charmaz). The following sections will discuss three areas of findings relating to some of the unique North Queensland influences that have impacted the development and sustainability of the two regional jazz communities.Transient Musical PopulationsThe prospect of living in North Queensland is an alluring proposition for many people. According to the participants in this study, the combination of work and a tropical lifestyle attracts people from all over the country to Cairns and Mackay, but this influx is matched by a high population turnover. Many musicians who move into the region soon move away again. High population turnover is a characteristic of several Northern regional centres such as the city of Darwin (Luckman, Gibson and Lea 12). The high growth and high population turnover in Cairns, in particular, was one of the highest in the country between 2006 and 2011 (ABS). The study participants in both regions believed that the transient nature of the local population is detrimental to the development and sustainability of the jazz communities. One participant described the situation in Cairns this way: “The tropics sort of lure them up there, tease them with all of the beauty and nature, and then spit them out when they realise it’s not what they imagined (interviewee 1, 24 Aug. 2016).” Looking more broadly to other coastal regional areas of Australia, there is evidence of the counter-urban flow of professionals and artists seeking out a region’s “natural and cultural environment” (Gibson 339). On the far North coast of New South Wales, Gibson examined how the climate, natural surroundings and cultural charms attracted city dwellers to that region (337). Similarly, most of the participants in this study mentioned lifestyle choices such as raising a family and living in the tropics as reasons to move to Cairns or Mackay. The prospect of working in the tourism and hospitality industry was found to be another common reason for musicians to move to Cairns in particular. In contrast to some studies (Salazar; Conradson and Latham) where it was found that the middle- to upper-classes formed the majority of lifestyle migrants, the migrating musicians identified by this study were mostly low-income earners seeking a combination of music work and other types of employment outside the music industry. There have been studies that have explored and critically reviewed the theoretical frameworks behind lifestyle migration (Benson and Osbaldiston) including the examination of issues and the motivation to ‘lifestyle migrate’. What is interesting in this current study is the focus of discussion on the post-migration effects. Study participants believe that most of the musicians who move into their region leave soon afterwards because of their disillusionment with the local music industry. Despite the lure of musical jobs through the tourism and hospitality industry, local musicians in Cairns tend to believe there is less work than imagined. Pub rock duos and DJs have taken most of the performance opportunities, which makes it hard for new musicians to compete.The study also reveals that Cairns jazz musicians consider it more difficult to find and collaborate with quality newcomers. This may be attributed to the smaller jazz communities’ demand for players of specific instruments. One participant explained, “There’s another bass player that just moved here, but he only plays by ear, so when people want to play charts and new songs, he can’t do it so it's hard finding the right guys up here at times (interviewee 2, 23 Aug. 2016).” Cairns and Mackay participants agreed that the difficulty of finding and retaining quality musicians in the region impacted on the ability of certain groups to be sustainable. One participant added, “It’s such a small pool of musicians, at the moment, I've got a new project ready to go and I've got two percussionists, but I need a bass player, but there is no bass player that I'm willing to work with (interviewee 3, 24 Aug. 2016).” The same participant has been fortunate over the years, performing with a different local group whose members have permanently stayed in the Cairns region, however, forging new musical pathways and new groups seemed challenging due to the lack of musical skills in some of the potential musicians.In Mackay, the study revealed a smaller influx of new musicians to the region, and study participants experienced the same difficulties forming groups and retaining members as their Cairns counterparts. One participant, who found it difficult to run a Big Band as well as a smaller jazz ensemble because of the transient population, claimed that many local musicians were lured to metropolitan centres for university or work.Study participants in both Northern centres appeared to have developed a tolerance and adaptability for their regional challenges. While this article does not aim to suggest a solution to the issues they described, one interesting finding that emerged in both Cairns and Mackay was the musicians’ ability to minimise some of the effects of the transient population. Some musicians found that it was more manageable to sustain a band by forming smaller groups such as duos, trios and quartets. An example was observed in Mackay, where one participant’s Big Band was a standard seventeen-piece group. The loss of players was a constant source of anxiety for the performers. Changing to a smaller ensemble produced a sense of sustainability that satisfied the group. In Cairns, one participant found that if the core musicians in the group (bass, drums and vocals) were permanent local residents, they could manage to use musicians passing through the region, which had minimal impact on the running of the group. For example, the Latin band will have different horn players sit in from time to time. When those performers leave, the impact on the group is minimal because the rhythm section is comprised of long-term Cairns residents.Venue Conditions Heat UpAt the Cape York Hotel in Cairns, musicians and audience members claimed that it was uncomfortable to perform or attend Sunday afternoon jazz gigs during the Cairns summer due to the high temperatures and non air-conditioned venues. This impact of the physical environment on the service process in a venue was first modelled and coined the ‘Servicescape’ by Bitner (57). The framework, which includes physical dimensions like temperature, noise, space/function and signage, has also been further investigated in other literature (Minor et al.; Kubacki; Turley and Fugate). This model is relevant to this study because it clearly affects the musician’s ability to perform music in the Northern climate and attract audiences. One of the regular musicians at the Cape York Hotel commented: So you’re thinking, ‘Well, I’m starting to create something here, people are starting to show up’, but then you see it just dwindling away and then you get two or three weeks of hideously hot weather, and then like last Sunday, by the time I went on in the first set, my shirt was sticking to me like tissue paper… I set up a gig, a three-hour gig with my trio, and if it’s air conditioned you’re likely to get people but if it’s like the Cape York, which is not air conditioned, and you’re out in the beer garden with a tin roof over the top with big fans, it’s hideous‘. (Interviewee 4, 24 Aug. 2016)The availability of venues that offer live jazz is limited in both regions. The issue was twofold: firstly, the limited availability of a larger venue to cater for the ensembles was deemed problematic; and secondly, the venue manager needed to pay for the services of the club, which contributed to its running costs. In Cairns, the Cape York Hotel has provided the local CJC with an outdoor beer garden as a venue for their regular Sunday performances since 2015. The president of the CJC commented on the struggle for the club to find a suitable venue for their musicians and patrons. The club has had residencies in multiple venues over the last thirty years with varying success. It appears that the club has had to endure these conditions in order to provide their musicians and audiences an outlet for jazz performance. This dedication to their art form and sense of resilience appears to be a regular theme for these Northern jazz musicians.Minor et al. (7) recommended that live music organisers needed to consider offering different physical environments for different events (7). For example, a venue that caters for a swing band might include a dance floor for potential dancers or if a venue catered for a sit down jazz show, the venue might like to choose the best acoustic environment to best support the sound of the ensemble. The research showed that customers have different reasons for attending events, and in relation to the Cape York Hotel, the majority of the customers were the CJC members who simply wanted to enjoy their jazz club performances in an air conditioned environment with optimal acoustics as the priority. Although not ideal, the majority of the CJC members still attended during the summer months and endured the high temperatures due to a lack of venue suitability.Parochial MindsetsOne of the challenging issues faced by many of the participants in both regions was the perceived cultural divide between jazz aficionados and general patrons at many venues. While larger centres in Australia have enjoyed an international reputation as creative hubs for jazz such as Melbourne and Sydney (Shand), the majority of participants in this study believed that a significant portion of the general public is quite parochial in their views on various musical styles including jazz. Coined the ‘bogan factor’, one participant explained, “I call it the bogan factor. Do you think that's an academic term? It is now” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). They also commented on dominant cultural choices of residents in these regions: “It's North Queensland, it's a sport orientated, 4WD dominated place. Culturally they are the main things that people are attracted to” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). These cultural preferences appear to affect the performance opportunities for the participants in Cairns and Mackay.Waitt and Gibson explored how the Wollongong region was chosen as an area for investigation to see if city size mattered for creativity and creativity-led regeneration (1224). With the ‘Creative Class’ framework in mind (Florida), the researchers found that Wollongong’s primarily blue-collar industrial identity was a complex mixture of cultural pursuits including the arts, sport and working class ideals (Waitt and Gibson 1241). This finding is consistent with the comments of study participants from Cairns and Mackay who believed that the identities of their regions were strongly influenced by sport and industries like mining and farming. One Mackay participant added, “I think our culture, in itself, would need to change to turn more people to jazz. I can’t see that happening. That’s Australia. You’re fighting against 200 years of sport” (interviewee 6, 12 Feb. 2016). Performing in Mackay or Cairns in venues that attract various demographics can make it difficult for musicians playing jazz. A Cairns participant added, “As Ingrid James once told me, ‘It's North Queensland, you’ve got an audience of tradesman, they don't get it’. It's silly to think it's going to ever change” (interviewee 7, 26 Aug. 2016). One Mackay participant believed that the lack of appreciation for jazz in regional areas was largely due to a lack of exposure to the art form. Most people grow up listening to other styles of music in their households.Another participant made the point that