Elizabeth Sheppard Media

“We Are Your Witnesses” at St Johns Cathedral Evensong, Brisbane, 30 July 2023

https://www.youtube.com/live/B_VDdNG_18o?feature=share
Evensong from St Johns Cathedral Brisbane.

The Choral Evensong Service of 30 July 2023 at St Johns Cathedral Brisbane, livestreamed on the St Johns Cathedral YouTube channel, will include my SATB Indigenous anthem “We Are Your Witnesses” as the Introit. Thanks to Music Director Graeme Morton for this commission. The anthem lyrics (see below) and Graeme’s program note (quoted below) are printed in the Cathedral Evensong Program, available on the Cathedral website.

The SATB score of “We Are Your Witnesses” is available at http://www.scoreexchange.com Click on this link to see it:

https://www.scoreexchange.com/scores/602807.html

“Tonight’s Introit: This evening the choir is giving the premiere performance of “We Are Your Witnesses” by Indigenous Australian composer Elizabeth Sheppard. This piece was commissioned by the Queensland Branch of the Royal School of Church Music. Sheppard, who also wrote the words of the piece, describes the work as: “A Song in Acknowledgement of the courageous, faithful, combined contribution of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Church Communities of Australia, led by Elders past, present and emerging, that guides us to a better future”.”

We Are Your Witnesses

Words and Music Copyright ©️®️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2023. All Rights Reserved.

From an ancient land, O Lord of life,
children of this earth
we reach out to your Kingdom.
Your Word resounds across the seas,
the ends of the earth, to Terra Spiritus Sancti.
For your covenant is like a jarrah tree,
Standing proud and tall, bearing fragrant leaves,
giving shade to all, rooted deep and sure,
drinking hidden streams from your hearland’s law.
We remember, Lord, your great sacrifice,
how you died and rose, overcoming death,
sent your Holy Spirit to be with us now,
as you promised, Lord, to your Apostles.
We are your witnesses, we are your disciples,
arising through your power, Lord,
we are children of God.
We are your witnesses, we are your disciples,
lifred by your power, Lord, we are with you now,
in Terra Spiritus Sancti.

Choir 4 Karollini Crowdfunding Campaign launched on Pozible (Sun 16 July 2023)

See https://www.pozible.com/profile/elizabeth-sheppard

Check out my fundraiser, me and my team need funds to stage a concert of Karollini, my ten new Australian carols.

‘Kalgoorli Silky Pear’, ‘Warangka Makialo’ and ‘Wonthaggi’ on ABC Classic FM’s Passenger Podcast for NAIDOC

abclisten.page.link/34cYJ57p22aD4xhFA

ABC Classic FM’s 2023 NAIDOC Week broadcasts have included music from a wide range of Indigenous composers, including (among many well advertised others) Dharawal Inuk woman Sonya Holowell, Yorta Yorta woman Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, Kalkadunga man William Barton, the Tiwi Strong Women, the Pitjantjatjara Ntaria Womens Choir, Noongar Yamatji man Aaron Wyatt, Gadigal man Matthew Doyle, and many of my own Noongar instrumental and vocal tracks from the Ngarra Burria concerts and Songs from the Heart

. Click on the link above and to hear Aaron Wyatt’s clouds music and go to 20.12 to hear three of my pieces, with a background commentary on them.

“Songs from the Heart” ABC Classic FM Lunchtime Concert 1.00 pm 5 July 2023 & Podcast on Demand for NAIDOC Week

The Song Company’s Songs from the Heart is on the ABC Listen app

https://abclisten.page.link/hrw2iFZDX15VoAtX8

Music by Rhubee Neale (Anmatjere Arrernte) & Elizabeth Sheppard:

As I Walk, Keep Guard of our Dreams

Music by Elizabeth Sheppard:

‘Cross Country, Kaouwi Two Children Cooee, As I Walk, Gathering, The First Sovereign Nations, Sovereignty, Ngaala Maaman (The Noongar Prayer), Noonakoort Karnya Respect, A Rightful Place, Enshrinement, Makaratta, A Better Future, Keep Guard of our Dreams, Koorlangka Children, Land of Sunshine

Music by Sonya Holowell:

Never Extinguished, We Here, A Way, This is the Torment of our Powerlessness, Like You Can, Become Like Children

Songs of the Stolen Generation

Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2023. All Rights Reserved.

Music Australia grant funding of First Peoples’ musicians and composers may remain restricted to 3% of all arts grants for several years, under the new First Peoples First Cultural policy. Australian media playlists are still stacked with non-Australian music, so the suppressed songs of all Australian Stolen Generations people and their descendants may never reach mainstream media in time for coming generations to learn and transmit them. Only a handful of these songs have reached mainstream media. These truth telling stories need to be told, they’re not going away. They are remembered, and they will be taught and sung locally in communities. By rights, they should be heard right now, across Australia and the world.

