Immigrant Australian Church Music

When the British military arrived with a band of transported convicts in Australia in 1788, they brought  the hymn repertoire of the English-speaking Churches with them. Since then, Church music of many cultures has found its way to Australia, performed by the many waves of immigrants seeking to make a home in the new land. Much of the Australian immigrant Church music repertoire reflects the immigrants' longing for a stable society where they could bring up their families in peace. After the convict era, postwar immigration brought masses of European refugees and immigrants to Australia under the White Australia policy, and with them came a rich repertoire of Italian, Greek, Russian, and many other European Church musics. In the gold rush era, Christian Chinese and Malaysian people added their Church mission music to Australian liturgies. Later, the doors of Australia opened to other Asian, Indo-Chinese, Indian, Chinese, Korean, Polynesian and Middle Eastern peoples, and to the new genres of Church music that came with them.

The great Australian melting pot of immigrant Church music is fascinating. It presents a unique opportunity for anyone with an interest in religious music, to observe multicultural Church music in vigorous, tolerant, and enlivening action, in welcoming environments. Scholarly research into Australia's fusion musics is gathering pace, for example, PhD Samantha Dieckmann's recent paper presented at the Musicology Australia Conference "The Power of Music", on Anglo-Australian, Filipino and Sudanese community music in Blacktown, Western Sydney.

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