Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Eerie Sounds, Then and Now: Listening In to Mid-Century Non-Indigenous Central Australian Soundscapes
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Mid-century non-Indigenous visitors to Central Australia such as the naturalist Hedley Finlayson (author of The Red Centre, 1935) and the journalist-cum-conservationist Arthur Groom (author of I Saw a Strange Land, 1950) wrote popular works that overturned prejudices about a “dead heart” and encouraged subsequent visitors and tourists. Yet they were often unsettled by eerie sounds. This article uses Mark Fisher’s notion of eeriness, as well as literature on the uncanny, to theorise the ambiguous sonic eerie. In particular, I show how, in the Australian settler-colonial context, the sonic eerie can prompt an unhomeliness that presences Indigenous dispossession or environmental degradation. In this way, it can undermine feelings of wonder and emplacement that other senses, including eyesight, might impart. But sonic eeriness need not always develop in that way, and it is often transient in its effects, even though it can result in echoes. While Finlayson and Groom overcame their unsettlement, part of the power that eeriness possesses is in the way in which those who read about it can also be affected by it. In these after-effects, we can still hear Indigenous claims to land being made, and the ghostly echoes of climate change.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Journal of Australian Studies vol. 46 no. 2 2022 24776425 2022 periodical issue

    'Our first general issue for the year once again demonstrates the vitality of Australian studies, exploring topics that range from 1970s feminist activism to postcolonial soundscapes and Cold War intrigues. The work included here continues to broaden thinking on Australian identity, culture and history, and it extends the very live conversation about the place, and its many communities, that we call Australia. This live-ness seems appropriate for our uncertain times in which the horror of international war, the unsettling threats of climate change and, domestically, potential upheavals in our federal political landscape with an upcoming election are playing out amid the uncertainties of the ongoing COVID pandemic and post-lockdown Australia. Within the scholarly field itself, the ongoing assault on the humanities by political leaders represents another source of unease. Yet even in these times of extraordinary pressure, researchers keep producing crucial work.' (Brigid Magner and Emily Potter, Editorial introduction)

    2022
    pg. 211-226
Last amended 11 Oct 2022 07:54:33
211-226 Eerie Sounds, Then and Now: Listening In to Mid-Century Non-Indigenous Central Australian Soundscapessmall AustLit logo Journal of Australian Studies
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