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Life in a northern (Australian) town: Darwin's mercurial music scene
Susan Luckman a; Chris Gibson b; Julie Willoughby-Smith c; Chris Brennan-Horley c
Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies and School of Communication, University of South
Australia, b School of Communication, University of South Australia, c GeoQuest Research Centre, School of
Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
a
Online Publication Date: 01 October 2008
To cite this Article Luckman, Susan, Gibson, Chris, Willoughby-Smith, Julie and Brennan-Horley, Chris(2008)'Life in a northern
(Australian) town: Darwin's mercurial music scene',Continuum,22:5,623 — 637
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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Vol. 22, No. 5, October 2008, 623–637
Life in a northern (Australian) town: Darwin’s mercurial music scene
Susan Luckmana*, Chris Gibsonb, Julie Willoughby-Smithc and Chris Brennan-Horleyc
a
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Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies and School of Communication, University of South
Australia; bSchool of Communication, University of South Australia; cGeoQuest Research Centre, School
of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
Introduction
In the present article, we seek to bring critical attention to the idea of ‘scene’ in relation to
musical activity in Darwin, an iconic northern, remote, (post)colonial city. The idea of ‘scenes’,
in the sense of ‘connections between audiences, musicians, industry and infrastructure’ (Street
1995, 255– 63) is pervasive in music scholarship and journalism (Cohen 1999). The word
‘scene’ has a certain linguistic utility, and it conveys a sense of social allegiance and interaction
imbued with positive overtones – of people hanging out, creating music and experimenting
together, and sharing aural pleasures. Whether explicitly or by default, the corpus of music
scene research has been particularly attuned to the uniqueness of place. Ethnographic methods
invariably focus research in particular places (Cohen 1995; Bennett 2000) and, more often
than not, locational discourses permeate talk of ‘scenes’ to the extent that a scene and its
place are often considered inseparable – a form of ‘place-consciousness’ (Street 1995; Connell
and Gibson 2003). In some places, musical ‘sounds’ become associated with place because
of their genesis in scenes that emerged in particular eras around certain venues, record labels,
shops or city districts (Cohen 1994; Connell and Gibson 2003; McLeay 1994; Mitchell 1997).
Accordingly, geographical detail and depth characterizes much music scene research.
Darwin: An isolated creative tropical city
Although geographical sensitivity has meant that contextual detail and rich description characterize
the field, we would argue that assumptions are nonetheless made about the relationship between the
particular and universal: about whether observations and theories made in close analysis of music
scenes in one location are transferable to others (Straw 1991). Even if claims to ‘centrality’ are not
made by researchers, too often, it seems, insights about music scenes from (usually) North American
or European cities are assumed to be ‘unlimited’ in their relevance. To paraphrase Spivak’s (1988)
point, case studies from the global north become the subject of theory in the field, the ‘constitutive
referent for philosophical or theoretical reflection’ (Berg and Kearns 1998, 129). Analysis either
affirms the importance of the specific, local and contextual in its own right (an important assumption
of all ethnography) or assumes that music scene studies in certain parts of the world have a certain
taken-for-granted significance. This potentially, if unwittingly, renders music scenes in ‘other’
places peripheral or marginal (see, for example, Tony Mitchell’s (2001) critiques of American
scholarship on hip-hop). Even when translocal disseminations and international adaptations of scene
*Corresponding author. Email: susan.luckman@unisa.edu.au
ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online
q 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304310802311667
http://www.informaworld.com
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S. Luckman et al.
formations are the subject of research (e.g. Straw 1991; Hodkinson 2004; Schilt 2004), they are
usually at best only ever partially ‘global’, normally still centred on genres or scenes with origins in
the global north and disseminated through certain types of industrial/postindustrial cities.
The present article discusses a music scene in a place – Darwin, in Australia’s tropical north
– which raises a number of critical questions because of its very geography. It is small, extremely
remote (the extent of which we discuss in further detail below) and has a comparatively transient
residential population. Few comparative examples can be found in the literature on music scenes.1
Indeed, because urban centres are more likely to have vibrant or sizeable music scenes, research
usually focuses on cities of over 100 000 people (e.g. Bennett 1997, 1999b; Cohen 1991;
Mitchell 1997) and, more often than not, important large cities, usually in the West, of well over
1 million people (Brabazon 2005; Brennan-Horley 2007; Halfacree and Kitchin 1996; Grazian
2004; Kong 1996; Urquia 2004), which tend to have the critical mass and sheer population to
support specialist scenes. Big places are more likely than small ones to have professional
recording studios, niche music venues, specialist record shops, subcultural fashion shops and the
like. Darwin, by comparison, has a population of approximately 75 000. Thus, a series of
questions then arise from its modest size, relating to the working conditions for musicians
(cf. Gibson 2003a), the presence or absence of a sense of unity of style or ‘sound’ in Darwin’s
music scene (cf. McLeay 1994; Mitchell 1997) and the role for ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’
media – particularly whether previous assumptions about oppositional discourses towards mass
media within music scenes (e.g. Thornton 1995) hold true in a small, remote place that has few
alternatives to the mainstream press.
