Australia’s Jindyworobak Composers

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Notes

1 See Calloway and Tunley (1978), Covell ([1967] 2016) (a new imprint of the 1967 edition with Covell’s postscript and rearranged musical examples), McCredie (1969), and Murdoch (1972).

2 Recent examples include Kerry (2009), Hooper (2019), McNeill (2014), and McNeill (2023).

3 Chapter 4 is entitled ‘Jindyworobakism and More’ (Covell [1967] 2016, 69–93).

4 See also ‘Jindyworobak Movement’ in Wilde, Hooton, and Andrews (1994, 408–9).

5 A counterpoint that presents First Nations voices within Australian music history is found in Harris et al. (2020).

6 An earlier treatment of Douglas can be found in David Symons’s ‘Words and Music: Clive Douglas and the Jindyworobak Manifesto’ (Symons 2007).

7 Tate was one of the first to articulate the possibility of incorporating birdsong and First Nations music within an Australian nationalist idiom in his collection of essays Australian Musical Possibilities (Tate 1924).

8 This film is virulently racist and forms a window into what was considered acceptable within 1930s white Australian culture, against which the Jindyworobak movement might be seen as a positive counterbalance.

9 See Murdoch (1972, 165). Rachel Campbell shows a clear connection between the ethos of Corroboree and the mid-1950s music of Peter Sculthorpe in ‘“The Whole Work is Full of Primitive Rhythms”: The Folk-Primitivist Origins of Peter Sculthorpe’s National Music’ (Campbell 2019).

10 This arrangement is discussed in detail in Pickering (1995, 157–59), together with a score extract and recording.

11 There is no mention of Sculthorpe’s close musical connection to William Barton, whose crucial collaborative role as improviser/performer in the Requiem continued in the composer’s subsequent re-recordings of his orchestral and chamber works.

12 Douglas stated that his approach was ‘defiant of precedent’ and thoroughly unique. See Douglas (1956, 83).

13 A documentary film John Antill was made by Keith Salvat in 1975 and is available in various formats at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in Canberra (https://www.collection.nfsa.gov.au/title/6118). Antill was also interviewed by Hazel de Berg in 1963 (https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/19459371).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rhoderick McNeill

Rhoderick McNeill is an honorary professor in the School of Creative Arts, University of Southern Queensland, Australia. He has written four books, including The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960 (Ashgate, 2014), The Music of Carl Vine (Wildbird, 2017), and The Symphony in Australia 1960–2020 (Routledge, 2023).