Cirrus@Austlit

'In his novel, Dirt Music, Tim Winton centres the narrative on the literary conceit of “dirt” music as an elemental thus generative force that at once ‘earths’ and elevates the human being. Luther Fox, one of two central characters, experiences a powerful epiphany upon playing a rudimentary musical instrument through which he creates a reverberative drone summoned from the environment using improvised natural acoustics. In doing so, he enters a paradoxical state of immanent transcendence through the drone experienced as a kind of pure sound. Thus, Dirt Music invites creative speculation about the power of music as source of both music (rhythm/harmony) and ontological ‘poetics’. In this article, I explore the literary significance and philosophical and ethical implications of what Winton has called (after the indigenous poet and elder, Bill Neidjie) “practical mysticism”. In this way, the transcendentally spiritual is always grounded in a “common-sense” experience of fully lived being, just as ‘dirt’ music is ‘rooted’ in the energised abstraction of the aharmonic drone – “common” as both a shared and an empirically immediate sense of wonder at the living, interactive presence of the natural world. In Dirt Music, then, the act of making music is richly allusive: to make music becomes a means of working towards a felt and vital connection with country; but it is also to understand how music works conductively as indigenous sound, effecting the animating interplay or interconnection between individual consciousness and the living presence and force of natural world as ecology and wilderness, landscape and country.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay focuses on verbal and sonic interactions, and the spatial relationships they create, in the new media work of the Australian sound and multimedia ensemble austraLYSIS, of which the author is a founding member. It discusses three recent works by austraLYSIS: motions (2014) and Film of Sound (2013) created together with US-based video artist Will Luers, and Disappearing (2013) jointly made with Sydney-based sound artist Greg White. The essay explores the ‘glocal’ interaction in the work of austraLYSIS between a cosmopolitan, transnational outlook and a strong sense of Australian culture: it suggests that this is part of a broader posthuman cosmopolitanism characteristic of some new media works. The article proposes a new theoretical framework with which to consider word and sound relationships in the fields of intermedia and multimedia work to which austraLYSIS’s creative output belongs. It analyses the non-hierarchical processes by which words and music are juxtaposed, merged or superimposed in such works to create emergent results, employing the concept of semiotic and perceptual exchange. In particular, the essay argues that such crossings of word and music can facilitate various forms of cultural crossing, resulting in what is conceptualized as ‘musico-literary miscegenation’.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper will examine the ultimately incommensurable divide between the listening ear and speaking voice that defines Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934). Read in the context of an internationally conceived modernist interrogation of the conditions of literary production, exemplified by the modernist magazine transition, where Stead first encountered James Joyce’s ‘in-progress’ publication of Finnegan’s Wake, Stead’s experimentation with sound in her first novel registers an exilic sensibility which would become a generative impetus for her later work. Founded in 1927, transition reflected the fusion of Dadaism, Surrealism and German Romanticism of its American expatriate editor Eugene Jolas. Initially published as a monthly magazine it was cut back after twelve issues to four issues a year and repackaged as ‘An International Quarterly for Creative Experiment’. Issues continued to appear, sometimes sporadically, until 1938, with later incarnations bearing the suggestive subtitle ‘International Workshop for Orphic Creation’. The revolutionary project of wresting the voice and the word from the machinery of mass production and rational communication, as this later subtitle indicates, was sustained throughout the life of the magazine. Reading Seven Poor Men of Sydney alongside this collective dismantling of the grounds of rational communication throws the novel’s particular convergence of a modernist inspired exilic aesthetics with a typically excoriating critique of bourgeois radicalism into sharp relief.' (Publication abstract)

'Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel Loaded (1995) is one of the most sonically intense Australian novels ever written. Taking place over a 24-hour period, it depicts Ari – a 19-year-old child of Greek migrants – engaging in a continuous flow of sexual encounters, drug taking, walking, dancing, and listening to music. Ari’s movements through the city of Melbourne immerse him in an almost constant series of soundscapes. Traversing between venues of excess and confrontation – the city street, the nightclub, the Greek club, and a variety of domestic spaces – Ari pushes the boundaries of his identity, his sexuality, challenging what it means to exist in Australian urban modernity. In this article I will trace Ari’s engagement with sound, sound technologies, and sound spaces. I argue that Ari maps a terrain of social and historical alienation, from the values of both his parents and friends, and of the larger society. This is not to say that Ari wholly rejects his parents and society: rather, his position is shot-through with contradictory attitudes and experiences. The fault-line of this ambivalence and tension is located around sound – mostly manifest as forms of popular music – where Ari is able to reject the mainstream, but also, at times, to connect with his family, and be part of a community. To chart Ari’s use of sound technology is, I argue, to encounter the core of Loaded’s portrayal of a second-generation Greek homosexual man grappling with the demands of contemporary Australian society.' (Publication summary)

'Scholarship on Rosa Praed continues to expand and generate interest in her writing and life, but her relationship with her deaf daughter Maud has not yet been canvassed. This paper seeks to reclaim the overlooked figure of Maud and to examine how Praed’s attitudes to sound and hearing manifested through the use of the grotesque in her novels, her interest in telepathy, and in her practice of listening to and communicating with the dead through writing and reading.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper explores the way silence has been defined and redefined as a means of describing the Australian landscape. Since the first stages of European colonisation in Australia, “silence” has been a common trope used to describe the Australian landscape. While many parts of the country, especially the interior, are indeed audibly silent, other “noisier” regions were also described as such. This silence has been identified as being based in a problem of description and an ‘ontological uncertainty’, which was in turn effaced through the rhetorical construction of silence as implying an absence or lack of meaning in the landscape prior to the arrival of European settlers. Judith Wright’s poetry interrogates this silence in these terms, demonstrating that it may not be a signifier of emptiness, but rather of signs or aspects of phenomena that escapes conceptual grasp. Taking a poststructuralist-informed, ecocritical approach to Wright’s poetry, I argue that Wright refigures the perceived silence of the Australian landscape in such a way that it comes to signify the presence of other-than-human configurations of landscape, without venturing to define them explicitly.' (Publication abstract)

'Drawing on Derrida’s reading of the crypt as both secret place and no place (Fors, 1986), and on Catherine Malabou’s work on the plasticity of form, this essay argues that buried in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well (1986) is a Pygmalion-esque melodrama about animated stones and the turning to stone of the animated. This essay shows how the novel’s juxtapositions of song and speech place it in a musical-dramatic tradition that, reaching back to antiquity, has crossed spatio-temporal borders and metamorphosed in migration through various media, genres and modalities (including theatre and novel). Like the words carved on the palm of a hand, The Well’s melodrama is partly buried within its written form. Melodrama is, in this Australian story, an encrypted imaginary that nevertheless animates the novel’s fascination with terrestrial death and sub-terrestrial life and its depiction of a human will to closure or burial that exists alongside a will to expose, transfer, transform and renew.' (Publication abstract)

'This article develops a reading of Gerald Murnane's 2014 novel A Million Windows, focusing on the manner in which the novel interrogates the nature of meaning making in fiction. It looks at the paired ideas of sound and silence: the former producing sense through sentences proper to the sense they need to convey; the latter impressing itself as what needs to be understood.' (Publication abstract)