Informing Practice Through Collaboration: Listening to Colonising Histories and Aboriginal Music

Informing Practice Through Collaboration

Listening to Colonising Histories and Aboriginal Music

Shannon Foster and Amanda Harris

Over the last twenty years, Indigenous Australian scholars have increasingly questioned established research methods. In 2000, Goenpul and Quandamooka academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson argued that:

white middle-class women anthropologists’ representations [of Indigenous women] create a binary opposition of ‘traditional’ versus ‘contemporary’ Indigenous women which privileges certain groups of Indigenous women as culturally and racially authentic and positions the rest as racially and culturally contaminated […] The methodology denies the historical construction of racialized power relations that shaped the subject positions of both women anthropologists and Indigenous women […] The methodology allows for an illusory absence of colonisation which is preserved and felt in the presence of its absence.

This challenge has opened up new possibilities for how scholarship on Australian Aboriginal music might change. Here we describe an interdisciplinary, intercultural approach to collaboration and listening that shapes our work together — one of us a Sydney D'harawal Saltwater knowledge keeper, scholar, and creative practitioner; the other a non-Indigenous cultural historian and musicologist. We examine how listening and collaboration can generate practice that feels ethical to both of us. We further propose that this kind of collaborative listening can reshape understandings of Australian history, making it not simply a question of ethics but a driver of new knowledge and scholarly discovery. These insights draw on Indigenous knowledges and approaches, non-Indigenous historical and ethnographic methods, and the very act of collaboration itself. We explore these ideas through a dialogue about how listening and collaboration inform research.

The chapter presents a song as methodology and practice — a way to sing up story and knowledges from history in the present.

Amanda Harris (AH)

In January 2018, I began work on a new project funded by the Australian Research Council. The project was designed to be led by equal numbers of Aboriginal and non-Indigenous researchers. At its heart, it aimed to find historical records and audiovisual materials in archives and reconnect them with living communities and families of Aboriginal people who performed music and dance on public stages from the 1930s to the 1970s. One historical forum for these public performances that I already knew about was the touring gum leaf bands. These groups came from Wallaga Lakes and Lake Tyers Aboriginal Reserves. Despite restrictions imposed by NSW and Victorian government "Protection" and "Assimilation" policies, they travelled the country performing a mix of songs.

The repertoire included folk songs, hymns, popular tunes, and arrangements of Aboriginal songs, performed in church halls, outdoor concerts, dances, and fundraisers. A number of residents from the Sydney Aboriginal Reserve at La Perouse had also played gum leaf and toured in bands like these. Background research by Clare Compton and Matt Poll identified D’harawal man Tom Foster as one of these La Perouse performers. A name makes searches in online databases much easier, so I tried to learn more about Tom Foster and soon found a rich — though scattered — collection of newspaper articles, archival files, photographs, and musical scores. These documents revealed Tom Foster as a composer, performer, correspondent, and representative of Aboriginal people on Australia’s east coast in the 1930s. Clare and Matt put me in touch with Tom Foster’s great-granddaughter Shannon Foster, a saltwater knowledge keeper and scholar working on PhD research at the University of Technology, Sydney. We arranged to meet.

Shannon Foster (SF)

My earliest memories of my great-grandfather, Tom Foster, centre on a black-and-white photo that my father kept in a large envelope in the top of his wardrobe. He would bring it out with great reverence. In the photo, my father explained, Tom and my grandfather Fred were with two journalists. Fred was painted up, and Tom wore his kangaroo skins; both knelt on the ground, showing the white journalists details of the boomerangs they made from mangrove trees along the shore of Kamay (Botany Bay), near their Aboriginal mission home on Guriwal (whale) Country, La Perouse, south of what is now Sydney.

Figure 9.1 Fred Foster (left) and Tom Foster (right) with journalists 1930 photo courtesy of John Foster

My father always spoke of Tom with great pride and seemed frustrated that we did not fully grasp how important he was. It was not until much later, when catalogues began to be digitised and Tom’s name popped up in internet searches, that a fuller picture of their public lives emerged. In online records, I found two hymns that Tom had written in 1930: "Happy Today" and "My Thoughts." Reading his words, I could barely comprehend what I had found. I saw musical notes I could not read — they were just marks on a page. It never occurred to me that those marks create sound, that someone could pick up that music and play it, and I could listen and be swept into another layer of this remarkable man’s spirit.