Who now knows the songs of Uncle Roger Knox, Auriel Andrews, and Dawn Hippi? The Indigenous creators of Stolen Generation songs were removed from Country, force fed with imported musics by missioners, slaveowners, reserve managers and church officials, and banned from speaking and singing in their own languages. But many survivors hung on to their cultures, and survived. Australians of many races have worked with Indigenous Elders to regather these suppressed musics, and reconstruct them. Various methods were used to do this – transcription, collecting remembered words and song fragments, recomposing colonial transcriptions, or fusing cultural content with imported genres such as band songs, country music ballads, R&B songs, hymns, oratorios and operas. This cultural work is undervalued, and sometimes denigrated, and the reconstructed songs shouldn’t be buried in archives, as they are part of Australia’s history. Confident professional performances of more Indigenous Australian songs and theatre productions on global media platforms and world stages, would improve Australia’s human rights record, by demonstrating that many non-Indigenous Australians opposed racism in colonial times.

It is a fact that a minority of land-grabbing politicians and government-funded colonisers enforced the culturally genocidal policy of erasing Australian First Peoples music cultures and identities for over two centuries, to break Indigenous Australian peoples’ connections to Country. Proof of Indigenous song continuity is now used in Australian law courts, to establish First Peoples land claims. The colonisers’ scheme to silence all Indigenous songs didn’t succeed, because many brave people, black and white, defied the Indigenous language and song bans. One white mission teacher at Ernabella Mission in northern South Australia, Nancy Sheppard, who I knew personally, defied racist prejudice and taught her students to speak and write in both Pitjantjatjara and English. She is still remembered at Ernabella, with gratitude. At Hermannsburg Mission (now Ntaria) Carl Strehlow, Elder Moses, Carl’s son Theodor Strehlow, and Catherine Ellis worked to preserve Pitjantjatjara culture, and due to their work, and the work of many other respected Elders and researchers such as Linda Barwick and Jennifer Newsome, the Strehlow Centre and CASM were established in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) and Adelaide. The songs of the Ntaria Choir Songkeepers, the Tiwi Strong Women, the Gay’wu Womens Group, Madjitil Moorna Choir, Yothu Yindi, Gurrumul Yunupingu, Ngarra Burria, the Warumpi Band, Uncle Ossie Cruse, Uncle Joe Gaia, Seaman Dan and similar First Peoples’ musicians, are reviving many Indigenous Australian music cultures. Immigrant communities who inhabit monocultural musical fortresses while living on Australian First Peoples lands, have a duty to provide equitable, non-segregated performance spaces for these musics.

Despite the continuing presence of diligent, thorough, skilled Australian First Peoples musical traditions, and the work of Indigenous recording studios, only a few hundred commercial albums from Australian First Peoples communities have been widely distributed and heard in Australia and overseas. There should be many more. The large repertoire of hundreds of Pitjantjatjara hymns translated and sung for generations by the Ntaria Choir may never be fully recorded, because Australian government policies still preferentially fund foreign musics. Apart from a few token albums, the songs of the Stolen Generation are generally excluded from Australian government funded recordings, publications and school lessons. This neocolonial music policy masks culpability for past massacres and cultural censorship, and is also driven by a Western music industry paradigm that cynically treats songs and performers as harvested, captured, marketable, disposable investment commodities. Indigenous Australian songmaking traditions have transmitted our histories truthfully for millenia. They have sustained foundational networks of responsible, emplaced lifestyles on Country, and maintained resilient human societies, but they are still being demeaned, displaced and silenced.

“New Music” & First Peoples

Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2023. All Rights Reserved.

My compositions usually combine Indigenous and Western traditions, but in 2019 I ventured into experimental phonetic choral composition of “New Music”, and produced “Untitled”, that was recorded by The Song Company and performed at the Sydney Opera House. In this piece I reflected the anguish I felt at Australia’s utter neglect of First Peoples’ communities and musics, and to warn of inevitable consequences.

If a concatenated set of random or patterned “new music” sounds or noises claims to be an “identifiably Australian” composition, it should be subject to culturally competent assessment, before being canonized as such. The practice of foreign judges applying foreign music criteria to assess the cultural integrity of a piece of Australian music, seems to me to be nonsensical. If a piece of music has no recognizably Australian features or origins, how can it be Australian? If an immigrant origin composer shuns, neglects, overrides or presumes to denigrate all Indigenous Australian music cultures, and insists on prioritising imported foreign and coloniser music models and paradigms, heritages and theories in their works, their music promotes only foreign cultures, and foreign economic interests. And when an immigrant composer whose music promotes foreign traditions and interests claims their music is Australian, without any evidence of connecting respectfully with Indigenous Australian communities, this offends Australia’s First Peoples. Yet this illogical, culturally offensive music policy is the very policy endorsed by the Australian government. Immigrant musics that are based entirely on non-Australian heritages, models and paradigms should be classified by their origin, as foreign music, and registered as such in their composer’s place of origin.

