John Antill’s orchestral ballet Corroboree was neither the first work, nor the last, in which a non-Indigenous composer sought to represent Australian distinctiveness by evoking Aboriginal culture. Amanda Harris uses the examples of Corroboree and the Australian Aborigines’ League’s production Aboriginal Moomba – Out of the Dark from the 1951 Jubilee to discuss the issues around representation and cultural appropriation in Australian music history.
The writing of Australian music history represents certain points of view. It also excludes others. This story from 1951 is about how some representations of Australian culture have been...
The use of indigenous elements by non-indigenous composers is certainly fraught, but one contextual point to note is that the John Antill’s “Corroboree” was also written in the wake of the influence of Stravinski’s earlier “Rite of Spring”, which used elements from eastern European cultures. One could argue that Stravinski was from eastern Europe and therefore ‘indigenous’ but I’m not sure whether he would have all of his cultural bases covered. Another observation is that many indigenous cultures have voluntarily adapted European instruments and musical elements as their own – one thinks of the guitar and harmonic progressions used in Aboriginal country style music and Pacific islander music; the piano, guitar and European harmonies & scales in Afro/American blues and jazz. Many of these had their ultimate roots in sacred Christian liturgical music going back to the Middle Ages and beyond. I am not aware of any formal permission being sought for this ‘reverse cultural appropriation’ in the sense of today’s post-modern identity obsessives, whose underlying goal – across many fields including so-called gender, class, ‘race’, history etc – is arguably to create division, hatred and a poorly informed, even indoctrinated, sense of shame in the achievements and freedoms of Western culture.
Hi Stephen I’ve only just seen your comment. The article very deliberately argues against thinking about these issues only in the context of cultural appropriation, or “reverse cultural appropriation” to use your term. I show that there was a direct relationship between government and arts institutions’ promotion and financial support of Antill’s Corroboree and the denial of permission for Aboriginal artists to self-represent their culture on public stages. These historical facts tell a story with much more to it than discussions about cultural appropriation generally acknowledge. The detail I present is not “poorly informed”, but instead gives examples from some historical events that are not widely known, and that have been hidden in the repetition of some our national musical myths. Though the conventional wisdom about Antill’s Corroboree is that its primary influence is from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, historical evidence points to a much more systemic project of representation of Aboriginal music and stories by non-Indigenous people, that paradoxically created obstacles in the way of Aboriginal people representing themselves.
The argument you make about reverse cultural appropriation is an example of exactly the kind of circular debate that I suggest this framework lends itself to. Stating that Indigenous people haven’t asked formal permission to use piano, guitar and European harmonies requires considerable intellectual acrobatics to overlook coercive policies that literally punished Indigenous people in Australia for continuing to practice traditional culture (for example by permanently removing their children or banning them from stations and reserves where their communities resided), and that rewarded them for showing signs of “assimilation” (for example by granting access to free movement across state borders and participation in the nationwide economic system). In short it’s much more complex than you suggest, and my account relies on systematic historical research, not on a sense of shame about the “achievements and freedoms of Western culture”.
Hello Amanda
I read with interest your contribution to Limelight magazine in April, ” Whose voices get to be heard?” and felt impelled to write a response. Unfortunately I have only just seen the piece in the magazine, so my contribution is perhaps not very timely – my apologies!
At the outset, I declare I am not an Indigenous Australian but an orchestral cellist in Melbourne. I also have an ongoing interest in archaeology and wrote a PhD in 2012 about the influence of archaeology and anthropology on art in Australia. One of my chapters explored John Antill’s Corroboree and how Antill was so inspired by Aboriginal culture that he attempted to create something that would enable non-Indigenous audiences to appreciate how extraordinary Aboriginal culture really was. What I would like to offer to the conversation is that like many artists, Antill’s motivation was far more inspiration than appropriation. The Tate Gallery in London defines appropriation as “the practice of artists using pre-existing objects or images in their art with little transformation of the original”. If you have heard the music or seen the ballet of Corroboree, you will recognise that neither bear much resemblance at all to either Aboriginal music or dance, but were inspired primarily by the incredible photographs in the books of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen (for eg, Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), The Arunta (1927)) from their journeys through Central Australia. And just to make a small note with regard to your response to Stephen, the conventional wisdom that Corroboree was primarily influenced by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is slightly incorrect as Antill himself said he never heard the piece, and the conductor Eugene Goossens “flatly opposed” the comparison. I have played Rite many times, and can say the comparison is at best superficial, in both contextual and musical terms.