regardless of the region’s cultural and leisure-time preferences, if a jazz band is playing in a football club, you must expect it to be unpopular. Many of the research participants emphasised that playing in a suitable venue is paramount for developing a consistent and attentive audience. Choosing a venue that values and promotes the style of jazz music that the musicians are performing could help to attract more jazz fans and therefore build a sustainable jazz community.Refreshingly, this study revealed that musicians in both regions showed considerable resilience in dealing with the issue of parochial mindsets, and they have implemented methods to help educate their audiences. The audience plays a significant part in the development and future of a jazz community (Becker; Martin). For the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Mackay, part of the ethos of the institution is to provide music performance and educational opportunities to the region. One of the lecturers who made a significant contribution to the design of the ensemble program had a clear vision to combine jazz and popular music styles in order to connect with a regional audience. He explained, “The popular music strand of the jazz program and what we called the commercial ensembles was very much birthed out of that concept of creating a connection with the community and making us more accessible in the shortest amount of time, which then enabled us to expose people to jazz” (interviewee 8, 20 Mar. 2016).In a similar vein, several Cairns musicians commented on how they engaged with their audiences through education. Some musicians attempted to converse with the patrons on the comparative elements of jazz and non-jazz styles, which helped to instil some appreciation in patrons with little jazz knowledge. One participant cited that although not all patrons were interested in an education at a pub, some became regular attendees and showed greater appreciation for the different jazz styles. These findings align with other studies (Radbourne and Arthurs; Kubacki; Kubacki et al.), who found that audiences tend to return to arts organizations or events more regularly if they feel connected to the experience (Kubacki et al. 409).ConclusionThe Cairns and Mackay jazz musicians who were interviewed in this study revealed some innovative approaches for sustaining their art form in North Queensland. The participants discussed creative solutions for minimising the influence of a transient musician population as well as overcoming some of the parochial mindsets in the community through education. The North Queensland summer months proved to be a struggle for musicians and audience members alike in Cairns in particular, but resilience and commitment to the music and the social network of jazz performers seemed to override this obstacle. Although this article presents just a subset of the findings from a study of the development and sustainability of the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns, it opens the way for further investigation into the unique issues faced. Deeper understanding of these issues could contribute to the ongoing development and sustainability of jazz communities in regional Australia.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. "Mackay (Statistical Area 2), Cairns (R) (Statistical Local Area), Census 2016." Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.———. "Perspectives on Regional Australia: Population Growth and Turnover in Local Government Areas (Lgas), 2006-2011." Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.Becker, H. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982.Benson, Michaela, and Nick Osbaldiston. "Toward a Critical Sociology of Lifestyle Migration: Reconceptualizing Migration and the Search for a Better Way of Life." The Sociological Review 64.3 (2016): 407-23.Bitner, Mary Jo. "Servicescapes: The Impact of Physical Surroundings on Customers and Employees." The Journal of Marketing (1992): 57-71. Charmaz, K. Constructing Grounded Theory. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2014. Chessher, A. "Australian Jazz Musician-Educators: An Exploration of Experts' Approaches to Teaching Jazz." Sydney: University of Sydney, 2009. Clare, J. Bodgie Dada and the Cult of Cool: Jazz in Australia since the 1940s. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995. Conradson, David, and Alan Latham. "Transnational Urbanism: Attending to Everyday Practices and Mobilities." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31.2 (2005): 227-33. Curtis, Rebecca Anne. "Australia's Capital of Jazz? The (Re)creation of Place, Music and Community at the Wangaratta Jazz Festival." Australian Geographer 41.1 (2010): 101-16. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Melbourne, Victoria: Pluto Press Australia, 2003. Gibson, Chris. "Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast." Transformations 2 (2002): 1-15. ———. "Rural Transformation and Cultural Industries: Popular Music on the New South Wales Far North Coast." Australian Geographical Studies 40.3 (2002): 337-56. Johnson, Bruce. The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency Press, 2000. Kubacki, Krzysztof. "Jazz Musicians: Creating Service Experience in Live Performance." International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 20.4 (2008): 401- 13. ———, et al. "Comparing Nightclub Customers’ Preferences in Existing and Emerging Markets." International Journal of Hospitality Management 26.4 (2007): 957-73. Luckman, S., et al. "Life in a Northern (Australian) Town: Darwin's Mercurial Music Scene." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22.5 (2008): 623-37. ———, Chris Gibson, and Tess Lea. "Mosquitoes in the Mix: How Transferable Is Creative City Thinking?" Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30.1 (2009): 70-85. Martin, Peter J. "The Jazz Community as an Art World: A Sociological Perspective." Jazz Research Journal 2.1 (2005): 5-13. McGuiness, Lucian. "A Case for Ethnographic Enquiry in Australian Jazz." Sydney: University of Sydney, 2010.Minor, Michael S., et al. "Rock On! An Elementary Model of Customer Satisfaction with Musical Performances." Journal of Services Marketing 18.1 (2004): 7-18. Mitchell, A. "Jazz on the Far North Queensland Resort Circuit: A Musician's Perspective." Proceedings of the History & Future of Jazz in the Asia-Pacific Region. Eds. P. Hayward and G. Hodges. Vol. 1. Hamilton Island, Australia: Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music, 2004. Nikolsky, T. "The Development of the Australian Jazz Real Book." Melbourne: RMIT University, 2012. Radbourne, Jennifer, and Andy Arthurs. "Adapting Musicology for Commercial Outcomes." 9th International Conference on Arts and Cultural Management (AIMAC 2007), 2007.Rechniewski, Peter. The Permanent Underground: Australian Contemporary Jazz in the New Millennium. Platform Papers 16. Redfern, NSW: Currency House, 2008. Rolfe, John, et al. "Lessons from the Social and Economic Impacts of the Mining Boom in the Bowen Basin 2004-2006." Australasian Journal of Regional Studies 13.2 (2007): 134-53. Salazar, Noel B. "Migrating Imaginaries of a Better Life … until Paradise Finds You." Understanding Lifestyle Migration. Springer, 2014. 119-38. Shand, J. Jazz: The Australian Accent. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009.Stake, Robert E. "Qualitative Case Studies." The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005. 443-66. Stevens, Timothy. "The Red Onion Jazz Band at the 1963 Australian Jazz Convention." Musicology Australia 24.1 (2001): 35-61. Thorp, Justine. "Tourism in Cairns: Image and Product." Journal of Australian Studies 31.91 (2007): 107-13. Turley, L., and D. Fugate. "The Multidimensional Nature of Service Facilities." Journal of Services Marketing 6.3 (1992): 37-45. Waitt, G., and C. Gibson. "Creative Small Cities: Rethinking the Creative Economy in Place." Urban Studies 46.5-6 (2009): 1223-46. Whiteoak, J. "'Jazzing’ and Australia's First Jazz Band." Popular Music 13.3 (1994): 279-95.

On 19 January 1975, Australia’s first youth station 2JJ (Double Jay) launched itself onto the nation’s airwaves with a NASA-style countdown and You Only Like Me ‘Cause I’m Good in Bed by Australian band Skyhooks. Refused airtime by the commercial stations because of its explicit sexual content, this song was a clear signifier of the new station’s intent—to occupy a more radical territory on Australian radio. Indeed, Double Jay’s musical entrée into the highly restrictive local broadcasting environment of the time has gone on to symbolise both the station’s role in its early days as an enfant terrible of radio (Inglis 376), and its near 40 years as a voice for youth culture in Australia (Milesago, Double Jay). In this paper we explore the proposition that Double Jay functioned as an outlet for youth counterculture in Australia, and that it achieved this even with (and arguably because of) its credentials as a state-generated entity. This proposition is considered via brief analysis of the political and musical context leading to the establishment of Double Jay. We intend to demonstrate that although the station was deeply embedded in “the system” in material and cultural terms, it simultaneously existed in an “uneasy symbiosis” (Martin and Siehl 54) with this system because it consciously railed against the mainstream cultures from which it drew, providing a public and active vehicle for youth counterculture in Australia. The origins of Double Jay thus provide one example of the complicated relationship between culture and counterculture, and the multiple ways in which the two are inextricably linked. As a publicly-funded broadcasting station Double Jay was liberated from the industrial imperatives of Australia’s commercial stations which arguably drove their predisposition for formula. The absence of profit motive gave Double Jay’s organisers greater room to experiment with format and content, and thus the potential to create a genuine alternative in Australia broadcasting. As a youth station Double Jay was created to provide a minority with its own outlet. The Labor government committed to wrenching airspace from the very restrictive Australian broadcasting “system” (Wiltshire and Stokes 2) to provide minority voices with room to speak and to be heard. Youth was identified by the government as one such minority. