This article was downloaded by: [University Of South Australia] On: 10 September 2008 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 788842275] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Continuum Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713411120 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 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10304310802311667 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304310802311667 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 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 Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 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 Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 624 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, Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 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 Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 626 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 627 Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 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 628 S. Luckman et al. Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 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 Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 629 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) Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 630 S. Luckman et al. 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 Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 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). 632 S. Luckman et al. Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 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 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 633 Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 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 Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 634 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 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 2. 635 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. Downloaded By: [University Of South Australia] At: 03:03 10 September 2008 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. 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