Abstract
Over the last forty years, Dunedin—a small city with a population of 120,000 in the South Island of New Zealand—has become a metonym for New Zealand rock music. Scholars have identified the disproportionate national and international media attention that a narrow network of Dunedin rock musicians has received since the establishment of the record label Flying Nun in 1981. As a consequence of this narrow network, Dunedin is now accepted as the centre of alternative New Zealand culture, but analysis or explanations as to how this reputation emerged other than textual analyses are scarce.
This thesis uses oral histories of forty-six rock musicians who have played in bands between 1978 and 2018 in Christchurch and Dunedin to explore the motivations and processes that produce rock music culture in the South Island of New Zealand. Bourdieu’s theoretical approach to how social and cultural capital are key vectors in cultural production is used to explain how the resources that produce Dunedin rock music culture are managed and exchanged among individuals within a network that linked New Zealand cities. Although one of the repeated claims about Dunedin rock music culture is that it is made without money, this thesis shows how those outside Dunedin have contributed to the financial capital necessary to create the infrastructure required to develop the scene, including record labels, professional recording studios, venues, and media and distribution outlets.
The most important contributions to this infrastructure have come from Christchurch, the largest city in the South Island, which supplied audiences, recording venues, and record labels that enabled what became known exclusively as Dunedin rock music to reach wider audiences in New Zealand and across the world. Rather than Dunedin rock music culture experiencing a peak in the 1980s or a new golden age, this thesis demonstrates how Dunedin rock music culture has been sustained within one ongoing network among three successive cohorts of rock musicians and artists who lived at some stage in Dunedin. Over the last forty years, the cultural reproduction and the transmission of rock music practices have built and expanded the social and cultural capital resources within the habitus of the Dunedin Sound.