Finding Tom’s music has opened up many chances to learn more about him. It is through his music that I came to know Dr Amanda Harris, Linda Barwick, and the team working on the project "Reclaiming Performance under Assimilation in Australia 1935–75." They were starting to research Tom, and it felt validating and empowering to meet them and see my awe for this man reflected back. I was also relieved that they contacted me to collaborate early in the project. All too often, this does not happen in the research world; our stories get told by outsiders as if we do not exist. At best, we are consulted as an afterthought; at worst, we are erased from the histories. This research was different: a key element built into the project was that information would be shared and that collaboration and reciprocity with the community would be a priority. I had always yearned to do more with music and song, so I looked forward to being part of this work. Soon after, Amanda started sending me everything she could find about my great-grandfather, Tom.

AH

Sharing resources from the very start creates opportunities to listen. And this listening allows different kinds of histories to have a voice. As a cultural historian, I have always valued archival sources — records from long ago that reveal crucial details about the past. But in this work, I could see that family stories and oral histories often paint a very different picture of what historical events mean and how they are carried within families. When I first saw the hymns Tom Foster composed, I wondered what living D’harawal people would make of their religious texts, which were meant for performance in the La Perouse church.

In December 2018, we held the project’s first symposium at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Contributions from Indigenous participants brought the sounds of Aboriginal languages, Aboriginal song, and ongoing practice into the room — invoking people now past through current performances. Music, culture, and revitalising performances ran through the event. Musician, writer, and performer Nardi Simpson showed how she wove recorded sound from her Country into new musical work — an installation that built melodic lines out of the pitches made by the wind against the riverbank.

Lou Bennett and Romaine Moreton demonstrated how images of Country on film were entwined with the sounds of Yorta Yorta language being reawakened in their collaborative multimedia work. Nerida Blair asked for a clip of her father, tenor Harold Blair, singing to be played over the venue’s speakers. Shannon Foster had brought the sheet music for two songs composed by her great-grandfather. Imagine if these could be played on those beautiful pianos at the front of the room, she said.

SF

Late in 2018, I spoke about Tom Foster’s songs and their impact on our lives at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, at a symposium arranged as part of the research project. The event brought together an amazing group: descendants of the performers, researchers (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous), and contemporary performers. The symposium changed me in many ways; most importantly, it opened my eyes to the possibilities of actually creating music and song that could tell our stories and share our languages.

Sitting in the concert hall, I was captivated by the shiny grand piano sitting silent on the stage where speakers had shared their stories and experiences. I imagined the smell and feel of its silken keyboard and the distinct beauty of its sound. An idea began to fill my head. I felt a compulsion to speak like never before. It was more than just a thought or an idea — it was a calling from eons ago, but as strong and fresh as if someone were speaking directly to me in that moment. This was my chance to ask, for Tom, in a room full of musicians, singers, and performance professionals: could someone please play Tom’s music on that beautiful shiny piano?

Everyone was eager to bring Tom’s notes to life in one of the few places that could do justice to the sounds. Lecturer in Piano, Kevin Hunt, played the piano, and Amanda offered her beautiful voice. Within moments, the Conservatorium filled with Tom’s music in perfect acoustics. Every note swam through my heart and mind, transcending time and space, striking in a way that no sound has ever done before or since. It was sublime. This had come from him — his mind, his heart — and the spirit of the man I revered filled the air. It was an incredible moment. With each note, I understood with absolute clarity that from then on, I had to find a way to create music for our stories. So, in that space, generations after it was conceived, ceremony was enacted, culture was alive, and I knew without a doubt who I am.

AH

Seeing tears pour down Shannon’s face as Kevin and I finished performing Tom Foster’s songs, I understood something new about what it means to bring to life musical scores that had sat for so long in the National Library of Australia’s collection. For Aboriginal families who endured systematic displacement and separation under NSW government Protection and Assimilation policies, historical records are inseparable from deeply personal stories of dispersal, survival, and reclamation.

In Shannon Foster’s presentation at the symposium, she showed photographs and handmade, engraved boomerangs made by her great-grandfather — items she had recovered from antique shops and eBay. She also linked the designs on Tom Foster’s painted body, on his engraved boomerangs, and on rock art in the Sydney region to her contemporary paintings. In my own searches through archives and historical newspapers, I was especially intrigued by one photograph of Tom Foster. In this image, Tom Foster posed in animal skins, holding and displaying boomerangs he had made, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers leaning in for a closer look at what he exhibited (Figure 9.3).

Further research revealed that this was an exhibit of the Ranger’s League, a bushland conservation group that held annual exhibitions at Sydney’s David Jones and Farmers department stores between 1930 and 1937. How should I interpret this image? Was it an example of coerced displays of savagery, as Roslyn Poignant has described? Or a public parading of "noble savages," similar to Judith McKay and Paul Memmott’s accounts of touring Wild Australia shows? If so, who had coerced Tom Foster and Wesley Simms into this display? The NSW Aborigines Protection Board was listed among the exhibitors at the Ranger’s League Australian Bushland Exhibition at Blaxland Galleries.

