Archaeology, Heritage and Performance in the Perth Popular Music Scene

Abstract

The city of Perth, Western Australia, has a long-running local popular music scene. Music is performed live in pubs and clubs, but it is often only a secondary reason for the running of these venues – consequently, the physical heritage of this music scene is often forgotten, with little memorialisation of the places and people involved in it. Archaeological investigation of one of these longer-running venues – the Fly By Night Club, a music venue from 1986 to 2015 – recovered a range of material culture that largely provides evidence of social encounters within the audience rather than of the many performers who have played at the Fly. The material evidence challenges the notion of modern music as capitalist commodity, including the idea of audiences as passive entities that exist in a subordinate position to performers, who occupy a privileged position within the paradigm of live music. Instead, the audience is shown to have considerable agency in the way it enhances its own enjoyment of live music, and to be an active participant in the social process of live musical performance.

Investigating Underfloor and Between Floor Deposits in Standing Buildings in Colonial Australia

“…It is also worth noting that the combination of dry underfloor areas and a dust matrix provides excellent opportunity for organic preservation. Indeed, at the majority of sites discussed here, fragile organic materials such as paper, textiles, fibers, leather, and plant materials were well preserved and survived intact for over a century (Auld et al 2019;Bryant et al 2020;Davies 2013b;Winter and Romano 2019).…”

“…Casey (2004: 33) suggested this may be in part because the presence of cellars in many American buildings precludes the capacity for deposits to build up underneath floorboards, so they are rarely encountered. However, nineteenth-century Australian buildings are less likely to have cellars, and indeed Australian research certainly shows the importance of under and between floor deposits in archaeological research (e.g., Bryant et al 2020;Casey 2004;Murphy 2013;Winter and Romano 2019). Their interpretation requires an understanding of the construction, life span, and use of buildings.…”

“…Auld et al (2019) and Bryant et al (2020) reported a particularly spectacular episode of caching at the Royal Derwent Hospital in Tasmania, with large bundles of material being deposited, seemingly by a single inmate over decades. Likewise, Drummond-Wilson (2018) reported the caching of numerous toys and items valuable to children at the Perth Girls Orphanage, while Winter and Romano (2019) reported the deliberate placement of drug paraphernalia below floorboards at the Artillery Drill Hall in Fremantle. Burke et al (2016) also discussed the caching of specific artifact types (e.g., shoes, garments, modified coins) under floors for ritual or superstitious purposes, though they note the difficulty in interpreting this behavior.…”

“…Following Lamotta and Schiffer (1999), in attempting to understand the accumulation of underfloor deposits, consideration must be given to the life span of a building, including initial construction techniques and subsequent repairs. For example, while the Brisbane Commissariat Store was originally constructed in 1829, floorboards were probably not installed until the 1860s (Murphy 2013: 551), while the Artillery Drill Hall was constructed directly over the top of a convict garden and the majority of material recovered during excavation was considered to predate its construction (Winter and Romano 2019). At both Fremantle Prison (Mein 2012) and Hyde Park Barracks (Starr 2015), the installation of latheand-plaster ceilings in the nineteenth century provided a TAQ for the deposition of a between floor deposit, while at Fremantle the replacement of many of those ceilings in the late twentieth century completely destroyed any deposit before it could be excavated.…”