The soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema: re-sounding the past

Anne Barnes

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Arts and Media University of New South Wales Australia

2014 THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Barnes First name: Annette Other name/s: Louise Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: Arts and Media Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences

Title: The soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema: re-sounding the past

Abstract

This thesis addresses a gap in current scholarship on Australian cinema by highlighting the role of the soundtrack in what I call an Australian transcultural cinema. I argue that the iconic sounds belonging to the national cinema from the 1970s and 1980s are variously repositioned, silenced and manipulated in the more recent transcultural cinema in ways that critically re-sound Australia’s history. I develop three concepts – the sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic spectre – that codify and help explain why sounds hold certain meaning and are stored in bodily ways and in memory. Providing a method for listening to the soundtracks of transcultural cinema, I argue that soundtracks need to be broken down and listened to as sound events and that silence should be recognised for the powerful role it plays in a film soundtrack.

By examining the development of the film sound industry in Australia, I highlight the reasons why the soundtrack is an integral element in recent Australian films. My argument is supported by interview material from interviews I conducted with some of Australia’s most respected filmmakers, sound professionals, educators and industry personnel for this project. To support my find- ings I provide a series of close listenings of films that include: Walkabout (Roeg 1971), Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975), The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Flanagan 1998), Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (Moffatt 1989), and Samson and Delilah (Thornton 2009b).

I conceptualise Australian transcultural cinema as a genre that draws from global and cultural influences, where boundaries are blurred and meanings take on new shapes and forms. I highlight how this cinema makes use of the sonic semantic markers and syntactic elements of the road movie, melodrama and Gothic genres to tell stories that cut across the Australian landscape and chal- lenge ideals and representations of Australian society, home and family. I argue that the Gothic, operating as a mode and generated by the soundtrack, underpins the melodrama and the road movie in Australian transcultural cinema.

Through my examination of sound in Australian cinema, I argue that, largely driven by the soundtrack, Australian transcul- tural cinema generates and can resurrect sociological hauntings and in doing so, sounds out Australia’s ghostly remains.

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This thesis addresses a gap in current scholarship on Australian cinema by highlighting the role of the soundtrack in what I call an Australian transcultural cinema. I argue that the iconic sounds belonging to the national cinema from the 1970s and 1980s are var- iously repositioned, silenced and manipulated in the more recent transcultural cinema in ways that critically re-sound Australia’s history. I develop three concepts – the sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic spectre – that codify and help explain why sounds hold certain meaning and are stored in bodily ways and in memory. Providing a method for listening to the soundtracks of transcultural cinema, I argue that soundtracks need to be broken down and listened to as sound events and that silence should be recognised for the powerful role it plays in a film soundtrack.

By examining the development of the film sound industry in Australia, I high- light the reasons why the soundtrack is an integral element in recent Australian films. My argument is supported by interview material from interviews I conducted with some of Australia’s most respected filmmakers, sound professionals, educators and industry personnel for this project. To support my findings I provide a series of close listenings of films that include:Walkabout (Roeg 1971), Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975), The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Flanagan 1998), Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (Moffatt 1989), and Samson and Delilah (Thornton 2009b).

I conceptualise Australian transcultural cinema as a genre that draws from global and cultural influences, where boundaries are blurred and meanings take on new shapes and forms. I highlight how this cinema makes use of the sonic semantic markers and syntactic elements of the road movie, melodrama and Gothic genres to tell stories that cut across the Australian landscape and challenge ideals and representations of Australi- an society, home and family. I argue that the Gothic, operating as a mode and generated by the soundtrack, underpins the melodrama and the road movie in Australian transcul- tural cinema.

Through my examination of sound in Australian cinema, I argue that, largely driven by the soundtrack, Australian transcultural cinema generates and can resurrect sociological hauntings and in doing so, sounds out Australia’s ghostly remains.

I Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jodi Brooks for the quality of her supervision, including her generosity and exacting, challenging and rigorous mentorship. I am also grateful for the encouragement of Jane Mills whose tutorage, enthusiasm for this thesis and fresh ideas were beneficial and welcome in the final stages of my thesis writing. My thanks go to Greg Dolgopolov for our shared conversations and his questions and ideas in the early stages of this work. Chapters four and five could not have been written without the generosity and expertise of the sound professionals, filmmakers and industry personnel who shared their time, ideas and knowledge with me. I acknowledge with warmth and respect those who have made and continue to create the soundtracks of New Zealand and Australian films; many of my original ideas were generated by conversations with, and the mentorship I received from, these skilful and diligent filmmakers.