Figure 9.2 "Buldyan" (Grandfather) 2018 references the body painting on Shannon’s grandfather Fred Foster’s legs in a photograph from the 1930s (see Figure 9.1), artwork created for the Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges, University of Technology Sydney.

But further searching in the collections of the State Library of NSW showed that Tom Foster was not simply an anonymous "Aboriginee" presented by the board. He actively negotiated with the organisers about the terms of his participation and pursued this opportunity annually after his first appearance in 1932. Correspondence from 1936, addressed directly to Foster at no.7 Aboriginal Reserve, La Perouse, suggested he might consider bringing along some Aboriginal children to make the exhibit more interesting and sell more wares. Shannon Foster’s uncle Wesley Simms was listed among the stallholders who needed after-hours access to the Gallery to set up the exhibit.

Selling wares had long been part of tourist operations at La Perouse Aboriginal Reserve, where Foster and Simms had lived since early in the century. This trade grew after the tram line was extended to the La Perouse headland, and tourist industries sprang up around "The Loop," where trams turned for the return trip into the city. Maria Nugent describes how tourists travelled to the end of the line expressly to see "Aboriginees" in what quickly became a "local amusement precinct." The State Library’s collections also captured Tom Foster in a parade of Aboriginal gum leaf musicians crossing the Harbour Bridge in 1932 (Figure 9.4).

Figure 9.3: "Aborigines' Gunyah at Bushland Exhibition." The Sydney Morning Herald, September 1933: 12. Accessed 8 Mar 2019 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17006273.

Figure 9.4: Hood, Sam. Aboriginals and Their Gum Leaf Band Pass the Dais, 20 March 1932, Home and Away – 2136, 44240, State Library of NSW, Sydney.

SF

There is another photo from my father’s collection that we had seen regularly over the years. It shows Tom with his daughter, my great Aunty Renee (senior). Tom is all dressed up in a nice coat, holding something like a box or plaque — it is hard to tell from the old black-and-white picture. My father explained that this was Tom after he had performed a corroboree for the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932. This story seemed so hard to believe — surely, if it had happened, we would have been taught about it and heard about it outside our home? It is such a sensational story, especially because of how Aboriginal people — my great-grandfather, no less — would have been allowed to do this at what was considered such an important colonial event.

Dad would go on to explain that my great-grandfather and the other Aboriginal men performing the corroboree were meant to be the first people to walk out onto the bridge at the official opening. The family story says that just before they walked out, a white man walked in front of the group and officially became the first person to step onto the bridge. Understandably, the Aboriginal men were furious. My great-grandfather’s anger and frustration is always the main focus of the story whenever it is told.

Growing up hearing this story, I had no idea whether it was true. My father has been known to pull your leg sometimes and would tell tall tales to us kids. He is a great storyteller, but he does not always let the truth get in the way of a good story, so I was really sceptical. I became even more sceptical as the internet opened up access to archives and records, and I searched relentlessly for colonial evidence of the corroboree — but never found anything about it. I do not know why I needed validation from outside our family’s stories. Perhaps I just wanted a photo to convince others. Regardless, I searched for evidence of that corroboree for years, even though I knew better than to dismiss my family’s oral histories and question their truth. It had backfired before, and I had learned to trust what they knew, even if it is not written down in some archive somewhere.

On the 26th of January 2018, I was preparing to deliver a speech in Australia Hall. The speech had been given by Tom eighty years earlier in the same building as part of the 1938 Day of Mourning protest. That protest saw Aboriginal people from all over the country come together to demand equal rights for Aboriginal people. On that day, I walked up the same stairs Tom had climbed eighty years earlier; I stood under the same roof Tom had stood under; and I read his words:

The Aborigines have three enemies. The first is the Aborigines Protection Board, which has meted out most callous treatment to our people, and has forced us to do as the white man wishes. The second enemy is the white missionary, who preaches to our people. Some of these are disgraceful. The third enemy is liquor. White men brought liquor for us, and it has helped to destroy our people. We should stand shoulder to shoulder to destroy these three enemies.