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) contributed to this process by enabling young staffers to establish the semi-independent Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) (Webb) and within this a youth station. Not only did this provide a focal point around which a youth collective could coalesce, but the distinct place and identity of Double Jay within the ABC offered its organisers the opportunity to ignore or indeed subvert some of the perceived strictures of the “mothership” that was the ABC, whether in organisational, content and/or stylistic terms. For these and other reasons Double Jay was arguably well positioned to counter the broadcasting cultures that existed alongside this station. It did so stylistically, and also in more fundamental ways, At the same time, however, it “pillaged the host body at random” (Webb) co-opting certain aspects of these cultures (people, scheduling, content, administration) which in turn implicated Double Jay in the material and cultural practices of those mainstream cultures against which it railed. Counterculture on the Airwaves: Space for Youth to Play? Before exploring these themes further, we should make clear that Double Jay’s legitimacy as a “counterculture” organisation is observably tenuous against the more extreme renderings of the concept. Theodore Roszak, for example, requires of counterculture something “so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all” (5). Double Jay was a brainchild of the state: an outcome of the Whitlam Government’s efforts to open up the nation’s airwaves (Davis, Government; McClelland). Further, the supervision of this station was given to the publicly funded Australian national broadcaster, the ABC (Inglis). Any claim Double Jay has to counterculture status then is arguably located in less radical invocations of the term. Some definitions, for example, hold that counterculture contains value systems that run counter to culture, but these values are relational rather than divorced from each other. Kenneth Leech, for example, states that counterculture is "a way of life and philosophy which at central points is in conflict with the mainstream society” (Desmond et al. 245, our emphasis); E.D. Batzell defines counterculture as "a minority culture marked by a set of values, norms and behaviour patterns which contradict those of the dominant society" (116, our emphasis). Both definitions imply that counterculture requires the mainstream to make sense of what it is doing and why. In simple terms then, counterculture as the ‘other’ does not exist without its mainstream counterpoint. The particular values with which counterculture is in conflict are generated by “the system” (Heath and Potter 6)—a system that imbues “manufactured needs and mass-produced desires” (Frank 15) in the masses to encourage order, conformity and consumption. Counterculture seeks to challenge this “system” via individualist, expression-oriented values such as difference, diversity, change, egalitarianism, and spontaneity (Davis On Youth; Leary; Thompson and Coskuner‐Balli). It is these kinds of counterculture values that we demonstrate were embedded in the content, style and management practices within Double Jay. The Whitlam Years and the Birth of Double Jay Double Jay was borne of the Whitlam government’s brief but impactful period in office from 1972 to 1975, after 23 years of conservative government in Australia. Key to the Labor Party’s election platform was the principle of participatory democracy, the purpose of which was “breaking down apathy and maximising active citizen engagement” (Cunningham 123). Within this framework, the Labor Party committed to opening the airwaves, and reconfiguring the rhetoric of communication and media as a space of and for the people (Department of the Media 3). Labor planned to honour this commitment via sweeping reforms that would counter the heavily concentrated Australian media landscape through “the encouragement of diversification of ownership of commercial radio and television”—and in doing so enable “the expression of a plurality of viewpoints and cultures throughout the media” (Department of the Media 3). Minority groups in particular were to be privileged, while some in the Party even argued for voices that would actively agitate. Senator Jim McClelland, for one, declared, “We say that somewhere in the system there must be broadcasting which not only must not be afraid to be controversial but has a duty to be controversial” (Senate Standing Committee 4). One clear voice of controversy to emerge in the 1960s and resonate throughout the 1970s was the voice of youth (Gerster and Bassett; Langley). Indeed, counterculture is considered by some as synonymous with a particular strain of youth culture during this time (Roszak; Leech). The Labor Government acknowledged this hitherto unrecognised voice in its 1972 platform, with Minister for the Media Senator Doug McClelland claiming that his party would encourage the “whetting of the appetite” for “life and experimentation” of Australia’s youth – in particular through support for the arts (160). McClelland secured licenses for two “experimental-type” stations under the auspices of the ABC, with the youth station destined for Sydney via the ABC’s standby transmitter in Gore Hill (ABCB, 2). Just as the political context in early 1970s Australia provided the necessary conditions for the appearance of Double Jay, so too did the cultural context. Counterculture emerged in the UK, USA and Europe as a clear and potent force in the late 1960s (Roszak; Leech; Frank; Braunstein and Doyle). In Australia this manifested in the 1960s and 1970s in various ways, including political protest (Langley; Horne); battles for the liberalisation of censorship (Hope and Dickerson, Liberalisation; Chipp and Larkin); sex and drugs (Dawson); and the art film scene (Hope and Dickerson, Happiness; Thoms). Of particular interest here is the “lifestyle” aspect of counterculture, within which the value-expressions against the dominant culture manifest in cultural products and practices (Bloodworth 304; Leary ix), and more specifically, music. Many authors have suggested that music was pivotal to counterculture (Bloodworth 309; Leech 8), a key “social force” through which the values of counterculture were articulated (Whiteley 1). The youth music broadcasting scene in Australia was extremely narrow prior to Double Jay, monopolised by a handful of media proprietors who maintained a stranglehold over the youth music scene from the mid-50s. This dominance was in part fuelled by the rising profitability of pop music, driven by “the dreamy teenage market”, whose spending was purely discretionary (Doherty 52) and whose underdeveloped tastes made them “immune to any sophisticated disdain of run-of-the-mill” cultural products (Doherty 230-231). Over the course of the 1950s the commercial stations pursued this market by “skewing” their programs toward the youth demographic (Griffen-Foley 264). The growing popularity of pop music saw radio shift from a “multidimensional” to “mono-dimensional” medium according to rock journalist Bruce Elder, in which the “lowest-common-denominator formula of pop song-chat-commercial-pop-song” dominated the commercial music stations (12). Emblematic of this mono-dimensionalism was the appearance of the Top 40 Playlist in 1958 (Griffin-Foley 265), which might see as few as 10–15 songs in rotation in peak shifts. Elder claims that this trend became more pronounced over the course of the 1960s and peaked in 1970, with playlists that were controlled with almost mechanical precision [and] compiled according to American-devised market research methods which tended to reinforce repetition and familiarity at the expense of novelty and diversity. (12) Colin Vercoe, whose job was to sell the music catalogues of Festival Records to stations like 2UE, 2SER and SUW, says it was “an incredibly frustrating affair” to market new releases because of the rigid attachment by commercials to the “Top 40 of endless repeats” (Vercoe). While some air time was given to youth music beyond the Top 40, this happened mostly in non-peak shifts and on weekends. Bill Drake at 2SM (who was poached by Double Jay and allowed to reclaim his real name, Holger Brockmann) played non-Top 40 music in his Sunday afternoon programme The Album Show (Brockmann). A more notable exception was Chris Winter’s Room to Move on the ABC, considered by many as the predecessor of Double Jay. Introduced in 1971, Room to Move played all forms of contemporary music not represented by the commercial broadcasters, including whole albums and B sides. Rock music’s isolation to the fringes was exacerbated by the lack of musical sales outlets for rock and other forms of non-pop music, with much music sourced through catalogues, music magazines and word of mouth (Winter; Walker). In this context a small number of independent record stores, like Anthem Records in Sydney and Archie and Jugheads in Melbourne, appear in the early 1970s. Vercoe claims that the commercial record companies relentlessly pursued the closure of these independents on the grounds they were illegal entities: The record companies hated them and they did everything they could do close them down. When (the companies) bought the catalogue to overseas music, they bought the rights. And they thought these record stores were impinging on their rights. It was clear that a niche market existed for rock and alternative forms of music. Keith Glass and David Pepperell from Archie and Jugheads realised this when stock sold out in the first week of trade. Pepperell notes, “We had some feeling we were doing something new relating to people our own age but little idea of the forces we were about to unleash”. Challenging the “System” from the Inside At the same time as interested individuals clamoured to buy from independent record stores, the nation’s first youth radio station was being instituted within the ABC. In October 1974, three young staffers—Marius Webb, Ron Moss and Chris Winter— with the requisite youth credentials were briefed by ABC executives to build a youth-style station for launch in January 1975. According to Winter “All they said was 'We want you to set up a station for young people' and that was it!”, leaving the three with a conceptual carte blanche–although assumedly within the working parameters of the ABC (Webb). A Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) was formed in order to meet the requirements of the ABC while also creating a clear distinction between the youth station and the ABC. According to Webb “the CRU gave us a lot of latitude […] we didn’t have to go to other ABC Departments to do things”. The CRU was conscious from the outset of positioning itself against the mainstream practices of both the commercial stations and the ABC. The publicly funded status of Double Jay freed it from the shackles of profit motive that enslaved the commercial stations, in turn liberating its turntables from baser capitalist imperatives. The two coordinators Ron Moss and Marius Webb also bypassed the conventions of typecasting the announcer line-up (as was practice in both commercial and ABC radio), seeking instead people with charisma, individual style and youth appeal. Webb told the Sydney Morning Herald that Double Jay’s announcers were “not required to have a frontal lobotomy before they go on air.” In line with the individual- and expression-oriented character of the counterculture lifestyle, it was made clear that “real people” with “individuality and personality” would fill the airwaves of Double Jay (Nicklin 9). The only formula to which the station held was to avoid (almost) all formula – a mantra enhanced by the purchase in the station’s early days of thousands of albums and singles from 10 or so years of back catalogues (Robinson). This library provided presenters with the capacity to circumvent any need for repetition. According to Winter the DJs “just played whatever we wanted”, from B sides to whole albums of music, most of which had never made it onto Australian radio. The station also adapted the ABC tradition of recording live classical music, but instead recorded open-air rock concerts and pub gigs. A recording van built from second-hand ABC equipment captured the grit of Sydney’s live music scene for Double Jay, and in so doing undercut the polished sounds of its commercial counterparts (Walker). Double Jay’s counterculture tendencies further extended to its management style. The station’s more political agitators, led by Webb, sought to subvert the traditional top-down organisational model in favour of a more egalitarian one, including a battle with the ABC to remove the bureaucratic distinction between technical staff and presenters and replace this with the single category “producer/presenter” (Cheney, Webb, Davis 41). The coordinators also actively subverted their own positions as coordinators by holding leaderless