The Sound of Place: Rouse Hill House and Farm’s Music Collection

Abstract

For many Australians, heritage sites and house museums are a popular form of entertainment. They are also crucial to understanding our multi-viewpoint ‘historical consciousness’[1] and our collective sense of story about who we might be as a community, in the present and in the future, as well as who we were in the past. Until recently, most of these sites could be seen, read and felt, but not heard.

In order to solve one of the silences of these heritage places, this thesis examines the sheet music collection, roughly 1,500 objects, of one such site, Rouse Hill House & Farm, Museums of History NSW.

I use recent cross-area research methodology, with particular emphasis on creating narrative for visitor interpretation (Sound Heritage UK) employing both the tangible object archive archaeology, in combination with the intangible uses or performance practices of the object; the intangible practice being uncovered through social, oral and archival source histories.

This thesis is a combination of the areas of Australian social and public history, heritage and museum studies, musicology and historically informed performance, all combined in the new discipline of Sound Heritage.[2] Most of this intangible practice evidence is generated by women, in domestic and local site history – social, oral and performance practice ‘her-stories’, through family memory keeping.

I attempt to uncover and re-situate the popular music collection of Rouse Hill House within a broader Sydney culture of the time, and also try to understand the music collection through Rouse family generational use and ownership, thus providing human story, narrative – music making in practice – for public engagement/hearing with both music and site at Rouse Hill House and Farm.

This thesis will propose possible ways of hearing a 19th-century heritage site for the general visitor, situated within the social context of 1840s–1914 Sydney, and suggest ways in which this methodology can be used particularly to understand women as the linchpins in the broader social context of domestic music making in 19th-century New South Wales.

[1] Anna Clark, Private Lives Public History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2016).

[2] Jeanice Brooks, Matthew Stephens and Wiebke Thormählen, eds, Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses (London: Routledge, 2022).