Brass bands, characterised by their strict all-brass and percussion instrumentation, have been a continuous facet of music-making in Australia for over 150 years. Across the country today, there are over 170 active brass band organisations that engage thousands of people both through player membership and public performances.

Despite this sustained presence in many towns across Australia, researchers have given very little attention to what brass band participation meant for participants and their communities. As a result, the role that brass bands have played in shaping the musical lives of these participants and more broadly, Australian musical life remains underrepresented in music studies. Fortunately, this gap is not due to a lack of available information.

Brass bands in the collection

Lots of material related to brass bands can be found in public and private archives. The most substantial of which is the Papers of Jack Greaves housed in the Library. Spending time with this collection as a 2026 Scholar allowed me to begin to fill in some of these gaps. 

Jack Greaves spent his life collecting and archiving material related to Australian brass bands. His donation of this material to the Library has made available a wealth of band history in the form of ephemera, magazines, books, photographs and all kinds of other brass band documentation. Whilst I was blown away by the scope of the material, what struck me most in Greaves’ collection was the care and passion that is so evidently woven throughout his entire archiving project.

Greaves kept copies of the back-and-forth handwritten communication between himself and those who provided him with new collection material. He reviewed the work of other brass band historians, and his files are meticulously organised, named and dated. Given the sheer number of individual newspaper stories glued to pieces of paper and then sorted into themed cardboard sleeves, it was not difficult for me to imagine the number of hours Greaves would have spent immersed in this material.

Australian brass bands must have been so meaningful to Greaves that he dedicated an insurmountable effort to ensuring that records of their history would be maintained. Spending four weeks with this collection gave me a glimpse into the world of a life-long collector and set the tone for how I would approach the material itself. What did it feel like to participate in Australian brass bands of the past, and how are these feelings represented in the material at the Library?

Brass band participation and the archives

My own background of long-term participation in Australian brass bands and my current ethnographic research on belonging in these ensembles means that I am interested in how people experience brass band participation. By considering the affective components of archives at the Library (the feelings of the archivist, of the people represented in the archive, and of myself), I was able to reflect on relationality and meaning in band participation, and how the collections may help broaden how we think about these ensembles.

In the material, I found many late 19th and early 20th century photographs of brass bands that were highly staged, similar to school photos but with militaristic uniforms, polished instruments, and very stern facial expressions. Filing through the hundreds of group photos felt a bit like playing spot the difference. The serious way in which photographers captured these bandspeople gave the impression that banding was a rigid and disciplined endeavour. It was easy to feel a bit sad for the photographed young boys who looked like sombre little soldiers in their suits and caps.

However, as I flipped through the photos, I’d occasionally get a nice surprise. Someone had positioned their dog to be at the front of a band photo, another three were poised around a table mid-pour of beer, a dad sat with a baby cradled in his lap amongst his band peers. Perhaps then, I thought, most photos of these bands were not really showing the full dynamics of brass band involvement. Instead, it is in these playful instances of disruption to serious representations of brass bands that affect is archived.

And this is not to say that bands weren’t serious. Material in Greaves’ collection included bands’ extremely detailed financial and membership records, meticulous meeting minutes, and player registration reports. Books about band anniversary achievements e.g. Gosford City Brass Band Celebrates 100 Years, and newspaper articles about long-term civic service within local communities clearly demonstrate the ingenuity and significant contribution made by brass bands around Australia. 

At the same time, it seemed that the aspects of brass bands that were visible to an outside audience did not adequately capture the band world for participants. This became clear when I read some of the band magazines in Greaves’ collection that were distributed amongst bandspeople, and which took a markedly different tone to material presented for external eyes and ears.

Reading Ozoompah

In a clever satirisation of the tension between external perspectives of brass bands and player experience, the 1976 band journal with the title Ozoompah launched. A portmanteau of Oz (Australian) and Oompah (a style of music associated with Oktoberfest), Ozoompah got its name despite the: 

This was to poke fun at the misattribution of brass bands in the print media as Oompah bands. Ozoompah felt like reading a skit. At times, letters to the editor were crass and offensive, articles were lined with dry humour, and the back-and-forth debates between writers each month present Australian bands as a big tongue-in-cheek club. 

These magazines make overt a side to brass band participation that is rare in other parts of the archive. Of course, it is impossible to generalise the perspectives of these contributors with the many brass band players around Australia. Nonetheless, when opinions are (sometimes strongly) expressed in Ozoompah, I see a group of people who feel deeply invested in their brass band movement. 

My National Library Scholarship

As well as being an invaluable educational experience, my time with the Greaves’ collection was personally satisfying. I kept seeing names of people that I recognised from my own brass band involvement and it gave me joy to share images and stories of the material with them. This brought into the present a diversity of material would at first appear to capture the past. I felt as though my own close proximity to the collection, which connects me to Greaves and the other bandspeople in the material, in and of itself affirmed the relational nature of participating in brass bands. 

The affective components of the archive, of Greaves’ obvious care in documenting Australian brass band history, of the playful disruptions in photographs, of the wit and cheekiness shared between band members, and of the connectedness between those involved in the movement, highlight the importance of considering participant experiences and feelings in Australian brass bands. This Scholarship allowed me to spend time with the collection, enabling reflection on these aspects of band participation.