Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 Noisy Silences : Complexity in Non-Indigenous Central Australian Soundscapes in the 1970s
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Silence is a powerful concept that many read in stark metaphorical, binarised and/or ahistorical terms. By contrast, sound historians can show how metaphors like silence take on specific historical power, but elide complexity in the heard world, and how they change. This article uses Robyn Davidson’s popular travelogue, Tracks (1980), to investigate how the non-Indigenous meanings of the iconic motif of Central Australian silence were shifting in the 1970s, in line with acoustic ecology and second-wave feminism that positively valorised certain sorts of quiet and/or listening. But silence is multivalent and it also developed negative metaphorical connotations in the 1970s, especially as shorthand for the way many Australians had obscured Indigenous presence. By reconceiving 1970s silence as entangled with noise, we can better understand complexity and change in these non-Indigenous soundscapes.' (Publication abstract) 

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon History Australia vol. 20 no. 1 2023 25962606 2023 periodical issue

    'We are twenty! This year the journal is delighted to mark 20 years of publication, making us classic zoomers. We salute our Gen-X parents, too, the Australian Historical Association, on turning 50 this year. We congratulate them on deciding to produce us in 2003, back when they were 30.' (Kate Fullagar, Jessica Lake, Benjamin Mountford  & Ellen Warne: Editorial introduction)

    2023
    pg. 137-153
Last amended 27 Mar 2023 16:55:42
137-153 Noisy Silences : Complexity in Non-Indigenous Central Australian Soundscapes in the 1970ssmall AustLit logo History Australia
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X