This chapter describes Clare’s attitude to form and surveys the various forms in which he writes. It emphasizes the variety of Clare’s formal achievement, showing how across his career he adopts different prosodic and generic conventions, including those of the sonnet, ballad, lyric, couplet, and ode. Running through all Clare’s poems, the chapter suggests, is a wariness of imposing excessive order upon the patterns of experience. The irregular beauty and emotional clarity of Clare’s poems emerge out of an effort to find a balance sympathetic to nature over artifice, spontaneity over control, and existing tradition over individual embellishment.

In “Divine and Human Plans of God in the Book of Isaiah,” J. Todd Hibbard follows the occurrences of a Hebrew root that means “to plan, advise, counsel” through the whole book, bringing to light one of its central themes. He shows how Isaiah’s theological rhetoric begins with a plan against Judah that involves foreign nations, but eventually undermines the plans of those nations as well. As with feminine imagery in the book, it is possible to identify a kind of episodic narrative running through the book in relation to certain themes in a way that animates the development of the book and holds it together despite its lengthy formation. The divine plans for Judah and nations eventually come together and culminate with the summoning of Cyrus as messiah and the appearance of the Persian empire.

This introduction offers a brief account of Clare’s biography, drawing attention to some of the major events in his life, and some of the aspects of his life and his work which have most interested critics. It goes on to offer an extended close reading of one of Clare’s poems, in order to demonstrate the ways in which Clare is able to write within convention, but also to develop a unique poetic voice. By examining his engagement with the aesthetic discourse of the picturesque as exemplary, it argues for his particular capacity both to reflect and to enable reflection upon Romantic-period issues and debates, and also for the originality of Clare’s posture and verse.

The Ngarra-burria First Peoples Composers program is an Indigenous-led initiative that assists Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musicians to develop composition skills and emerge within the Australian classical/new music sector. It is about enabling new expressions via mostly scored music for fine First Nations musicians, and the facilitation of their own narratives. This is against a background of many non-Indigenous composers appropriating First Nations cultural materials including music, and First Nations cultural and historical narratives, a practice which went on for many decades. In the chapter we hear from the founder Christopher Sainsbury and participating composer Nardi Simpson, both First Nations people. Ngarra-burria means ‘to listen and to sing’ in the Dharug Aboriginal language of the Sydney region. Whilst the industry has some way to go, in the seven years since the program began in 2016 many ensembles, festival directors, soloists, educators and broadcasters have indeed begun to listen to First Nations composers and sing with them. Many composers from the program are being commissioned, programmed, broadcast and participate in various industry events. As Nardi Simpson points out, it is not all about the music, but also about the ongoing community of First Nations musicians that existed already, of which Ngarra-burria has become a recent part. Whilst the composers glean from any relevant Western styles and techniques in the workshops we hold, they are not necessarily tethered to the same.

This chapter considers evidence of European music making in the early colonial towns of Sydney and Hobart. Two concert series in 1826 show the role of music in reimagining colonial towns as organised and aesthetic cities. The musicians that led the concerts shaped these musical worlds, bringing European instruments, forms of opera and vocal music, chamber, orchestral and solo instrumental music that would continue to develop over the next two centuries in Australia’s urban centres. We trace several key musicians who shaped the early phase of these towns’ music-making, looking to the cultural practices of the British Isles and continental Europe. While contextual evidence from this time reminds us of the ongoing presence of Aboriginal people, there is only an occasional glimpse of the musicians’ awareness that their efforts to import a European musical culture took place on Aboriginal land.

In this artist perspective, didjeridu virtuoso William Barton recounts key moments in his career from his education on Kalkadunga Country to the biggest art music stages in Australia and the world. From early collaborations with Peter Sculthorpe to recognition of Barton as a composer in his own right, Barton now sits in the engine room of major arts programming, with roles on Boards of Directors of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Australian Music Centre. Barton’s music and his practice remains grounded in history, place and culture.

