I began to categorise the interactions I observed during the preparations and performances of OUR MUSIC, with the objective of producing a methodical set of suggestions that could be used to guide Conservatorium tertiary music students’ involvements in collaborative cross-cultural music projects. Resources of research for this set of suggestions would include Paul Grabowsky’s Crossing Roper Bar⁴⁷⁴ , the collaboration with the Waligah singers in Southeast Arhnem Land, and the Regionalist compositional practices of Dr Chirstopher Sainsbury⁴⁷⁵ . The application of Activity theory would provide a structure to monitor the level of interaction and outcome.

Activity Theory ⁴⁷⁶ analyses the interactions of people involved in preparing for a particular collaboration, and defines the change that occurs in the activity as the collaboration ensues. To aid the educational process, Activity Theory defines internalised conventions and illustrates how changes to these conventions would occur in cross-cultural collaborations. The theory demonstrates the possibility of evaluating the level of change that occurs to internalised practices.

In an earlier section of this chapter I discussed Peter Sculthorpe’s suggestion, that if the first Europeans had initially collaborated artistically with the first peoples in the colony here in Sydney, there may have been a very different outcome affecting how the first peoples and the colonisers interacted in the ensuing years. ⁴⁷⁷ He claims that this could have also established a different perspective on how the nation identifies its culture, suggesting it would have instigated less of a Eurocentric identity. To continue on this a little further, it does seem that history records reveal changes occurred in Aboriginal music very soon after the arrival of the Europeans. Captain John Hunter, known to be musically trained in his youth⁴⁷⁸ , recorded in his first fleet journal that in 1790, an Aboriginal tribe in Botany Bay sang and danced a song about Woollarrawarre Bennelong and his house and his new European friends. ⁴⁷⁹ Graeme Skinner suggests that this must be the earliest record of ‘Australian composition activity.’ Skinner also offers accounts of information gathered by anthropologist Daisey Bates of another Aboriginal ceremonial song that contained impressions of European drum and fife military music. The connection being the military music played by the marine musicians accompanying Matthew Flinders’ expedition to King Georg Sound in Western Australia in 1801.⁴⁸⁰ The first steps taken by European musicians towards participating in cross-cultural musical collaborations with Indigenous musicians from all accounts were the actions of scribing the chant transcriptions ⁴⁸¹ by Edward Jones, Pierre-Francis Bernier, Baron Field and Nathan Isaac. We know both Field in 1822 and Isaac in 1840 and

^{474     4} Paul Grabowsky. Rennaisance On The Roper.
^{475     3}Sainsbury,
⁴⁷⁶ – takes the object-orientated, artifact-mediated collective activity system s a unit of analysis, thus bridging the gulf between the individual subject and the societal structure.- Yryo Engestrom, “Perspectives on Activity Theory”. Learning in Doing edited by Y. Engetrom, R. Miettinen and R. Punamaki. (New York, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
^{477     2}Sculthorpe, 200.
^{478     2}Skinner, G. (2011)”Toward a General History of Australian Musical Composition- First National Music 1788-1860.” The University Of Sydney, 2011 pg. 59-60
⁴⁷⁹ibid p.61 source: 4Hunter.
⁴⁸⁰ Isobel.M.White,”The Birth and Death of a Ceremony’ Aboriginal!History!4!(1980),p 33-42. See: Skinner,G ( 2011) p.64
⁴⁸¹ see Sydney’s Aboriginal chants- earlier in this chapter, p.221.