Between 1886 and 1889, the renowned mixed vocal ensemble, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, of Tennessee, USA, toured Australia and New Zealand. The Singers’ concerts featured polished arrangements of spirituals, a unique African American form of religious folk song. These performances sparked a conversation about the boundaries of race and the transformative potential of the spiritual for those who embraced the genre within the Australian context. Over the century that followed, often but not always with the support of white missionaries, Indigenous groups employed the songs in various ways: as anthems of emancipation; to stir sympathy among white audiences; as a means of securing space on Australian concert stages and over the air, and to call out the Australian government’s racist policies. Hence, the Fisk Singers’ tour of Australia set into play both performance practices and discourses about the power of Westernising non-European music that fit easily within Australian assimilationist social ideology. Yet tensions would noticeably arise around the mid twentieth century between those who championed spiritual singing as a pathway to assimilation and touring African American recitalists such as Paul Robeson who viewed the cultural value of the songs in starkly different terms.

This chapter discusses how historical exchanges with Makassan and other seafaring peoples from beyond the Arafura Sea remain a profound influence on Yolŋu music and culture that endures to this day. We explore how Yolŋu people, through their enduring ceremonial traditions, elaborately integrate song, dance and design elements to recount exchanges with Makassan seafarers, the boats in which they sailed, and the goods they carried. We also discuss how, since the mid-1980s, this autonomous history of Yolŋu exchanges with foreigners has been remembered and continues to inspire new forms of Yolŋu cultural expression that overtly reach out across cultures. Our approach is informed by our long history of researching Yolŋu song in all its forms and working together to document the Yolŋu public ceremonial song tradition known as manikay. Garawirrtja’s expertise is further grounded in his extensive training and practice as a Yolŋu elder and ceremonial singer of the manikay tradition, who maintains hereditary songs that recount Yolŋu contact histories with Makassan and other seafarers.

This chapter offers an assessment of the challenges that interactive forms of digital literature pose to print-based assumptions about narrative. The assertions of critics such as Espen Aarseth, Janet Murray, and Bolter and Landow – that the interactivity of digital texts invalidates such core assumptions as the distinction between fabula and syuzhet as well as author, reader, and character – have tended to lose their force as the genres they regarded as transformative – hypertext fiction and text-based interactive fiction (IF) – have receded from public view. Yet, as Emily Short argues here, these genres are far from “dead.” Speaking from her perspective as one of contemporary literature’s most highly regarded authors of interactive and choice-based literature, Short shows that interactive fiction has not disappeared, but rather become so thoroughly ingrained in contemporary artistic practice as to become nearly invisible – not only in hypertextual forms like the popular videogames authored in the Twine platform, but also in contemporary print-based literary fiction. In thus penetrating the mainstream of literary production, both digital and analog, interactive forms have subtly but powerfully revised our core assumptions about literary narrative.

Art music in Australia has always reflected the dominant social and cultural values of its time. As with all forms of art, the context of music making significantly influences the evolution of musical practice, from concept and narrative through to techniques and performance. In the twenty-first century, the zeitgeist of ‘our time and place’ is dominated by two global issues: the climate crisis and social justice. Both issues are strongly influencing the evolution of art music in Australia, shaping new directions in creative practice, informing conceptual frameworks, and guiding curatorial and collaborative approaches to programming and mentorship. This chapter will focus on how these issues are influencing curatorial and creative practices in Australian art music today, using works, projects and programs from the 2010s and early 2020s as examples.

This chapter positions digital editions within a broader and longer tradition of textual scholarship, book history, and scholarly editions. In it we consider the spatial, conceptual, and methodological approaches to editorial practice used in print editions and show the ways in which digital scholarly editions both extend and remake existing editorial paradigms and practices. In particular, we consider three elements of digital editions: networked structures, interactive reading, and multimodality. Throughout the chapter we consider both the potential and the ongoing challenges of making and using digital editions.

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.

I began my 2016 book Literature in the Digital Age with what, in subsequent years, I came to think of as “the parable of the cheese.” The story goes as follows.

For their 2013 conference, the organizers of the Modernist Studies Association decided to include their first ever “poster session.” Their intention was to showcase the Digital Literary Studies (DLS) research that was then starting to attract attention in the broader discipline. Since I had some work I thought might be of interest – a synoptic digital edition of To the Lighthouse that visualized wildly varying interpretations of free indirect discourse in the text – I signed up. One night, we were asked to set up our posters at the wine and cheese reception. Not a single person asked me about my project and no one engaged with the demonstration I had set up on my laptop.

