playing with others and selves: australian aboriginal desert musicians on tour
TRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [University of Arizona]On: 16 April 2013, At: 13:43Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Playing with Others and Selves:Australian Aboriginal Desert Musicianson TourDr Åse OttossonVersion of record first published: 05 May 2009.
To cite this article: Dr Åse Ottosson (2009): Playing with Others and Selves: Australian AboriginalDesert Musicians on Tour, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 10:2, 98-114
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442210902842154
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Playing with Others and Selves:Australian Aboriginal Desert Musicianson TourAse Ottosson
Based on extensive fieldwork among Aboriginal country, rock and reggae musicians in
the Central Australian deserts, the present paper expands the analytical theme of
mediation for exploring intercultural transformations of Indigenous and male modes of
being. Drawing on ethnographic descriptions from interstate touring ventures, it explores
how various and overlapping ideas of masculinity and sense of selves are mobilised and
transformed as the men engage with other ‘blackfella’ and ‘whitefella’ places, people and
models of manhood and music. From such engagements, ambivalent ‘mongrel’
Aboriginal and male selves emerge that are nonetheless experienced as distinctive and
deeply meaningful.
Keywords: Aboriginal Australia; Popular Music; Intercultural Theory; Masculinity
Contemporary Australian Indigenous music activities are essentially intercultural
processes, emerging from an ongoing history of interactions and influences among a
multitude of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and sociomusical traditions.
Based on my ethnographic work with Aboriginal country, rock and reggae musicians
in Central Australia, the present paper explores the concept of mediation for
understanding such interactional and intercultural dynamics in which Aboriginal and
male ways of identifying are asserted and transformed.
Like the shaping of other aspects of social orders and forms of identifying, musical
cultures are best understood as fundamentally relational, dialogical and mutually
transformative phenomena (Barth 1969; Said 1978; Hall 1989; Gupta & Ferguson
1992). This idea of music practices and cultures as socially productive and
transformative is central for more recent works on intercultural and transnational
interplay, migration, borrowing and domestication of musical and sociocultural
Correspondence to: Dr Ase Ottosson, BIITE, Central Australian Campus, PO Box 9170, Alice Springs, NT 0871,
Australia. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1444-2213 (print)/ISSN 1740-9314 (online)/09/020098-17
# 2009 The Australian National University
DOI: 10.1080/14442210902842154
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
Vol. 10, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 98�114
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features (McClary 1991; Gilroy 1993; Stokes 1994; Born & Hesmondhalgh 2000;
Radano & Bohlman 2000; Wade 2000; Hesmondhalgh & Negus 2002; Meintjes 2003;
Ottosson 2006). Yet, there is often an underlying assumption that this transformative
interplay takes place between distinctive sociomusical and cultural entities. That is,
difference and social boundaries are at the heart of our analysis. A remaining question
for the ethnographer, and an underlying theme in the present paper, is how he or she
should describe and understand the role of similarities and commonalities in
intercultural interactions and histories, even if the people involved articulate their
experiences of such interactions in terms of radical difference.
Intercultural Mediations
The use of the concept of mediation in the present paper diverts in some important
ways from its role in semiotic approaches to music as systems of ‘languages’ or ‘texts’
(Feld 1974; Feld & Fox 1994; Turino 1999; Samuels 2004). My starting point is instead
the social practices, interactions and lived experiences of Aboriginal musicians as they
produce and perform music in different places and events. I approach the social realm
of music making as intercultural mediation in that it ‘connects and translates
disparate worlds, people, imaginations, values, and ideas, whether in its symbolic,
social or technological form’ (Meintjes 2003, p. 8). Similar to Fox (2004) in his
ethnography of Texas country music and working class, I see mediation as a process
that connects:
The practical and concrete domains of everyday life (work, play, sociability, worship,aggression, sexuality, performance, sound, smell, taste, kinesics) with more abstract
domains of memory, historical consciousness, senses of emplacement and displace-ment, ideologies of class, race, and gender, models of self- and personhood, poetics,
theories of emotion, and structures of feeling. (Fox 2004, p. 34)
The idea of the formation of identities as reiterative practice (Butler 1990, 1993)
resonates with this use of the concept of mediation. Both notions emphasise the
always emergent, ambiguous and multifaceted processes inherent in identity
formations. Both concepts suggest that it is through everyday mundane repetition
or layering of certain norms and experiences in practice that already socially
established sets of meanings are both legitimised and inevitably transformed. The
material situation, the dynamics of power or the time and place are never identical.
The intention of an action may be misunderstood and responded to in unpredictable
ways. And, by adding layers of experiences, every action irreversibly changes the
context for renewed action (Goodwin & Duranti 1992).
In their musical life, the Central Australian Aboriginal men continuously engage
with ideas, practices and values from varying sources and sociocultural formations.
