Category: Uncategorized
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Super Rats – Romanian lautari music, 145 Strings & biscuits
This interview features Tim Meyen and Pip Thompson from Super Rats – discussing Romanian (Roma) lautari music, the complexities of learning traditional music from different cultures, and the surprising merits of the humble lemon crisp biscuit. Super Rats is a pun. It sounds like the Romanian word supărați, meaning “annoyed ones”. ‘Lautari’ music comes from…
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Paddy Montgomery – Turkish Instrumentation & Music
Melbourne musician and multi-instrumentalist Paddy Montgomery talks to A Hidden Culture about his video submission for Sala Fest (Turkey) – the background of the music itself and the instruments featured in the performance. Paddy is a Melbourne based multi-instrumentalist specializing in a variety of genres. Proficient in regional Greek, Turkish and Balkan music, along with…
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Documenting Play: From the Front Line
This article was published in Play and Folklore no. 66, December 2016, by Museum Victoria. In 2007 and 2008 I had the privilege of working for the Childhood, Tradition and Change project as a fieldworker. The project was funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project Scheme and received additional support from the National Library of Australia,…
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Halloween in Australia? It’s been here much longer than you might think…
Earlier this month, farmer Rusty Dredge was preparing to harvest around 150,000 jack-o’-lantern pumpkins on his farm near Broome, WA. Most of these pumpkins will have now made their way to homes in Western and South Australia where they’ve been stabbed, hacked at, and lovingly transformed into ghoulish lanterns for Halloween. A steadily growing celebration in Australia, many…
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Superstition, Shoes & Secrets – Australia’s History of Concealed Objects and Evil-Averting Symbols.
WATCH VIDEO: Below is a transcript of the content that appears in the video (with a few extra pictures and a comment here and there): 1863 Sydney, Australia George and Mary Hurley move into a house in Lower Fort Street, Dawes Point. During this period, families often lost their children to disease and illnesses that pose no threat today. Life expectancy was significantly…
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“It’s Just a Joke”: The Dark Side & Lore of Prejudice.
Knock-Knock… Joke cycles. We’ve all come across or taken part in them throughout our lives. There are chicken jokes, knock-knock jokes and lightbulb jokes. Remember those awful dead baby jokes? The jokes that circulated when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff in 1986? Not long after email became a ‘thing’, it took just hours (some…
A Hidden Culture 