Resonant histories of musical encounter in Australia aims to understand Australia’s cultural past by situating histories of musical encounter in the nation's Oceanic location and colonial history.
Underpinned by multi-sensory conceptual frameworks, it aims to apply collaborative, intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches drawing on historical, musicological and ethnographic methods to reveal musical encounters as sites for understanding Australian history.
Focusing on a formational period, 1888-1988, the project expects to generate new knowledge about Australian musical institutions, sites and intercultural encounters and aims to have benefits for the diversification of curricula, and implications for Australian cultural policy.
Julia Russoniello’s research investigates key moments of musical innovation and exchange in mid-twentieth-century Australia. Focusing on the performing careers of violinist Eva Kelly and harpist Elizabeth Vidler, this research reveals how these female Australian instrumentalists adopted and disseminated new techniques and performance styles shaped by their transnational encounters. Through this lens, Julia explores how such exchanges contributed to the evolving contours of Sydney’s classical music landscape in the postwar period.
The project also engages with the cultural significance of festivals, with a particular focus on the Townsville Pacific Festival (1970–1991). As the AHA 2025 Northern Australia Fellow, Julia examined the festival’s lifespan and shifting priorities, situating its changing focus within broader networks of cultural exchange, celebration, and arts practice. In collaboration with Amanda Harris, she published an article exploring the relationship between the 1988 Festival of Pacific Arts held in Townsville and the long-running Townsville Pacific Festival in the 2025 volume of the Australian Studies Journal.
This project examines the participation of women artists in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific diaspora in the music industries across Australia and Papua New Guinea. Women’s inclusion and representation worldwide in many aspects of music making in the field of popular music, has been limited.
Recent research has highlighted the impact on the music industry of gender disparities particularly in the Papua New Guinea music industry. This research will focus on a select group of women artists based in Papua New Guinea and Cairns/Australia.
This research involves a collaborative recording project of original compositions, exploring individual stories, cultures and belief systems as well as shedding light on current issues faced for Papua New Guinean women artists.
I explore questions of traditional and contemporary identities and how they influence each other in music making and challenge current cultural paradigms.
The purpose of this research is to bring new light to the processes and methodologies experienced in collaboration with women artists, and illustrate the challenges currently being explored by courageous Papua New Guinea women in the music industries across Oceania today.
Amanda Harris leads a team of researchers each pursuing distinct lines of enquiry that feed into the larger project. Summaries of each project are included below and outputs of the project will be added as they come out.
Amanda’s work is currently pursuing a series of research strands. These strands aim to sound out recent histories of cross-cultural encounter in Australia. How does history sound? Australia’s musical exports to the 1970 International Expo in Osaka Japan provide a soundbite. In the Australian exhibition pavilion the music of German-born Jewish Australian composer George Dreyfus played on a loop.
On the main stage folk icon Rolf Harris compèred a concert juxtaposing the Aboriginal musicians and dancers of the Aboriginal Theatre with Australian jazz performers Judy Stone and Don Burrows. Meanwhile young orchestral musicians from the Australian Youth Orchestra performed a newly commissioned work Music for Japan by Peter Sculthorpe without the didgeridoo part he would later add. These representations of Australian culture reveal musical encounters rich with potential for interrogating Australian history’s key themes: continuous Indigenous presence, migration, and settler colonial disruption.
New collaborative research resulting from wide ranging archival research and fieldwork is just out or coming soon:
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Nardi and Amanda joined together with Katerina Teaiwa and Tamm Kingi-Falakoa for a panel on Pacific Festivals at the 2025 conference of the Australian Association for Pacific Studies at the University of Sydney, 3-6 June 2025.
Header image credit: Clare KuOlga Meere speaking and Nardi Simpson listening and weaving at the Study Day on Listening and Storytelling as Research Method, 4 December 2025, Gadigal Country, Sydney Botanic Gardens. Photograph by Amanda Harris.
