evolve musically through my creative practice when both the instrumental and cultural forms interact in composition. Each Aboriginal performer is also free to develop an individual musical interpretation through improvisation. I do not claim that the new music that came out of these collaborations are definitively new forms of Australian music, attached to the but simply that these pieces are the result of new instrumental and creative and collaborative

The generic vocabulary of 15 Stuart piano sounds illustrated in the preceding section, illustrate my perceptions of the Stuart sound and they exhibit the extent of the clarity and balance in the sound, especially in dissonant harmonic layering and in its ‘speaking’ of extended frequencies. My first sense of connection between the piano sounds and Indigenous music was that these more abstract elemental tones of the Stuart soundscape could resonate contextually with images of land and environment. The musical form which is ‘inextricably linked’³⁹⁰ with the elemental aspects of its natural environment could in a way resonate with the vibrational instrumental sound of its place, and possibly confirm it by mythically ‘singing it into being’.³⁹¹

My enquiry began by playing Aboriginal chants of historic significance to the Sydney region, on the Stuart piano with a collective of Sydney’s Indigenous singers. I was fortunate in gaining access to these chants, thanks to the assistance of historian Keith Vincent Smith, and singer Clarence Slockee a Bungalong man and an Indigenous culture educator.

These musical collaborations took place in the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, which is located in a historic location, Farm Cove and the Botanic Gardens, in the busy city centre of Sydney. This is the region of the first regular and considered interactions between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians. The location is also located very close to Aboriginal ceremonial grounds . These characteristics of place were considered to be significant to all Indigenous and non- Indigenous artists involved in this intercultural research.

…[in Australian Indigenous music] situating music in the places where it is created , performed and received,… land ownership, language and music are linked as a complex through which individual and group identity are constructed, expressed and maintained.³⁹³

So a fresh look at our history sees our beginnings not in 1788 but many millennia before that and including the vast majority of Australians who have been part of our story. From a static point of view the long peaceful occupation of this land by Aborigines might be seen as a kind of primitive paradise now lost and replaced forever. From another, more dynamically, it can be viewed as the beginnings of a slow formation of an Australia still in the future: the Aboriginal stock was to grow so atuned to this land as to become one with it, so that, their time of testing over, they might show latter-day

³⁹⁰PaulGrabowsky,(2010)presentation “The complete musician”lecture, Australian National University, 2010.
http://developer.jazztuition.com.au/the-complete-musician-paul-grabowsky/ ; also- A.N.U. “The complete musician”YouTube video 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTTQpCxukBw
^{391     2} Grabowsky.
³⁹² David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales: orAppendix VI . (The Strand, London: Customs and Manners T.Caldwell and W. Davis, 1804), 365.
^{393     2}Dunbar-Hall.