Darwin also provides a variation on studies of music scenes because of its differential
geographical proximity: meaning the access (or lack of) musicians have to neighbouring cities,
touring networks and nearby larger markets. Even with the rise of supposedly ‘global’ digital
music platforms, the commercial market for popular music is still inherently shaped by urban
networks and geographical proximity (Watson 2008). ‘Network sociality’ (Wittel 2001) is an
important part of how opportunities are created in music scenes to progress and secure musical
work (Gibson 2003a; Brennan-Horley 2007). Webs of small and large places of different
densities enable musicians travelling overland to sustain incomes by touring regional markets and
tapping into extended social networks (Gibson and Robinson 2004). Likewise, webs of places of
above a certain size are the basis of the microeconomics of recorded music distribution (for small
and large labels alike). In turn, the density and interconnectivity of urban centres provide settings
for scenes formed around particular styles, genres and social networks in those places.
In Darwin’s case, it is focally positioned within a network of scattered, tiny Aboriginal
settlements throughout Arnhem Land, meaning that it occupies a particular niche for Indigenous
musicians. However, its extreme remoteness, coupled with small size, challenge its ability to
sustain working lives for musicians in ways possible in North America or Europe – continents
that have both the densest networks of urban centres in the world and most economically viable
touring circuits for live musicians. Where music scenes have been studied outside urban centres,
or in regions with few major cities, tourism has often been an important catalyst, providing
ready-made audiences and night-time demand for entertainment in lieu of large residential
markets (Gibson 2002, 2003b; Kneafsey 2002). As we discuss for Darwin below, tourism (and
associated seasonality) is a major factor cutting across the absence of a surrounding network of
sizeable urban centres, sustaining and yet shaping the character of the city’s musical activities.
A final feature of Darwin’s geographical setting that provides challenges to the formation of
music scenes is its transient population base. Although ‘melting pot’ cities are often identified as
sites of rich scene formation (e.g. Wade 1994; Lornell and Rasmussen 1997), most cases
analysed previously are usually characterized by comparative residential stability (meaning that
even across diverse cultural groups, and in multicultural cities where in-migration is strong,
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625
people still intend to live there for a number of years). Other places, like remote mining towns,
seasonal tourist centres (e.g. ski-villages and seaside towns) and iconic centres of ‘alternative’
culture, such as Woodstock, Goa and Byron Bay, usually on the global backpacker trail, are, by
contrast, defined by strong ‘population churns’ of temporary residents, itinerants, drifters and
seasonal workers. Darwin exemplifies this – so much so that the ‘population churn’ is a topic of
regular public debate and concern in local media. Accordingly, we also note the particular
challenges population mobility creates for musicians and fans seeking to build scenes.
In short, we would argue that the normative power and utility of the phrase ‘scene’ rests on
the very particular geography of the places where music scenes emerge. Therefore, in the present
paper, we seek to explore musical activities in a place with an unusual geographical profile.
The paper draws upon predominantly qualitative data generated as part of a larger project,
funded by the Australian Research Council, mapping Darwin’s creative industries. The project
has at its core the aim to understand how creative activities are catalysed in a small place
renowned for its remoteness, its large Aboriginal population and its volatile population churn.
It is our contention that beyond mere unusual exception, Darwin provides an important
opportunity to open up debate on musical ‘scenes’ to places where the sense of allegiance, the
critical mass or the ‘place-consciousness’ found elsewhere may prove difficult to find.
Darwin is small (with an official population of approximately 75 000 in 2006) and physically
remote within Australia, in a way even most Australians who have not been there probably fail to
fully comprehend. It is 1500 kilometres by road to the nearest substantial town (Alice Springs,
which has a population of only 25 000) and 3000 kilometres to the nearest state capital city
(Adelaide). London is closer to Cairo in Egypt than Darwin is to Sydney, Melbourne or Perth.
