Aboriginal Music and Passion: Interculturality and Difference in Australian Desert Towns

Abstract

Aboriginal country, rock and reggae music makers in Central Australian desert communities often portray performances in regional white towns as desirable and rewarding occasions for engagements with a non-indigenous ‘mainstream’. Aboriginal popular music is also often understood as a tool for a marginalised minority to ‘talk back’ to non-Aboriginal powers, or for ‘sharing culture’ to achieve greater cross-cultural understanding. This article investigates what actually takes place at local Aboriginal music events in the town of Alice Springs. It shows how they, in fact, become powerful occasions for enacting certain blackfella forms of sociability that reinforce relations of estrangement between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people and domains. Addressing the question how to account for the lived experience of racial and cultural formations without resorting to notions of bounded or pre-existing categories, the author proposes an approach to difference as relational at the outset that can accommodate multiple dimensions and inherent contradictions of intercultural lives.

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