Australia’s First Piano – belated update
Surgeon George Worgan, thirty-three, improbably managed to bring a piano with him on the First Fleet. In 1790 he gallantly began to tutor Elizabeth Macarthur, telling her she’d ‘done wonders in being able to play off God save the King and Foots Minuet’ and that she was ‘reading the Notes with great facility.’ Worgan went…
Australian Colonial Dance
Serendipity used to mean flicking through a dictionary and finding interesting and unusual words. But now it means stumbling across fascinating websites. Like this one: Australian Colonial Dance. It’s a lovely little blog about dance and music in colonial Australia, with interesting information and (crucially) bibliographic lists of sources. Of course my favourite post is the…