The ‘Don Banks Box’ was commissioned and used by one of Australia’s most revered 20th-century artists, Don Banks. Banks was a composer of commercial music, including music for feature films, documentaries, animated films, television, advertisements, record libraries and theatre. He was a leading figure in the development of electronic music in England and Australia.

The ‘Don Banks Box’ was designed and made by a group of electronic music pioneers, engineers and entrepreneurs in late 1960s London. Around that time the sounds of the Moog synthesiser began to emerge in popular music and film. However, Moog synthesisers were large, cumbersome and very expensive which made access difficult for artists wanting to explore electronic music and its possibilities. Australian composer Don Banks, then living in London, asked his friends Tristram Cary and Peter Zinovieff, who later co-founded the synthesiser company Electronic Music Studios in London in 1969, to build him an instrument using this type of technology and they agreed. The ‘Don Banks Box’ was versatile and portable and may be considered a prototype of the first portable synthesiser, the VSC3.

Campbell Bickerstaff, Curator, 2020