As a result, Darwin holds a particular place in the Australian cultural imaginary as
simultaneously a strategic military ‘outpost’ on the northern frontier, an economic and tourism
‘gateway’ to both Southeast Asia and Kakadu National Park (a ‘wilderness’ World Heritage site
with iconic Aboriginal rock art and cultural heritage) and as a focal point for (post)colonial
struggles over mineral resources and land (Jull 1991; Povinelli 2001). Moreover, a strong
cultural geographical imagination persists of Darwin as part of an untamed ‘north’ (e.g. in
tourism marketing campaigns), akin to the northern-most zones of other continents (Ridanpää
2005). In a musical sense, Darwin’s uniqueness is marketed to potential tourists via images of
Indigenous music and dance performances and the associated market for instruments, such as the
yidaki/didjeridu (see Figure 1). Contradicting this sense of real and imagined remoteness are
Darwin’s proximity to Asia and its connections to other places through flows of seasonal
workers, temporary residents and tourists (particularly international backpackers and richer,
older cultural tourists and ecotourists). Darwin is only 700 kilometres from East Timor and is
closer to both Jakarta and Singapore than to Sydney. Darwin receives over 1.5 million short-term
tourist visitors per annum (Tourism NT 2005), mostly from overseas.
The uniqueness of Darwin is further complicated by the major setbacks faced in its short
(European) history. Surveyed for European settlement only in the late 1890s, in the 20th century
Darwin was demolished four times, by cyclones (twice), fire and repeated strafing by Japanese
bombers during World War II (Alford 1995). After Cyclone Tracy devastated the town on
Christmas Eve in 1974, the population halved and probably would not have recovered to its
present levels without the Federal Labor government’s decision to reposition defence forces in
the North (cf. Beazley 1987). The present population of military personnel and families is
approximately 16 000. Mobile military families contribute to a wider ‘population churn’.
Approximately one-quarter of the Northern Territory’s resident population in 2001 had lived
somewhere else 5 years earlier, compared with less than 10% for most other states (Luckman
et al. 2008). The tourism industry is dominated by relatively low-paid, seasonally dependent
service sector employment (jobs often being filled by backpackers or southern Australians
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S. Luckman et al.
Figure 1. Indigenous music forms meet the global tourist market at Darwin’s famous dry season outdoor
markets. Source: Tourism NT.
seeking a season of relatively stress-free work in the warm northern winter). Although mining is
also a major industry, most mining workers and executives fly in to Darwin and surrounding
mines to work on fortnightly shifts and then fly back to Perth, Brisbane or Adelaide. Finally,
Darwin, like the whole of the Northern Territory, has a much larger Indigenous population
(12.5%) compared with either the national average (2.5%) or any other Australian capital city.
Official census estimates of Darwin’s Indigenous population are underestimations owing to a
large number of ‘unknown’ records in the census for Indigenous status (at approximately 20%)
and incomplete capture of the extent of the use of Darwin by Indigenous people who move
through the city on a temporary or itinerant basis. A likely more accurate estimate is that
Indigenous people comprise approximately 30% of Darwin’s population, similar to that of the
Northern Territory as a whole (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2004).
Darwin’s music is both circumscribed and enriched by this mix of remoteness, size,
(post)coloniality, population churn and mobility (see Figure 1). Because of its small size,
Darwin is hardly ever part of the touring networks of international acts (more people saw The
Police in a stadium concert recently in Sydney than reside in the whole of Darwin) and, until
Darwin was added to the routes of budget airlines in 2005, travel there was usually too expensive
for national acts to include in their touring plans. This lack of big name international and national
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Figures 2 & 3.
Darwin’s Mitchell Street tourist hub. Source: Julie Willoughby-Smith.
touring acts restricts access to live music, especially for the under-18s, because most live
performances occur in licensed premises. High-profile acts reflecting young people’s musical
tastes also potentially instil and reinforce a music culture among that age cohort; their absence in
Darwin was seen by at least one of our interviewees as a missing opportunity to potentially
inspire local young people to consider music a possible career:
I think generally if you ask any musician, it’s a bit of struggle in the music scene. I don’t really
understand why, but it’s always been like that since I was in my early teens when I started paying
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attention to such things. There’s never really much music to go and see and international acts are few
and far between, therefore that inspiration to produce quality music just isn’t there. (Nicholas
Mather, interviewed 17 December 2007)
Conversely, lack of integration into national and international tours by big-name performers
means stronger demand for local live music, added to demand from tourists seeking nightlife and
entertainment (see Figures 2 & 3). Thus, Darwin has a healthy amount of musical activity for a
place of its size. But to what extent could its musical activities be called a ‘scene’ (in the usual
sense of a coherent, organized set of actors, allegiances and cultural practices)? To what extent
does Darwin’s unusual confluence of geography, demography and cultural diversity shape its
musical activities? As part of our creative mapping project in Darwin, in 2007 and early 2008
we approached people involved across the creative industries to talk openly about their social
networks, about Darwin and its advantages and limitations for their creative work.
