Transnational and transcultural exchange has long attracted scholarly investigation, but framing and analysing such contact has proved an ongoing challenge. The idea of ‘global music history’ has recently attracted music scholars as a new framework to explore the complex issues surrounding cultural contact, exchange, and entanglement from a decentred, non-hierarchical perspective. Still, it has also attracted criticism for reviving the problematic legacy of comparative musicology and appropriating approaches long used outside the Anglosphere.
This special issue journal welcomes proposals of unpublished material that asks what research on Australian music and musicians can contribute to these discussions. For instance:

▪ How do Australia’s histories of European settlement, racial nationalism, restrictive immigration, forced labour, and multiculturalism expand existing narratives of music, race, migration, and diaspora in other settler-colonial societies, especially the United States and Canada?
▪ How does music’s role in relations between Australia’s First Peoples and their Southeast Asian and Pacific neighbours contribute to explorations of global networks not centred on or driven by the West?
▪ How has the growth and development of musical life in Australia been fostered or impeded by its status as a British colony and a belief in British/European cultural authority, particularly about notions of insularity, progress and parochialism?
▪ What can Australia’s position as a British colony engaged in colonialism in Southeast Asia and the Pacific tell us about music and colonialism?
▪ How does Australia’s sometimes self-image as an Anglo-Western society located in geographic networks of Southeast Asia and the Indian and South Pacific Oceans disrupt narratives of Western and non-Western cultural contact that centre the West on Europe and North America? How does it disrupt the very concept of “Western music”?
▪ What styles, idioms or genres of music have arisen from transnational and transcultural exchange?
The editors especially welcome new scholarship that explores new and emerging concepts and frames of thinking relating to Indigenous music, female participation, popular music, minority groups, and interdisciplinary research.

Abstracts of up to 350 words in Word (.doc or .docx) format should be sent to Rachel Orzech, orzechr@unimelb.edu.au, by 1 October 2024. Please include your name and contact information in the abstract document. Decisions will be sent by 1 November. Authors whose abstracts have been selected will be invited to submit a full article of up to 6000 words (including references) by 1 April 2025. Final inclusion in the special issue depends on the Journal’s double-blind peer review of the full article.