Sound Exchanges: An ethnomusicologist's approach to interdisciplinary teaching and learning in collaboration with a remote Indigenous Australian community

Abstract

Ethnomusicology is a highly pragmatic discipline in Australia driven by an ethos of research engagement that seeks to deliver applied and relevant outcomes for the musicians and communities whose lives and cultures ethnomusicologists examine. In this article, I explain how this ethos has been informed by the chequered history of colonial engagements with Australia's Indigenous peoples, and how this, in turn, has shaped my own approaches to teaching collaboratively with Indigenous colleagues. I explore how, within this context, my own thinking as an ethnomusicologist was shaped by Indigenous conceptualisations of bi-culturalism such as those theorised by educator and musician Mandawuy Yunupiņu, and how this influenced my collaborations with Indigenous colleagues in teaching the undergraduate course Garma Fieldwork at both the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney. I show how this contribution as an ethnomusicologist was advantageous in challenging students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to think about the nature of knowledge, and the non-textual ways of expressing it that traditionally dominate within Indigenous epistemologies. Finally, I consider what insights this experience might hold for ethnomusicology amid this broad academic context.