Announcing the release of a grand chronicle of Astra’s history!

Across 9 chapters and more than 300 pages, the book Astra Travels in Sound and Space: Eight Decades of Exploratory Music-Making charts eight decades of remarkable evolution. Authors Aline Scott-Maxwell and Maree Macmillan weave together essays, images and personal reflections from composers and performers — a panorama of contemporary music-making in Melbourne and beyond.

With a publication date of 6 December 2025, we are so close to bringing this enormous project to a close.

RSVP to our Launch Event here.

Support the final stages of this project with a donation, and receive a copy of this piece of Melbourne Music history! 

All book sales and contributions fund author fees and publication costs.

Blurb

Music ensembles come and go but Astra is inked deeply into Melbourne’s ongoing cultural fabric. Through the voices of its extensive network of local and international composer and performer contributors, Astra Travels in Sound and Space plots the 80-year journey of this dynamic contemporary music organisation from its origins as a women’s string orchestra under Asta Flack, through the large choir and orchestral repertoire presented under George Logie-Smith, to the extraordinary 45 years of rich and imaginatively conceived programming under John McCaughey, joined recently by co-director, Andrew Byrne.

Embracing dance, theatre, improvisation, technology and other media in its performance of brand new and little-known older music, Astra’s remarkable body of work and profound influence on Melbourne’s music scene is revealed for the first time, not least in its idiosyncratic exploration of unusual architectural spaces.

About the Authors

Aline Scott-Maxwell is an ethnomusicologist, musicologist and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow attached to the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance at Monash University. Her doctoral research was on Southeast Asia, but she has also published extensively on music in Australia, including music and migration. She was Co-General Editor of the ground-breaking Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia.

Musicologist and performer, Maree Macmillan, is a former music educator at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University and a singer, pianist/accompanist/repetiteur, woodwind specialist and conductor. Her interest in intertextual interpretation across music, film, literature and theatre combines the scholarly with the practical—from the operatic to the experimental.

Income:

Private Donation for the Book Project - $30,000

Astra Contribution - $23,239

TOTAL: $53,239

Expenditure:

Personnel Costs (inc. design, writing, proofreading, indexing) - $49,435

Printing Costs - $23,804

TOTAL: $73,239

Ask: $20,000