This thesis has benefited from the patience and critical eye of Marie-Louise Taylor and from her scrupulous and precise copy-editing skills. Special mention goes to Rosita Rawnley-Mason who offered her graphic-design skills and has formulated this thesis into a well-presented and cohesive document. The support and patience of my family, friends and work colleagues over the years needs to be acknowledged with deep thanks. Finally, I wish to thank my partner, Shirley Hamilton, for her continual support over the time I have been writing my thesis and for taking on the role of PhD widow with little hesitancy and such grace.

II Table of contents

Abstract I

Acknowledgements II

Introduction 1

Chapter One Sonic collisions in Australian cinema 18

Chapter Two Listening to the cinematic soundscape 37

Chapter Three The emergence of an Australian transcultural cinema 53

Chapter Four Sound speak: the sound of Australian cinema 64

Chapter Five Sound speak: sound changes 82

Chapter Six Conceptualising Australian transcultural cinema 101 through genre

Chapter Seven An Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains 116

Chapter Eight Conclusion 137

Appendix 1: Interviewee Biographies 159

Sources 167 Introduction

Proposal

This thesis examines the role of the soundscape in Australian transcultural cinema. I outline how and why the soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema have served as a key site for examining how history, social policy, memory, trauma and diaspora are negotiated in Australian national cinema. The term ‘Australian transcultural cinema’ refers to films that started to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I discuss my use of this term in greater detail later in this introduction.

The last thirty-six years of Australian filmmaking have been prodigious in producing stories responding to Australia’s national and social issues. These responses can be heard in the soundtracks of Australian films. In this thesis I examine the way sound and silence were used in the New Australian Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s and compare this to the changes that can be heard in Australian transcultural cinema that followed. By taking this approach, I am able to argue that sound is a crucial component in Australian cinema for investigating social change. This exploration provides a dramatic shift in critical approaches to and the textual analysis of Australian cinema.

Australian transcultural films explore Indigenous and migrant stories as well as interpretations of Australian history, life and culture. They are created by filmmakers from a wide variety of backgrounds including Indigenous Australians, Anglo-Celtic descendants of early settlers, and more recent migrants and their children. The makers of Australian transcultural films come from all social and cultural walks of life; this is worth noting because of the shift that happened on a national scale in the types of storylines that started to be produced in the late 1980s and 1990s in Australian cinema. Australian filmmakers began to explore and observe more closely Australia as a multicultural society as well as telling different types of stories featuring the Australian landscape. In the interview I conducted with her, sound designer Annie Breslin noted a changing ‘sound of nation’ and pointed out how early films such asThe Cars that Ate Paris (Weir 1974) initially responded to a number of key issues affecting settler Australia, such as the exploration of ‘our evil centre’: But at the same time, our concerns are not the same any more, we are not just convicts in a strange land, though there is a bit of that still coming through in our stories. There is a lot more about

1 multiculturalism and that dictates a lot of our films. It’s not about ‘us against the land’ anymore, it’s about: ‘us against us’ or ‘us against our society’ or ‘struggling to get out of our society’ or ‘change our society’. …our main concerns now are about where we fit into society… (Breslin 2009).

Breslin maintained that it was not just new technologies that changed soundtrack design, but that the changes in storylines also had an enormous influence on the re-creation of the cinematic soundscape.

Australian transcultural films have mutable borders and often explore the tension that arises at the point where different cultures converge. Some of the films backtrack over Indigenous/settler relations, responding to past history. These include Nice Coloured Girls (Moffatt 1987) and The Tracker (de Heer 2002). Others, such as Beneath Clouds (Sen 2002) and Samson and Delilah (Thornton 2009b), tell contemporary stories of Indigenous Australians. These films establish Indigenous Australians as belonging to Country1, being from different nations that have their own memories and interpretations of how they have been affected by Australian colonial history and their own perspectives and stories on life today. Just as Indigenous films touch on stories recounting cultural difference, ethnicity, trauma and memory, so do the films that reflect on the 20th and 21st century migrations from Europe andAsia. Films that fall under this category include The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Flanagan 1998), La Spagnola (Jacobs 2001) and Lucky Miles (Rowland 2007).

Though the storylines of the films in these two groups are different, they all fall under the category of what I call Australian transcultural cinema. I argue that it is predominantly through the sonic fissures and ruptures in the soundtracks ofAustralian transcultural films that it is possible to hear what happens when the national and the social sonically collide – often in an audible rewriting of history.