Due to colonial assimilation policies, many Indigenous Australian compositions sit in between Indigenous heritage traditions, and foreign music traditions. Mixed race Australian Indigenous descendants have adopted culturally approved ways of making our music uniquely Australian, by contextualizing our pieces, as I did with my choral piece Gandangarragal, and as William Barton does when he depicts his Kalkadunga culture. In 2020, shocked at the terrible destruction the Australian bushfires inflicted on ancestral lands, I composed this commissioned choral piece to sing the fire scarred Blue Mountains, the Country originally called Gandangarragal by Gundungurra First Peoples, back to life. It was premiered in 2022, after the pandemic lockdowns of 2020-2021, by the River City Voices Choir, conducted by Dr. Sarah Penicka-Smith, at Riverside Theatres Parramatta. Working respectfully with and for the ancient Country and First Peoples that hold the First Contact, Colonial Era and Post Colonial stories of this continent, is what makes our music Australian.

Music Australia: where to from here?

Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2023. All Rights Reserved.

In 2023 many factional divisions in Australian society have been exposed and discussed, in truth telling workshops and rehearsals, in online media, and in hard talk dialogue sessions. Australians have gathered together to help those affected by disasters, through constructive community action and songmaking, but the ultimate Reconciliation is still pending. Many Australian composers and music fans have come to believe that only uniquely Australian, home grown music that’s grounded in Australian Indigenous Country, and demonstrates deep respect for one or more named Australian Indigenous cultures and its Elders, can gather and voice the soul of Australia. We’ve come a long was from March 2020, when the Covid pandemic hit us. In 2023 Australia’s musicians are still faced with huge challenges, but now we’re much better prepared to deal with them.

In 2020 I’d just begun Postgraduate music studies at the Australian National University School of Music, after completing nine scored pieces for my Ngarra Burria First Peoples Composer internship in 2018, and composing two commissioned pieces (Karlinkiri Hearth and Untitled) in 2019, that were performed at The Australian Museum and the Sydney Opera House. In 2020 my creative output increased; I surprised myself by drafting three new pieces in quick succession, and revising four earlier drafts. This momentum increased in 2021 and 2022, when I completed eighteen commissioned works and many more drafts, and the music continues to flow in 2023, with my latest EP album of Australian carols and interludes, Karollini, professionally recorded by Antony Pitts and Tonus Australis, due for release in September 2023. AProf. Christopher Sainsbury, Ensemble Offspring, The Song Company, River City Voices, Sydney Living Museums, Dr. Sally Walker and Dr. Scott Davie have continued to support and guide my composition studies, and I extend my sincere thanks to them.

In 2016 to 2023 my music has been tested, professionally performed, recorded, produced and released in partnership with Mooghalin Arts, Anmatjere Arrernte Songwoman Rhubee Neale, Dharawal Inuk composer and soprano Sonya Holowell, Biripai opera tenor Elias Wilson, conductor and baritone Antony Pitts, Reconciliation for Western Sydney Inc., Eora Aboriginal College of TAFE, the Australian Music Centre, Ensemble Offspring, Roland Peelman, the RAN Band Wind Quintet, Dr. Scott Davie, Dr. Sally Walker and harpist Emily Granger, River City Voices Choir, The Song Company and Tonus Australis. This music was produced with assistance from the Indigenous Composers Initiative program, an ANU AGRTP Postgraduate Scholarship, and the 2021 ANU School of Music Indigenous Music Scholarship. Eora and Tranby Aboriginal Colleges have also supported my music with musical, cultural and legal training.

This has been a time of environmental turmoil, community reflection and impending change, that I and many other Australian composers have tried to depict and ease in our music. Through music, many factional divisions in Australian society have been exposed and discussed, in truth telling workshops and rehearsals, in online media, and in hard talk dialogue sessions. Australians have gathered together to help those affected by disasters, through constructive community action and songmaking. The ultimate Reconciliation is still pending. All Australians have taken part, in various ways, in live and online community gatherings, and this intensive process is ongoing. During this time, many Australian composers and music fans have also come to believe that only uniquely Australian, home grown music that’s grounded in Australian Indigenous Country, and demonstrates deep respect for one or more named Australian Indigenous cultures and its Elders, can gather and voice the soul of Australia.

“Australian-ness” in Music

Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2023. All Rights Reserved.

The proper judges of “Australian-ness” in music are the skilled Songmen and Songwomen of the Country, people and languages that have, since time immemorial, made the unique music of this Great Southern land we now call Australia. Acultural sonic “new music” concatenations, unless composed in close consultation with an Australian First Peoples community, authorised by accredited First Peoples Elders, and tested in a performance attended by the Elders who consulted on and authorised the music (and consequently have shared rights in it), cannot possess the integrated cultural power and raw presence that an accredited Australian First Peoples song possesses. A song that has no personal or communal connection to any Australian Indigenous Country, can’t communicate the unique sovereign character and nationhood of Australia to its listeners.

