"We're Just Bush Mob": Producing Aboriginal Music and Maleness in a central Australian Recording Studio

Over the last sixty years, country, rock and reggae music have become important everyday expressive forms among Aboriginal people in Central Australia. In this particular socio-musical scene, these forms of music have emerged as an almost exclusively male activity. The recording studio of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association in Alice Springs likewise continues to constitute a socio-musical space dominated by Aboriginal men from diverse backgrounds. This paper explores the ways in which the musicians and studio workers assert and negotiate a diverse range of ancestral and more recent local and global forms of accumulating male respect and status as they work with each other in the professional and technological regimes of this studio. In the process they reproduce as well as rework their distinctive and shared sense of worth as Aboriginal music makers and men.