Putting Aboriginal Masculinities into Play in Central Australia
Åse Ottosson, Central Land Council, Alice Springs
Over the last 80 years, variations of popular music have become core expressive forms in Aboriginal Central Australia. Distinct localised styles of country, rock and reggae music are now intrinsic parts of regional Aboriginal life worlds. In this particular Australian region, these genres of Aboriginal music are almost exclusively practiced by men, and within an almost exclusively male homo-social realm. This paper explores country, rock and reggae music practices as important means for Aboriginal men to assert, negotiate and variously identify with a diversity of local and global practices, values and ideas of masculinity and manhood. By framing ethnographic examples with some influential theories of masculinity and gendered practice, this paper demonstrates how the desert men continue to put into play a variety of models of manhood when they craft their sense of selves as contemporary Aboriginal men. It discusses how ancestral normative regimes for appropriate male behaviour may partly resonate with aspects of global male imagery and practices associated with various popular music genres. Some prominent non-Aboriginal models of masculinity that have emerged in the particular inter-cultural history of the Central Australian region also continue to shape both men and music practices in the desert region.