The 98 interviews conducted included many musicians and other sound workers. The exact
number of musicians interviewed is hard to identify because few of them identified as musicians
as their foremost creative occupation and hence did not prioritize this aspect of their creative
work in interviews. Rather, most musicians in Darwin have ‘day jobs’ as policy officers, arts
teachers, venue operators or music retailers. Although this is true of many creative workers
everywhere, the situation in Darwin is particularly acute. This contributes to a fluidity of creative
identities necessary in a small market. What follow here are themes that emerged from
interviews with those who did claim to be musicians in some capacity: namely city size and
scale; local media; physical infrastructure; and the impact of the city’s climatic seasonality on
the city’s musical culture.
What happens to music ‘scenes’ in the absence of size and scale?
According to official statistical sources, there are few musicians in Darwin. In a statistical report
produced from our creative mapping project for government partners, there were only
50 musicians in Darwin who recorded that music was their main occupation in the national
census (Gibson and Brennan-Horley 2007). However, as discussed in more detail elsewhere (see
Gibson 2002), official statistics grossly underestimate the number of people involved in music
scenes because of often informal, unpaid status and reliance on other ‘day jobs’. No single music
scene exists in Darwin within which there are enough musicians and audiences to sustain regular
yearly activity. Yet, there are many instances of musical activity and a wide variety of styles and
genres performed. Folk music has been a long presence, as with musical theatre, jazz and
country. In Darwin, the mid-20th century was the heyday of ‘two distinct (and, to some extent)
inter-related music traditions: stringband music, performed by Aboriginal/mixed race
performers, and acoustic ensemble music played by members of the local Filipino community
(often referred to as rondalla music)’ (Hayward 2005, 6). Darwin is the only Australian location
that has a Filipino musical heritage of this kind. More recently, continued interest of local
community members has led to a series of attempts to sustain and revive such music.
For as long as contemporary musicians can recall, Darwin has also been a focal point for
Indigenous music. This status comes less from being a major production centre in its own right
(although the city was the home for influential 1980s band Coloured Stone for a period of time, does
have recording studios, such as Kakadu Studios, which have recorded many Aboriginal groups, and
Indigenous radio stations 8KNB Radio Larrakia and TEABBA – the Top End Aboriginal Bush
Broadcasting Association) and more because of its position at the centre of an intricate network of
remote communities, scattered across several hundred kilometres in surrounding Arnhem Land,
from which most contemporary Aboriginal bands and performers hail. Darwin is a meeting place, a
stop en route between communities (and, for the more successful Aboriginal bands, flying from
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Darwin to gigs in southern states). With the Top End studios for the ABC and Triple J national
broadcasters, both of which are strong supporters of contemporary Aboriginal music, Darwin is also
a place to connect with supportive non-Indigenous musicians and institutions. In other words,
Darwin is the setting for much of the ‘network sociality’ surrounding Indigenous music. Darwin is
also a place for Aboriginal musicians to perform – albeit more intermittently than an outsider may
imagine. The annual Darwin Festival is a centrepiece (one interviewee described it as ‘outward
looking . . . It’s developed a real flavour of Darwin’), yet securing gigs at other times of year is
difficult. Cost of transport from remote communities and lack of performance spaces both contribute
to this (see below), but so too does racism from venue owners (Dunbar-Hall and Gibson 2004). One
manager stated that ‘established venues generally don’t like the type of audience that Indigenous
bands bring’. Reputations for bringing Indigenous crowds fuelled by alcohol consumption, violence
and ‘anti-social behaviour’ are associated with all Aboriginal bands, meaning opportunities to
perform are restricted further. (This ‘problem discourse’ for Aboriginal bands is widespread across
Australia, stemming back to at least the 1960s, and even the subject of a cult film of the 1980s,
Wrong Side of the Road, which followed young Aboriginal bands around Australia in their
quest to seek audiences; see Gibson and Dunbar-Hall 2004 for further discussion). There is
some recognition that this is a lost opportunity for Darwin; thus, for Mark Grose, who established
the Skinnyfish Music record label in Darwin in the 1990s to cater exclusively to Indigenous
musicians:
I used to say when Skinnyfish first started, Darwin should be the Tamworth of black music, because
it has so many great musicians surrounding it. There’s not so many living here in Darwin, but in the
surrounding regions there are great musicians, and I think that as a place for people to come and get a
feel for that, I think that’s something that Darwin can build on. The difficulty with people coming
here to see a live concert is that that almost never happens . . . If you want to go and see an Indigenous
band play here, I can’t think of a time other than end of February and May where you’ll be able to see
one. So, in a sense there’s a big loss there for visitors, because they can’t actually go and see someone
perform on a regular basis. (Interview 23 January 2008)
The remainder of Darwin’s musical activity is characterized by small numbers of people pursuing
quite diverse stylistic orientations. Darwin features its own Symphony Orchestra, some reggae,
several hard rock bands (popular among young mining and military workers in Darwin), a few DJs
specializing in house and trance-techno music, intermittently groups of different backgrounds
in the ‘world music’ genre and several acoustic/semi-acoustic covers acts (often made up of
musicians who play original music in other styles elsewhere), who perform predominantly for
backpackers and weekend drinkers in clubs and open-air beer gardens along Mitchell Street, a main
thoroughfare in Darwin’s CBD. Other popular performance outlets are the weekly outdoor markets
(notably at Mindil Beach, where didjeridu players, folk duos, funk and hybrid ‘world music’/gypsy
bands dominate) and cultural festivals (most prominent in the ‘dry season’ winter months). The city
has a small number of professional recording studios (in addition to Kakadu mentioned above),
a handful of record shops, local live music managers and a PA/equipment hire store.