meetings open to all Double Jay employees – meetings that were infamously long and fraught, but also remembered as symbolic of the station’s vibe at that time (Frolows, Matchett). While Double Jay assumed the ABC’s focus on music, news and comedy, at times it politicised the content contra to the ABC’s non-partisan policy, ignored ABC policy and practice, and more frequently pushed its contents over the edges of what was considered propriety and taste. These trends were already present in pockets of the ABC prior to Double Jay: in current affairs programmes like This Day Tonight and Four Corners (Harding 49); and in overtly leftist figures like Alan Ashbolt (Bowman), who it should be noted had a profound influence over Webb and other Double Jay staff (Webb). However, such an approach to radio still remained on the edges of the ABC. As one example of Double Jay’s singularity, Webb made clear that the ABC’s “gentleman’s agreement” with the Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters to ban certain content from airplay would not apply to Double Jay because the station would not “impose any censorship on our people” – a fact demonstrated by the station’s launch song (Nicklin 9). The station’s “people” in turn made the most of this freedom with the production of programmes like Gayle Austin’s Horny Radio Porn Show, the Naked Vicar Show, the adventures of Colonel Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, and the Sunday afternoon comic improvisations of Nude Radio from the team that made Aunty Jack. This openness also made its way into the news team, most famously in its second month on air with the production of The Ins and Outs of Love, a candid documentary of the sexual proclivities and encounters of Sydney’s youth. Conservative ABC staffer Clement Semmler described the programme as containing such “disgustingly explicit accounts of the sexual behaviour of young teenagers” that it “aroused almost universal obloquy from listeners and the press” (35). The playlist, announcers, comedy sketches, news reporting and management style of Double Jay represented direct challenges to the entrenched media culture of Australia in the mid 1970s. The Australian National Commission for UNESCO noted at the time that Double Jay was “variously described as political, subversive, offensive, pornographic, radical, revolutionary and obscene” (7). While these terms were understandable given the station’s commitment to experiment and innovation, the “vital point” about Double Jay was that it “transmitted an electronic reflection of change”: What the station did was to zero in on the kind of questioning of traditional values now inherent in a significant section of the under 30s population. It played their music, talked in their jargon, pandered to their whims, tastes, prejudices and societal conflicts both intrinsic and extrinsic. (48) Conclusion From the outset, Double Jay was locked in an “uneasy symbiosis” with mainstream culture. On the one hand, the station was established by federal government and its infrastructure was provided by state funds. It also drew on elements of mainstream broadcasting in multiple ways. However, at the same time, it was a voice for and active agent of counterculture, representing through its content, form and style those values that were considered to challenge the ‘system,’ in turn creating an outlet for the expression of hitherto un-broadcast “ways of thinking and being” (Leary). As Henry Rosenbloom, press secretary to then Labor Minister Dr Moss Cass wrote, Double Jay had the potential to free its audience “from an automatic acceptance of the artificial rhythms of urban and suburban life. 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The experiences of regional Australia are unique. This issue of M/C Journal solidifies some of the understandings of the experiences of living, working, creating, researching or thinking in, or through, regional Australia. Our work explores regional cultural constructions of these places, spaces, and identities, as well as of the communities that breathe life into these landscapes, whilst also bringing into question relations between the regional, the local, and the global. The contributions to this issue have all worked to investigate sites of collaboration and innovation, to tell stories about diverse communities, and cultural centres in addition to sites of hardship, innovation, and resilience.Moreover, regional Australia has often been marginalised and routinely activated as a symbol of what it means to live in the Great South Land, thus these places are often situated in the shadows of major metropolitan areas. This issue seeks to be a small redress of such acts of marginalisation and activation. Indeed, one of the central purposes of this collection of articles is to privilege regional voices. To this end, the editors have maintained the authorial voices within each piece. Revealed here is a diversity of point of view, of writing styles, and, most importantly, a diversity of scholarly approaches to what we know (and what we might come to know) of ‘regional’ in Australia. The feature article, from Karen Hall and Patrick Sutczak, takes up ideas of regional Australia through an examination of three site-based creative arts projects in the Tasmanian Midlands, arguing for an understanding of regionality as an accretion of environmental and cultural histories. Steven Pace has written on how a high-bandwidth data network project identified a special challenge for the Mackay region which had traditionally prospered from industries such as coal, sugar, and tourism; two decades later, how does the reality compare with the original vision? Alison Sheridan, Jane O’Sullivan, Josie Fisher, Kerry Dunne, and Wendy Beck have argued, looking at television media, that there is greater cultural diversity and complexity in regional towns and cities than portrayed in popular programming that often focus on landscapes and resilient communities, or on the lifestyle benefits of living in a regional area. Damien Webb and Rachel Franks have explored the institutional collecting of stories vital to the culture and knowledge of Aboriginal Australians and how such stories, generated by colonists, can be shared—across metropolitan and regional locations—with Indigenous communities through meaningful collaboration. Robin Ryan, with Uncle Ossie Cruse, has discussed Koori culture in New South Wales and the value of bringing together emerging regional artists, national headline performers of music, dance, and poetry, complemented by art, craft, culinary, language, and performing arts demonstrations. Terry Eyssens has also looked carefully at Indigenous issues and argues that the Australian colonial project has been to convert the entire continent into a region of Europe, in the process he has challenged readers to see the spaces they inhabit in a new way.In highlighting a collaboration between the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site, the Albury LibraryMuseum, and Charles Sturt University, Jessie Lymn has considered the role of regional libraries and museums in collecting, preserving, and making accessible the history of migrant communities. Alison Wishart has also looked at the cultural sector through the lens of the important issue of training and ways to connect the staff and volunteers of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums in regional areas to low-cost professional development and networking opportunities. Ellen Forsyth has investigated how local studies collections in public libraries can help people navigate the various experiences of regional Australia, paying particular attention to how this discovery work can be done onsite and online.Patrick West has examined how the concept of the regional is tied to ideas of well-being through the lens of domestic violence in Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House”. Creativity is central to Susie Elliott’s article which draws on her work on the social, economic, and local conditions that can support art practices, this research highlights alternative ways to live well while entering into the shared space of cultural production. We bookend this issue with another piece of scholarship from Tasmania. The notion of regional has been expanded here by Hanne Nielsen, Chloe Lucas, and Elizabeth Leane with their investigation into Antarctica and how this polar cap has been conceptualised as a region and what that might mean for people in this southern-most state of Australia. AcknowledgementsOur sincere thanks to the members of the Advisory Board of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC) for encouraging us in this project. The ACHRC supports two Member Initiatives: Humanities in the Regions; and Humanities in Cultural Institutions. The Humanities in the Regions Member Initiative, established in 2014, seeks to promote Humanities-based research in regional areas across Australia. We thank our enthusiastic contributors, those who gave their expertise and time in the blind peer review process, and Axel Bruns.

If you have a look at the concert schedules around Australia (and elsewhere in the Western world) these days, you could be forgiven for thinking that you've suddenly been transported back in time: there is a procession of old players, playing (mainly) old songs. The Rolling Stones came through a while ago, as did the Eagles, Creedence Clearwater Revival's John Fogerty, and James Brown. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant played updated versions of Led Zeppelin's music, with some new songs strewn in on occasion. The Beach Boys served up a double blast from the past, touring with America ("Horse with No Name") as their opening act. Australian content in this trend is provided by the odd assortment of media darling John Farnham, ex-Grease girl Olivia Newton-John, and former Phantom of the Opera Anthony Warlow, who are touring under the unlikely name of 'The Main Event'; Australian rock legends Cold Chisel have also reformed recently, with a reunion tour to follow. On the more prestigious end of the pop mainstream, The Three Tenors have only had one concert in Australia recently, but publicity-savvy as they have proven themselves to be during the Football World Cup it's a fairly safe bet that they'll be rolling into Sydney Opera House in time for the last Olympics of this millennium, in the year 2000. Thankfully, we've so far been spared of a remaining-Beatles reunion and tour (they did release their Anthology CDs and videos, though), but it wouldn't really come as a surprise anymore. Why this wave of musical exhumations; why now? Admittedly, some of the reunions produced interesting results (Page & Plant's update of Led Zeppelin songs with world music elements comes to mind), but largely the bands involved have restricted themselves to playing old favourites or producing new music that is content with plagiarising older material, and so it's unlikely that the Beach Boys are touring, for example, because they have a strong desire to take surf music to the next level of art. A better explanation, it seems, can be found in the music industry and its structures, and in the way those structures are increasingly becoming inadequate for today's mediascape. For much of this century, popular music in the Western world -- while music itself is a global obsession, the marketing industry largely remains dominated by the West -- has come in waves: to give a broad overview, jazz was outdone by rock'n'roll, which was followed by the British invasion and the British blues revival, leading to the stadium rock of the 1970s (co-existing with disco), which in turn caused the punk revolution