“Colonial Anxiety & Aboriginality: The Jindyworobakism of Peter Sculthorpe Through the Lens of Settler-Colonial Cultural Cringe” (Stephen de Filippo, University of California, San Diego)

This presentation examines Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe’s response to the notion of cultural cringe, a complex arising from the belief that colonial art is inferior to the imperial motherland’s by nature of its settler status. Sculthorpe’s reaction to cultural cringe serves as a lens through which we can view the incorporation of Aboriginal materials in his compositions, shedding light on how Australian artists address questions of identity in their work.

This research offers a nuanced analysis of how Sculthorpe’s works were shaped by this response to cultural cringe, highlighting the complexities of cultural representation in Australian art. While he critiques the commercialization of Australian identity, Sculthorpe’s compositions paradoxically perpetuate a similar artifice, a nationalistic identity known as jindyworobakism. Jindyworobakism is a well-meaning attempt by settler artists to define an Australian identity through the incorporation of Aboriginal materials in settler art—it is settler-curated Aboriginal culture inserted into Western art as a means of legitimizing settler connection to the land and creating cultural distinction. Sculthorpe, conscious of the politics of jindyworobakism, perpetuates an “authentic” connection to Aboriginality through a series of misleading performative acts— an American concept known as playing Indian.

In light of the failed 2023 Indigenous Voice referendum, which aimed to recognize the First Peoples of Australia, the question of settler relations with Aboriginal culture renews significance. The referendum’s failure, along with Sculthorpe’s legacy, underscores the colonial paradox in Australia: the appropriation of Aboriginal culture to sustain colonial occupation while distancing itself from the responsibility for its Indigenous peoples.

“Errant Textility: The Role of Musicking in Jon Rose’s ‘Great Fences of Australia’” (Oliver Brown, University of California Irvine)

Despite beginning over a decade before Christopher Small first described ‘musicking,’ composer Jon Rose’s Great Fences of Australia (1983–2015) is a multifaceted project which can be retroactively labelled as such. In this paper, I identify four different variants of Great Fences, considering how each represents a different hybridity of participatory and presentational performance modalities. This includes the original improvisations with violin bows on wire fences in the Australian outback; the fixed-media works produced using the resultant field recordings; subsequent gallery-installation performances; and, finally, the adaptation of the project into a concert-hall piece commissioned by the Kronos Quartet.

Beginning with the original Great Fences improvisations, I invoke Tim Ingold’s account of processual textility and Édouard Glissant’s notions of errantry and circular nomadism to frame Rose’s project as a participatory process of mapping the Australian outback’s variegated “sonic cartography.” Sounding out these vast physical barriers entails raising their sonic potential from obscurity; transforming dormant, inanimate fences into resurgent, ecologically-situated voices. I discuss how these voices are colonial articulations of sovereign Indigenous lands; in some areas, the arbitrary physical subdivision of the landscape forcefully supplanted traditional use of orally-transmitted navigational and narrative “songlines.” Evaluating Rose’s initial in-situ improvisations alongside the project’s eventual Kronos Quartet adaptation, I contemplate how these different performance modalities influence our interpretation of the fence-as-sounding-body. I contend that the four variants of Great Fences demonstrate how contemporary practices of musicking can encapsulate shifting performer-object dynamics, wherein the fence itself becomes a pseudo-agential element in the musicking paradigm.