Such intercultural engagements and experiences become embedded, in layers upon
layers, as the men reiterate them in their day-to-day practices and musical
expressions. The ways in which they articulate such mediated forms of being male
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and blackfella differ from one sociomusical setting to the next.1 The present paper
focuses on the setting of touring ventures. After a brief background, I draw on
ethnographic descriptions to consider the interactional and mediating dynamics in
which the desert musicians engage and are transformed when in ‘foreign’ blackfella
and whitefella territories. The main subject of this paper is the production and
transformation of male and Aboriginal ways of being in the social world of music
making. It leaves out more musicological and equally interesting matters of the
intercultural production and mediation of musical styles, sounds and structures,
which I have considered elsewhere (Ottosson 2006).
Intercultural Home Settings
The home region of the Aboriginal musicians appearing in this paper is a vast,
sparsely populated desert area with one major town, Alice Springs (population
27,000). Approximately one-quarter of the population in Central Australia identify as
Indigenous, compared with 2.3 per cent of the total Australian population (Australian
Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2006). Since the introduction of land rights legislation in
the 1970s, close to half the land in the region has been handed back to its traditional
owners. This land is dotted with small Aboriginal settlements, where many people
organise their life based on customary principles that are associated with particular
ancestral areas and languages.2 That is, Aboriginal people in Central Australia (and
elsewhere in the country) have never belonged to one society or language group. They
continue to identify and organise themselves according to distinct localised orders,
affiliated with identifiable ancestral areas. Twenty-five different Aboriginal languages
and dialects are still spoken across the region. Most of the musicians from remote
communities are ritually initiated men who take part in ceremonial life. Musicians
who grew up in and live around Alice Springs, and especially those of mixed
Indigenous/non-Indigenous families, may speak English only and are not always
initiated.
The musicians’ life worlds are formed in a history of rich sociocultural diversity
where the notion of ‘intercultural’ can denote not only engagements with a variety of
non-Indigenous peoples, but also among people from diverse Indigenous orders.
British colonisation of the desert region began in the 1860s and by World War II most
Aboriginal people had been forced off their ancestral lands to live in Christian
missions, in camps on rural properties or on the outskirts of white towns.
Christianity and the rural industry have had a still powerful, region-wide influence
on Aboriginal values and practices. However, the new settlers came from many
different ethnic, national and religious backgrounds in Europe and Asia, contributing
to the repertoire of cultural influences. There has also been a great deal of mutual
influence and partial adoption of practices, beliefs and values among different
Aboriginal groups. This historical context suggests that anything ‘cultural’ is better
understood as always already ‘inter-‘ (Merlan 2005, p. 168ff; see also Hinkson &
Smith 2005). That is, if we approach practices, ideas and forms of identification as
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emerging in social encounters and interactions, as proposed in the Introduction, they
are always already socioculturally interrelated, intermingled and mediated.
The music the Aboriginal desert men play is in itself a prime example of cultural
forms that continue to be made at local, national and global intercultural crossroads.
Hillbilly and cowboy song music arrived in Central Australia from the late 1920s with
travelling White show men and, later, touring country shows (Whiteoak 2003). From
the 1950s, the Hollywood western movie music and honky tonk style country was
widely adopted by Aboriginal locals. Surf and guitar rock music heard on vinyl
records and radio has been reworked into many distinct local Aboriginal styles since
the early 1960s. Local variations of so called ‘desert reggae’ have similarly become part
of Aboriginal everyday life across the region since the late 1980s.3
These musical genres are often marketed and practised as rather distinct in a
Western, globalised music industry. This is not the case in the regional social history
of music making in Aboriginal Central Australia. Similar to descriptions of local
music scenes in colonised settings elsewhere in the world (Collins & Richards 1989;
Barber & Waterman 1995; Bilby 1999), desert musicians started playing the music
brought to their regions and what they listened to on the radio, as movie soundtracks
or on vinyl records people happened to bring to their remote communities. As songs
and sounds have been reworked and reperformed over time in local contexts, various
styles and genres have become fused. Thus, a mixture of genres commonly appears in
both the one song and in the repertoire of the one musician or band. As Samuels
points out in his work on Apache communities in south-eastern Arizona, the term
‘eclectic’ doesn’t quite do this phenomena justice (Samuels 2004 p. 136). It is also
about a ‘thickening of experiences’ (p. 139) through the constant layering and
transformations of a mix of music, emotions, people, places and events. This
‘mongrel’ cultural quality makes these music cultures especially interesting to explore
as ‘a medium that mediates, as it were, mediation’ in that ‘music in global culture . . .
functions as an interactive social context, a conduit for other forms of interaction,
other socially mediated forms of appropriation of the world’ (Erlmann 1996, p. 6).