I’d like to comment if I may on your observation about the direct relationship between government and arts institutions’ promotion and support of Antill’s Corroboree, and the denial of Aboriginal cultural self-representation on public stages. You discuss the process leading up to the decision to include Corroboree – and to exclude Aboriginal corroborees – in the Jubilee celebrations, but it should be remembered that the decision to include Corroboree in the Jubilee celebrations of 1951 only came after the symphonic premiere of the music in 1946, an international concert debut in 1947 (received with great accolade) and the first performances of the ballet in 1950. When first written, Corroboree was rejected by the ABC Director of Music, W.G. James and relegated to a dusty shelf. Until the celebrated conductor Eugene Goossens took notice of the work, not many in Australia were really interested in it. As a prime example of the ubiquitous Australian cultural cringe, it’s not surprising to learn that international acceptance played a large role in its final inclusion in the Jubilee events. The response by the press, public and international audiences created the momentum that propelled Corroboree to its iconic status at the time. I think the fact that Hiawatha was the first choice of the Jubilee organisers and their performing arts budget, tells us more about the cultural history of Australian music than the fact that Corroboree was finally chosen. It’s a great testament to Doug Nicholls and Bill Onus that due to their agitating, An Aboriginal Moomba: Out of the Dark was eventually included in the Jubilee celebrations. So in fact there was an Aboriginal presence in the Jubilee events of 1951. And with regard to Onus’ repressive ASIO file, he’s not the only artist or activist – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – in Australia who has been surveilled and prevented by the Government from pursuing certain activities.
But in this sense, I would like to offer, and with deep regard and sadness for the history of indigenous exclusion at so many times throughout our shared histories, that to cast John Antill and Corroboree as an example of cultural appropriation is really to do a disservice to the attempt by an artist to present to an alternative way of seeing Aboriginal people and culture. Corroboree was his interpretive expression of the visual and literary impact of Indigenous people, ceremony and society. He well recognised the contemporary climate concerning the treatment of Aboriginal people – like many non-Indigenous people at the time – but sought to bring attention to the complexity and beauty of a culture that had only previously been described in a language that was primarily scientific, observational and categorising in framing the construction of Indigenous perspectives. This was also at a time when many non-indigenous Australians believed that the Aboriginal people were a disappearing group. Although the language of science was expressively inadequate, it presented concepts that were provocative and available to be translated for easier consumption. No-one before had attempted to bring Aboriginal culture into the purview of the concert-going, primarily white, non-Indigenous audience. Antill was trying to know and express Aboriginal Australia beyond the dominant language of anthropological systems and Darwinist views by forming a different relationship with it through the language of art. In considering his attempts to do this, your statement that Corroboree was a non-Indigenous work “whose rhetorical capital was reliant on its evocation of Aboriginal culture”, is imposing a narrow and, in my view, cynical definition as to Antill’s artistic motivation.
You make the point that the work has been awarded and recorded and accoladed, but the music is now heard rarely and the ballet is so anachronistic as to be pretty well impossible to perform, and rightly so, though for their time both were exceptionally different to anything written before. With regard to your criticism that Antill didn’t seek input from Aboriginal people for Corroboree, it was because it wasn’t an Aboriginal work. In trying to follow through on this criticism, it leads me to think you imagine Aboriginal input would have made the work better, or more “authentic”? I can’t quite see to the end of this argument. With regard to Antill’s apparent professional success coming off the back of Corroboree, he was employed as assistant to the Federal Music Editor before his compositional skills were recognised; like many in these roles, he fulfilled his employment responsibilities at the ABC, and as a composer was offered opportunities for professional development . And to further remark as I did earlier, on your comment about the direct relationship between government and arts institutions ‘ promotion of Antill and the denial of permission for Aboriginal artists to self-represent their culture, I feel that you suggest a level of purposeful cultural manipulation and cunning that stretches the imagination.
