ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses music's contributions to cultural life in rural Australia. It focuses especially on choir singing, a prevalent community music form in the Bega Valley. Choral practices exemplify grassroots elements of cultural sustainability and invite contemplation of a broader range of social issues in rural life, including the meanings of leisure activities, inter-generational relationships, gender norms and emotional belonging. The chapter argues that choirs enable expressive participation in a cultural pursuit, music, within a context that struggles to support commercial performances, and in which the existing orthodoxy of sports, pubs and churches often excludes women, older people and non-sports-orientated men. Community music exemplifies the unheralded cultural resources brought to bear on rural Australian life beyond the commercial sphere, as well as the quotidian means through which ordinary people negotiate new circumstances, isolation and entrenched social relations.
