Georgiana McCrae’s manuscript music collections: a life in music

Abstract

This thesis considers the biographical, historical and musical significance of manuscript music collections belonging to the diarist, artist and musician Georgiana McCrae, who brought her collections from London and Scotland to Melbourne in 1841 and continued to extend them after her arrival. McCrae used music to help maintain her sense of national, class and gender identity through various challenging events in her life, including her migration. This thesis contributes to an understanding of how domestic music collections were used in Britain and its colonies in the nineteenth century for the purposes of education, socialisation and memorialisation.