There are no words to describe such a moment. As I stood there, I felt knowledge, connection, and culture come full circle. I knew exactly who I am, why I am here, and what I must do for those who came before me and those who will come after. On the morning of the speech, I was aimlessly scrolling through social media when, out of the blue, an old black-and-white picture appeared of a group of Aboriginal men in a procession. The photo credit said it was taken in 1932 during the official opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (Figure 9.4). Years and years of searching records, archives, books, and endless internet sites — and here it was, the evidence I had been looking for, randomly dropped into my newsfeed from a newspaper photo database, on the day I was about to deliver his speech, no less.

I frantically scanned the photo, and there he was. Tom was in his skins, playing the gum leaf and holding one of his Harbour Bridge boomerangs aloft. Leading the procession, just as my father had always said in the story, was a white man. Through Amanda’s research, I have since discovered that this man represented the Aborigines Protection Board. After the event had been organised by the Aboriginal men, the Board swept in and claimed ownership over them and their presence there. No wonder they were so angry.

The tale of how it survived across the generations to reach us today is remarkable.

Yet a remark from someone in that audience drags me back to our racist reality, reminding me that non-Indigenous historians frequently view our cultural heritage through a deficient, colonial lens. They have made assumptions and drawn conclusions that the visual evidence of our cultural past must somehow undermine our cultural integrity, dismissing it as inauthentic Aboriginal art.

A prominent historian in the gathering told me they had always regarded boomerangs like Tom’s as merely kitsch — symbols of cultural denigration, humiliation, and damage. It had never occurred to them to wonder how we feel about such objects; they simply never thought to ask. What they fail to see is that for us, these items are physical proof of our existence in a world that has constantly erased us. Tom’s boomerangs speak of survival, resistance, and cultural fortitude. When we look at what our Elders created, we see staunch, courageous, and innovative people who continued making and promoting culture under extreme, violent conditions. They ensured vital links were left for us in this future, giving us an anchor point from which to speak and tell these stories. We see evidence of who we are and how we have survived and resisted what tried — and continues — to destroy us. Most importantly, we see our grandparents, aunties, and uncles, and how relentlessly their incredible stories forged a path into a future they were never even considered part of.

How then can an outsider assume authority to place themselves in our position and speak about us as if we are absent? They must ask themselves: are you researching with us, or about us?

It is our responsibility to tell our own stories; others cannot do it well enough, accurately enough, or thoroughly enough. Their knowledge of us is built on colonial records – records created to perpetuate lies, erase, diminish, and oppress us in pursuit of a colonial agenda. For every piece of us I find in the archives, I also find things I wish I had never seen or heard.

The archives are the ruins of a battle: they contain warriors and survivors, but also bludgeoned lives and corpses. I do not want to depend on bloodstained colonial documents, yet our ghosts haunt them. Fragments of us are left behind and need to be returned home to where they belong. They need to be with us, not lost forever or found by strangers who would only exploit them again.

AH: When we read the sounds and historical sources of the past, we are always interpreting from the present. We seek to read closely the kinds of sources history has preserved, to understand how they can inform our view of distant events. Aboriginal understandings of cultural practice – both those continuing traditional expressions and those adapting culture to current circumstances – are often missing from written archives.

To respond to Moreton-Robinson’s challenge that methodologies and analytical frameworks have imposed anthropological representations on individual Aboriginal subjectivities, we have attempted to listen to historical sources in new ways. This method centres the interpretations of history by Aboriginal family members and communities as sources that can radically reinterpret what performative actions meant in the recent past.

These collaborative approaches can be regenerative, inspiring new expressions of culture that not only respond to, but extend and continue cultural practice.

SF: During a retreat made possible by the research project “Reclaiming Performance under Assimilation in south eastern Australia 1935–75,” I found myself among amazing performers who inspired me to compose the following song with good friend and colleague Jo Kinniburgh. The song is based on a process called Naway (now, the present moment), which I developed through my doctoral research. Linda Barwick, Amanda Harris, and Jakelin Troy had been workshopping a song in the Ngarigo language published by John Lhotsky, so Jo and I took the opportunity to perform our song guided by these wonderful women. We were delighted to learn that Linda notated it as we sang (see Fig. 9.6). The song describes acquiring the knowledges required for working with Country. The research methodology followed at the retreat, and in our ongoing collaboration, is laid out in this song; its text is a poetic version of the collaborative practice we have retold in these pages. The song describes a methodology and a practice to sing up story and knowledges made accessible through the powerful, Ancestral energies of Naway.

Naway
(Singing in the sevens)

Naway − in the moment of now,
ngalawah − wait,
ngara − listen,
wingara − understand,
bangaaaaa, bangaaaaa − do, share.

Figure 6: Naway: Singing in the Sevens by Shannon Foster and Jo Kinniburgh, transcribed by Linda Barwick.