Music, Culture and Society: Peter Beilharz, Trevor Hogan, and Clinton Walker
7 March 2008
The Vinyl Age: Rock Music in Australia, 1945-1995
Peter Beilharz, Trevor Hogan, and Clinton Walker
This paper represents a work in progress. This project promises the first coherent narrative and thematic work on rock and the postwar period, especially the sixties , with reference both to content and context . Team members - Clinton Walker, Peter Beilharz, and Trevor Hogan - will offer vignettes of enthusiasms including the idea of cultural traffic between cities outside and inside Australia, picking up themes like patterns of performance, innovation, imperfect mimesis, music technologies, production, consumption and youth culture. What happened in these spheres in the antipodes? What made these experiences different, as well as common, and what are the remaining resonances of these stories?
Peter Beilharz attended Croydon High School and Rusden College, and after a short experience teaching high school went to Monash University, where he completed a doctorate on Trotskyism in 1984. He taught at Monash, RMIT, and Melbourne before replacing Agnes Heller at La Trobe in 1988, where he progressed from lecturer through to personal chair in 1999. In 1980 he co-founded the international journal of social theory, Thesis Eleven. Since 2002 he has been director to the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at La Trobe. In the course of his travels Peter has been a visitor at Manila, Amsterdam, Chapel Hill, Mexico City, Sao Paolo and Tokyo and a visiting fellow at RSSS, ANU. He was Professor of Australian tudies at Harvard 1999-2000, and William Dean Howells Fellow at Harvard Library, 2002. He is a Faculty Associate in the Sociology Department at Yale. Peter has written or edited twenty books, including Labour’s Utopias (1992), Postmodern Socialism (1994), Transforming Labor (1994), Imagining the Antipodes (1997) and Zygmunt Bauman – Dialectic of Modernity (2002) and eighty papers.
Trevor Hogan is Senior Lecturer, Sociology Program, La Trobe, and Deputy Editor of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology. He is also on the Editorial Board of the journal Thesis Eelven.
Clinton Walker is an art school drop out and recovering rock critic who has published seven books on Australian music and cultural and social history, and written television documentaries and produced archival CD collections. His output includes: Inner City Sound (1982; re-released in the US in 2005, plus 2CD set); Highway to Hell (1994), the internationally best-selling biography of AC/DC’s Bon Scott; Stranded (1996); Football Life (1998), a personal history of grass roots Australian Rules culture; Buried Country (2001), the story of Aboriginal country music; and Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car _(2005). _Buried Country expanded to a documentary and 2CD set as well, while Walker co-wrote ABC TV’s hit 2001 rockumentary series Long Way to the Top and produced its Top 10 2CD soundtrack. He is currently working on a TV documentary series version of Golden Miles, with La Trobe University on the research project The Vinyl Age, and writing two new non-fiction (non-music-based) books.
Questions for all participants were taken at the end of this session. Download the questions in MP4 format or in MP3 format.