Rock band: A third, brave space for Indigenous language

This chapter focuses on popular music, and particularly the purportedly egalitarian “rock band” format, as a framework for intercultural performance. The ways in which rock bands with Indigenous and non-Indigenous members collaborate provides an already-existing model of how third space or “brave space” intercultural collaboration can work. Inter-band relationships, Indigenous domains of language and concepts of Country are often integral to how these bands make music. In Australia, the rock band format can be viewed as a mutually understood space for exchange, experimentation and working things out, with the common musical language of the rock band potentially facilitating the foregrounding of Indigenous languages and worldviews. In considering this kind of intercultural collaboration in rock bands, music is best conceptualised as not just a product but a process. The binary “Indigenous/non-Indigenous” informs the way that Australians produce and consume culture, so terms such as “Indigenous music,” “Indigenous band,” and “Indigenous artist” are persistently applied.