Early Popular Music in Australia: Roots, Diversity and Directions

Representing thirty years of research and writing on popular music in Australia, the eleven articles selected for this volume examine how both urban and country musicians adapted a variety of transnational genres, from blackface and black minstrelsy to ragtime, jazz, brass band, circus, “German band”, Latin, “Gypsy”, hillbilly and country and western music. Given that much of this music was unwritten and often improvised, heard in rotundas, showgrounds, circus tents, balls, civic receptions and nightclubs, this research draws on an imaginative range of sources, including personal reminiscences, rare sheet music and recordings. Always entertaining and accessible, Early Popular Music in Australia uncovers extraordinary musicianship, remarkable collaborations and a vein of homespun larrikinism to significantly broaden and enrich our understanding of the Australian cultural landscape in the century before rock and pop.

John Whiteoak is an Adjunct Professor attached to the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance, Monash University, with a widely diverse performance background. His publications include Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia 1836–1970 (1999), the Currency Companion to Music in Australia (2003, as co-general editor) and “Take Me to Spain”: Australian Imaginings of Spain through Music and Dance (2019).

ISBN: 9780734038050 (paperback); published 2026.  Also available as a downloadable pdf (ISBN: 9780734038067; AMR022E). ISSN: 1325 5266