Across the creative spectrum, and with a consistency that is striking, in answer to the
question, ‘Where do you feel Darwin’s strengths lie as a creative city?’, interviewees pointed to
Darwin’s diversity of voices, sounds and cultures, in particular the city’s proximity to Asia, its
distance from the population centres of Australia and important Indigenous population. For one
local sound artist, Darwin’s strengths were in its:
. . . outlook, which is relatively unique; its multiculturalism. Its contact with Indigenous Australians;
its diversity and its remoteness do kind of make certain things more unique. Cheap travel up here is
kind of reducing that human remoteness, but the physical remoteness remains. There are some
influences that tend to make their way up here a bit more frequently on the more mainstream side, but
you know, undercurrents are still felt. (Interview 2007)
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Although in larger cities cultural diversity is often reflected in a multitude of coexisting
independent scenes, in Darwin this has not been the case. Musicians and fans tend not to define
themselves along genre lines or in opposition to one another, but rather more inclusively through
participation in a relatively small and varied set of music activities, defined by fluidity and
hybridity. As argued by Nicholas Mather, a local creative practitioner who himself diversifies
across multiple sectors (piano player and graphic designer for the NT News), ‘networking in
Darwin’s quite central, because everyone knows everyone and it’s just very important. Probably
more so than a major city’.
As a result of basic economies of scale, the city’s arts sector is heavily dependent upon unpaid,
‘pro-am’ labour. Members of the Darwin Symphony Orchestra are largely unpaid, with the paid
positions mostly in management and administration. Musicians all require ‘day jobs’ and are likely
to mix in a wide variety of circles. There is, of course, a downside to this: ‘artists are frequently
exploited in Darwin. You’ll find that universally said, when people are honest’ (interview 2007).
But this has the effect of creating a more integrated artistic community than elsewhere; musicians
and consumers of live music necessarily mix across the borders of what, in larger cities, may be
considered separate scenes. A similar spirit was obvious in the experience of Zeb Olsen, manager
of the Happy Yess2 live music space (Darwin’s most successful ‘alternative’ venue) and someone
with extensive prior experience of life as a creative practitioner in Sydney, in (among other things)
the ground-breaking riot Grrrl group Matrimony:
I think [Darwin’s] really great for artists because the artist community in general, and the music
community [in particular] is very accepting. People don’t say ‘oh, you didn’t go to art school’, people
say ‘oh, you’re an artist aren’t you, you should put something in this show’ and give you a gig if
you’ve got a band; people are really accepting and really supportive. And because there’s not a lot of
people to go to everything, if they’re interested, I think that people have quite wide tastes; people will
go to every opening and every gig because that’s what’s on, especially this time of year [the dry
season] ’cause you know it’s not going to last all year so it’s really positive. It’s a great place to be an
artist I think. (Interview 14 August 2007)
Thus, a particular kind of network sociality emerges in Darwin; less tightly governed than larger
genre-affiliated or ‘subcultural’ scenes studied elsewhere. Boundaries are porous; musicians
maintain social networks and sustain an artistic community while moving across stylistic or
genre categories.