Yet Western music notation, althougb deemed unnecessary, and even corrupting, by some Indigenous Australian musicians, can be used ethically in assimilative scenarios, to support and promote Australian Indigenous music. To be sure, Western music notation is a blunt and irredeemably colonial instrument, but a necessary one, if intercultural communication and musical peacemaking is to thrive in Australia. However, Australian First Peoples are regularly plagued with barriers to writing and publishing the songs we own. Commercial agents and cabal monopolies have profited hugely from recording, producing and selling digital files, CDs and published scores of our music, while promoting the outrageous lie that all First Peoples are condemned to musical illiteracy forever. However, Indigenous Australian composers of many traditions are currently learning to use AI technology for fast music transcription and editing, so these self-paced learning systems may disempower the overpriced music products and services of the cabals. But right now, restrictive cabal practices are blocking widespread distribution and teaching of a large repertoire of high quality Indigenous Australian music.

Opportunities for Music Reform

Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2023. All Rights Reserved.

An increasing number of Australian First Peoples’ communities are publishing funded songbooks. The Austranesia songbooks from Queensland, the Tiwi Murli La songbook, the Madjitil Moorna choir songbooks, the songbooks of Gina Williams and Guy Ghouse, the Dhungala Choir Songbooks, and the Magabala Books audio songbooks, are boosting Australia’s overseas reputation as a country that’s proud of its Indigenous musics. The Australian Music Centre has joined the act, by publishing Australian First Peoples compositions, and the ABC has recorded many Indigenous Australian compositions. But the apartheid musical colonialism created by colonial bans on Aboriginal languages, that has obstructed Australian music development for over two centuries, is still common in Australia.

The forced imposition of English on Australia’s First Peoples produced a large repertoire of Indigenous Australian music with English lyrics. These mixed genre resistance songs, combined with immigrant folk genres from Slim Dusty and visiting singers like Buddy Holly and Paul Robeson, quickly became part of Australian Indigenous oral traditions. These mixed genre songs, described in Amanda Harris’s Representation of Aboriginal Music, are now beginning to combine with revived traditional Australian languages. Recent government funding of Australian Indigenous language resources, spurred on by the 2022-2032 UNESCO Decade of Indigenous Languages, is intended to revive Australia’s music cultures. However, this is uphill work, because Australian media policies don’t support it. Take a look at the ABC’s Saturday Rage playlist. No traditional Aboriginal music there! That’s a whole morning of opportunities to revive and support healthy Australian community music, completely wasted. Australia’s musical grass roots past deserves much more attention, and much more government and commercial promotion.

Populat Australian First Peoples’ songs and performers, often heard on radio in my childhood, were dropped from Australian concert repertoires, radio and app playlistsm and soundtracks in the 1960s, when untariffed overseas music and cinema imports flooded into Australia. The Australian government still doesn’t promote pre-1960s Australian songs, or pay to have them performed. Scores of well loved Australian bush classics like Peppamenarti, the Wattle Day Song and Hop And Go One have been neglected and undervalued by cultural cringe policies and corporate agendas that funnel music consumer profits overseas. Occasionally these songs appear in research papers, and are performed and recorded at restricted conferences, then the scores and audios are archived away from public view. Many of these iconic songs were created by Indigenous Australians, and they have roots in Australian communities. They should be celebrated, regularly performed, and broadcast worldwide, to advertise Australia and bring much needed income to their Indigenous communities of origin.

Australian church music repertoires for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday (July 2 2023) provide many examples of how Australian First Peoples songs are excluded from non-Indigenous Australian venues. Uncle Jimmy Little’s joyful “Royal Telephone” and Uncle Tom Foster’s “My Thoughts” and “I’m Happy Today” are deemed liturgically unsuitable,, and shamefully banned, in these places.

Apartheid music segregation is also firmly in place in many public Australian venues and media outlets. Many Australian liturgical committees have banned Aboriginal music and languages from church repertoires because they believe that Aboriginals are immoral, drunken, criminal pagans. But most Australian First Peoples’ parents, grandparents and earlier ancestors were raised on church missions or reserves and Christianized. So (despite the terrible crimes of corrupt mission supervisors) many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Isalnder people have combined this Christian heritage with tribal music traditions. Australian First Peoples church songs successfully integrate Australian stories about family and Country with Christian teachings.

“Songs of Home” & Creative Australia

Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2023. All Rights Reserved.

Australia has a new National Cultural Policy, and Creative Australia’s Music Australia, led by CEO Adrian Collette and the ACA Board, and Executive Director of First Nations Arts Dr. Franchesca Cubillo, is charged with building Australia’s music making capacity, and attracting investment to the full scope of the Australian arts sector. As a primary pillar of this new policy, the Arts Minister Tony Burke has announced a “First Peoples First” priority.

