Writing Workshop, May 2012

Now that data collection for the project is almost at an end, it's time for the team to shift focus to writing up the research. With this task in mind, the project team met for a two-day writing retreat in May. The aim of the meet-up was to circulate writing samples amongst the team, and obtain feedback on work in progress. We also had an opportunity to workshop a range of ideas for future publications, many of which will be collaborations between team members.

Here's a brief snapshot of the sorts of things that we're working on at the moment. Details of final publications will be posted on the website in the coming months.



Andy Bennett is drafting a contribution to the Routledge edited collection, Sites of Popular Music Heritage, based on his keynote address at the Symposium of the same name.  He is also working on a piece about music, memory and the peripheral city, as well as a third commissioned chapter on the notion of 'resisting nostalgia'.

Andy Bennett and Ian Rogers are co-authoring a chapter called, "In Search of Subcultural Brisbane" based on fieldwork interviews conducted there, as well as a second piece about music venues.

Shane Homan is finalising a chapter based on the Australian documentary series made for the ABC, Long Way to the Top.  He is also planning a chapter related to popular music radio and memory (think nostalgia programming like that you might find on Gold FM).

Peter Doyle is finalising an article on Merv Acheson, the Sydney-based journalist, musician and man-about-town, which considers issues related to the textual record of performance-based musicians and genres.  He is also working on a paper that considers how writers of popular music history assemble the narratives they write.

Peter Doyle and Shane Homan are discussing an idea for an edited collection of literary popular music writing, a mode somewhere in between academic writing and mass-market rock biography that is not very familiar in Australian traditions of writing about music (but which has a strong presence in the US, for example).  Think: Nick Tosches, Robert Guralnick, Colin Escott....  Shane and Peter will also collaborate on a piece related to the interviews they recorded for the project at the National Film and Sound Archive.

Sarah Baker and Alison Huber have been co-authoring a number of articles based on their research into what they have called 'DIY institutions', that is, places of popular music preservation that exist outside the frame of 'official' projects of collection and display.  They have finalised draft articles about the Victorian Jazz Archive and the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, and have a third piece almost completed which outlines their 'typology' of the DIY institution.  They are also drafting their contribution to the Routledge edited collection, Sites of Popular Music Heritage, which will focus on anxieties related to 'rubbish' in the DIY institution.