The information you present about Antill having frequent commissions for “Aboriginal ballets” is unfamiliar to me, as in an attempt at a chronological reorder and assessment of Antill’s works, David Symons identified twenty works written by Antill, with ten of the works either lost, incomplete or existing only as fragments. I don’t believe any of the commissions actually came to fruition, but there were other attempts at staging and performing the ballet by Beth Dean. There was a suggestion that Robert Helpmann nearly became involved in staging performances at Covent Garden, but this became untenable due to the quickening and welcome development of a greater contextual awareness surrounding the political and racial sensitivities associated with any interpretive reading of Aboriginal rites and ceremonies and their translation to theatre.
I applaud any discussion that enables the process of truth-telling in the shared histories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and I deeply understand that there are important alternative stories to be revealed, discussed and shared, contributing to our increased understanding of the past. But there were non-Indigenous, settler artists who sought to bring the beauty and complexity of Aboriginal culture to a wider, uneducated audience when it was exceptionally uncommon. Of course, their attempts now seem appropriative and clumsy in many respects, but the works arose within the context of the time and could be considered to be on the continuum towards the greater understanding by non-Indigenous Australians that is now being slowly but continuously developed. I actually believe, and argued in my thesis, that artists have always been ahead of the game in this respect. As metaphor is the language of art, they understood why Aboriginal culture was so important and interesting – unfortunately as we explore our shared histories, the overly simple juxtaposition of advantage and exclusion are writ large. But I personally think the story of Antill and his motivation to write Corroboree is more complex and from my perspective and as in my own research, worthy of a deeper analysis.
Hello Tania,
Thank you for the detailed engagement with an aspect of my article – the discussion of John Antill’s Corroboree. Indeed, the key provocation I was aiming to offer is that assessing works only in terms of cultural appropriation is a distraction from the kinds of questions we could more productively be asking of our music histories. So, I agree with you that Antill didn’t “appropriate” Aboriginal culture. As I tried to explain in the article – focusing on questions of cultural appropriation locks us into circular debates about Antill’s intentions, when Antill was just one individual in a much larger culture of representation, predicated on an almost complete lack of involvement from living Aboriginal people. Indeed, contrary to what you suggest, Antill was not the first to try and bring Aboriginal culture into the domain of white concert-going audiences at this time, rather he was part of a wider push towards this kind of cultural representation, and one of his ABC colleagues Clive Douglas – about whom David Symons has also written – composed orchestral works in the 1930s drawing on similar themes (one was even entitled Corroboree). In showing how Antill’s Corroboree headlined the festival to celebrate the Jubilee of Federation, I’m thinking not just about artistic intention (the focus of the cultural appropriation debate), but about the uses to which this representation of Aboriginal culture was put.
These uses were extensive. As Roger Covell put it in his 1967 “Australia’s Music”, Antill was “a kind of musician-laureate for state occasions”. You are right that Helpmann rejected the proposal to choreograph the ballet (this was in 1947 at Covent Garden, not later as you imply, though Helpmann was involved in rejecting the proposal for the Australian Ballet to perform it in 1970 as well). After Corroboree’s tour of all capital cities in 1951 (with Rex Reid’s choreography), it headlined the gala concert for Queen Elizabeth II’s first Australian visit in 1954 (with Beth Dean’s choreography). Antill’s ballets (in collaboration with Beth Dean) – “Legend of the Boomerang” and “Legend of the Waratah” were commissioned for the visit of Princess Alexandra of Kent in 1959 (presented as the suite Burragorang Dreamtime), and then were again featured in a Pageant of Nationhood when Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1963. These two ballets were then filmed for television broadcast following the Governor General’s Australia Day Speech on ABC TV as Dreaming Time Legends on 26 January 1965. Antill’s orchestral work “Jubugalee” also featured in one of the opening concerts for the Sydney Opera House in 1973.
I list these events to demonstrate the way Antill’s “Aboriginal” works came to represent Australian culture at major, high-profile, publicly-funded events, and that this was a steadily-pursued agenda for decades after the events of 1951 that I briefly summarise in this article. This is the rhetorical capital that I refer to. I would be happy to send you sections of my book if you would like to see the details of the larger history of which this is just a small snippet, only one chapter of it is available open access at the moment: https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/24592, but the full book is obtainable through most libraries, and I’m happy to provide sections of the book by email. I’m not familiar with your PhD thesis, but would welcome the opportunity to read it if you provide the details. I can certainly agree with you that the story of Corroboree is more complex than can be captured in a 3,000 word magazine article, and the claims I make are based on far more than it was possible to include here.