Cirrus@Austlit

'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) 

'Scholars considering the acoustics of exploration have focused on how explorers heard Australian space in terms of silence, to argue this silenced Indigenous presence, or that stillness, was incongruous with how a place to be colonised should sound. I focus on the acoustically attuned Ludwig Leichhardt, a science-poet indebted to the Enlightenment, but also engaged with the German Romantic legacy. The manifold acoustic dimensions of expeditioning – including music – were important to him in different ways. The acoustic world could be assayed and harnessed in ways that were often consistent with colonialism. But there was also something fugitive about acoustics. They could mark a site for emotional engagement with place, and sometimes embryonic cross-cultural dialogue. Yet the possibilities were not always heard and, in line with Romanticism, the acoustic could drag down expeditioners’ spirits just as it could buoy them up. It could baffle or be a site for Indigenous resistance.'  (Publication abstract)

'This essay uses the 2003 symphonic Cantata Journey to Horseshoe Bend to examine some of the different entangled memories of German missionisation in Central Australia, including those held by the settler-European librettist Gordon Kalton Williams and members of the Indigenous Ntaria community choir, among others. Rather than simply reading this as a pernicious settler-Australian appropriation of Aboriginal culture, or as a simple story of harmonious intercultural collaboration, the author seeks to open up the multiplicity of meanings – the consonances, as well as the ambiguities and the disconcerting moments of  (Publication abstract)uncanniness and clash that lie beneath the surface of a musical act of memory.'

In this essay, the authors review 'a selection of the more influential writings about Leichhardt to demonstrate both the enduring

interest in his life and the vastly different perspectives held in the texts.' (537)

'In 1983, the German film-maker Werner Herzog realized a decade-long ambition to create a film thematizing the struggles of Aboriginal groups against mining companies in Northern Australia. Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) was ultimately reviled by Australian pundits and also disappointed international critics. However, the film and the story behind its making raise important issues, not only about the creative appropriation of Aboriginal mythology, and the filmic representation of Aboriginality and of the struggle for Aboriginal land rights, but also about the intricacies of cross-cultural collaboration. This article reveals how Herzog relied upon the first land rights court case (Milirrpum v Nabalco) in writing his film script. In doing so, he came up with a hybrid ambiguously situated between documentary and feature film, something which proved uncomfortable for the lead Aboriginal actors Wandjuk and Roy Marika, who had both been players in Milirrpum v Nabalco. This article analyses Herzog's mix of documentary and fiction, examines the film's reception-both by white Australian critics and by Aboriginal Australians-and argues that, while the film may be flawed, it is valuable because it threw (and continues to throw) light on the processes and pitfalls of cross-cultural collaboration.'

Source: Abstract.