Alice Marshall Moyle

Alice Marshall Moyle, who has died in Sydney at 96, has been described by her academic colleagues as "the grand lady of Australian music research" and "the standard-bearer of Aboriginal musicology".

Her work, which includes a history of Aboriginal music and dance through film, field recordings, archaeo-musicology and analysis, and the cataloguing and indexing of ethno-musicological material, has done a great service to the understanding of Aboriginal people and their culture.

Born at Bloemfontein in South Africa, Moyle was deeply impressed, as a small child, by her first encounters with choruses of African women singing as they worked.

She arrived in Australia at the age of four with her parents, Margaretta and Ellison Brown. While the Browns excelled in business, her mother's family loved music and scholarship. From her maternal grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, she learnt the words which were to become her credo, "Be sure of your facts and careful of your inferences."

Moyle was educated in Melbourne and achieved first class honours in music in the Leaving Certificate and the Exhibition at Fintona Girls' Grammar School. In 1930 she graduated from the University of Melbourne with a bachelor of music in piano and cello, and spent a number of years as a private piano teacher and music journalist.

In 1933 she married John Murray Moyle, a multi-talented kindred spirit and a family friend from her school days. While her husband served in the RAAF during World War II and for some years afterwards, Moyle continued writing and publishing. 

She took part in the vigorous postwar intellectual life in Sydney and was attracted to the University of Sydney by the appointments of John Anderson as professor of philosophy and Donald Peart as foundation professor of music. 

In the late 1940s she returned to formal academic studies there and was awarded a bachelor of arts (honours) degree in 1954 with a thesis on the music of ancient Greece. At this point Moyle was managing her roles as wife and mother of two daughters as well as student - a rare situation in the early 1950s.

A talk by A.P. Elkin, then professor of anthropology, during which he played some recordings of Aboriginal music, prompted her to undertake a musicological study of them for which she was awarded a master of arts (honours) in 1957. From 1960 to 1963 she worked part-time as a teaching fellow in the new music department.

Moyle undertook her first field trip to the Northern Territory in 1959, recording Aboriginal songs in Darwin and at Ayers Rock and Alice Springs. The trip was encouraged and financed by her husband, then editor of the journal Radio and Hobbies in Australia, later published as Electronics Australia, who also built the recording equipment she used during the trip. He died in 1960, having become a pioneer in his field of electronics and sound recording.