Good-bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand's Great War by Chris Bourke was awarded the 2019 IASPM-ANZ Rebecca Coyle Prize.
The Rebecca Coyle Prize is awarded to the best paper on popular music in the Australia-New Zealand region in a given year. The prize is named in honour of long-time IASPM ANZ member Rebecca Coyle in commemoration of her work advancing popular music studies and mentoring emerging academic talent.
The judges were impressed by the quality and variety of submissions to the Rebecca Coyle prize. The 2018 winner was awarded to Chris Bourke for his book Good-bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War. The judges offered the following comments:
This elegantly written and highly illustrative work aimed at a readership beyond the academy represents a significant contribution to our historical understanding of music in Aotearoa/New Zealand during the First World War. It covers the role of a wide range of music traditions and practices in the lives of soldiers overseas and people on the home front.Good-bye Maorilandcaptures with striking force the ability of music to engender collective feelings and belonging during the war. The book weaves together stories of musicians and soldiers, instruments and songs, performances and battles. Bourke pays significant attention to Maori and women in emergent New Zealand musical identities shaped by imperial culture and other transnational flows. The variety and presentation of archival material is impressive and the writing gives a rich sense of the musical sounds of war. Please join us in congratulating Chris Bourke.
Chris Bourke is a writer, journalist, editor and radio producer. He has been arts & books editor at the NZ Listener, editor of Rip It Up and Real Groove, and producer of Radio New Zealand’s Saturday Morning with Kim Hill. He wrote the best-selling, definitive biography of Crowded House, Something So Strong (1997), and received a National Library Fellowship to write Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964, which went on to win Book of the Year and People’s Choice at the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards.
The International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) is an organisation established to promote inquiry, scholarship and analysis in the area of Popular Music. Founded in 1981, IASPM has grown into an international network of almost 600 members world-wide.
More information:http://iaspm.org.au/publication-prize/