Mostly these regional Aboriginal styles of music continue to be reworked by
Aboriginal people for and with other Aboriginal people in settings dominated by
particular Aboriginal groups. Occasionally, though, desert musicians leave their
regional blackfella music scene to perform in white townships and, at times, they
venture further afield on more or less organised touring ventures.
Going on Tour
Aboriginal desert musicians who go on tours are commonly credited with an
increased status as men and musicians among people in their home communities.
These men also tend to engage in a ‘talking-up’ discourse of their and others’ touring
experiences. This real and imagined elevation of male and musician status is based on
two main interactional aspects of touring: engagements with whitefella music workers
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and a ‘mainstream’ (non-Indigenous) music industry; and being involved in a
broader Aboriginal musical brotherhood.
These two aspects are presented as highly valued features of tours. The musicians
often talk about the whitefella music scene as a desired place of plenty: plenty of
money, professionalism, technological resources, musical equipment and plenty of
drugs and sex. It comes to stand for what their everyday situation is not. Through this
‘talking-up’ discourse, the musicians basically create a place where they can tap into
greater resources and recognition. By placing oneself in this perceived place, the self is
positioned on a more advanced level of music making compared with the everyday
‘mucking around’ in their Aboriginal settings.4 Similarly, before and after tours, the
men often mention how rewarding it is to meet with Aboriginal musicians and
audiences from elsewhere when on tour. They talk about being inspired as Aboriginal
musicians by other Aboriginal people’s music. They emphasise how important the
support from Aboriginal audiences in other places is for their self-confidence and
growth as Aboriginal artists.
Hence, this touring discourse at home tends to reinforce ideas about sociocultural
and racial difference. It produces an idealised imagery of tours as an opportunity for
the Aboriginal men to engage in a productive blackfella musical and social affinity,
and in a cross-culturally enriching whitefella domain. As we shall see, this discourse is
largely contradicted by the men’s actual behaviour and experiences when on tour.
Instead, these ventures tend to become opportunities for the men to assert, and in the
process inevitably reflect on, play with and transform, their understanding of
themselves and various blackfella and whitefella others.
Blackfella in Other Blackfella Places
Driving from Alice Springs, it usually takes a couple of days to get out of the
musicians’ home region. No maps are needed to indicate when this happens. The
men’s changed demeanour makes it clear enough. Closer to home, they keep a
running commentary on the country and places we drive through, connecting
landscapes with their own and other Aboriginal families and individuals, language
groups, music activities and experiences of work and residence. The further we drive,
the quieter the men become, gradually losing interest in the view. A clear signal that
we have entered another blackfella topography is when we pass through a settled
place and nobody makes a gesture of interest.
As we enter such ‘alien’ sociogeographical territory, the men increasingly turn their
attention to themselves. They begin to talk about themselves in terms such as ‘we’re
desert rats, we don’t belong here’ or ‘we’re no-water people’. When we arrive to set up
for performances in small towns with a large Aboriginal population, or in Aboriginal-
dominated communities, the desert men keep a guarded distance to local Aboriginal
people and tend to restrict their movements to a minimum. On one occasion, for
instance, we had a few days between two performances on a tour in the north of the
Northern Territory (NT) and were invited to stay in an Aboriginal settlement for
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a few days after the performance there. The community generously provided the crew
of ten people with two houses and food. Locals were keen to take us fishing and
swimming at beautiful local waterholes and to socialise in the evenings. Only one of
the desert men came along for a swim. Apart from giving the concert, the rest of the
crew stayed in the houses for our entire stay, which was moreover cut short. Early on
the second morning, the men drove off without saying goodbye or thanking the
hosts. They instead spent the time before the next performance in a white township a
couple of hours away.
In performance contexts away from home, the desert men seem similarly reluctant
to interact directly with other Indigenous people. At larger Indigenous music festivals,
for instance, artists, managers, music workers, media people and fans often mingle
backstage and in the green room. I seldom saw the desert men engage with anybody,
Indigenous or non-Indigenous, in those settings unless these people were connected to
Central Australia. The men rarely showed much interest in performances by
Indigenous bands from elsewhere, either. If they did comment on such performances,
it was usually disinterested or negative.
Looking for direct manifestations of the black brotherhood imagery of tours we
thus end up rather empty handed. We need to attend to other forms of engagements
to account for how the men interact with other Indigenous people and places. One
common way the men elaborate their understanding of themselves in ‘foreign’
blackfella places is through narrating themselves into Indigenous stories from those
places. On a couple of tours we ended up in Darwin on the NT north coast. Every
time, the men kept telling each other blackfella stories from Darwin. One story was
about creepy ‘alley cats’ that supposedly live in dark alleys out in the Nightcliff area, a
beach suburb and known hangout for local Aboriginal people. The point of the story
was that these unreliable and clearly female alley cats follow single (Aboriginal) men
around. The desert men shuddered when imagining these creatures. Another story
was about a big black ghost woman who appears in the back seat of cars, and only in
the cars of single (Aboriginal) men. When the male driver turns to look at her, she’s
not there; he can only see her in the back mirror. She’s supposed to have thrown
herself from a cliff out in Nightcliff, killing herself over a man, and she’s coming back
to haunt and tempt single men.
