ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the process by subsuming the case studies presented here under the ecological principle of resilience: the capacity of a system to absorb threshold disturbance while undergoing change. The chapter conceptualize two distinct systems as inextricably intertwined within a social-ecological system, i.e., in a complex assembly of nature and people: eucalypt vegetation structures that supply musical instruments, and the music-culture traditions that rely on these structures. The Canadian ecologist C. S. Holling devised resilience theory in 1973 to describe the persistence of natural systems in the face of changes in ecosystem variables due to natural or anthropogenic causes. From the 1920s through the 1940s, gumleaf playing peaked in Australia's populous southeastern crescent the nation's first species factory for introduced plants, and, coincidentally, the eucalypt woodland region with the highest continental concentration of bioregions under high environmental stress. Thus the concept of resilience coupled through their connection to Eucalyptus, gumleaf music and didjeridu traditions are context-dependent.
