Sounds of Our Town: The Wollongong Edition

This zine arises out of a project run by three researchers - Sarah, Raph and Zel - from Griffith University, Australia. We received a small grant from Griffith in 2018 to support research into popular music heritage initiatives in places that have gone through industrial decline. Although Australia is home to many deindustrialising cities- Newcastle, Geelong;' Elizabeth - we selected Wollongong for our study. While each of these places has a rich music history, Wollongong was an example of a city where various efforts had been made to document and celebrate this history. Heritage initiatives like Steel City Sound (an online archive founded by Warren Wheeler in 2010 and subsequent exhibition at Wollongong Art Gallery) and The Occy: A Doco (a 2014 documentary produced and directed by Nathan Burling commemorating the Oxford Tavern, an important live music venue that closed in 2010) highlighted an emerging recognition of popular music's value to people's lives and sense of community. In October 2018, Raph and Zel spent a week in Wollongong exploring the town and talking to locals involved in heritage projects and the live music scene. One of the key things we took away from this visit was the importance of passionate, committed individuals in the community who were taking a grassroots, do-it-yourself, doit- together approach to telling stories about popular music's past. In 2019, we received more funding from Griffith University to expand the scope of our research, allowing us to visit Birmingham, UK and Detroit, USA. Like Wollongong, Birmingham and Detroit drew our interest because they're deindustrialising cities with rich music histories and heritage initiatives that serve to reflect on those histories. We were interested in what parallels could be drawn between these places, but also what aspects made them unique. Zel travelled to Detroit and Birmingham to connect with and learn from Carleton Gholz, director of the Detroit Sound Conservancy, and Jez Collins, founder of the Birmingham Music Archive. Meanwhile, Raph returned to Wollongong for more interviews and observations. All of this activity made us determined to find a way to bring together the insights we had collected and the perspectives and expertise of the people we had spoken to, with the aim of generating productive dialogues around the potential benefits and challenges bound up in doing popular music heritage. But we wanted this to occur in a public space, where we could invite and engage with the people of Wollongong. All of this led us to hold the 'Sounds ofOur Town' event at the Wollongong Art Gallery on the evening of Thursday, 17 October 2019. The event consisted of a panel of 6 people involved in heritage preservation in different capacities and in different places. We include the full transcript of the panel conversation on the pages that follow. The purpose of this zine is to document and share our experiences and reflections on what we found in Wollongong. We start with an overview of some of the ideas that informed our research project, followed by the flyer that we circulated to promote the Sounds of Our Town event, a transcription of a radio interview that Sarah, Raph, Jez and Carleton did with Lindsay McDougall (The Doctor') at ABC lllawarra, and a transcription of the Sounds of Our Town panel discussion. The zine concludes with contributions from two of our panel members, who reflect on their short time in Wollongong through the lens of the 'sounds of their towns' of Birmingham and Detroit.