Videogames once seemed like they would have a part to play in the future of the book – the natural evolution of literary practice onto more expressly interactive digital platforms. Today, despite numerous compelling examples of videogames that support literary engagement, the comparison can seem strange, clichéd, banal, and beside the point. This chapter attempts to reset the comparison of videogames and literature for the present moment of digital culture. First, it presents a brief history of critical perspectives on videogames as literature. Second, it reflects on the contemporary status of and challenges to videogaming’s literary aspirations following recent shifts in the industry’s design priorities and monetization practices. This chapter does not present an argument regarding the status of games as literature. Rather, its goal is to describe the urgent work of literary studies in continuing to rethink digital gaming in the unfolding digital age.

This chapter explores the history and present of the singles charts, and the phenomenon of the number one single, in a specifically Australian context. The history of the Australian singles charts are explored, from their beginnings in Go-Set magazine in 1966, based on sales of physical product, to the present-day situation, where the ARIA singles charts are primarily based on listens on streaming services. The chapter goes on to discuss the ways in which these differing consumption methods over the years affects the composition of the charts. While the charts in Australia often reflect overseas success by international artists, the particular music industry ecosystem in Australia can affect the success of different music.Similarly, the number one singles by Australian artists from the last decade are discussed, suggesting that it is increasingly difficult to have Australian chart success without international success.

It has long been argued that digital textuality fundamentally alters familiar conceptions of literary authorship. Critics such as Jay David Bolter, George Landow, and Mark Poster have articulated a conception whereby the interactive affordances of digital textuality level the playing field between author and reader. Rather than consuming the text passively, readers become “coauthors,” actively creating a unique narrative through their interactions and narrative choices. While these bold prophesies may not have materialized, digital textuality has worked to challenge the model of individual authorship. This chapter looks at two contemporary practices that serve to promote and “normalize” group authorship: fanfiction and social reading. It provides a literary history of collective authorship and analyzes the pressure that fan sites like FanFiction.net and An Archive of Our Own are putting on our conventional means of evaluating literary excellence, notably by challenging conceptions of originality and distinctiveness. It also considers how another facet of digital reading – social reading, as practiced on sites like Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter – is creating new feedback loops between authors and readers, facilitating the development of new “interpretive communities,” and working to undermine the centrality of the solitary genius and the solitary reader to literary production and reception.

This chapter provides an overview of folk and multicultural festivals in Australia, especially as to how these events have been important to the creation and celebration of community identity since the 1950s. It begins with a brief outline and critique of the policies that have shaped modern Australia as a culturally diverse nation and the role of festivals as a vehicle for representing ethnic identity, inclusivity and tolerance. This discussion also considers the contentious positioning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures as part of a broader notion of diversity, as well as debates raised by a focus on the performance of ethnic identity that emphasises authentic practice and devalues cross-cultural collaboration. This is followed by a discussion of the origins of an Australian folk culture in British folk music traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the revivalist folk movement of the 1960s. The final section outlines the development of national folk festivals as events representing an authentic Australian folklore and culture that, like multicultural festivals, offer insight into the problematic relationships between place, community, belonging and the national space.

Modernist art music of the interwar period takes its place among other early Australian musical modernisms. It developed within an antipodean modernity transformed by new technologies of transport and communication. Mobility – the movement of people, scores, print journalism and recordings – is central here. Using a conceptual framework informed by transnational historical approaches and expanded understandings of the unsettled and contested concept of modernism, this chapter provides a more generous reading of this musical moment long obscured by the concerns and anxieties of a young nation negotiating its complicated ties to Britain and continental Europe while searching for a distinctive culture. After tracing the emergence of a modernist musical discourse in Australia’s popular press, this chapter looks at the output of a group of composers and various forms of modernist musicking to reveal a transnational community of Australian musicians who actively participated in what can be understood as a modernist music world.

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.