Singing Peace Into Existence? Music and Peacebuilding in Australia

This article connects research on music and peacebuilding with an exploration of related Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of being, knowing and doing. To understand the vision and potential of music-based peacebuilding in Australia, we consider Indigenous-led music and culture festival Treaty in the Park as a timely case study. Engaging the concept of ‘resonance’, we illuminate how peacebuilding knowledge is grounded in place through sound, song and music. Noting intersections with broader traditions of Indigenous resistance and resurgence, we suggest that the peacebuilding considered here is animated by, and sustained through, music’s capacity for resonating with Country and across generations of people. In this way, audiences may see, hear and feel prospects for peace rippling beyond what dominant approaches to understanding, analysing and practicing peacebuilding typically offer. We thus theorize these music-based peacebuilding practices as offering uniquely powerful potential for advancing intergenerational peacebuilding.