Music museum curatorship: Reclaiming rights and responsibilities for musicking on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), Australia

The Music Curator describes a staged approach to support the reclamation of rights and responsibilities for music-making on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), in southern Moreton Bay, Queensland. This is part of enabling a localised movement toward claiming agency for planning the future course of musical development—especially early childhood musical development. The stages are to firstly understand the local music history from the perspective of local people. Secondly, the person-environment-occupation transactions are described to understand people’s musical relationships to Country. The Person-Environment-Occupation (P-E-O) Model, developed by Canadian occupational therapists (Mary Law and colleagues, 1996), is commonly used to assist individuals to adapt their occupational performance to adverse circumstances. Finally, local people and stakeholders are invited to engage in a strategic planning process to develop Music Action Plans for facilitating community musical development in the future. These stages of musical development are briefly discussed in this paper to highlight the role of the Music Curator, as an occupational therapist and ethnomusicologist, who facilitates the creative process. There are indications that the P-E-O model can be applied to the new context of music curatorship, especially for cultures with strong environmental relationships