that fizzled out into New Wave and the new romantics, which were superseded by Alternative Rock and Britpop. Looking at this succession, it's not difficult to see that the waves have become smaller over time, though: recent styles have failed by far to reach the heights of interest and influence that earlier waves like rock'n'roll and the British invasion achieved. How many people will remember, say, Oasis in three decades; how many will The Beatles? The question seems unfair. This gradual decrease in wave amplitude over the years is directly linked to changes in the media structure in the Western world: earlier, new musical waves swept the few available channels of radio and TV to their full extent; severe bandwidth limitations forced the broadcasters to divert their entire attention to the latest trends, with no air time to be spared for the music of yesteryear. As the number of channels increased, however, so did the potential for variety; today, most cities of sufficient size at least have stations catering for listeners of classical music, over-40s easy listening, mainstream rock, and alternative rock, and perhaps there's also an open-access channel for the more obscure styles; stations for more specific tastes -- all-jazz, all-heavy metal, all-goth -- are now also viable in some cities. As new style waves come in, they might still sweep through the mainstream stations, but will only manage to cause some minor ripples amongst the less central channels. Similar trends exist among music stores, and the music press. The mainstream might remain in the middle of the musical spectrum, therefore, but it's been narrowed considerably, with more and more music fans moving over to the more specialised channels. There is now "an increasingly fragmented international marketplace of popular musics" (Campbell Robinson et al. 272). In media-rich Western nations, this trend is strengthened further by changes to the mediascape brought on by the Internet: the Net is the ultimate enpander of bandwidth, where anyone can add another channel if their needs aren't met by the existing ones. With an unlimited number of specialised channels, with fans deciding their musical diet for themselves instead of having radio DJs or music journalists do it for them, and with the continued narrowing of the mainstream as it loses more and more listeners, new waves of musical styles lose their impact almost immediately now. Whatever your specific tastes, you'll find like-minded people, specialty labels and CD retailers, perhaps even an Internet radio station -- there is now less need than ever to engage with outside trends. Whether that development is entirely desirable remains a point of debate, of course. The paradox for the big old players in the music industry is that the ongoing globalisation of their markets hasn't also led to a globalisation of musical tastes -- largely because of this exponential increase and diversification of channels. Music is a powerful instrument of community formation, and community formation implies first and foremost a drawing of boundaries to everything that isn't part of the community (Turner 2): as musical styles diversify, therefore, there are now more musical taste communities than anyone would care to list. Instead of turning to some mainstreamed, global style of music, listeners are found to turn to the local -- either to the music produced geographically local to them, or to a form of virtually local music, that is, the music of a geographically dispersed, but (through modern communications technologies) otherwise highly unified taste community (Bruns sect. 1 bite 8ff.). There certainly are more such groupings than the industry would care to cater for: the division of their resources in order to follow musical trends in a large number of separate communities is eating into the profits of the large multinationals, while small specialty labels are experiencing a resurgence (despite the major labels' attempts to discourage them). As Wallis & Malm note, "the transformation of the business side of the music industry into a number of giant concerns has not stopped small enterprises, often run by enthusiasts, from cropping up everywhere" (270). The large conglomerates are remarkably ill-prepared to deal with such a plurality of styles: everything in their structure is crying out for a unified market with few, major, and tightly controlled trends. This is where we (and the industry) return to the Beach Boys & Co., then. Partly out of a desire for the good old times when the music business was simple, partly to see if a revival of the old marketing concepts may not reverse the tide once more, the industry majors have unleashed this procession of the musical undead (with only a few notable exceptions) upon us; it is a last-stand attempt to regather the remaining few servicable battleships of the mainstream fleet to grab whatever riches are still to be found there. Judging by ticket prices alone (Page & Plant charged over A$110 per head), there still is money to be made, but these prices also indicate that such 'mainstream' acts are now largely a spectacle for well-to-do over-35s. Amongst younger audiences, the multinationals remain mostly clueless, despite a few efforts to create massively hyped, but musically lobotomised lowest-common-denominator acts, from the Spice Girls to Céline Dion or U2. Most of the acts the major industry players cling to as their main attractions have quite simply lost relevance to all but the most gullible of audiences -- in this context, the advertisment of the travelling Farnham / Newton-John / Warlow show as 'The Main Event' seems almost touching in its denial of reality. It's not like the industry hasn't tried this strategy before, of course: reacting to the fragmented musical world of the early 1970s, with styles from folk to hard rock all equally vying for a share of the audience, the labels created stadium rock -- oversized concerts of overproduced bands who eventually became alienated from their audiences, causing the radical back-to-the-roots revolution of punk. Stadium rock mark II is bound to fail even more quickly and decisively: with most of its proponents not even creating any excitement in the all-important 'young adults' market in the first place, it's the wave that wasn't, and should properly be seen as the best sign yet of the industry's loss of touch with its fragmenting market(s). It's time for new, smaller, and more mobile players to take over from the multinationals, it seems. References Bruns, Axel. "'Every Home Is Wired': The Use of Internet Discussion Fora by a Subcultural Community." 1998. 17 Dec. 1998 <http://www.uq.net.au/~zzabruns/uni/honours/thesis.php>. Campbell Robinson, Deanna, et al. Music at the Margins: Popular Music and Global Cultural Diversity. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1991. Wallis, Roger, and Krister Malm. Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. London: Constable, 1984. Turner, Graeme. "Rock Music, National Culture and Cultural Policy." Rock Music: Politics and Policy. Ed. Tony Bennett. Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith U, 1988. 1-6. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "Old Players, New Players: The Main Event That Isn't." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/main.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "Old Players, New Players: The Main Event That Isn't," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/main.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1998) Old players, new players: the Main Event that isn't. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/main.php> ([your date of access]).

The elaborate cross-media spectacle, ‘Australian Idol,’ ostensibly lays bare the process of creating a pop star. Yet with so much made visible, much is rendered opaque. Specifically, ‘Idol’ is defined by the use of carefully-tuned strategies of publicity and promotion that create, shape and reshape a series of ‘authentic celebrities’ – pop stars whose emergence is sanctified through a seemingly open process of public ratification. Yet, Idol’s main actor is the music industry itself which uses contestants as vehicles for crafting intimate, long-term relationships with consumers. Through an analysis of the process through which various contestants in ‘Australian Idol’ are promoted and sold, it becomes clear that these populist icons are emblematic of an industry reinventing itself in a media environment that presents remarkable challenges and surprising opportunities. Curiously, the debates, strategies and motivations of the public relations industry have received little sustained attention in popular music studies. While much has been written about the contradictions between the rhetoric of rebellion and the complicated realities of corporate success (Frank; Negus), less has been written about the evolution of specific kinds of publicity and the strategies that shape their use in the music industry. This is surprising given the foundational role of public relations strategies within the culture industries generally and the music industry in particular. Specifically, what Turner et. al. define as ‘the promotional culture’ is central to the production and marketing of mainstream popular music. The ‘Idol’ phenomenon offers a rich opportunity to examine how the mainstream of the popular music industry uses distinct and novel marketing strategies in the face of declining sales of compact discs, an advertising environment that is extraordinarily crowded with all manner of competing messages, a steady rate of trade in digital song files and ever more effective competition from video games and DVDs. The ‘Idol’ phenomenon has proved to be a bundle of highly successful strategies for making money from popular music. Selling CDs seems to be almost ancillary to the phenomenon, acting as only one profit centre among many. Indeed, we can track the progress and deployment of specific strategies for shaping the creation of what has become a series of musical celebrities from the start of the first series of ‘Australian Idol’ through a continuous process of strategic publicity. The Attention Economy It has been somewhat hysterically estimated that the average resident of Sydney might be presented with around 3000 commercial messages a day (Lee). It is this kind of communication environment that makes account planners go weak in the knees in both paralysing anxiety and genuine excitement. Many have taken to paying people to go to bars, cafes and clubs to talk up the relative merits of a product to complete strangers in the guise of casual conversation. Similarly, commercial buskers have recently appeared on City Trains to proclaim the virtues of the wares they’ve been contracted to hawk. One can imagine ‘Cockles and Mussels’ has been updated as ‘MP3 Players and Really Cool Footwear.’ These phenomena are variously referred to as ‘viral,’ ‘tipping point,’ ‘word of mouth’ or ‘whisper’ marketing. (Gladwell; Godin; Henry; Lee; Rosen) Regardless of what you call it, the problem inspiring these promotional chats and arias is the same: advertisers can no longer count on getting and holding our attention. As Davenport and Beck, Brody and even Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon have noted, the more taxed public attention gets, the more valuable it becomes. By most industry accounts, the attention economy is an established reality. It represents a significant shift of emphasis away from traditional methods of reaching consumers, instead inspiring new thinking about how to create lasting, flexible and evolving relationships with target audiences. The attention economy is a complicated and often contradictory response to a media environment that appears less and less reliable and to consumers who behaviour is often poorly understood, even mysterious (Elliott and Jankel-Elliott). This challenging backdrop, however, is only the beginning for a seemingly beleaguered music industry. Wherever one looks, from the rise of the very real threat of global piracy to the expansion of the video game industry to mobile phones and hand held players to increasing amounts of money spent on DVDs and ring tones, selling CDs has become almost a sideline. The main event is the profitable use and reuse of the industry’s vast stores of intellectual property through all manner of media, most which didn’t exist ten years ago. Indeed, the ‘Idol’ phenomenon shows us how the music industry has been incorporating its jealously-guarded intellectual property and familiar modes of industrial self-presentation into existing media environments to build long-term relationships with consumers through television, radio, DVDs, CDs, the internet and mobile phones. Further, ‘Idol’s’ producers have supplemented more traditional models of communication by taking direct and explicit account of how and where audiences use a wide variety of media. The broad range of opportunities to participate in ‘Idol’ is central to its success. It demonstrates a willingness on the part of producers to accept the necessity of bending somewhat to the audience’s existing and evolving uses of the media. In short, they are simply not all that fussy about how participation actually happens so long as it does. Producers allow for many kinds of participation in order to constantly offer more specific and more active levels of involvement. ‘Idol’ has transformed consumer relationships within the music industry by coaxing into being ever more intimate, active and reciprocal relationships over the course of the contest by encouraging increasingly specific acts by consumers to complete a continual series of transactions. The Use and Reuse of Celebrity In many quarters, ‘Australian Idol’ has become a byword for bullshit. The competition seems rigged and the contestants are not seen as ‘real’ musicians in large part because their experience appears to be so transparent and so transparently commercial. As the mythology of the music industry has traditionally had it, deserving pop stars are established as celebrities through what is a more or less a linear progression. Early success is based on a carefully constructed sense of authentic cultural production. Credibility is established through a series of contestable affiliations to ostensibly organic music cultures, earned through artistic development and the hard slog of touring and practice (see Maxwell 118). The fraught possibilities of mainstream success continually beckon to ‘real’ musicians as they either ‘crossover’ or remain independent all the while trying to preserve some elusive measure of public honesty. As this mythology was implicitly unavailable to the producers of ‘Idol,’ a different kind of authenticity had to be constructed. Instead of a ‘battles of the bands’ (read: brands) contest, ‘Idol’ producers chose to present ‘unbranded’ aspirants (“Sydney Audition”). These hopefuls are presented as appealingly ambitious or merely optimistic individuals with varying degrees of talent. Those truly blessed, not only with talent but the drive to work it into saleable shape, would be carefully chosen from the multitude and offered an opportunity to make the most of their inherent yet unformed ability. Thus, their authenticity was assumed to be an implicit, inchoate presence, requiring the guiding hand of insiders to reach full flower. Through the facilitation of competition and direction provided in the form of knowledgeable music industry veterans who never tire of giving stern admonitions to indifferent performers who do not take full advantage of the opportunity presented to them, contestants are asked to prove themselves through an extended period of intense self-presentation and recreation. The lengthy televised, but tightly-edited auditions, complete with extensive commentary and the occasional gnashing of teeth on the part of the panel of experts and rejected contestants, demonstrate to us the earnest intent of those involved. Importantly, the authenticity of those proceeding through the contest is never firmly established, but has to be continually and strategically re-established. Each weighty choice of repertoire, wardrobe and performance style can only break them; each successful performance only raises the stakes. This tense maintenance of status as a deserving celebrity runs in tandem with the increasingly attentive and reciprocal relationship between the producers and the audience. The relationship begins with what has proved to be a compelling first act. Thousands of ‘ordinary’ Australians line up outside venues throughout the country, many sleeping in car parks and on footpaths, practising, singing and performing for the mobile camera crews. We are presented with their youthful vigour in all its varied guises. We cannot help but be convinced of the worth of those who survive such a process. The chosen few who are told with a flourish ‘You’re going to Sydney’ are then faced with what appears to be a daunting challenge, to establish themselves in short order as a performer with ‘the X factor’ (“Australian Idol” 14 July 2004). A fine voice and interesting look must be supplemented with those intangible qualities that result in wide public appeal. Yet these qualities are only made available to the public and the performer because of the contest itself. When the public is eventually asked to participate directly, it is to both produce and ratify exactly these ambiguous attributes. More than this, contestants need our help just to survive. Their celebrity is almost shockingly unstable, more fleeting than its surrounding rhetoric and context might suggest and under constant, expected threat. From round to round, favourites can easily become also rans–wild cards who limp out of one round, but storm through the next. The drama can only be heightened, securing our interest by requiring our input. As any advertiser can tell you, an effective campaign must end in action on our part. Through text message and phone voting as well as extensive ‘fan management’ through internet chat rooms and bulletin boards (see Stahl 228; http://au.messages.yahoo.com/australianidol/), our channelled ‘viral’ participation both shapes and completes the meanings of the contest. These active and often inventive relationships (http://au.australianidol.yahoo.com/fancentral/) allow the eventual ‘Idol’ to claim the credibility the means of their success otherwise renders suspect and these activities appear to consummate the relationship. However, the relationship continues well beyond the gala final. In a fascinating re-narration of the first series of ‘Australian Idol,’ Australian Idol: The Winner’s Story aired on the Friday following the final night of the contest. The story of the newly crowned Idol, Guy Sebastian, was presented in an hour long program that showed his home life, his life as a voice teacher in the Adelaide suburbs and his subsequent journey to stardom. The clips depicting his life prior to ‘Idol’ were of ambiguous vintage, cleverly silent on the exact date of production; somehow they were not quite in the past or the future, but floated in some eternal in-between. When his ‘Australian Idol’ experience was chronicled, after the second commercial break, we were allowed to see an intimate portrait of an anxious contestant transformed into ‘Your Australian Idol.’ There could be no doubt of the virtue of Sebastian’s struggles, nor of his well-earned victory. ‘New’ footage began with the sudden sensation reluctantly commenting on other contestants at the original Adelaide cattle call at the prompting of the mobile camera crew and ended with his teary-eyed mother exultant at the final decision as she stood in the front row at the Opera House. Further, not only is the entire run of the first series dramatically recounted in documentary format on the Australian Idol: Greatest Moments DVD, framed by Sebastian’s humble triumph, so are the stories of each member of the Final 12 and the paths they took through the contest. These reiterations serve to reinforce not only Sebastian’s status, but the status of the program itself. They confirm the benevolent success of the industry it so dutifully profiles. We are taken behind the curtain, allowed to see the machinery of stardom grind inevitably to a conclusion, knowing we will be allowed back again when the time is right. Whereas ‘Idol’ is routinely pilloried for its crass commercialism, it remains an unavoidable success. Viewers keep tuning in, advertisers still clamour to sponsor all aspects of the production and the CDs keep selling. Most importantly, the music industry has a showcase for its own operations. The structures of feeling it exists to produce take on a kind of subtle explicitness that ensures their perpetuation. Within an industry faced with threats perceived to be foundational, the creators of ‘Idol’ have produced an audacious and arrogant spectacle. They have made a profitable virtue out of an economic necessity. The expensive and unpredictable process of finding and nurturing new talent has not only been made more reliable, but ‘Idol’ has shown that it can actually turn a profit. The brand of celebrity produced by Idol possesses no mere sheen of populist approval, but embodies that more valuable commodity: popular attention, however reluctant or enthusiastic it may be. References “Australian Idol.” Ten Network, Sydney, 14 July 2004. “Australian Idol: The Winner’s Story.” Ten Network, Sydney, 21 November 2003. Australian Idol: Greatest Moments. Fremantle Media Operations, 2004. Brody, E.W. “The ‘Attention’ Economy.” Public Relations Quarterly 46.3 (2001): 18-21. Davenport, T., and J. Beck. “The Strategy and Structure of Firms in the Attention Economy.” Ivey Business Journal 66.4 (2002): 49–55. Elliott, R., and N. Jankel-Elliott. “Using Ethnography in Strategic Consumer Research.” Qualitative Market Research 6.4 (2003): 215-23. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002. Godin, Seth. Unleashing the Ideavirus. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Henry, Amy. “How Buzz Marketing Works for Teens.” Advertising and Marketing to Children April-June (2003): 3-10. Lee, Julian. “Stealth Marketers Ready to Railroad the Unsuspecting.” Sydney Morning Herald 24-5 July 2004: 3. Maxwell, Ian. “True to the Music: Authenticity, Articulation and Authorship in Sydney Hip-Hop Culture.” Social Semiotics 4.1-2 (1994): 117–37. Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge, 1999. Negus, Keith. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold, 1992. Rosen, Emanuel. The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing. London: Harper Collins, 2000. Stahl, Matthew. “A Moment like This: American Idol and Narratives of Meritocracy.” Bad Music: Music We Love to Hate. Eds. C. Washburne and M. Derno. New York: Routledge, 2004. 212–32. “Sydney Auditions: Conditions of Participation in the Australian Idol Audition.” Australian Idol Website 10 June 2004. http://au.australianidol.com.au>. Turner, G., F. Bonner, and P.D. Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fairchild, Charles. "'Australian Idol' and the Attention Economy." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/09-fairchild.php>. APA Style Fairchild, C. (Nov. 2004) "'Australian Idol' and the Attention Economy," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/09-fairchild.php>.