Music media and critical mass
Central to the coherence of the larger music scenes researched elsewhere is a rich media culture
at all levels: micro, niche and mass (Thornton 1995). At the ‘mass’ level, two key players
emerge in our research: (1) the city’s only major daily newspaper The NT News; and (2) local
ABC radio. Both of these are identified as key sites for the dissemination of information on
Darwin’s music scene because – and not in spite of – their dominance of the local media
landscape. As some of the only players in a small town, links between the mainstream press and
grass roots activity are more mutually supportive and less reactionary than may be the case in
larger cities (cf. Thornton 1995). Indeed, local media outlets in remote places need local content
to fill their pages and airspace. Local artists and organizations are desirable news sources. Such a
symbiotic relationship can be found in other smaller urban communities, problematizing some
conventional subculturally inspired attitudes to the mainstream media that have tended to rely on
size, scale and the associated critical mass of larger cities to allow for the growth of disparate and
tightly defined music-related identities (Thornton 1995) – something not present in the smaller
melting pot of a city like Darwin.
Problems of critical mass have meant a string of unsuccessful attempts to introduce a microor niche-level street press beyond the tourist or Indigenous community sectors. The Internet is
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631
Figure 4. A key site for live, alternative music in Darwin: the Happy Yess Club, February 2008. Source:
Julie Willoughby-Smith.
proving useful for groups such as Happy Yess, but accessing such sites requires a level of prior
knowledge to know to seek them out (see Figure 5). Darwin’s small size limits not only potential
audience and advertisers, but also infrastructure, with the effect that existing mass publishers,
like The NT News, are frequently responsible for attempts at niche offerings (such as its
discontinued D News). Seasonality adds to this: with far more events on and the bulk of tourists
arriving for the dry season (May– September), this is the time when street-level press is most
likely to be seen, only to disappear as crowds dwindle. The (relative) absence of a lively street
press for local music also has ramifications for further audience growth among tourists. Tourism
NT has for some time identified ‘adventure travellers’ and backpackers as a key demographic
target. Especially during the dry season, Mitchell Street palpably throbs with the energy of
young backpackers; yet, the potential flow of people interested in accessing a genuinely original
Figure 5.
Fliers for gigs from the Happy Yess website (http://www.happyyess.com/1.htm).
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and local music scene is interrupted without a lively, free local street press. This leads to a divide
between performances for ‘locals in the know’ and the ‘covers and clubs’ scene dominating the
tourist strip. Speaking more broadly about Darwin’s creative industries, one local sound artist
observes that it ‘can take quite a while to find stuff that’s going on nearby, it’s just not
publicised’. He continues that finding out about gigs is often a word-of-mouth affair and about
getting ‘a feel for the place’: ‘like you can come in at tourist level and see covers bands and stuff
like that, or you can come in and know people and people will tell you what’s going on a bit
more, it’s very informal’ (interview 2007).
Physical infrastructure
Question: Where do you feel Darwin’s strengths lie as a creative city?
Answer: In the sheer amount of really amazing artists that happen to be here, I think that’s the strong
point for sure. The weak point would be that they don’t have enough places to do what they do. (Kris
Keogh, interviewed 16 April 2007)
This is a claim frequently heard from sound artists everywhere, but the situation is indeed
uniquely dire in Darwin, where the biggest issue across the local creative community was lack
of venue space and/or low-cost buildings. Some spaces are available for hire. The high-profile
Entertainment Centre on Mitchell Street, the façade of which is currently being refurbished, is
one of the few custom-made performance spaces in Darwin. It was, however, almost universally
dismissed by our interview respondents as an unviable option, at least for local musicians. Among
their concerns were prohibitive venue hire costs (including the significant compulsory charge for
running the air-conditioning system) and its lack of suitability (large size and poor acoustics).
Conversely, local arts organization ‘Browns Mart’ has a smaller hall space for hire in strong demand
as a central site for a range of musical, drama and arts activities. However, even with Browns Mart,
the dearth of venue spaces is a defining feature, especially for Indigenous music and dance:
Well one of the key areas for me is the lack of Indigenous performance in Darwin. So when I have
friends who arrive here as tourists and want to hear the bands on the albums I’ve given them, and that
is high quality Aboriginal music, there’s nowhere [to go], unless it’s the Darwin Festival. They can’t
hear it anywhere in this town. (Gillian Harrison, Northern Territory Manager, ArtSupport Australia,
interviewed 12 December 2007)
Nowhere are issues of lack of available space more apparent than in the ongoing search by
the Happy Yess Club to find a venue (see Figure 4). Initially conceived by a group of friends
in late 2005 and opening in mid-2006, the Happy Yess Club has emerged as Darwin’s key
alternative music venue. Open Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, its remit is broad:
Thursday night features regular arts events, from poetry readings, comedy, spoken word
performance or films; and Friday and Saturday nights are explicitly devoted to live, original
music. This space fills a void left by the closure of the Worker’s Club – the city’s last dedicated
original live music space – in the early 1990s. Like other comparable grass roots organizations,
Happy Yess has been in a start-up phase, heavily reliant on unpaid labour and the goodwill of a
committed group of local artists:
When we started, we just decided to start it up no matter what, and so for the first six months it just
ran on love, so we all did everything for free, and the bar managed to pay the rent and the bills.
