Redmond Barry Fellow 2012

In the early 1900s, Australian artists and musicians had a tendency to flit between one hemisphere and the other, between the Old World and the New. Torn by the desire for creature comforts at one moment and the will to adventure the next, they were often unable to choose between what some perceived as the narrow, culture-starved glorified-country-town of their upbringing (wherever that might be in Australia), in contrast to the enticing mirage of a progressive, spontaneous, creative and 'anything-is-possible' Europe. While nearly all such individuals identified strongly with Australia, they also harboured an unreconciled relationship with that nation. It might have been 'home', but it wasn't 'Home'.

Dr Pear's project considered the formative years of Percy Grainger, particularly those character traits which he believed marked him specifically as an Australian (despite the British passport he carried and the American one he was later to adopt). It questioned the presumption that 1890s Australia—and Melbourne in particular—was entirely the cultural backwater which drove the culture-seeker overseas in the first place. Dr Pear's research at both the State Library and the Grainger Museum sought to identify more precisely the young Percy's educational milieu in all its manifestations: pedagogically, socially, and even geographically.

It also aspired to identify and tease apart those influences his mother might have had on the child's formation, and those of his talented but oft-neglected father, John Harry Grainger. This latter aspect of the project proved more successful than anticipated, and Dr Pear now has confidence in having established a more rounded portrait of the child Grainger's social and educational development, enhancing (and perhaps at times contradicting) the two biographical accounts (by John Bird and Paddy Dorum) currently heavily relied upon by musicologists and historians. This Fellowship will enable Dr Pear to write the initial chapters of a new biography of the composer.