The ways in which artists, musicians, filmmakers and other creative practitioners perceive, navigate and represent 'place' in their work is complex and multifaceted. Further, place-based conditions also influence the ways in which creative activity occurs in particular locales. This raises questions regarding the role of history, economics, attitudes towards and perceptions of particular forms of arts and culture, shared social and creative contexts, and the geographical location of places, in shaping and fostering creativity. While the relationship between place and creative practice is now widely recognised across the social sciences, it remains poorly conceptualised at the level of specific forms of artistic and creative practices and creative industries. The aim of this issue has been, therefore, to bring together scholarship from across a range of disciplines that is concerned with the relationship between broadly defined concepts of place and creativity.This issue brings together scholars whose work examines a wide range of geographical and digital, real and imagined concepts of place, working from a wide range of locales: America, Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Practices related to artisans, music, film, visual arts and broadly, place-specific creative economies form the focus of this issue. Such a broad spectrum of scholars and associated sectors represents the vast ways in which concepts of place all at once influence, and be influenced by, creativity, and creative and cultural practices.The first five articles of this issue examine in various ways the relationship between culture, art and the urban. In the feature article, Samuel Whiting and David Carter focus on Australian live music to consider broader issues around access to places that cultivate artistic practice, communities and audiences. Their analysis suggests three key factors which enable and constraining access to live music: public transport; social status and stage of life; and government regulation. Their findings suggest that traditional conceptions of access have limited utility when applied to live music - an important conclusion in the context of high levels of venue closures and the pressing need to foster and support place-based live music scenes.Staying on the theme of music, Robert C. Kloosterman and Amanda Brandellero consider the role of the Chelsea Hotel in New York and the Indica Bookshop and Gallery in London in the 1960s as meeting places for musicians, artists, managers and hangers-on, and thus as key social institutions in the development of the music scenes of these cities. They suggest that their central location, proximity to night clubs and venues, tolerant atmosphere towards drugs and sex, and the continuous flow of key actors, acted together to foster cultural innovation. Thus innovation can be clearly tied to particular urban places and spaces at particular times. Yet often, ‘place’ is a much more difficult concept to tie down.Saesha Senger examines the music of Paris-based French rapper, MC Solaar. Senger points to the importance of local influences on Solaar’s music, such the way in which Parisian banlieues, nightclubs, and other places figure prominently in particular songs. Yet she also notes the importance of American references, used as part of a conscious connection to rap’s lineage. Thus the mixture of the local and global is highly evident in Solaar’s music, and Senger suggests that while countries, cities, neighbourhoods, and even specific government housing developments inform the music, the identities of these places are not fixed either for the performers or for the audience. His account thus points to some of the complexities of ‘place’ as it relates to culture and cultural production under contemporary globalization.Moving beyond music, Stephen Marotta, Austin Cummings and Charles Heying also consider some of the complexities of the concept of ‘place’, with specific reference to the Artisan Economy of Portland, Oregon. Their account of the resurgence of place specificity and branding, through the notion of ‘Portland Made’, seeks to reveal an important tension immanent in the notion of place: that place is both real and imaginary. ‘Place’, they suggest, conceptually captures various intersections of materiality and mythology, aesthetics and economics, with makers actively producing Portland as both a local and global ‘place’.The paper by Joshua Syenko examines the productive relationships between art, landscape and cities as sites of collective memory. Focusing on Gibellina, a Sicilian town destroyed in 1968 by a series of earthquakes, and the subsequent struggle among its community to articulate a sense of spatial belonging with its remains, Syenko considers how memorial objects in Gibellina have become integral to the reimagining of place. Questioning the relationships forged between the history of Gibellina and its architectural presentation, the paper raises important issues about the complexity of ‘place’ with regards its ritual and memorial functions.The next three papers perform the important task of switching our attention from the urban, on which the majority of literature on place and culture has tended to focus, to consider creativity and creative production in the context of rural and ‘peripheral’ places. Elasaid Munro focuses on recent attempts to develop the creative economy in rural Scotland. Within rural communities, she suggests, there is a sense of being distant from decision makers and being isolated in terms of practice. Her findings suggest that ‘importing’ models from urban contexts is alienating and frustrating for rural creatives, who seek through their work to contribute to the development of the communities within which they are embedded, rather than engaging in creative activities merely for economic gain. Highlighting the piecemeal funding and support landscape, Munro argues that targeted, rural-specific interventions are required if the potential of the rural creative industries is to be maximised.Staying in Scotland, and also focusing on the issue of appropriate frameworks of support for the creative economy, Katherine Champion explores the relationship between place and the screen industries. She argues the need for a closer examination of the role of incentives and infrastructure investment in developing a vibrant and sustainable industry. Recent success for the screen industries in Scotland, Champion suggests, can in part be attributed to interventions including increased decentralisation of broadcasting and high-end television tax incentives. Yet, she also identifies gaps in infrastructure which continue to stymie growth and have led to production drain to other centres. Important questions are raised regarding the difficulties of establishing a rich production ecology that is far removed from the traditional ‘hub’ of the industry in London and the South East England.Moving to rural Australia, Robin Ryan considers the mobilisation of culture as a socioeconomic resource. Specifically, she focuses on the town of Northcliffe, which in 2015 found itself at the centre of the largest wildfire in the recorded history of the southwest region. In her article, Ryan highlights the importance of the local creative scene in providing a cultural and socioeconomic resource for conservation and the healing of community spirit, and draws important links between place-based social, economic and material conditions and creative practices. In particular, she highlights how the ecologically-inspired musical representation of place can act to draw out the richness and significance of place.The issue closes with two papers that consider place not only as it is constituted physically but also virtually through digital technologies. Alfio Leotta argues that the digital revolution has been characterized by the overlapping of different media technologies and platforms which have not only reshaped forms of audiovisual consumption but also conceptions of place and space. Focusing on film locations, tourism, and digital mapping tools, Leotta demonstrates how the smartphone, as a new hybrid media platform online communication and GPS capability, has begun to play to a crucial role in the construction of new notions of place. He argues that, through providing new layers of cultural meaning and alternative modes of affective engagement, apps and maps are contributing to the redefinition of both the notion of tourist destination and the construction of place identity. Such research is crucial in shedding light on the way in which contemporary leisure activities reshape the cultural, social and geographic meaning of place.Finally, Jason Luger considers how the digital realm is necessitating a reconceptualization of urban space. Focusing on the concept of ‘placeless art’ through field-research in Singapore, Luger considers the ways in which social media and other digital platforms have extended the art-scape to a new, global, hyper-connected scale. Interactive and immaterial art-making, he argues, increasingly complements, and in some cases supplants, traditional place-based artistic practice. Yet, he emphasises that despite the emergence of ‘placeless’ art-forms, specific urban sites remain crucial anchoring nodes in a critical art ecosystem. Thus, we are returned squarely to the importance of place.When taken together, this collection of articles pick up on just some of the many complexities inherent in the relationship between place, culture and cultural production, across a variety of creative practices and geographical contexts. While there is much scholarship in this area, it is clear that our understanding of these complexities remains underdeveloped. This set of articles make an important contribution in this regard. All of the articles point to important avenues for further research, and we hope will inspire and shape further scholarship in this area.

Conurbation [f. CON- + L. urb- and urbs city + -ation] An aggregation of urban areas. (OED) Beyond the urban, further and lower even than the suburban, lies the con-urban. The conurban: with the urban, partaking of the urbane, lying against but also perhaps pushing against or being contra the urban. Conurbations stretch littorally from Australian cities, along coastlines to other cities, joining cities through the passage of previously outlying rural areas. Joining the dots between cities, towns, and villages. Providing corridors between the city and what lies outside. The conurban is an accretion, an aggregation, a piling up, or superfluity of the city: Greater London, for instance. It is the urban plus, filling the gaps between cities, as Los Angeles oozing urbanity does for the dry, desert areas abutting it (Davis 1990; Soja 1996). I wish to propose that the conurban imaginary is a different space from its suburban counterpart. The suburban has provided a binary opposition to what is not the city, what lies beneath its feet, outside its ken. Yet it is also what is greater than the urban, what exceeds it. In modernism, the city and its denizens define themselves outside what is arrayed around the centre, ringing it in concentric circles. In stark relief to the modernist lines of the skyscraper, contrasting with the central business district, central art galleries and museums, is to be found the masses in the suburbs. The suburban as a maligned yet enabling trope of modernism has been long revalued, in the art of Howard Arkeley, and in photography of suburban Gothic. It comes as no surprise to read a favourable newspaper article on the Liverpool Regional Art Gallery, in Sydney's Western Suburbs, with its exhibition on local chicken empires, Liverpool sheds, or gay and lesbians living on the city fringe. Nor to hear in the third way posturing of Australian Labor Party parliamentarian Mark Latham, the suburbs rhetorically wielded, like a Victa lawn mover, to cut down to size his chardonnay-set inner-city policy adversaries. The politics of suburbia subtends urban revisionism, reformism, revanchism, and recidivism. Yet there is another less exhausted, and perhaps exhaustible, way of playing the urban, of studying the metropolis, of punning on the city's proper name: the con-urban. World cities, as Saskia Sassen has taught us, have peculiar features: the juxtaposition of high finance and high technology alongside subaltern, feminized, informal economy (Sassen 1998). The Australian city proudly declared to be a world city is, of course, Sydney while a long way from the world's largest city by population, it is believed to be the largest in area. A recent newspaper article on Brisbane's real estate boom, drew comparisons with Sydney only to dismiss them, according to one quoted commentator, because as a world city, Sydney was sui generis in Australia, fairly requiring comparison with other world cities. One form of conurbanity, I would suggest, is the desire of other settled areas to be with the world city. Consider in this regard, the fate of Byron Bay a fate which lies very much in the balance. Byron Bay is sign that circulates in the field of the conurban. Craig MacGregor has claimed Byron as the first real urban culture outside an Australian city (MacGregor 1995). Local residents hope to keep the alternative cultural feel of Byron, but to provide it with a more buoyant economic outlook. The traditional pastoral, fishing, and whaling industries are well displaced by niche handicrafts, niche arts and craft, niche food and vegetables, a flourishing mind, body and spirit industry, and a booming film industry. Creative arts and cultural industries are blurring into creative industries. The Byron Bay area at the opening of the twenty-first century is attracting many people fugitive from the city who wish not to drop out exactly; rather to be contra wishes rather to be gently contrary marked as distinct from the city, enjoying a wonderful lifestyle, but able to persist with the civilizing values