Although for the first six months of this year we’ve got a $15 000 grant from Arts NT, and,
essentially, now we can afford to pay the people that work there during the night, and I get paid as a
manager two days a week. (Kris Keogh, interviewed 16 April 2007)
Or, in the words of Zeb Olsen, the manager of Happy Yess:
Happy Yes is the only place that original bands play in Darwin, and before that there was nothing for
a long time and after it if anything happens there will be nothing, so it’s really important. There’s a
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bit of pressure there because it’s a fledgling organization. It relies on a lot of volunteers; we don’t
have much money but we all feel that it’s really, really important cultural thing to keep supporting.
(Interview 14 August 2007)
Clearly there is a demand for such a venue. By 2007, the small size of the old Bennett Street
premises had come to limit Happy Yess’ capacity to fund itself and grow its community. As Kris
Keogh noted, ‘the venue size is limiting our options, because often we have to turn people away.
When you’ve only got so many people, you can only make so much money. The next place we
get is going to need to be bigger’ (interview 16 April 2007). Although not the only live music
venue, Happy Yess plays an essential role in providing a space for local artists to showcase
original work. Darwin’s other live music venues, such as the Casino and those on Mitchell
Street, operate as commercial ventures catering to tourists and more mainstream local audiences.
In those venues, as elsewhere, acoustic cover acts are seen as the lower-risk/higher-return option
by operators. Original artists struggle to find performance outlets, although Darwin’s famous dry
season open-air markets (Mindil Beach, Nightcliff, Rapid Creek and Parap) have emerged as
alternatives popular among Darwin residents, itinerant travellers and mainstream tourists.
The centrality of seasonality
Although all music scenes have their peaks and troughs, few would be as climatically
circumscribed or regular as Darwin’s seasonal shifts, which, for many, define the mood of the city.
Although Indigenous customary knowledge holders identify multiple seasons for the region – in
some cases up to nine – for the most part, Darwin’s seasons are known as the ‘wet’ and the ‘dry’,
with shoulder seasons in between. The dry is the peak tourist season and is festival and event time
for locals and visitors alike. The Darwin Festival and Darwin Fringe occur at this time. Darwin’s
famous outdoor markets re-open and pressure on venues fades as outdoor spaces become ideal
performance locations, with consistently mild and reliably dry weather. At this time, new
pressures on local music organizers emerge. The one event hire company a city the size of Darwin
can sustain experiences a ‘seller’s market’ and event infrastructure, such as PAs, staging and even
portaloos, become prohibitively expensive. The Darwin Festival has even found it necessary to
bypass the local provider and seek out interstate companies thousands of kilometres away:
. . . there’s one production company in Darwin who have traditionally been able to set their own
prices because they’ve had a monopoly. On occasion we have brought in a lot of our gear from
interstate, and it’s been cheaper for us to do that, including freight and transport and accommodation,
airfares for staff to manage that gear, than it has been to use a local company. (Anne Dunn, General
Manager of the Darwin Festival, interviewed 16 April 2007)
Darwin’s extreme seasonality sets it apart from the cities of the global north, upon which most music
scenes research is based, and again challenges ideas of scene stability or coherence. On the creative
side, many of the artists interviewed for this research project valued the lack of activity and audience
during the wet and, instead, saw this time of monsoonal downpours as an invaluable, indeed even
enforced, time of reflection, introspection, creative production and renewal. ‘The wet’ was a built-in
downtime, preparing them for the busy performance, exhibition and festival season ahead; artists
originally from interstate and overseas especially articulated a clear sense of the value of this time
as something uniquely tropical and remote about Darwin: a vestige of frontier life in an age when the
economy and technology are premised on year-round availability and output.