Similar stories in and from other blackfella places are more or less obviously about
the desert men. On tour, they are in effect ‘single’ men and tend to see themselves as
victims of sexual temptations and dangers, here dressed up as predatory, yearning
and revengeful female figures. In telling these other-placed Aboriginal stories, the
men put into play their own everyday dominant Aboriginal norms for appropriate
male and sexual behaviours. For instance, aspects of their customary norms prescribe
appropriate sexual relationships to occur only between men and women of particular
kin categories and not others. In associated models of dignified adult manhood, men
earn respect by being fair, authoritative and responsible in relation to their wives.
This doesn’t necessarily exclude extramarital affairs, but those should be handled
responsibly to avoid shaming affines or wives, which is a common cause of conflict
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and violence. As mentioned earlier, many desert people identify strongly with aspects
of Christianity. This is also clear in stories like those above, resonating with Christian
ideals for morally virtuous adult men and the sacred status of monogamy within
heterosexual marriage.
When in other blackfella places, the exchange of localised stories can operate
simultaneously as a self-mirroring (as self-imposed warnings promoting self-control
and sexual discipline) and as a reminder that they are now Aboriginal outsiders. As
outsiders, they need to be very careful because they don’t know the local blackfella
social and ancestral dynamics and therefore cannot predict the consequences of the
actions in those places. However, they do know from their own Aboriginal normative
regimes that sexual adventures by Aboriginal outsiders with local women can result in
severe actions from the woman’s kin. It is precisely this lack of knowledge about local
Aboriginal dynamics that make the men wary, withdrawn and reluctant to move
about in places dominated by other Aboriginal peoples, as described above.
Thus, the reiteration of stories from other places can be seen as an attempt to
prevent conflict through emphasising the men’s outsider blackfella status and playing
down commonalities with local Indigenous orders. At the same time, these assertions
of difference are made possible, and even generated, by some shared Indigenous
expressive forms and common cultural understandings, including the fundamental
role of ancestral narratives for disciplining behaviours and guiding relations and
interactions in many customary Indigenous social orders and forms of identification.
Cut Loose and Reined In
During tours, the restrained models for male behaviour described above are
constantly challenged by powerful masculine imagery of global country, rock and
reggae music cultures, where hard drinking, drugs and sexual adventures often are
valued male behaviours, especially in touring contexts. Among the desert men, too,
going on tour is more or less accepted as being ‘cut loose’ from the dense social
control of their home settings, even if the men may have different ideas about where
to pull back the reins.
During one particular tour, for example, a crew of ten Central Australian musicians
and roadies partied hard after a big concert. A few of them picked up a couple of very
drunk local women in the touring vehicle. Some of the others turned up drunk and
upset to hide in my motel room. Sitting on the floor with his arms covering his head,
one of the men wailed that couldn’t come for the rest of the tour because the vehicle
was now ‘shamed’ by the careless behaviours of his fellow countrymen. ‘You have to
be f . . .g careful, man! This is not our place, we don’t belong here!’ A second man had
also had enough of the touring life. ‘I am a married man, sis’!’ he complained. ‘I have
a six months old baby! There are things I can’t do no more, I’ve got responsibility!’
The youngest man on the tour instead stated that he was going to ‘go professional’,
longing for a life beyond the control of his elders at home. He pulled up his shirt to
show a big, ugly scar on his back where one of his elders had hit him with a piece of
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wood for not being obedient enough. On this tour he had seen how professional
musicians are put up in good hotels and paid well. From now on, he declared, he
would not play for his uncles’ country bands no more. They never paid him or
treated him with that kind of respect. The older men agreed that he could make a
musical career with his talents. But they told him off in no uncertain terms for
criticising his ‘oldfellas’. ‘Listen bros’,’ one of them said sternly and making a fist,
‘Don’t you disrespect your grandparents! We’re all brought up older than we are. Got
a lot of hidings, too. You just take it, and get on with life!’ By bringing the junior man
back into line, the more senior men reinforced some basic Aboriginal male values
from home, where younger men are expected to show respect for and never openly
question men older than themselves, and where senior men exercise authority and
responsibility in relation to younger ones.
