Music as a Resource for World-Building in Newcastle, NSW and its Townships, 1869–1879

This thesis investigates music-making in Newcastle, NSW, and its townships in the period 1869–1879. In this period many of the mining townships, notably Lambton, Wallsend and Waratah, were sufficiently established to have developed a cultural identity, based on the re-creation of traditions and cultural practices from the places their largely migrant population had left behind. Music performed many roles in the incipient settler communities, accompanying community groups in both work and leisure activities. Music’s many functions have led to the hypothesis that music was a resource for world-building for the settler communities. Four questions are posed to further the hypothesis: (1) what type of music-making was being practised in Newcastle and its townships in the 1870s? (2) how was music perceived in the 1870s; (3) what could music represent in the nineteenth-century Anglophone world of which the migrant communities were a part? and (4): how can the use of music and its perception be analysed and understood from a twenty-first-century perspective? Since little is known of the cultural life of these settler communities, archival research was first carried out into their music-making from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, with a focus on the period 1869–1879. In order to address questions two, three and four, a theoretical framework has been created that draws on the work of music historians, cultural theorists and sociologists, notably William Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and Tia DeNora, and is further informed by nineteenth-century concepts, such as rational recreation, models of the public sphere and soundscape theory. The concept of affordance, framed by Gibson and subsequently applied to music by DeNora, is the tool used in this thesis to identify the many strands that constitute music’s multimodality. Identifying music’s affordances has allowed the breadth of music’s multimodality to be captured, revealing how important music was to the process of world-building in the mining townships. In taking this innovative approach, the thesis makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how settler communities used and interacted with music in the process of building their world in colonial Australia and opens up possibilities of further research and application of the findings to both historic and contemporary communities.