Aaron Wyatt is an accomplished musician, composer, conductor, researcher and assistant lecturer in Classical Music (Viola) at The Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance at Monash University. A Noongar man with Yamtji and Wongi heritage, Aaron picked up the violin at the age of 5.
“My love of music started early. As a kid, I played violin in the youth orchestra, and loved how social it was,” he says. “At university, I started studying biomedical science and electronic engineering but couldn’t imagine not having orchestral music as a central part of my life. So, I switched after my first year of study at the University of Western Australia to a music degree.”
Aaron is recognised as the first Australian First Nations person to conduct one of the major orchestras in Australia, conducting the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s performance of Long Time Living Here by Deborah Cheetham–Fraillon AO FAHA.
A current PhD student at Monash University, Aaron’s research focuses on animated graphic notation and electroacoustic compositions, which merge acoustic instruments, vocals, or environmental field recordings with electronic manipulation, to examine the history behind significant objects or places.
As the recipient of the 2026 John Mulvaney Fellowship, Aaron will travel to New Norcia access archives of Aboriginal documents, music, and language to create a major new musical work.
The music of New Norcia
Located 132km north of Perth, on the lands of the Yued people, New Norcia is Australia’s only monastic town. The community was founded and developed under the guidance of Spanish Benedictine monk Rosendo Salvado in 1843.
Under the Fellowship, Aaron will expand on the work of his collaborator, PhD student Allegra Giagu, who identified neglected musical material alongside evidence of Yuen and Noongar language documents in the archives in New Norcia.
“Existing musical works about New Norcia have been written by prominent Australian composers, including Peter Sculthorpe and Ann Carr-Boyd, but these tend to focus on the monastery itself,” says Aaron.
“They make reference to psalms to highlight the spirituality embedded within daily life there, they embrace Spanish influences to reflect the architecture of the town and the heritage of the monks, they imitate the sounds of the bells that punctuate the flow of time—but in no way do these musical pieces reference the Indigenous people whose connection to Country long predated the town.”
Truth-telling through music
The Benedictine community established St Mary’s Mission in 1848, and St Joseph’s Native School and Orphanage in 1861. Under government policy, Aboriginal children from across the state were forcibly taken from their families and communities and taken to New Norcia.
Those who grew up and lived in New Norcia have detailed the poor conditions and cruel punishments they endured while under the care of the Mission. Recent investigations suggest hundreds of children and young people are buried in unmarked graves across missions in Western Australia, including in New Norcia.
“The real reckoning with the brutality that was inflicted on young Indigenous children at the Mission. While this has been discussed in other media, like Alf Taylor’s memoir, the musical accounts of the place tend to take a more romanticised view of it. This project responds to that gap and offers the chance to embrace notions of truth-telling and start to correct the record in the canon of repertoire.
Over two trips, Aaron plans to work with Indigenous community leaders of New Norcia to create a new original piece which reflect the culture and histories of the traditional custodians, on their own terms.
“This work extends my current practice of electroacoustic compositions which examine the history behind significant objects or places, attempting to reckon with their past and in doing so free them from their historical baggage.”
Music & history
Aaron’s recent work, Moving On, written for the West Australian Academy of Performing Art’s Piano Panoply conference, sees acoustic instruments like modern piano, historic piano, and viola layered above an electronic sound world created using heavily manipulated samples of the Beck square piano, a likely candidate for the instrument that came out to colonial Australia on the first fleet.
The samples, mostly reversed and heavily time stretched, give the instrument an ethereal and expansive, synth-like quality, freeing it from its origins.
“I’m currently engaged in the composition of a much longer form, 40-minute work with Speak Percussion that will apply a similar process to Victoria’s Federation Handbells. Together, these works question colonial narratives around our history and ask how decolonisation might be approached in the art music world.”
Aaron’s work will premiere at a major jubilee event at the New Norcia Monastery in 2029. Following which he will publish the score, so the work may be programmed and performed by other ensembles and analysed and reference by musicians and researchers.
“Indigenous voices have long been absent from the Australian art music scene, and that is something that has only recently begun to change. The arts play a fundamental role in shaping our cultural narrative. Projects like this can be a powerful avenue for truth telling and can help to lead to greater diversity in our art music scene, ensuring that it better reflects and represents who we are as a nation.”
