Showing 18 items
matching language, themes: 'creative life','family histories','immigrants and emigrants','local stories'
Diverse state (25)
Aboriginal culture (13)
Built environment (2)
Creative life (6)
Family histories (2)
Gold rush (3)
Immigrants and emigrants (9)
Land and ecology (6)
Local stories (6)
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The Welsh Swagman
... of the patients was very noisy some times. wholly in a lunatic state He reported himself on the books from Cornwall but the plain welsh language came out from his mouth last night and he confessed this morning that he was a welsh man but nothing better or worse ...Joseph Jenkins was a Welsh itinerant labourer in late 1800s Victoria.
Exceptional for a labourer at the time, Jenkins had a high level of literacy and kept detailed daily diaries for over 25 years, resulting in one of the most comprehensive accounts of early Victorian working life.
Itinerant labourers of the 1800s, or 'swagmen', have become mythologised in Australian cultural memory, and so these diaries provide a wonderful source of information about the life of a 'swagman'. They also provide a record of the properties and districts Jenkins travelled to, particularly around the Castlemaine and Maldon area.
The diaries were only discovered 70 years after Jenkins' death, in an attic, and were in the possession of Jenkins’s descendants in Wales until recently, when they were acquired by the State Library of Victoria in 1997.
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Sound in Space
... , ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGES with works by Giovanni Gabrieli, Goerge Brecht and Donald Martino A return to arguably Melbourne’s finest acoustic space, the Customs House. The Palladian surroundings were the environment for a multi-lingual program at Pentecost ...Music always interacts with the architecture in which it is heard.
Melbourne has some wonderful acoustic environments. Often, these spaces were built for other purposes – for example the splendid public and ecclesiastical buildings from the first 100 years of the city’s history, and more recent industrial constructions.
Exploiting ‘non-customized’ spaces for musical performance celebrates and explores our architectural heritage.
For 30 years, the concerts of Astra Chamber Music Society have ranged around Melbourne’s architectural environment. Each concert has had a site-specific design that takes advantage of the marvellous visual qualities, spatial possibilities, and acoustic personality of each building.
The music, in turn, contributes a new quality to the perception of the buildings, now experienced by audiences as a sounding space - an area where cultural issues from music’s history are traversed, and new ideas in Australian composition are explored.
In this story take a tour of some of Melbourne’s intimate, hidden spaces and listen to the music that has filled their walls.
For further information about Astra Chamber Music Society click here.