So who are the music makers who will produce a better future for Australian music? There seem to be three kinds.

1. Australian First Nations Musicians: First Nations people who have birth and ancestry from a named, well defined Australian Country, who maintain and express their identity in uniquely Australian Indigenous customs, organizations, languages, arts, music, and choose to maintain either apartheid or mixed kinship relationships.

2. Australian Expatriate Musicians: Immigrant origin musicians with birth and ancestry from a foreign country, whose families have travelled to and settled in Australia, and retain their right to maintain an expatriate identity, expressed in expatriate customs, organizations, languages, arts, music, and apartheid or mixed social relationships.

3. Australian Kriol Musicians: Culturally diverse musicians of mixed Australian First Nations and Australian Expatriate birth and ancestry, who have formed diverse intercultural and corporate alliances, created intercultural customs, organizations, languages, arts and music, and have generated uniquely Australian cultural identities and relationships.

Equitable Investment in First Nations, Expatriate and Kriol “Songs of Home”

From a commercial viewpoint, Music Australia needs to know what skills, value and products Australian artists, musicians, dancers and craftspeople can supply, what their accreditations are, and what financial returns their products can bring to the country. To research this, the ACA Board sought submissions from arts practitioners and organizations across Australia. The submission findings showed that Australian arts, particularly First Nations arts. are currently under-resourced. This will not change until 1 July 2024, when the $35 million allocated to supporting First Nations arts will be deployed. Artist Blak Douglas has advised First Nations artists to guard against misappropriation of these funds by non-indigenous arts administrators, and has proposed a generic government grant for all graduating Australian First Nations artists.

How arts producers and their works are valued by Australian communities, may be quite different to how arts sponsors and investors assess the current and future potential of these artists and their products. At the moment, Arts Council Australia believes that the investors they attract, value Australian arts primarily as exportable commodities whose value can be translated into GDP dollars. But that’s only part of the story. Judging who are the best artists to represent Australia, and which is the best Australian music repertoire to invest in, requires a broad knowledge of the full scope and social capital of Australian arts, music, dance and crafts, what is needed to support the Australian musicians who produce it, and what uniquely Australian features attract Australian and foreign consumers to it.

Australia prides itself on being a multicultural country whose citizens tolerate cultural difference, respect each other, and work hard at maintaining peaceful intercultural communities. One reason for the boasted success of multiculturalism in Australia, is generous Australian government funding of immigrant music making, arts and social events. This pro-expatriate arts strategy aims to maintain social harmony. Meanwhile Australian First Nations, who are culturally and linguistically distinct from immigrant and coloniser communities, and from each other, have been expected to raise our own funds, and compete with government funded displays of immigrant and coloniser culture. Australian First Nations musicians can register as First Nations cultural suppliers, but may not be able to access corporate funding. Under pro-expatriate arts policies, Australian Kriol musicians have been pressured to abandon inherited Indigenous Australian musics, comply with global secular consumerism, and become imitators or adoring fans of foreign music stars and genres. Up to now, ACA’s music policies have supported Australian Kriol musicians conditionally; i.e. if they collaborate with non-indigenous expatriate partners and administrators.

Nevertheless, Australian Kriol communities have continued to privately create and develop fusion customs, arts and music that are distinctly Australian. The combined resurgence of Australian First Nations and Australian Kriol arts and musics offers an opportunity to forge a rightful place for these uniquely Australian musics, and the First Nations and Kriol musicians who produce them. This reaffirmation may enable alienated Kriol Australians and Expatriate Australian musicians to form stronger ally relationships with Australia’s First Nations musicians.

The Australian government supports and generously funds many expatriate communities, including (among many others) communities who have emigrated here from England, China, Russia and Ukraine. Many members of these communities have integrated into neocolonial Australian society. At the Australian Citizenship Ceremony they are also required to acknowledge and state their respect for Australia’s First Peoples. However, many expatriates have failed to follow through on their commitment to learn about and befriend Australian First Nations communities, through no fault of their own. They, and Australian First Peoples’ communities, are not supplied with sufficiently regular government support or education, to connect immigrant cultures and communities with First Peoples’ cultures and communities. So when government funds are received, they are much more likely to be used to preserve strict cultural apartheid, rather than promoting respectful enculturation into Australian First Nations host Country cultures.

For many years, spurred on by pro-colonial policies, Federal and State Australian governments have prioritised apartheid expatriate “Songs of Home” repertoires, apartheid music composition based on foreign music pedagogies, and apartheid music teaching. In effect, pro-colonial Australian governments have encouraged expatriates to undervalue Australian First Nations cultures, and silence the songs of the Countries they live on. Proudly imitating and praising non-Australian music and global music stars, while remaining completely ignorant of Australian First Nations musics, is still common in Australia. But as the Australian Citizenship Oath states, those who are awarded Australian citizenship, and the freedom to enjoy their own “songs of home” on First Nations Countries, still have a responsibility to respect, befriend and promote the music of the Australian First Nations that have provided sustenance for them.

