Ms Grace Koch

Grace Koch is an ethnomussicologist, audiovisual archivist, and researcher in Australian Aboriginal land rights and native title. After completing a Master's degree in Music Education at Boston University in 1973, she and her husband Harold Koch moved to Canberra, where she taught music education at the (then) Canberra College of Advanced Education. In 1975, she became assistant to Alice Moyle at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now AIATSIS). When the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976 (Cth) was enacted, she was seconded by the Central Land Council to work on documenting three land claims with duties involving tracing song lines through claim areas and gathering evidence of women's connections with the land. After the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) was passed, she did similar work for two native title claims.The book, Kaytetye Country, arose from a request by the Central Land Council to do oral histories with the people living around Barrow Creek, N.T.

She presented a course in Aboriginal music at the University of Vienna in 1993. Later, she worked with the collections held by the City Archive of Cologne, Germany that had been damaged by a collapse of the building.

She has been active in the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives for many years serving as Editor and was awarded a Special Recognition Award for Outstanding service in 2008. Her last position with AIATSIS was as Native Title Research and Access Officer. She was a C.I. for the ARC project, Return, Reconcile, Renew that worked with the return of Indigenous human remains held in various institutions both in Australia and overseas. Her many publications are in the areas of Aboriginal music, audio archiving and Indigenous rights to collections held in institutions, and history. Along with R.M.W. Dixon she was awarded the Stanner Prize from AIATSIS for the book, Dyirbal Song Poetry. Presently she is history researcher for the True Echoes Project, documenting the 1898 wax cylinder collection of Torres Strait Islander material recorded by the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait and interviewing descendants of people recorded. The project is sponsored by the British Library and the Leverhulme Trust. Forthcoming are a book chapter on the politics of research within the Torres Strait community during the True Echoes project, and the description of the historical research underpinning the True Echoes project.  Another project, with Stephen Morey at Latrobe University, is a book on traditional Aboriginal music of the state of Victoria.

She has been working as a Volunteer Guide at the National Gallery of Australia where she gained her qualification in 2014. She has presented various seminars to Guides on pronunciation of Australian Indigenous  languages and the Australian art glass movement. The Gallery awarded her special recognition awards in 2019 and 2024.

BSc Music Education, Eastern Nazarene College, Wollaston, Mass., USA 1967, M.Mus., Boston University, USA 1973