'…that keen interest we have for the strange and the rare…'

The Radio Broadcasts of Adelaide Composer Hooper Brewster-Jones (1930–1933)

Abstract

The surviving transcripts of Adelaide composer Hooper Brewster-Jones’s
lecture broadcasts given in the early 1930s on Adelaide’s recently
established ABC radio station 5CL reveal a cosmopolitan Australian
composer eager to engage with other cultures. His cosmopolitanism is
very much a rooted even provincial one, clearly embedded in his
particular historical and cultural context. Nonetheless, the story of
Brewster-Jones’s broadcasts helps to destabilise and complicate the
picture of early twentieth-century Australian musical history. His
encounters with musics modern, ancient and exotic add a missing page
to Australian broadcasting history and challenge the received
orthodoxy of Australian music from this period as a pale imitation of
English pastoralism.