In Australia, it should be remembered that certain inflammatory expatriate “songs of home” (e.g. “Rule Brittannia”) symbolize colonial terror campaigns to exterminate Indigenous people, erase our identities, and force assimilation on us. English “songs of home” were, in fact, deployed as a hostile propaganda arsenal, that tried to usurp the sovereign authority of Australian First Peoples languages and musics. Those who admire these “songs of terror” should think twice about the potential negative effects of re-endorsing and re-promoting colonial editions of them. It makes more sense to re-compose them in healthy ways, with reformed lyrics that assert and promote Australia’s emergent democracy, and its self determined independence.

The act of walking cooperatively and peacefully together into the future with Aboriginal Elders, may be, for many immigrant Australians, a step too far. Immigrant origin Australians often assume that this “walking together” requires them to utterly reject their inherited “songs of home”, which is simply not true. Everyone has a right to a peaceful musico-cultural inheritance, and first generation immigrants often find it hard to recover from the shock of cultural exile. “Songs of home” ease the pain of removal from Country, for all, when they are not censored. Disoriented and shocked by trauma and homesickness, expatriate communities often withdraw into “songs of home” for comfort and a substitute sense of identity. Australia’s First Nations were denied the comfort of “songs of home” for over two centuries, but by our own efforts we have now regained it. Immigrants to Australia eventually realise that the colonial regime that hosts them, has a history of attempting to exterminate its coloured First Peoples. Reactions to this revelation vary. Some coloured immigrants to Australia offer their own cultures to Australia, as an acceptably coloured substitute for supposedly exterminated or irretrievably weakened First Nations cultures. Others may reject Australia’s First Nations as uncivilized and unworthy.

When immigrant Australians treat First Nations Elders with ingratitude and rude disrespect, by prioritising expatriate cultures of origin in what they have been incorrectly told is the land of terra nullius, what should happen? Correcting the terra nullius lie can only be done by a coordinated mass cultural education program, across alll age groups.

Research shows that third generation immigrants are able to enculturate fully, if their host Country has a stable, widespread national cultural identity. Stable national cultural identities are supported by affirmative education programs, that immigrants are assisted to enculturate into. In the absence of well coordinated cultural transition programs, immigrants cling together, and maintain their familiar cultures, in linguistically and musically isolated ghettoes. Since Australia has welcomed many immigrant communities, and will welcome many more in future, finding ways to work together, despite everyone’s past traumas and our cultural diversity, is crucial to maintaining Australian social coherence. Australia’s First Peoples are looking for, but not always finding, long term, trustworthy friendships with the immigrant communities they have Welcomed.

There are other reasons to ask these questions about over-attachment to foreign music cultures. Australian music fans are subject to constant media pressure from global media, to prefer imported music. Taylor Swift’s mass global fandom is only one example, among many. Australians often choose to listen to imported music. Fans of foreign music stars are usually unaware of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tracks, that are not necessarily registered on the apps they use, and are habitually tokenised on mainstream Australian radio playlists. Digital ghettoes flourish in Australia.

In Australia’s current social, cultural, economic, diplomatic and geographic situation, excluding equitable representation of Australian First Nations music from mainstream consumer playlists and apps is not reasonable, balanced, or constructive. No one is proposing to silence imported music altogether, but it is increasingly clear that exclusive, unbalanced consumption of foreign music supports overseas music markets, not Australian music or the Australian economy. This unbalanced consumer bias disadvantages the iconic Australian Indigenous song economy, and it offends Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, who have a right to sustain, revive and promote their songs. It also offends immigrant descendant Australians who have partnered with Australia’s First Peoples at their own cost, to forge recognizably Australian music genres. As my Dharawal Inuit colleague Sonya Holowell asked in her moving choral lament “Never Extinguished” – “how long! how long!” How long must we wait for justice, a fair hearing of our voices, and a better future? Another of Sonya’s Songs from the Heart pieces, “If You Can” casts a cynical eye on the hope of salvation, but concludes with the hope that the spark of fire in all Australian hearts will one day burst into a living flame.

