This chapter explores two important interlinked strands in relation to Australian children’s music—children’s music informed by music education philosophy and pedagogy and children’s music informed by popular music. The chapter focuses on music for young children made by adults rather than music that children independently create for themselves. It also centres on television as a medium for engaging children with music. We begin with a social and cultural exploration of the main influencer of this genre, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) children’s television program Play School. We position this icon of Australian children’s culture as a leader in the development of children’s music, specifically linked to an educational agenda. We then explore the ways children’s music and the music industry intersect with a focus on two other popular Australian children’s television programs: Bluey and the variety of television series produced by children entertainers The Wiggles. Finally, we turn to how these programs represent race and otherness through song and ask questions about how these children’s programs attempt to empower both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children to sing, think and embody positive understandings about race in Australia.

Four prominent ‘origin stories’ for the American musical intertwine with the history of American operetta, which bifurcated, through the American legacies of Gilbert and Sullivan (including Cohan’s musical comedies) and The Merry Widow, into two distinct types: fast-paced musical comedies with an American profile, and the more romantically tinged, Viennese-derived American operetta. In balancing elements of these types, the American musical stage fostered camp reception modes, overtly emergent especially in Naughty Marietta, but becoming more closeted in the 1920s, when the two types again reached an extreme point of separation, with Gershwin’s and other musical comedies on one side of the divide, and Romberg’s and Friml’s hit operettas (along with Deep River), on the other, with operetta (or the ‘musical play’) bolstered by Hammerstein’s rhetoric laying claim to the higher aesthetic ground. Show Boat marked a probably deliberate attempt to remix and fuse the two types in a hybrid form that eventually stabilized in the wake of Oklahoma! Throughout, the element of camp, often passing as unintentional, governed the negotiations between the two types, allowing them to coexist in the musical play as it (re)emerged in the 1940s.