At the same time, they all accept that as musicians on tour many restrictions are,
in fact, negotiable. In addition, experiences of a wild night of drunken dramas may
become capital for accumulating respect as men and musicians at home. Shared and
retold among the men, such experiences become road stories, improving every time
they are reiterated. At home, such self-narratives can continue to circulate as part of
the broader touring discourse, adding another layer to self-images and how others
see the men, distinguishing them from those who haven’t ‘been there, done that’ in
the exciting and desired world of touring musicians. However, this ‘wildfella’
recognition is always in tension with the valued self-disciplined models of
Aboriginal manhood.
Thus, when out of their own Aboriginal social and musical territory, the desert
men increasingly ‘close ranks’ and emphasise their distinctiveness in relation to
Indigenous others. They are much less guarded and tense when in townships
dominated by non-Indigenous people, where the Aboriginal social density and
control is less prominent. At the same time, in these towns they are increasingly
restricted by being blackfellas in whitefella spaces.
Blackfella in Whitefella Places
When in a white town on tour, the crew get bored watching television in the motel
room. They decide to try out the motel pool. When the six black men enter the small
pool area, the white guests soon gather their towels, bottles of sunscreen, bathers,
books, radio, sunglasses and water bottles and leave. Country musician Lyndon
jumps into the pool, in his board shorts and t-shirt. ‘I forgot to bring my beach gear,’
he says with a feminine hand gesture, clearly referring to all the gear the white guests
took to the pool. Soon thereafter a motel employee appears. The men go quiet. She
asks if they are guests at the motel. Sound engineer Steve says ‘yep’. Nobody looks at
her. The woman wants to see evidence. It takes a few minutes for the men to locate a
room key card. They show it without a word. When she is gone, the men soon leave.
‘Fucking racist mob, this place’ one of them concludes when we’re back in the room.
‘Guess she thought we would wash off and dirty the water, ey?’ one of the more
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senior men says, in an unusually sharp tone for this mild-mannered person. A third
man then suggests that ‘the cunt’ in reception must be a ‘poofter, with that little
voice of his’. He performs a clever imitation of the man’s service manners. We all
laugh.
This incident is typical of the Aboriginal men’s engagements with whitefella-
dominated spaces on tours. When they enter coffee shops, restaurants, shops and
other non-Indigenous places, they are observed and surveyed, sometimes with
curiosity and often with suspicion. The men also expect being scrutinised with
suspicion in whitefella places, because they are Aboriginal. Not surprisingly, therefore,
they rarely sit down to eat in food places or use motel facilities outside their rooms.
They buy take-away meals or supermarket food and eat in places where they are not
directly in the way of non-Indigenous people. At concerts, they don’t engage much
with non-Indigenous musicians or music workers backstage or on stage, either, as
described earlier.
Although the men tend to elaborate blackfella aspects of places in complex and
imaginative local Aboriginal stories, as described earlier, their comments on non-
Aboriginal people in other places are usually in the form of rather one-dimensional
complaints or typecasting. Their remarks basically reinforce a view of the world as
divided up into blackfella and whitefella ways of acting and thinking. As we saw in
Lyndon’s feminine hand gesture and the comments on white staff, the black men also
tend to associate white manners with less masculine conduct. By mocking such
perceived white manners, the black men also reassert their own, somewhat crude, ‘no
bullshit’ blackfella manners.
On tours, then, the Aboriginal desert musicians tend to limit their direct
engagements with whitefellas. At times, however, they tour in mixed company with
white musicians and are left with no choice but to interact.
Mixed Company
Week 2 of a touring venture in the northwest of Australia has just ended with
performances at an Indigenous festival in Broome. We are now setting out on a
2-week ‘Bush Tour’ with performances in towns and Aboriginal communities along
the way back to Central Australia. The two acts on the tour are the Teenage Band, a
Warlpiri reggae-rock band from the remote community of Lajamanu in the North
Tanami Desert, and Frank Yamma, a Pitjantjatjara man from the south-western
deserts. He has made a national career and now has a band with non-Aboriginal city
musicians from the south-east. Three of them join the tour. A crew of six Aboriginal
roadies/musicians from Central Australia are also part of the touring party.
We leave Broome on a Monday. That night the bands perform at a small Aboriginal
community at Fitzroy Crossing, 4 hours drive east. The next night they perform in
Halls Creek, 3�4 hours further east. In that time, the tour has been off, on, off, and on
again, and the circumstances have changed radically. The Teenage Band bass player
suddenly takes off home because he worried about his wife and other men. The rest
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of the band then announced that they all had to go home for ‘sorry business’, the local
term for Aboriginal funeral proceedings. This very popular band in regional
Aboriginal settings was to be the big drawcard for the tour, easing the way for
introducing Frank’s locally less well-known cosmopolitan fusion music.
