Diasporic Transpositions: Indigenous and Jewish Performances of Mourning in 20th-Century Australia

In recent years, ethnomusicologists have shown increasing interest in the complex relations between musical performance and commemoration (for example, Reily 2006), personal and collective memory (Muller 2006; Shelemay 2006), loss (Reyes 1999) and forms of mourning (Magowan 1994; Randhofer 2004, 36-41). Regina Randhofer suggests that lamentation ‘is an anthropological universal, to be found in practically all cultures in the world, appearing as an expression of situations of travail in connection with events causing existential privation (Welten 1980, 736), such as death, sin, destruction, loss, military defeat, a threatening criminal process and so forth’ (2004, 38). With her study of the musical practices of Vietnamese refugees, Adelaida Reyes (1999) was one of the first ethnomusicologists to address the particular experiences of loss articulated musically by refugees, a theme that has subsequently been taken up by others (for example, Baily 2005). Mourning and loss are clearly related to memory, postmemory and commemoration in complex ways. ¹ These relationships, and their musical articulations, are complicated by histories of conflict, colonialism and diasporic encounter.