In this chapter, I show how the urge to monumentalize the book-bound novel in the face of cultural and technological transformations inspires a range of strategies to make literature anew. Starting from contested notions of the “end of the book” and then examining several “renaissances,” I explore the resilience of paper-based literature in the era of its foretold death. First, I examine how comparative literary studies has responded to the shift from analog to digital by developing new frameworks and critical tools. Then, I zoom in on recent innovations in, and reinventions of, analogue literary practices, in book art and book design as well as literary fiction. I end with a reflection on a specific form of bookishness that emphasizes the novel’s size and scale, and thus reinvents it as monumental. On all these levels, we will see, the digital has brought the book, and the novel as the literary art form bound by the book, into sharper focus.

What is a book, really? In tracing the passage of a single work from the alleys of Lahore to online retail and the author’s bookshelf, this chapter argues against idealism. In transmission, ideational content sediments within specific material contexts. In this way, ideas become objects. Consequently, the same idea can take shape by drastically different forms, affecting the practice of interpretation. The affordances of the object – what can be done with it, how, and where – affect our practices of interpretation.

This article explores the importance of music to Australian Torres Strait Islanders, in their home islands and on the Australian mainland, for maintaining and sustaining connections with the historical traditions of the Torres Strait region in far northern Queensland. Beginning post-World War Two, there was a sizeable diaspora to the Australian mainland and also the gradual unravelling of race-based laws aimed at controlling the travels and personal lives of Islanders, and Aboriginal peoples. Because of the diaspora, there were some changes in Islander sociality and culture over time, place and situation, in particular regarding performance and performativity. However, aspects of Islander music practices remain similar to what had occurred traditionally, but with some modifications via adoptions, adaptations and innovations befitting new social, cultural and economic environments. This article concludes with discussion of how traditional practices have contributed to contemporary Islander music variously as culture, commerce and creativity.

The chapter illuminates diverse musical encounters or engagements between ‘minority’ cultures and what was, until recently, an Anglo-Australian majority over four periods of social, cultural and political foment between the pre-Federation colonial era and the present. It first examines the pre-WWI musical contributions of German-speaking residents and visitors, and Italian and Jewish influence on musical entertainment in the inter-war and post-war era. It then considers how, from the 1980s, the twin forces of local multiculturalism and ‘world music’ intersected in Australia to foster a wealth of musical diversity, including creative musical interventions and experimentations. We also consider the many multi-faceted present-day music ‘scenes’ associated with diasporic communities by honing into the local world of Indonesia-related music-making in Australia. Music of minority cultures tends to become articulated through uneven power relationships with the majority culture and its institutions, but the chapter provides a more nuanced view of this relationship. It demonstrates, for example, how ‘minority’ musicians have strategically deployed the ‘power’, or value, of ‘difference’ for professional or other advantage, exploiting opportunities provided by the mainstream, which can simultaneously shape and even redefine minority music.

Literary historians generally explain change by narrating it. Narrative history excels at identifying individual events, authors, and works that exemplify transformations of literary culture. On the other hand, narrative often struggles to represent continuous trends. Since numbers are designed to describe differences of magnitude, quantitative methods can trace a curve and give a more nuanced picture of gradual change. As quantitative methods have become more common in literary studies, it has become clear that many important aspects of literary history are in fact gradual processes extending over relatively long timelines. But there have also, certainly, been moments of rapid change – in some cases initiated by a single book or author. More crucially, readers seem to want the kind of meaning produced by narration. Thus, quantitative methods are never likely to entirely replace a periodized narrative; they merely provide an alternative mode of description.

In moving to align narrative envisioning with the likes of CGI (computer-generated images) or laser holograms, this chapter sets out to rethink the essential text/image relation in literary reading under the generative rubric of IMAGEdTEXT: the visualization made operational, just as it sounds in that compound, by the alphabetic (and thus phonetic) momentum of written speech. This is the forward motion, at times momentarily recursive, by which mental images are produced, vistas made available, narrative scenes set and peopled, events brought to mind. It is in this sense that Western literature, rooted in what linguists call the “graphophomemic” structure of sound–symbol relations, summons sights and sounds from the spinning gears of what is at base an audiovisual engine of its own – one that, in just such a phrase, may set ringing ears spinning, dizzy with unseen wording as well as new mental pictures. Authors from George Eliot through Henry James, Proust to Richard Powers, are read into evidence on the score of such textual “audioptics.”

Written from the perspective of two people currently involved in experimental and electronic music in Australia, this chapter provides an overview of some of the key movements and works in the genre, from the twentieth century to the present day. Focusing primarily on music that exploits technology and experimental approaches that progress innovation in art music contexts, it highlights some of the diverse practitioners – performers, composers, improvisers, sound artists, and instrument makers – who have pushed the boundaries of what is possible, often blurring the lines between art forms in the process. While it is unable to provide an exhaustive historical or contemporary account of the innovations that have been achieved here, or those responsible, the selected representative survey should serve to contextualise Australia’s contributions to electronic and experimental music, demonstrating our reputation for presenting ‘mavericks’ to the music world.