of an urban culture. The contemporary figure of Byron Bay, if such a hybrid chimera may be represented, wishes for a conurbanity. Citizens relocate from Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney, seeking an alternative country and coastal lifestyle and, if at all possible, a city job (though without stress) (on internal migration in Australia see Kijas 2002): Hippies and hip rub shoulders as a sleepy town awakes (Still Wild About Byron, (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 2002). Forerunners of Byron's conurbanity leave, while others take their place: A sprawling $6.5 million Byron Bay mansion could be the ultimate piece of memorabilia for a wealthy fan of larrikin Australian actor Paul Hogan (Hoges to sell up at Byron Bay, Illawarra Mercury, 14 February 2002). The ABC series Seachange is one key text of conurbanity: Laura Gibson has something of a city job she can ply the tools of her trade as a magistrate while living in an idyllic rural location, a nice spot for a theme park of contemporary Australian manners and nostalgia for community (on Sea Change see Murphy 2002). Conurban designates a desire to have it both ways: cityscape and pastoral mode. Worth noting is that the Byron Shire has its own independent, vibrant media public sphere, as symbolized by the Byron Shire Echo founded in 1986, one of the great newspapers outside a capital city (Martin & Ellis 2002): <http://www.echo.net.au>. Yet the textual repository in city-based media of such exilic narratives is the supplement to the Saturday broadsheet papers. A case in point is journalist Ruth Ostrow, who lives in hills in the Byron Shire, and provides a weekly column in the Saturday Australian newspaper, its style gently evocative of just one degree of separation from a self-parody of New Age mores: Having permanently relocated to the hills behind Byron Bay from Sydney, it's interesting for me to watch friends who come up here on holiday over Christmas… (Ostrow 2002). The Sydney Morning Herald regards Byron Bay as another one of its Northern beaches, conceptually somewhere between Palm Beach and Pearl Beach, or should one say Pearl Bay. The Herald's fascination for Byron Bay real estate is coeval with its obsession with Sydney's rising prices: Byron Bay's hefty price tags haven't deterred beach-lovin' boomers (East Enders, Sydney Morning Herald 17 January 2002). The Australian is not immune from this either, evidence 'Boom Times in Byron', special advertising report, Weekend Australia, Saturday 2 March 2002. And plaudits from The Financial Review confirm it: Prices for seafront spots in the enclave on the NSW north coast are red hot (Smart Property, The Financial Review, 19 January 2002). Wacky North Coast customs are regularly covered by capital city press, the region functioning as a metonym for drugs. This is so with Nimbin especially, with regular coverage of the Nimbin Mardi Grass: Mardi Grass 2001, Nimbin's famous cannabis festival, began, as they say, in high spirits in perfect autumn weather on Saturday (Oh, how they danced a high old time was had by all at the Dope Pickers' Ball, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May 2001). See too coverage of protests over sniffer dogs in Byron Bay in Easter 2001 showed (Peatling 2001). Byron's agony over its identity attracts wider audiences, as with its quest to differentiate itself from the ordinariness of Ballina as a typical Aussie seaside town (Buttrose 2000). There are national metropolitan audiences for Byron stories, readers who are familiar with the Shire's places and habits: Lismore-reared Emma Tom's 2002 piece on the politics of perving at King's beach north of Byron occasioned quite some debate from readers arguing the toss over whether wanking on the beach was perverse or par for the course: Public masturbation is a funny old thing. On one hand, it's ace that some blokes feel sexually liberated enough to slap the salami any old time… (Tom 2002). Brisbane, of course, has its own designs upon Byron, from across the state border. Brisbane has perhaps the best-known conurbation: its northern reaches bleed into the Sunshine Coast, while its southern ones salute the skyscrapers of Australia's fourth largest city, the Gold Coast (on Gold Coast and hinterland see Griffin 2002). And then the conburbating continues unabated, as settlement stretches across the state divide to the Tweed Coast, with its mimicking of Sanctuary Cove, down to the coastal towns of Ocean Shores, Brunswick Heads, Byron, and through to Ballina. Here another type of infrastructure is key: the road. Once the road has massively overcome the topography of rainforest and mountain, there will be freeway conditions from Byron to Brisbane, accelerating conurbanity. The caf is often the short-hand signifier of the urban, but in Byron Bay, it is film that gives the urban flavour. Byron Bay has its own International Film Festival (held in the near-by boutique town of Bangalow, itself conurban with Byron.), and a new triple screen complex in Byron: Up north, film buffs Geraldine Hilton and Pete Castaldi have been busy. Last month, the pair announced a joint venture with Dendy to build a three-screen cinema in the heart of Byron Bay, scheduled to open mid-2002. Meanwhile, Hilton and Castaldi have been busy organising the second Byron All Screen Celebration Film Festival (BASC), after last year's inaugural event drew 4000 visitors to more than 50 sessions, seminars and workshops. Set in Bangalow (10 minutes from Byron by car, less if you astral travel)… (Cape Crusaders, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 February 2002). The film industry is growing steadily, and claims to be the largest concentration of film-makers outside of an Australian capital city (Henkel 2000 & 2002). With its intimate relationship with the modern city, film in its Byron incarnation from high art to short video, from IMAX to multimedia may be seen as the harbinger of the conurban. If the case of Byron has something further to tell us about the transformation of the urban, we might consider the twenty-first century links between digital communications networks and conurbanity. It might be proposed that telecommunications networks make it very difficult to tell where the city starts and ends; as they interactively disperse information and entertainment formerly associated with the cultural institutions of the metropolis (though this digitization of urbanity is more complex than hyping the virtual suggest; see Graham & Marvin 1996). The bureau comes not just to the 'burbs, but to the backblocks as government offices are closed in country towns, to be replaced by online access. The cinema is distributed across computer networks, with video-on-demand soon to become a reality. Film as a cultural form in the process of being reconceived with broadband culture (Jacka 2001). Global movements of music flow as media through the North Coast, with dance music culture and the doof (Gibson 2002). Culture and identity becomes content for the information age (Castells 1996-1998; Cunningham & Hartley 2001; OECD 1998; Trotter 2001). On e-mail, no-one knows, as the conceit of internet theory goes, where you work or live; the proverbial refashioning of subjectivity by the internet affords a conurbanity all of its own, a city of bits wherever one resides (Mitchell 1995). To render the digital conurban possible, Byron dreams of broadband. In one of those bizarre yet recurring twists of Australian media policy, large Australian cities are replete with broadband infrastructure, even if by 2002 city-dwellers are not rushing to take up the services. Telstra's Foxtel and Optus's Optus Vision raced each other down streets of large Australian cities in the mid-1990s to lay fibre-coaxial cable to provide fast data (broadband) capacity. Cable modems and quick downloading of video, graphics, and large files have been a reality for some years. Now the Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology is allowing people in densely populated areas close to their telephone exchanges to also avail themselves of broadband Australia. In rural Australia, broadband has not been delivered to most areas, much to the frustration of the conurbanites. Byron Bay holds an important place in the history of the internet in Australia, because it was there that one of Australia's earliest and most important internet service providers, Pegasus Network, was established in the late 1980s. Yet Pegasus relocated to Brisbane in 1993, because of poor quality telecommunications networks (Peters 1998). As we rethink the urban in the shadow of modernity, we can no longer ignore or recuse ourselves from reflecting upon its para-urban modes. As we deconstruct the urban, showing how the formerly pejorative margins actually define the centre the suburban for instance being more citified than the grand arcades, plazas, piazzas, or malls; we may find that it is the conurban that provides the cultural imaginary for the urban of the present century. Work remains to be done on the specific modalities of the conurban. The conurban has distinct temporal and spatial coordinates: citizens of Sydney fled to Manly earlier in the twentieth century, as they do to Byron at the beginning of the twenty-first. With its resistance to the transnational commercialization and mass culture that Club Med, McDonalds, and tall buildings represent, and with its strict environment planning regulation which produce a litigious reaction (and an editorial rebuke from the Sydney Morning Herald [SMH 2002]), Byron recuperates the counter-cultural as counterpoint to the Gold Coast. Subtle differences may be discerned too between Byron and, say, Nimbin and Maleny (in Queensland), with the two latter communities promoting self-sufficient hippy community infused by new agricultural classes still connected to the city, but pushing the boundaries of conurbanity by more forceful rejection of the urban. Through such mapping we may discover the endless attenuation of the urban in front and beyond our very eyes; the virtual replication and invocation of the urban around the circuits of contemporary communications networks; the refiguring of the urban in popular and elite culture, along littoral lines of flight, further domesticating the country; the road movies of twenty-first century freeways; the perpetuation and worsening of inequality and democracy (Stilwell 1992) through the action of the conurban. Cities without bounds: is the conurban one of the faces of the postmetropolis (Soja 2000), the urban without end, with no possibility for or need of closure? My thinking on Byron Bay, and the Rainbow Region in which it is situated, has been shaped by a number of people with whom I had many conversations during my four years living there in 1998-2001. My friends in the School of Humanities, Media, and Cultural Studies, Southern Cross University, Lismore, provided focus for theorizing our ex-centric place, of whom I owe particular debts of gratitude to Baden Offord (Offord 2002), who commented upon this piece, and Helen Wilson (Wilson 2002). Thanks also to an anonymous referee for helpful comments. References Buttrose, L. (2000). Betray Byron at Your Peril. Sydney Morning Herald 7 September 2000. Castells, M. (1996-98). The Information Age. 3 vols. Blackwell, Oxford. Cunningham, S., & Hartley, J. (2001). Creative Industries from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes. Address to the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit, National Museum of Canberra. July 2001. Davis, M. (1990). City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso, London. Gibson, C. (2002). Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Graham, S., and Marvin, S. (1996). 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The Feral Signifier and the North Coast. In The Abundant Culture: Meaning And Significance in Everyday Australia, ed. Donald Horne & Jill Hooten. Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Martin, F., & Ellis, R. (2002). Dropping in, not out: the evolution of the alternative press in Byron Shire 1970-2001. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Mitchell, W.J. (1995). City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Molnar, Helen. (1998). 'National Convergence or Localism?: Rural and Remote Communications.' Media International Australia 88: 5-9. Moyal, A. (1984). Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Thomas Nelson, Melbourne. Murphy, P. (2002). Sea Change: Re-Inventing Rural and Regional Australia. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Offord, B. (2002). Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of belonging and sites of confluence. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. 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Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass. Stilwell, F. (1992). Understanding Cities and Regions: Spatial Political Economy. Pluto Press, Sydney. Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). (2002). Byron Should Fix its own Money Mess. Editorial. 5 April. Tom, E. (2002). Flashing a Problem at Hand. The Weekend Australian, Saturday 12 January. Trotter, R. (2001). Regions, Regionalism and Cultural Development. Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Tony Bennett and David Carter. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 334-355. Wilson, H., ed. (2002). Fleeing the City. Special Issue of Transformations journal, no. 2. < http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Links http://www.echo.net.au http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/national/national3.html http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformations/journal/issue2/issue.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php>. Chicago Style Goggin, Gerard, "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Goggin, Gerard. (2002) Conurban. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]).