Kurry Jong, quadrille, by William Joseph Cavendish, Sydney-Parramatta, April 1833; from the earliest extant manuscript of a settler Australian musical composition; Castell family papers, State Library of New South Wales

Australharmony

An online resource toward the early history of music in colonial Australia

Dr GRAEME SKINNER (University of Sydney)

SPECIAL CARE NOTICE

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are respectfully advised that this site and links contain names, images, and voices of dead persons.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY

Australharmony acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, upon whose ancestral lands, and in respectful emulation of their careful stewardship of country and history, that this site has been built and is maintained.

Site directory - see left sidebar

To navigate the site and links use the left sidebar

Pulldown menus for the Biographical register and Chronological checklist

Site history

Graeme Skinner is the author and curator of this online resource on music and musicians in early colonial Australia.

He is an Honorary Associate, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney.

Australharmony was first launched online in January 2012, and has been regularly updated since.

From 1 July 2014, it is published online by the University of Sydney.

For three years, from April 2021 until March 2024, the ongoing development of Australharmony was partly supported by the Australian Research Council through the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Discovery Project, Hearing the Music of Early NSW, 1788-1860.

Australharmony is regularly updated as an open source report on the author and curator's ongoing research, work-in-progress toward the history of music, musicians, and audiences - Indigenous, settler, and visitor - in early colonial Australia.

It contains records of music from the earliest documented contacts between Indigenous Australians and outsiders, especially between British colonisation in 1788 and the 1860s, but also continues to document the later careers of key musicians and para-musicians (actors, dancers, circus performers, agents, managers, venue proprietors) and covers later documentation of early colonial music and musicians in late 19th, 20th, and early 21st century sources.

By providing links to a mass of online content, Australharmony is also a virtual anthology of Australian colonial music and documentation.

The core data of the site is contained in the alphabetical Biographical register, which currently includes documentary biographical entries on close to 3,000 professional and amateur musicians and para-musicians first active between 1788 and the 1860s. The biographical register is currently being revised, letter by letter, through the alphabet, and as at 2026 is mostly complete up to letter L.

The complementary General register of organisations, venues, events, and other general subject headings, currently contains mostly placeholder headings only, the intention being to expand them in due course into full entries.

Why "Australharmony"?

The colonist, judge, natural philosopher, and wit Barron Field was the first person to go into print attaching the epithet "Australian" to a piece of music.

Click here for his 1823 transcription of an Australian national melody.

Barron Field also believed he was the first Australian poet to issue a printed collection of his own work, First fruits of Australian poetry, the first edition of which appeared in Sydney in 1819.

The collection is best remembered now for its second poem, The kangaroo.

But also of interest, Field clearly intended the epigraph on his titlepage as a challenge to posterity:

I first adventure. Follow me who list;
And be the second Austral Harmonist.

Australharmony in TROVE

Under the TROVE username Australharmony, the author also curates a large and growing set of tagged resources inside TROVE.

Clicking here or selecting the Australian colonial music tag inside Trove gives instant access to over a curated selection of over 23,000 items, including:

A virtual anthology of almost 2,500 Australian colonial musical compositions, arrangements, and editions under Music, audio & video

Almost 20,000 relevant newspaper articles and advertisements under Newspapers and gazettes

Around 800 books and 300 journal articles on Australian colonial music under Books & libraries

Grouped resources on over 400 musicians and composers under People & organisations

Almost 600 images of colonial composers, musicians, and instruments under Images, maps & artefacts

You can then use Trove's powerful search functions to locate materials on specific subjects within the Australian colonial music virtual archive.

Shareable links to TROVE tagged items on specific individual musical personnel, groups, venues, and many musical works, also appear in relevant entries inside this site.

Copyright and fair use

This is an open-access, not-for-profit, non-commercial site, which generates no financial income for the author and curator or publisher. It contains transcriptions of a great deal of printed and manuscript material, and many digitised images, of originals that are out of copyright.

As a matter of course, Australharmony always acknowledges the source of the materials or images by providing not only references or citations in the usual way, but, wherever possible, also a live URLs to the digitised web originals sourced, whether freely accessible, or behind paywalls.

Fair use excerpts from copyright materials are also occasionally reproduced here; and otherwise, where necessary, explicit permissions have been sought.

Australharmony claims copyright over the editorially curated content and compilation. No one, under any circumstances, may reproduce for commercial or academic republication the whole or any complete component part of this site.

However, as an open resource, and subject to fair use, Australharmony actively encourages users to constructively reuse material from these pages in their own original research and writing. Nevertheless, it is the user's responsibility to cite Australharmony as a source in exactly the same way as a printed published work.

Australharmony in Pandora . . .

Some users will come first to Australharmony via search results in Trove's Archived websites tab. What you are seeing there are results not from the live site, but from a harvested versions in the NLA's Pandora archive. Australharmony is currently harvested by Pandora annually on the 23 December; but please note that these harvests seldom capture all the component pages of the live site. The Pandora address is:

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/tep/143528 

Australharmony in search engines . . .

Along with other University of Sydney public-facing sites, Australharmony is scanned frequently by Google, and most casual first users will probably come across a page of the site relevant to them as a result of a Google search.

© Graeme Skinner 2014 - 2026