Protecting the National Soundscape: The Gramophone Industry and the Nation in the 1920s

This article offers a cultural reading of the 1927 Tariff Board inquiry into gramophone record imports. The inquiry was a staging ground for visions of musical uplift in a wholesome and vulnerable nation. The manufacturers animated racialised and gendered rhetoric in service of their proposal to protect the local gramophone industry. The business elites that dominated the Board readily assumed a role as cultural arbiters, drawing on aesthetic predilections to shape trade policy. Two themes emerge: the racialised threat of jazz music, and anxieties regarding mass consumption. This episode highlights the contested nature of modernity in interwar Australia.