Music and World-Building in the Colonial City

Newcastle, NSW, and its Townships, 1860–1880

Helen English

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429663413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music and World-Building in the Colonial City investigates how nineteenth-century migrants to Australia used music as a resource for world-building, focusing on coalmining regions of New South Wales. It explores how music-making helped British migrants to create communities in unfamiliar country, often with little to no infrastructure. Its key themes are as follows:

• people's relationships to music within specific contexts;
• how music-making intersects with class, gender and ethnic background;
• identity through music.

Situated within a wider discourse on music and identity, music and well-being and music and emotions, this is an authoritative study of historical communities and their relationship with music. It will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers working in the fields of sociomusicology, colonial studies and cultural studies.

1 Introduction

Music-making at the coalface of the empire

[Rev Thackaray] commenced his lecture by an allusion to the power of music as exemplified by the ancient poets. He delineated the power of music over the mind and affections … proving that it would cultivate those feelings which pertain to the higher orders of our faculties.

It would make us gentle toward all, and throw gleams of sunshine across our path, It would bear up our hearts against trial and distress, and would cheer us in many an hour of solitude.

Maitland Mercury, May 24, 1860

The town was relieved from its wonted dullness on Monday evening by the performance of a company of amateur street minstrels, two in number, who, with the assistance of a mouth organ, and a little burnt cork, succeeded in amusing themselves and the youngsters considerably.

Newcastle Morning Herald, March 1, 1877

Overview

This book tells the story of settler music-making in colonial coalfields excavated with the purpose of fuelling the many and distant settlements that made up the British Empire. Migrants mainly from Britain travelled for months to reach country that was eucalypt-forested, that at its coastal edges boasted many waterways and an expansive saltwater lake. Miles of bush threatened to swallow up the unwary walker, while in some places grassland created by local Awabakal people reminded travellers of home. In contrast to Britain, it was hot and humid with mild winters facilitating an outdoors life and alleviating the need for covered meeting places. In this country, settlers’ commitment to music, in the form of bands, choirs and music societies, reaches us across time through the medium of contemporary newspapers, most now readily accessible through digitization. Migrants were quick to recreate musical practices from home and these were maintained and developed across the decades 1860–1880. From a twenty-first-century perspective, the settlers’ musical endeavours and the purposes they put these to are inspiring, given their migrant circumstances and lack of infrastructure or resources. This inspiration led to the investigation outlined here of the forms and content of settler music-making and the ways in which music was entwined in and enriched lives.

In the 1860s what is now the City of Newcastle, New South Wales (NSW), previously known by the Awabakal nation as Mulinbinba, was a collection of mining settlements dispersed along coal seams, often at some distance from each other. Some of these settlements were only just established and, together with the older port settlement dating from 1801, were still forming as communities in relation to each other, to the metropole of Sydney and to the British Empire. While these colonial sites and peoples were articulating and defining themselves as outposts of the Empire, England was defining itself as the local and global centre of the British Empire, whose people and spaces were distinct from those on the colonial peripheries.¹ The process of definition and identity formation of these various communities was aided by print capitalism.² As Benedict Anderson argues, reports on shipping, local news, colonial appointments and marriages in early gazettes and newspapers created a sense of a community of readers.³ For colonial outposts such as Newcastle they helped local communities in the process of self-articulation, while the reporting on metropolitan news, as well as news of the Empire, developed and kept alive the sense of parallel communities, reminding them of their colonial identity.

This identity formation did not take place in a blank space. The establishment of Newcastle and its coalmining townships disrupted and, by the 1860s, had largely destroyed the Awabakal people’s country and lifestyle. Early colonial officials and travellers commented with surprise on the park-like appearance of much of NSW with no understanding that it was due to centuries of systematic land care.⁴ By the mid-nineteenth century, much of the work of dispossession by colonists had been done (see Figure 1.1). For new migrants from Britain the challenge was to create communities in colonized country: country that hid abundant resources that were important to the Empire. In Newcastle and its townships, the key resource was coal, leading to the naming of the port as Newcastle in 1804 within the county of Northumberland (referring to the English coalport and county), and by the later 1800s, to its description as a Coalopolis.⁵ In parallel, the town which grew at the head of navigation on the Hunter River, Maitland, was pastoral, based initially on forestry and later on agriculture. Newcastle and its townships and Maitland were emerging and fluid communities during most of the nineteenth century, endeavouring to create stable urban places that were informed, at least in part, by imperial ideas of success and worth.