4. Recomposing Australia 2017-2023 . . .

Well before the Uluru Statement from the Heart issued its call for Voice, Truth and Treaty, Australia’s iconic First Nations’ Treaty Call rang out in Aboriginal rallies and the media. In 2017 the Uluru Statement echoed this rally call in its proposal for a Makaratta Commission leading to an Agreement. In 2023, Australia is now, whatever the coming Voice Referendum outcome, moving on to a lasting peace Agreement. Music has played a huge part in Australia’s journey to Treaty, and Yothu Yindi’s famous Treaty Song will forever occupy an honoured place in this history. In all Australian First Nations communities, the right to speak and be heard in our own Indigenous voices goes hand in hand with working towards an honourable Treaty, based on Truth Telling. Yothu Yindi’s powerful Treaty song was crafted skilfully and ethically to promote peace, truth and justice in Australia. It did not criticise, accuse, tell lies, incite divisive race hatred, or provoke violent, divisive factionalism. No honest campaign for a true Peace Treaty ever does that. Yothu Yindi’s Treaty Call shows that, in Australia, as in other countries, well crafted, well performed, widely distributed music can exert a wise, steady, guiding influence on human decision making. When the Australian Paliament listens and responds to the proposals of a united, undivided First Nations Voice, an honourable Treaty will eventually be made, and for that reason, I’ve supported the Referendum Yes vote with my Noonakoort Karnya Respect chorus, my Enshrinement anthem, and A Better Future (on the Songs from the Heart CD at Hyperion Records, see link below).

https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_1EMFTH

In 2017 I composed my Kooranginy suite for Ensemble Offspring. At that time there were riots in Redfern, the Australian First Nations campaign for a Peace Treaty was under attack, and the revisionist terra nullius debate was still raging. I raised consciousness of the 1788 British Invasion of Australia by incorporating truth telling dialogues and calls for justice in Kooranginy. I followed this up in 2018 with five more pieces – Burradowi, Warangka Makialo, Wonthaggi, Kaya Mary and Mary Moorditj Ngaangk – which declare First Nations presence and perspectives, as it persists in two way Australian scenarios. I’ve used my music to urge factions divided by mischievous propaganda, to listen to the truth and resolve their differences. Polyphonic music that includes contrasting voices is the perfect vehicle for overcoming factionalism.

In March 2018 I had my first Total Knee Replacement operation, but I pushed on, and in November 2018 Burradowi, Warangka Makialo, Wonthaggi, Kaya Mary and Mary Moorditj Ngaangk, were performed by Ensemble Offspring and Dharawal Inuk soprano Sonya Holowell at the ANU School of Music Studio, and were included in a second 2018 Indigenous Composers Initiative concert at the ABC’s Eugene Goossens Hall. This completed my ICI Composer Internship at ANU. In 2019 I composed for Sydney Living Museums, the Royal Australian Navy Band, and The Song Company’s challenging Nineteen to the Dozen concert tour, producing Karlinkiri Hearth, a wind quintet that commemorates the discovery of an ancient Dharug Aboriginal Smoking Hearth at Parramatta, and a phonetic a capella bushland soundscape. These two works – Karlinkiri Hearth and Untitled, were recorded and premiered at the Australian Museum’s Songs of Home Exhibition, and the Joern Utzon Room of the Sydney Opera House. I then enrolled in my current Postgraduate Composition course at ANU.

Over Christmas and New Year 2020 a series of massive bushfires, followed by smashing hailstorms, devastated Sydney and the Blue Mountains. Shocked by the terrible environmental destruction in the Blue Mountains near my home, I composed Gandangarragal, a choral piece for River City Voices, but the performances were cancelled due to Covid. On March 13 2020 Covid pandemic health restrictions were proclaimed in NSW and Canberra, and strict lockdowns were enforced. These travelling and performance restrictions posed huge challenges for creative work of any kind, including my craft of composition. However, we Australian composers and musicians are a tough breed. Despite tragic deaths of family members and friends, we rose to the challenge pragmatically, by providing mutual support, and maintaining disciplined safeguards and health routines. In 2020 my composition output actually increased; I completed four Coursework units at Masters level, drafted three new instrumental compositions, and revised four earlier drafts. This increased output continued in 2021 and 2022, as I completed my major Portfolio commission (43 min of a capella SSAATTBB choral music for The Song Company’s mainstage production Songs from the Heart), Minninup Pool, a string quartet, Gathering Yams, a chamber orchestra piece, and Karollini, a set of ten Australian carols. AProf Kim Cunio, AProf. Christopher Sainsbury, AProf Samantha Bennett, Dr. Alexander Hunter, Dr. Thomas Laue, Dr. Sally Walker, harpist Emily Granger and Dr. Scott Davie and my commissioners have encouraged and supported my composition work throughout and after the Covid pandemic restrictions.

This Christmas my long awaited set of ten Australian carols, Karollini, will be released on Hyperion Records. Recorded under my direction on December 21-22 2022 at 2 MBS FM by Antony Pitts and Tonus Australis, with audio engineer Joseph Goddard, these two way Australian carols were birthed from 2002 to 2008 as small “seed” guitar songs as I was singing as a Cantor at St Patricks Cathedral Parramatta, and simultaneously consolidating my Indigenous cultural connections to Country through reconnection studies in Australian Aboriginal song making, history, culture and law at Sydney’s Eora and Tranby Aboriginal Colleges. With ongoing composition mentoring from the ANU School of Music, I’ve arranged these carols as SATB and piano choral pieces. In October 2023 Parramatta’s River City Voices Choir, conducted by Dr. Sarah Penicka Smith, will perform several of my carols in the annual Ngarra Burria First Peoples Composers concert.

