Voices ResourcesA website for the worldwide community around the journal Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy

One night in July this year I walked on the beautiful South Bank of the Brisbane River, through a stunning park with beautiful trees and paths, art museums and university buildings, restaurants and pubs. I walked by the venue for the forthcoming World Congress of Music Therapy in 2005, the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre. I came from Boundary Street in West End, where I had had my first taste of Emu and Kangaroo after a drink of Pink Billabong, and was heading for the Story Bridge. I walked in solitude, but was thinking about the community of Australian music therapists.

I was preparing my mind and body for the paper I was to present the next day, on community music therapy and its place on the map of contemporary music therapy.

I was also thinking about a reference in The Dinkum Dictionary which I had been reading earlier that day from my balcony, while overlooking a striking mixture of city and nature; the winding river with the busy catamarans, the boardwalk, the botanical gardens, the hills and the skyscrapers. Walking on the South Bank it was the entry on the word "mate" that lingered in my mind. Writing on "mateship" as one of the buzzwords for Australian culture, the author of the dictionary had argued:

'Mate' is a word in British English and American English. For us, though, the meaning goes much deeper than just 'partner' or 'comrade,' 'buddy' or 'pal.' In the struggles of settlement 'mates' were men who worked as partners, often in a longstanding commitment, to perform difficult and dangerous work such as fencing, land clearing, goldmining - jobs that were well nigh impossible to do on your own. The bush was a dangerous place and it was safer to work in pairs. Then the 'mates' went to war and the word was imbued with wartime heroism and suffering. And now? 'Mate' has very little real meaning left, but still is a powerful word in our vocabulary with is affirmation of trust (Butler, 2003, p. 150).

Approaching the Story Bridge I asked myself: Would a similar description make sense in relation to the word "community"? Has the context of community changed as radically as the context of mateship, so that the word today refers to a valued idea more than to a lived reality? The answer I gave while dialoguing with myself in this way was probably less articulate than the question, but I figure it started with something like "no, I don't think so." The "gemeinschaft" of the old rural communities is gone most places, but it is hardly correct that in late modern societies there is nothing left but harsh individualism and fragmented, virtual communities. There are also strong signs of people recreating and reclaiming community. This seems to have happened in music therapy too.

I was preparing myself for a paper in the 29th National Conference of the Australian Music Therapy Association (AMTA), a conference that had been given the theme: Music Therapy: Creating Connections, Strengthening Communities. The conference, located in the rough and remarkable Powerhouse Museum of New Farm, Brisbane, turned out to be a fascinating event and for me a strong experience of community. The hospitality of Liesel Bremhorst, Janet Taylor-Wishart, and the other members of the conference committee was part of that experience, and so was the openness and friendliness of the Australian colleagues I met, from pioneers such as Ruth Bright and Denise Grocke to young and enthusiastic students. Adding to this was the stimulating quality of a number of presentations on community music therapy. In fact, I have never been attending any event comparable to this conference concerning the number and range of papers and presentations developed with a community perspective. I may mention some of them:

Katrina McFerran and Jane Mahrer had a presentation on CHAT, a community based program developed at an adolescent health centre to support young people who are disconnected from their peers. Rosemary Faire asked "What do you care about?" in a paper on music therapy in social change work. The challenges of developing COMMA (Community Music Therapy Access Incorporated) were described by Rachel Nendick, while Carolyn Jones showed and contextualized some convincing video clips on the role of military musicians in the Bougainville peace process. Mary Rainey Perry discussed the evolution of a community music therapy group for adults with traumatic brain injury, stressing the value of developing partnership with community associations and community lead agencies and also focussing upon how theoretical support for her work could be found in texts informed by cultural psychologists such as Lev Vygotsky. In a moving presentation which involved sign communication in Auslan and its translation to English, Vicky Abad, Sally Strobridge, and Kristina Anderson presented how the Sing & Grow project works with the creation of connections between cultures through an early intervention music therapy program with Deaf parents and their hearing children. Michelle Arthy-Chan's motto "Encourage, Challenge, Sing!" framed her paper on how she worked with the promotion of a sense of community within and beyond the residential facility through a choral music therapy program. Clare de Bruin demonstrated how she worked with song writing in the classroom, in relation to a traumatic event, and Megan Glass in "Music for Everyone" revealed how she worked with music in order to break down communication barriers and creating connections within a multicultural aged care residential setting.

The list in the previous paragraph could have been made much longer. It was just astonishing for me to see the richness of community based approaches discussed in this conference. In light of the relatively short history of usage of the term community music therapy in the international community of music therapy, this was striking. In me it created a sense of expectation in relation to a future event to be arranged in the same city. In July 2005 the 11th World Congress of Music Therapy (http://www.musictherapy2005.com) will be arranged in Brisbane. This will be the first World Congress ever in the pan-Pacific region, and AMTA has established a broad and thought-provoking theme for the congress: Music Therapy: From Lullaby to Lament. With this theme the organizers effectively communicate the breadth and depth of music therapy as a contemporary discipline and profession. From Lullaby to Lament conveys a vision of music in and as life for clients, therapists and other agents. From Lullaby to Lament suggests the relevance of music therapy in developmental, preventative, curative, and rehabilitative processes, but also in social and cultural processes of non-clinical contexts. The organizers thus seem to have the intention of stimulating a continued development of the dialogue and discussion initiated in the 10th World Congress in Oxford, where community music therapy and social aspects of the music therapy endeavour were put on the agenda in a much more focussed way than what has been common in previous congresses.

Other music therapists with other interests will certainly have different reasons for looking forward to this congress, and I am sure that there will be plenty of reasons for coming to Brisbane in 2005, the beauty of the beaches surrounding the city being one of them. The memory of the Brisbane community dinkum experience may be good enough reason for me.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Felicity Baker for bringing me to Rainbow Beach and for giving me The Dinkum Dictionary.

References

Butler, Susan (2003). The Dinkum Dictionary. The Origins of Australian Words. Melbourne: Text Publishing.

How to cite this page

Stige, Brynjulf (2003) A Brisbane Community Dinkum Experience. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2003-brisbane-community-dinkum-experience