In addition, after the Halls Creek performance, the most senior Aboriginal man of
the tour, Stanley, takes off. He is returning the hire van to Darwin and picking up our
original vehicle that broke down after 2 days on the road. Stanley was going to play
bass for Frank and is the only musician in the Central Australian group who knows
Frank’s recent music well. He could have delegated the job of returning the van but,
being a non-drinker, he is fed up with the hard-drinking Aboriginal crew. Before
leaving Broome he made it clear that he would leave if they didn’t shape up. He was
about to do so twice before Halls Creek, but was persuaded to change his mind,
which is why the tour was off and on a few times. Now he has indeed taken off, after a
few words to Steve, a younger man, on how to organise things.
We are now a one-band tour without its senior Aboriginal decision maker present.
Nobody knows when or if the Teenage Band or Stanley will turn up again. This
requires flexible men and musicians. Country musician Lyndon picks up the bass and
learns Frank’s more eclectic music to a workable degree after an hour of rehearsals. To
please the local Aboriginal audiences, Frank also has to revive his old rock-guitar and
country music repertoire. This is no problem, either. However, Frank’s city band
members are not familiar with his old numbers. Being professionals, they would no
doubt be able to play these songs but the Aboriginal crew do not trust them to know
the local Aboriginal performance conventions for this repertoire. This involves an
ability to read the changing moods of a blackfella audience of the night and, for
instance, shorten or extend songs, or mix a number of locally popular songs into a
long, uninterrupted session to keep a crowd on their dancing feet. Men in the
Aboriginal crew now step in as Frank’s backing band in those parts of the
performance.
The Aboriginal men tend to accept all these changes without question. According
to norms for male group dynamics and hierarchies of respect in their Aboriginal
home settings, they basically follow the lead of the most senior man in the blackfella
male group. Most senior Aboriginal men I’ve worked with don’t always communicate
their most immediate intentions to others. Therefore, on most tours with Aboriginal
musicians, the crew may not have a clear idea of when, where and exactly how gigs
are to take place, or what their role in the performances is. Often they don’t know at
what time the touring vehicles are leaving, staying or where exactly they are heading.
They don’t worry much about such details either. They simply stay around each other
and keep up with what actually happens instead of relying on plans on paper or what
somebody said yesterday or even a moment ago. If a man is missing when a gig starts
because he has not stayed around, this doesn’t create much drama. Most of them are
multi-instrumentalists and someone else just steps in. In the Aboriginal crew, then,
an ability to ‘go with the flow’ under constantly changing circumstances is the valued
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modus operandi. This kind of relaxed adaptability also tends to characterise
Aboriginal life worlds in general in Central Australia.
Conversely, the white city musicians are increasingly uncomfortable with the
constant changes and lack of firm plans. They mostly work in the conventions of an
urban, professional music scene. Here, tour itineraries with hours, dates and places
for sound checks, performances, checking in and out of accommodation, and times
for departures and arrivals are standard features. Each musician is usually specialised
and irreplaceable and therefore updated on changes without having to ask. Knowing
the shared itinerary, each person can then plan his own activities for the rest of the
time, independent of the others.
Consequently, during the first week on the road, the city musicians keep asking for
confirmation on where and how and when they are doing things next. They want to
discuss changes and reach group consensus. All such attempts at joint decisions are
largely ignored by the Aboriginal men. They look to their senior person for decisions,
they basically see constant changes as normal and by staying together they know what
is happening. To keep discussing and confirming details is seen as ‘making a fuss’,
which they tend to associate with how women operate and which complicates the
blackfella male way of ‘going with the flow’. For the white men, in contrast, verbal
confirmation on when and where they are going to do what is central for their sense
of a smooth operation. Because the Aboriginal party runs this tour, these different
ways of operating mean that the white men are often somewhere else when the
Aboriginal crew decide to leave a place, do a sound check or start a gig. One morning
after a gig they even leave without one of the white musicians. He is elsewhere when
they leave, which is earlier than he was told the night before. He had to organise a
local lift to the next location a couple of hours away.
All this creates tensions that the men need to work around in order to get on with
the work. Exploring how they negotiate such tensions can tell us something about the
shaping of the men’s understandings of themselves and the ‘others’.
Playing Blackfella and Whitefella
A very strong feature of interpersonal conventions in Aboriginal Central Australia is
to avoid direct confrontation or critique (Liberman 1985; Myers 1986). Therefore,
the white musicians’ occasional attempts to clear out possible misunderstandings
and other relational issues with the Aboriginal men on the Bush Tour are met with
silence or avoidance, such as a shrug or joking manner. One way in which the men
instead tend to deal with their differences is to exaggerate their own practices and to
more or less jokingly mock that of the ‘other’ in a kind of game of mutual
typecasting.