Conclusion
Prior work on music scenes has tended to emphasize unified musical sounds, a shared series of
cultural practices or subcultural identifications, common genre affiliations or groups of musicians
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S. Luckman et al.
and audiences occupying particular social spaces in the city. Underlying scene research has been a
focus on places of a certain size and type: usually medium-to-large industrial or postindustrial cities
in North America or Europe. We have sought to provide a fresh – albeit brief – perspective on scene
research from a very different location. Our research in Darwin has revealed a highly diverse set of
musical practices and, in many cases, a contradictory set of narratives about what makes it a unique
place for creative work. The term scene – in its more conventional application as a descriptor for a
more or less coherent set of practices and tastes – is at the very least highly problematic in relation to
Darwin. Indeed, although musicians do talk of the city having ‘a music scene’, the use of this term
bears little relation to the way in which that term has been used elsewhere. It may be that the notion of
scenes may be analytically redundant in places such as Darwin. Places do not necessarily require
unity or singularity of musical genre or subculture in a place in order to sustain music scenes –
previous studies have shown, for instance, how several scenes can coexist in creative interaction
across the same local space (e.g. Bennett 1999a, 1999b; Gibson 2002; Shank 1994; Mitchell 1997).
However, in Darwin, none of the genre or subcultural groups involved in music is large enough to be
considered ‘a scene’. Instead, key individuals come together in groups of between two and 10
people, around particular events or interests, and then frequently cross-fertilize with attendance and
participation in other events of other smaller groups. The exact make-up of these groups fluctuates
with seasons and with the constant ‘churn’ of participants from southern states, from scattered
remote Aboriginal communities and, in the case of international backpackers and other drifters,
from overseas. Street press, if not virtually absent, is certainly difficult to sustain beyond the dry
tourist season, whereas for Indigenous musicians, Darwin is important not because it is the
residential base for a music scene, but because it is an important locus for social networks that extend
far beyond the city into several scattered remote communities – where bands are actually based. To
us, it seems grand to call these disparate parts of Darwin’s musical landscape ‘scenes’. Instead,
musical activity in Darwin is perhaps better described as a loose and ever-changing assemblage of
participants, technologies and spaces, united by diversity, tropicality, remoteness and the perils of a
lack of critical mass. In the words of Kris Keogh:
I think the location and the size of the city doesn’t allow for really strong cliques of people to form
doing their thing. So you tend to interact with all sorts of people that, say if I was in Melbourne or
Sydney and I was into electronic music, I could hang out with my electronic music friends, but
there’s just not the critical mass to do that here. So, I make weird electronic music, I’m in a rock
band, a reggae band, I play in a Gamelan ensemble, there’s so many different outlets that Darwin just
exposes you to. (Kris Keogh, interviewed 16 April 2007)
Thus, musical identity hopping is both a survival strategy and suggestive of the fluidity and
comparative openness of cultural expressions in remote, small places.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Tess Lea, Francesca Baas-Becking and Karen Hughes for their participation in the wider
research project from which this article stems, as well as all the people who have given their time to be
interviewed for the study. The study was funded by the Australian Research Council (LP0667445) and
included financial and in-kind contributions from Tourism NT, the Northern Territory Government
Department of Natural Resources, the Environment and the Arts (NRETA) and Darwin City Council.
Notes
1.
The notion of ‘periphery’ is certainly present in research on music; for example, research in regions
considered ‘peripheral’ within national contexts, such as Wales (e.g. Hill 2007). In ethnomusicology,
studies of music in remote, obscure locations are familiar partly because of that discipline’s commitment
to documenting cultural diversity, but also because of its historical links to anthropology (e.g. Robinson
et al. 1991; Feld 1982; see related debates on the absorption of ‘exotic’ styles into ‘world music’
distribution and marketing: Lipsitz 1999; Feld 2000; Connell and Gibson 2004). Yet, in most studies of
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2.
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music scenes (meaning here the wider social, economic and technological networks surrounding music,
rather than the music itself), the locations are usually urban centres of above a certain size.
Happy Yess Community Arts Incorporated was formed by three friends and opened in mid-2006 with a
view to providing Darwin with an accessible community-run, not-for-profit live music and arts space in
a city not well served by grass roots-level music venues. Operating three nights a week, Happy Yess
embraces a range of original performance and arts performance, including music, spoken word, film,
art exhibitions and stand-up comedy.
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Notes on contributors
Dr Susan Luckman is a Senior Lecturer and Acting Research Portfolio Leader in the School of
Communication and a member of the Hawke Institute for Sustainable Societies (HRISS) at the University
of South Australia.
Chris Gibson is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Wollongong. His books include
Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place (with John Connell; Routledge) and Deadly Sounds, Deadly
Places: Contemporary Aboriginal Music in Australia (with Peter Dunbar-Hall; UNSW Press).
Julie Willoughby-Smith is a Research Assistant in the School of Communication at the University of South
Australia. Research interests include the sociocultural dimensions of globalization, new media
communications, creative industries and travel theory.
Chris Brennan-Horley is a PhD candidate in human geography at the University of Wollongong. His
research is on applying Geographic Information System Technologies to understanding Darwin’s creative
industries.
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