This chapter considers practices of Indigenous language singing in the place now known as Australia, framing it as both an overt act of resistance to settler-colonisation and key to the maintenance of reciprocal Indigenous relationships with landscapes. In response to deliberate and sustained government attempts to diminish the use of hundreds of Indigenous languages, song has emerged as core to Indigenous language revitalization efforts. Renewed interest in Indigenous songs has also motivated increasing numbers of Indigenous community-directed ethnomusicology studies involving the repatriation of audio recordings. In describing the dynamic intersection of popular music and Indigenous song forms since the mid twentieth century, this chapter draws links to longstanding Indigenous practices of sharing songs across vast geographic and cultural boundaries. Discussing the inherent complexity of revitalizing, maintaining, and innovating within Indigenous traditions, the authors emphasise the relational nature of song and the inherent responsibilities singers carry.

This concluding chapter considers the dynamics of music and place, issues of diversity, and the impact of Indigenous artists on building bridges to a whole history of music in this place. Reflecting on the four interlinked themes guiding this Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia: Continuities, Encounters, Diversities, and Institutions, it takes up musical threads not covered elsewhere in the volume, discussing pub rock and hip hop to consider dynamics of exclusion, inclusion, and identity. In advocating for a move away from anthropocentrism toward ecocentrism in considering the relationships between music and the place now known as Australia, it simultaneously foregrounds unresolved tensions associated with Indigeneity, settler-colonialism, and prejudice in music that are ultimately intertwined with concepts of place and belonging.

On the surface, Australian metal music can be read—quite fairly—as a white, working-class, hypermasculine phenomenon. With further excavation, however, the way metal music materializes in local Australian scenes around the country in various ways reveals its power in negotiating complex structures of identity and belonging. Australian metal music is paradoxical and complex, and fans ‘use’ metal in a variety of political ways. Quite specific to Australian metal music, too, are the ways in which it has long been constructed as a frontier space—a space sitting ‘on the edge’ both geographically and politically, wherein metal’s tendency for extremes—its celebration of brutality, and its perpetuation of hegemonic white masculinity—is only matched by its potential for counter-hegemonic politics, radical change, and boundary-pushing. The Australian frontier functions symbolically in our reading, both as a space dominated by the centralizing figure of the colonial white man, but also as a precarious space in which women’s resilience and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s agency in pushing back against colonial normativity rise to destabilize the accepted narratives of invasion politics.

This Introduction provides an account of how Music in Australia has been conceptualised in previous music histories. It shows that music historians have sought to draw boundaries around what Australian music is by emphasizing the milestones of European settlement, and have often struggled to reconcile Indigenous music making and non-Indigenous music into one account of music in Australia. It explores also the history of cultural institutions in Australia that have built the foundations for music in Australia. Stepping back to look at these cultural institutions and the wide ranging music making in the past and present, the introduction summarises the book’s contents across the themes of Continuities, Encounters, Diversities and Institutions.

Premiering at Perth Festival in 2020, Hecate is the first stage adaptation of Shakespearean work, in this case Macbeth, to be performed entirely in one Aboriginal language from Australia, specifically the Noongar language from Western Australia’s southwest. Australia is home to hundreds of Aboriginal languages, most of which are endangered due to settler-colonial suppression of Aboriginal culture. Today, although there are over 30,000 Noongar people, the Noongar language is rarely heard spoken in full sentences. More than being a significant artistic achievement, presenting Shakespeare in Noongar has provided a rare opportunity for Noongar and other people to actively engage with the Noongar language in deep and lasting ways. As a nation with a noted cultural cringe, Australia places high cultural value on Shakespeare. The opportunity to develop Hecate as a Noongar-language work arose because engaging with the English literary tradition – and particularly Shakespeare – attracted the necessary government and philanthropic support, media attention and audience interest. In Hecate, Shakespeare’s venerated status has been subversively used as a chink in the settler-colonial armour through which Noongar cultural activism, and deeper ‘felt’ intercultural understanding has been achieved via various collaborative processes, most importantly in developing a Noongar language-speaking ensemble of Noongar actors.