One of the white musicians, for instance, is meticulous in how he prepares for
performances. He wants to be in a particular spot on stage where he can see all the
others and he neatly organises his things to know exactly where they are when he
needs them. He jots down any changes in the way they play and is keen to discuss the
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Aboriginal musicians’ ways of playing particular song sections. He is basically a
passionate and curious musician. As a seasoned musician, he also uses earplugs on
stage to avoid impaired hearing. He uses earplugs to sleep well, too, and he eats
healthy foods. He rarely joins the black men’s drinking sessions long into the nights.
The Aboriginal men don’t worry much about sleeping rough, loud noise or eating
regularly or healthily. As a result, they are rather worn out early on in the tour,
whereas the white musician stays in good shape. In the music work, the Aboriginal
men certainly care about the condition of their instruments and the quality of sound
when they perform. But they tend to pick up and play any instruments available
without particular preparations. They are in a way always ready and they tend to ‘go
with the flow’ whatever happens, when it happens.
After a few days on the road, I notice how some of the Aboriginal men take an
overly careless attitude to their playing. To me, and they agree on this when we talk
about it later, it looks like they are out to prove to the white men that blackfellas don’t
need to prepare for a gig. They wish to make the point that they are skilled enough to
improvise and pick up whatever musical challenge comes before them. They don’t
respond much when the white musician wants to discuss their techniques, either. In
fact, it is rare that the Aboriginal desert musicians play a song in exactly the same way
twice, so there is not much to talk about.
Some of the Aboriginal men also begin to exaggerate other kinds of behaviour
when the white men are present. When travelling in the van to the next place, for
example, one of the Melbourne men cuts up some fruit and passes it around on a
plate. The Aboriginal men just look at the fruit arrangement. Ten minutes later, one
of the Aboriginal men grabs a piece of cooked meat from the cooler. He rips into it
with his teeth, chews with loud smacking and satisfied grunts. When he is done, he
rubs his greasy hands together as if he truly enjoys the feel of it and laughs
mockingly.
The black men also comment jokingly on the white men’s habits when they’re not
there. It’s not spiteful and the men often banter about each other, too. Their witty
comments still reaffirm some typecast notions of whitefella manners that are fairly
common among the Aboriginal desert musicians. In their view, the careful
preparation of stage performances or to arrange fruit on a platter comes across as
somewhat effeminate. Tearing into a fried piece of meat can be understood as talking
back to such manners, in a kind of parody of a stereotypical imagery of blackfella
masculine strength, but also of ‘primitive’ manners. The Aboriginal desert men tend
to identify with both those qualities, in ambivalent ways.
The white musicians also begin to comment on the black musicians when they’re
not here. One morning, for example, I have breakfast with the Melbourne men at a
coffee shop. As one of them pours himself a cup of tea, he spurts out with a dry smile,
‘well, f . . .k it, I’m f . . .g gonna have my f . . .g breakfast any f . . .g way I f . . .g want it,
f . . .k it!’ He then sips his tea with the small finger sticking out. In this gesture, he
contrasts exaggerated white Anglo tea-drinking manners with a defining feature of
the Aboriginal crew, who constantly use of the f-word for most things and actions.
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In this gesture, he thus effectively mocks the typecast habits of his ‘own kind’ just as
much as the Aboriginal men’s manners.
This mutual ‘game’ of self-exaggeration and parody involves making the ‘other’
look ridiculous, but without malice. I instead interpret these gestures as assertions of
the men’s own ways of approaching music and life in general. It can also be seen as
self-mockery when the men exaggerate their own manners. The fruit and meat
incident in the touring van works just as much to show to the other party that ‘I’m
aware of how you see me in these typecast ways’. That is, by exaggerating their
respective actual and perceived whitefella and blackfella manners, the men are
communicating to the ‘other’ that they know that it may look ridiculous to the other
(and at times to oneself, too) but this is what ‘we’ are, so live with it.
I also understand this imitation and mocking of each other’s manners as trying out
and playing around with the ‘other’s’ ways of being. It can be seen as a way to
demonstrate that one is competent in the manners of the ‘other’, too. It can be a way
of communicating that ‘I’m not so different from you’ while asserting that ‘I prefer
my own valued ways’ of identifying with certain male manners. It can also be a
simultaneous act of mocking precisely those own, male manners. For me, the meat-
eating performance was exactly this; a mocking of a typecast crude blackfella
masculine manner while at the same time assertively contrasting this with the
typecast whitefella conduct that the neat fruit platter represented.
By approaching the above ‘play’ as another instance of intercultural mediations, we
may begin to account for the ambivalent, contradictory, coproductive and partial
ways in which people simultaneously form a sense of self and of others, in different
places, relations and practices.
Concluding Discussion
The notion of intercultural mediation in this paper is meant to emphasise how
coherent and deeply meaningful notions and experiences of distinctive selves and
others emerge in complex, interactional dynamics, involving the constant layering of
a range of ideas, practices, emotions and values. As we saw in the Aboriginal desert
musicians’ ambivalent negotiation of blackfella and whitefella male and musician
models on tour, this is a dialogic, mediating process of local, national and
transnational appropriations and transformations.
