Orchestrating the Waterfront Dispute
Music and Discourse in Bastard Boys
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.v10i1.103Keywords:
Television music, Australian television, industrial relations music, song versioning, Jan PrestonAbstract
Bastard Boys is a historically-inspired mini-series broadcast on ABC TV in May 2007. It dramatizes a set of events that are commonly described as the Waterfront dispute, an industrial showdown between unions, the then-conservative Coalition government and corporate owners that occurred on the Australian docks in April 1998. The screenplay for Bastard Boys by Sue Smith and direction by Ray Quint interpret the dispute through a thematic framework of war. This approach is musically supported by Jan Preston’s score and the featured use of a rendition – by ex-Noiseworks singer Jon Stevens – of Edwin Starr’s 1970 hit song War. This song was originally written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong as an anti-Vietnam War protest song and, used in the opening sequence of Bastard Boys, establishes the events in terms of confrontation. This paper analyses the mini-series through the lens of its music and argues that the sound of a drama can signal authorial intent and direct audience emotions in the interpretation of events.
References
Bell, Philip. 1998. ABC News, the 7.30 Report and the ‘Waterfront Dispute(s)’, April-May. Report prepared for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. http://www.abc.net.au/corp/ pubs/reportsindex.htm
Button, John. 2007. ‘Waterfront Blues’. The Monthly 24 (June). http://www.themonthly. com.au/tm/node/538. Accessed 6 February 2009.
Caughie, John. 2000. Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Coates, Norma. 2007. ‘Filling in Holes: Television Music as a Recuperation of Popular Music on Television’. Music, Sound and the Moving Image 1/1 (Spring): 21–25.
Coyle, Rebecca, and Philip Hayward. 2008. ‘Spectacular Synchronisation: Songs, Animation Cinema and Happy Feet’. In Music On The Edge: Selected Papers from the 2007 IASPM Australia/New Zealand Conference, Dunedin, ed. Dan Bendrups, 62–67. Dunedin (NZ): Otago University Print.
Dovey, Jon. 2002. ‘Confession and the Unbearable Lightness of Factual’. Media International Australia 104 (August).
Ellis, John. 2000. Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: IB Tauris.
Enker, Debi. 2007. ‘Reliving the Waterfront War’. The Age, 10 May, Green Guide: 12.
Frith, Simon. 2004. ‘What is Bad Music?’ In Bad Music: The Music We Love To Hate, eds Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno, 15–36. New York and London: Routledge.
Gorbman, Claudia. 2004. ‘Aesthetics and Rhetoric’. American Music 22 (Spring): 14–26. doi: 10.2307/3592963
Lipkin, Steven N. 2002. Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
McConville, Chris. 2000. ‘The Australian Waterfront Dispute 1998’. Politics & Society 28/3 (September): 393–412. doi:10.1177/0032329200028003005
Mittell, Jason. 2004. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York: Routledge.
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1990. Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Paget, Derek. 1990. True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen and Stage. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
—1998. No Other Way to Tell it: Dramadoc/Docdrama on Television. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Tagg, Philip. 1979. Kojak—Fifty Seconds of Television Music: Towards the Analysis of Affect in Popular Music. Doctoral thesis from the Department of Musicology at the University of Göteborg, Sweden.
Treacey, Mia. 2008. ‘Bastard Boys: Bastard History or Brilliant Drama?’ Metro 156: 140–47.
Trinca, Helen, and Anne Davies. 2000. Waterfront: The Battle that Changed Australia. Sydney: Doubleday.
Unattributed. 2007. ‘Hard Yakka’. The Geelong Advertiser, 11 May: TO5.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. 1989. ‘Changed Times, Changed Tunes: Music and the Ideology of the News’. In Australian Television: Programmes, Pleasures and Politics, eds John Tulloch and Graeme Turner. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
—1999. Speech, Music, Sound. London: Macmillan.
Warby, Michael, and Kate Morrison. 1999. ABC TV News and the 1998 Waterfront Dispute: Reporting or Barracking? Sydney: Institute of Public Affairs.
