Connecting you with Australian culture online
The Australian Institute of Music has been preparing young Australians for music careers since 1968. This is a portal to other Australian music websites of various genres, including jazz, blues, pop, rock and classical. Australian country and folk music...
A number of organisations promote Australian music and assist Australian musicians and composers. This Fellowship acts on behalf of Australian composers in matters of copyright, composers' fees and the amount of Australian music broadcast on radio and te...
Portrait of Slim Dusty at the Australia Day Concert (i.e. Australia Day Live), Sydney Entertainment Centre, 1984, transparency. Country music, a derivative of folk music, originated in southern and western USA and consisted mainly of rural songs accompan...
In the early days of the Australian colonies, convict ballads and songs became the foundation of Australia's later day folk music and its first original compositions. Bush songs, ballads and music influenced and defined the folk music of the 1950s. Indi...
Australian independent (indie) music fills a space left by rock and pop music. With the punk movement came a formation of a new style of music, new bands, and independent music labels generally ran from backyard operations. One of the pioneering bands fo...
Indigenous music in Australia uses the environment itself to generate unique sounds and rhythms. Australian musicians performing across a range of genres, or styles, have achieved international recognition with a unique Australian approach. The opera sin...
For example, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders these ceremonies bring together all aspects of their culture - song, dance, body decoration, sculpture and painting. Anny Nungarrayi (centre) with other Warlpiri women perform a traditional dance dur...
The songs and music that has come from people's experiences of living and surviving in the Australian bush has become known in Australia as 'bush music'. The convict songs of the early days of the Australian colonies became the foundation of Australia's ...
Australia has had a strong and vibrant jazz scene since the 1920s, commencing with visiting performers and reciprocated by Australian jazz performers touring regularly in America and Europe. Mainstream jazz centres on 'swing', although most jazz styles co...
Military bands have accompanied Australian ceremonies, parades, church services, mess dinners and performed at concerts on innumerable occasions since then. Band musicians and band music owe a great deal to Australia's Salvation Army. Other Australian p...
Australian singer Little Pattie and the band, Col Joye and the Joye Boys, perform for soldiers of Headquarters Australian Force Vietnam, in the Free World Military building, Saigon, Vietnam. Like rock music, popular, or pop music had its origins in the 1...
Australian rock music has its roots in the 1950s and '60s when the style of music was growing in popularity around the world. In the 1970s Australian rock bands became well known for classic hard rock. First appearing in the United States of America, ro...
Marvellous Melbourne Jazz Festival - Bernie McGann Group - Bernie McGann, sax; John Pochee , drum; Chuck Yates, keyboard; Jeff Kluke, bass. An Australian jazz sound has developed through a practice of innovation where performers improvised within particu...
Each year the Sydney Festival offers a rich and diverse program spanning all art forms including dance, theatre, music, visual arts, film, forums and large scale free outdoor events. The National Multicultural Festival is held over two weeks and features...
Don McMurdo, Fireworks over the Sydney Opera House, Japan Week, 1988, slide. William Lyster set up his own opera company in 1861, giving audiences their first full scale productions of European opera. Opera Australia was created through the merger of Th...
Like other art forms, Australian theatre has built on previous traditions and developed over time, shaped by local and international artistic movements, events and trends. Australian theatre history incorporates the stories of many actors, entrepreneurs,...
The bush has an iconic status in Australian life and features strongly in any debate about national identity, especially as expressed in Australian literature, painting, popular music, films and foods. The bush was revered as a source of national ideals b...
Protestant and Roman Catholic churches hold Christmas Day services on 25 December. The Eastern churches - the Ethiopian Orthodox church, Russian Orthodox church and the Armenian church - celebrate Christmas on 6 or 7 January. Christmas is the celebratio...
Community radio stations receive government funding through the Community Broadcasting Foundation, which was established in 1984 as an independent, non-profit funding body for community broadcasting in Australia. The Community Broadcasting Association of...
Image courtesy of the Australian War Memorial: P01404.028. One of the most well-known Australian engagements of the Vietnam War was the Battle of Long Tan, 17-20 August 1966. Image courtesy of the Australian War Memorial: COL/67/0140/VN. ...
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