I have described how the desert men increasingly ‘close ranks’ and are cautious in
their interactions with Indigenous people and places elsewhere. They may instead
engage in local, blackfella sociocultural dynamics by reiterating and interpreting local
Indigenous stories in ways that emphasise their distinctiveness in relation to other
blackfellas. We have also seen how the men’s engagements with non-Indigenous
domains and people in general are characterised by a lack of interest, defiance and
typecasting. When they have to interact directly with non-Indigenous musicians on
joint tours, real and perceived differences may be exaggerated in a parodic play with
one’s own as well as the other’s manners and ideas. In this mutual commenting on
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oneself and the ‘other’, the men at the same time reaffirm, question and dislocate
certain historically established caricatures of blackfellas and whitefellas as radically
different sociocultural categories.
Using the idea of the significance of mimesis as a means to engage with Otherness
(Taussig 1993), we can see the Aboriginal and white musicians’ mimetic contestations
in the mixed Bush Tour company as ‘a gateway from the Self to the Other’ (Harrison
2002, p. 222), as well as a confrontation with images of oneself. Similarly, when the
desert men engage with other Indigenous places and people by placing themselves as
agents in stories from these places, we can understand this as a form of mimesis, an
identification of the Self with an Other by adopting shared Indigenous cultural forms
of narrative expression and a simultaneous distancing to certain feared or undesired
aspects of that Other/Self.
Hence, returning to the underlying theme of the paper, the ethnographic fragments
suggest that social identification take form not only in the interplay among different
sociocultural ideas and experiences. We also need to account for real and perceived
similarities and resemblances as constitutive and transformative for purportedly
radically different sociocultural categories of people (Harrison 2006). Indeed, in the
narrating of oneself into scary stories from other places, or in the play with stereotypes
of oneself and the ‘other’, difference may be seen to be a secondary effect, ‘produced by
the regulation, control, suppression or denial or similarities’ (Harrison 2006, p. 13).
That is, ideas and feelings of distinctiveness not only emerge from actual sociocultural
difference, but from a need to deny, disguise, control or undo shared features and
commonalities in circumstances where people continue to interact, work together and
share social and physical spaces, as well as history. As this paper demonstrates
ethnographically, such engagements may be limited to specific situations; to particular
geographical, sociocultural or musical settings; or they may involve broader influences
over time in global flows of changing forms of cultural practice and social orientations
(Appadurai 1991; Hannerz 1996).
Drawing together the ethnographic and theoretical matters considered, a key point
is how, in the course of ongoing sociomusical practice and processes of identification,
are already established and distinctive models for being men and being Aboriginal
reaffirmed. These models are also partially coimplicated in the continuous production
of new, syncretic, ‘mongrel’ meanings and distinctive forms of maleness, blackfella
ways of being and music. Here I have merely indicated the diversity of male, musical
and sociocultural forms of identifying that are put into play as the men venture beyond
their home regions and need to engage in different ways with other blackfella and
whitefella people and places. Regardless of whether such engagements produce a
withdrawal into their own grouping or take the form of exaggerated performances of
typecast Aboriginal and white men, these are mediating processes in which
transformed, multilayered male and Aboriginal forms of being will continue to
emerge. That is, the desert musicians will always return home from tours with new
experiences. This will always, in one way or another, change the way these men and
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musicians see themselves and how they act, as well as how other people see them and
relate to them.
Notes
[1] I use ‘Indigenous’ as the most general term, including Aboriginal (mainland people) and
Torres Strait Islanders. I use ‘Aboriginal’ more specifically for mainland people, including
Central Australian Aboriginal people. ‘Blackfella’ is the vernacular term used by the
musicians about themselves and other Indigenous Australians and they use ‘whitefella’ for
non-Indigenous people and things in general. I use these terms when referring more directly
to the musicians’ ways of expressing matters.
[2] The largest Aboriginal community in Central Australia, Yuendumu, has a population of 800�1000. Most other settlements have fewer than 300 residents. The rest of the land is occupied
by large pastoral properties, a few mining and petroleum operations and a small number of
tourist resorts, the most famous at Uluru (Ayers Rock).
[3] For more on these styles, see Ottosson (2006). Similar regionalised Indigenous music scenes
can be found elsewhere in Australia (Breen 1989; Neuenfeldt 1997; Hayward 1998; Walker
2000; Corn 2002; Dunbar-Hall & Gibson 2004; Furlan 2005).
[4] Meintjes (2003, p. 241) discusses similar idealised constructions of imagined and experienced
overseas success among Zulu musicians in South Africa.
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