Figure 1.1 Newcastle, 1875

Source: Sydney Illustrated News, April 1875.

The project of creating communities is considered here as one of world-building, in that the settlers were actively building individual and collective worlds. Music was a useful, accessible and valued resource that settlers could draw on to create their world. Music was powerful for this purpose because of its many attributes, its effects on the body and emotions, its potential for meaning-making and, notably in the nineteenth century, its value as symbolic capital. Music’s different effects and attributes are collected and organized in this study under themes. World-building will be examined by tracing themes of the self, body and the social, building on the work of Tia DeNora, and colonial identity, status, respectability and civilization, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, Saree Makdisi and Benedict Anderson. Settler activities drew on the effects of music as sound on the landscape and music’s potential for the transformation of space into place. This transformation process and the musical endeavours themselves contributed to a sense of public life, an echo of the European musical worlds of the eighteenth century.⁶ The next sections introduce settler Newcastle and its people, the approach taken in this study and expand on the themes that will be explored.

Newcastle, Maitland and the coalmining townships

From the late eighteenth century, law enforcers in Britain saw the potential of the recently ‘discovered’ land that became Australia to rid themselves of undesirables. The first penal colony was established at Sydney in 1788. The penal colony at Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) was founded in 1803. With a view to mining the coal which had been sighted at the mouth of the Hunter River in 1797 and after a failed first attempt in 1801, a colony for those who reoffended in the colonies was established in Newcastle in 1804.⁷ After several shallow mines had been worked by convicts as a government enterprise, the penal colony was relocated to Port Macquarie in 1822. In 1828, the private Australian Agricultural Company was awarded coalmining rights in Newcastle, a monopoly that it held until 1847.⁸ Although well situated for the transportation of coal, Newcastle’s harbour was dangerous and needed significant work over many years to be rendered safe and accessible by large ships.⁹ In 1770 when James Cook made the first of three voyages to the Pacific, he sailed past the area, noting an island whose Awabakal name was Whibayganba, now known as Nobbys, but not venturing further in.¹⁰ The dangerous harbour, failure of first coalmining efforts and poor soil quality affected Newcastle’s early development. Instead it was the settlements on the Hunter River system at West Maitland, East Maitland and Morpeth, whose flood plains offered prime agricultural land, that together made up the leading Hunter Valley centre until the 1860s. The three towns that later merged into the City of Maitland used the river system to transport goods, connecting with the Upper Hunter, Newcastle and Sydney (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Map showing Newcastle, Maitland and Cessnock 1924.

Source: Kenneth Craigie, Local Studies Collection, UON Cultural Collections.

The establishment of a railway line between Newcastle and East Maitland in 1857, extended to West Maitland in 1858, and improvements to Newcastle’s harbour were key factors in the latter’s ascent to become NSW’s leading regional city by the 1870s. Because Newcastle began as a penal colony and Maitland as a pastoral settlement, a significant difference in their demographics and social aspirations is apparent. Maitland’s early communities were relatively homogenous, whereas Newcastle was a diverse community that included ex-convicts, miners and tradesmen, as well as supporting a port’s itinerant population.

As a coalmining city, Newcastle did not develop like other cities in a gradual expansion from a city centre.¹¹ The driving force behind new settlements was always coal and therefore new townships were created close to productive coal seams, often at some distance from the Port of Newcastle. This way of development was not conducive to producing an integrated city, especially since transport and access between these townships and Newcastle was poor or non-existent. The situation led to a degree of self-sufficiency in townships separated by several miles from the port, such as Waratah, Wallsend and Lambton, which developed strong musical cultures that appear to have been more persistent than those in Newcastle itself (see Figure 1.3).¹²

Figure 1.3 Map showing Newcastle and its Townships, 193...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Music-making at the coalface of the empire
• 2. The sights and sounds of the Coalopolis
• 3. Aspirations and transposed traditions
• 4. Music’s affordances in the settler context: Brass bands and the self, body and the social
• Case study 1: Miners’ demonstration of 1874
• 5. Choirs at the local and global: Community makers, vehicles of respectability and colonial connectivity
• 6. Singing, eisteddfodau and identity
• Case study 2: Nostalgia: A transnational concert at Lambton
• 7. The minstrel mask: Blackface miners at work and play
• 8. Social inclusion: What township benefit concerts reveal about township values
• 9. Final thoughts
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index