Musical Traditions, Transitions & Innovations

Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2023. All Rights Reserved

At present, Australia is in the throes of birthing its own unique musical genres. This transition means that Australians, as a whole people, need to define what our music is, and is not, for our Australian places, and for our Australian times. Not that we should set this definition in stone, for music making is an ever developing personal, communal and national task. But every country’s music has clearly recognizable features, and uniquely Australian music is no exception. Documenting how we’re working this out, how we “do” music in Australian places and periods, is just as important – probably more so – as studying how Beethoven made his music in Europe. In doing this compositional task, the cultural guidance of Australia’s First Nations must rightfully take priority. There’s no lack of Indigenous Australian music in Australia, and the cultural breakthrough that has occurred, spurred on by the Reconciliation Movement and partnerships between Australia’s First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians, has facilitated many constructive musical projects recently. Immigrant origin Australian composers like Paul Stanhope, Joe Twist, and Nigel Westlake have collaborated with with First Peoples communities and composers like William Barton, Christopher Sainsbury, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon and Lou Bennett, to produce uniquely Australian music.

What the transitional Australian music of our generation is, and what it could become in future Australian generations, actually has nothing to do with other places, and little to do with the histories of those places. Australian musicians of all origins are gathering resources, in order to forge and voice the soul of a nation, and to do so, we are increasingly adhering to and redefining our own places, our own times, in song. We may gather from foreign traditions, but the music we make here, in this place, should respect and connect indissolubly to the land that sustains us. Revealing this continent’s history, accepting the guidance of wise, visionary Indigenous leaders, and singing up Country, is our starting point. Western definitions of “composition” and “music” don’t sit easily with uniquely Australian ways of songmaking. They originated in faraway places, were imported to our Country by colonisers, and have an obligation to adapt to and serve whichever Country they are now required to indwell. Indigenous people call this sitting on Country, and the Bible calls it indwelling, entering in to the essence of a place. In Australian Indigenous cultures, our songs come from and voice our Country, our culture, our history and our law. When we sing, we voice our Country, which gifts us our songs.

2. Jigsaw Music, Muzak and Elders’ Songs

Musical composition, in modernist “Western” terms, is often thought of as a set of selected sound objects arranged in patterns that elite audiences can digest and comment on scientifically or technologically, without reference to human cultures or social justice. Colonial music education systems based on Western music theory, now integrated with AI composing software, also take this jigsaw puzzle approach to music making. Australian “new music” and “art music” composers often experiment with inharmonic noise, electronic sounds, and performance techniques that display the virtuosic skills of performers. My conventionally scored Indigenous music is traditionally based, but I am still fully aware of recent innovations in sound generation and their integration with vocal and instrumental musical performance.

The narrow stream of experimental music composition that fully funded “new music” groups compose for, supports an elite global “new music” market. Therefore, by its very nature, it is unable, and rather unlikely, to produce uniquely Australian music. In the field of Australian composition this marketed global music agenda is aggressively prioritised, by preferential Australian government funding of virtuoso immigrant performing groups. There is nothing wrong with this, per se, if Australia provided sufficiently stable, generous support for its own uniquely Australian music genres. But it does not. Unlike China, Russia, the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Mexico and India, Australia does not prioritise funding of its Indigenous musics and musicians, over and above immigrant and experimental musics. In fact, the opposite is true. Australia’s cultural presence and identity in global forums has been unreasonably diminished by this cultural cringe.

At present, Australia is in the throes of birthing its own unique musical genres. The Australian population, as a whole, has an opportunity to define and consolidate what our own music is, in our Australian places, in our Australian times. This is a personal, communal and national task, and documenting how we approach and achieve it, how we “do” music, is important. In doing this compositional task, the cultural guidance of Australia’s First Nations must rightfully take priority. There is no lack of great Indigenous Australian music in Australia. As the 21st century dawned, a cultural breakthrough, spurred on by the Reconciliation Movement and partnerships between Australia’s First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians, inspired many memorable Australian classics, such as the songs of the great Yolgnu singers Gurrumul and Mandawuy Yunupingu, and the music of Uncle Jimmy Chi, Uncle Archie Roach, Auntie Ruby Hunter, Uncle Jimmy Little, and Uncle Ken Carmody. These are just a few of hundreds of Aboriginal Elders who are famous in Aboriginal communities, but are not nearly as well known as they should be, outside those communities. Their stories and songs should be taught in every Australian school.