Sensing and listening to cinema

In this thesis I examine and discuss sound both as something that can be felt, as sensation, and as something that can be interpreted through textual analysis. Using Laura Marks’s concept of haptic cinema, and her exploration of the senses in cinema, I argue that many Australian transcultural films rely on the haptic ability of the soundtrack to bring to the surface memories and experiences that are often difficult

1 Country: I use an upper case C to convey an Indigenous sense of country – that is, a tribal region that embraces culture, nature, land; a way of believing and belonging.

2 to articulate in other ways. It is important to take into account that sound waves as vibration do physically touch and move through the ear canal, whereas the image doesn’t have the same physical connection with the eye.

I use the term ‘close listening’ to describe the way I interpret Australian transcultural films. In her bookLoving & Hating Hollywood: Reframing Global and Local Cinemas,2 Jane Mills uses the term ‘close reading’, arguing that it describes more accurately than the term ‘textual analysis’ the way she ‘finds the traces of globalising processes within the film’s formal properties and follows these traces in and out of the film frame’ (2009, p.21). In the same way, I argue that the term ‘close listening’ better describes my method of analysing the soundtracks and ‘following the traces’ left by history, memory and globalising processes. In unpacking my argument, I apply a number of different methods; however, one method that pulls the chapters together is my form of analysis, provided by close listenings.

Methodology In chapter one I examine and explain the concepts behind the sound designs created for the New Australian Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s through close listenings of some of the key films from this body of work. Films such asPicnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975) and Walkabout (Roeg 1971)3 are particularly important for my analysis because of the ways that each of these films set up an opposition between civilisation and primitivism, portray the Australian landscape as uncanny and menacing, and highlight the relentless march of colonial conquest and modernity. Australian sound practitioners responded to these stories by creating key sounds that supported the common themes and undercurrents that ran through many of the Australian films produced in the 1970s and 1980s. By locating and interpreting how iconic sounds were used in the New Australian Cinema, I have been able to examine the way these sounds have been critically redeployed, used differently or silenced in Australian transcultural cinema,

2 Hereafter referred to as Loving & Hating Hollywood 3 Walkabout and Wake in Fright (Kotcheff 1971) are both set in the Australian outback. However, they were produced with offshore finance and have non-Australian directors – Nicholas Roag is English and Ted Kotcheff is Canadian. They have become cult and Australian screen classics and are considered key texts in Australian film studies for a number of reasons. Released in 1971, at the beginning of the new renaissance of Australian cinema, Walkabout and Wake in Fright are two of the first Australian features of this time to bring to the screen the trope of non-Indigenous Australians at a loss and disconnected from the vast Australian landscape. Both films have been highly influential to Australian filmmakers and they are mentioned in most publications that document Australian film. They form part of the National Screen and Sound Archive collection.

3 and how this provides the means for new interpretations of Australian cinema.

In selecting Australian films for examination, I have chosen both short and feature length films produced for theatrical screening. Films produced for theatrical screening have a very different soundtrack to television productions or audiovisual projects created for computer or small-screen platforms. Benefits of a theatrical soundtrack include: a greater dynamic range, better availability and use of the digital surround system, a longer postproduction period that gives more layers and complexity to the sonic storytelling, and more detail and nuance in the final mixed soundtrack.

As a sound practitioner for film and television, my training and professional experience in New Zealand and Australia gives me an insight into and knowledge of the way certain sounds have been created and used in both national cinemas. While sound designing the Inheritance (Joseph 1999), I examined more closely the way particular sounds and soundscapes have been used in Australian cinema; I was able to identify three significant ways sound has been used in Australian films that examined history, home, diaspora, memory and loss. My interest in the role of sound on film and the history of the soundscapes of Australian cinema became the starting point for this study of the place of sound in Australian transcultural films. Over the course of my research I identified three particular sound practices and from this developed my conceptual tools – the ‘sonic fetish’, the ‘sonic spectre’ and the ‘sonic artefact’. These conceptual tools are developed in detail in chapter one and play a central role in the film analyses that follow in later chapters. They are briefly sketched as follows.

The sonic fetish refers to sounds that have recognised meanings attached to them as a result of their deployment in the New Australian Cinema. An example of a sonic fetish in the New Australian Cinema is the use of winds to represent the uncanny. Sonic artefacts carry traces of the past and carry memory, they have the ability to take a character back to another time, another place, and they can also provide a link between films. For example, inSamson and Delilah (Thornton 2009b) the song ‘Little Baby Jesus’ is a sonic artefact; it is a trace that links to Charles Chauvel’s filmJedda (1954). In an early scene, little Jedda (Margaret Dingle) is taught various lessons about Anglo culture by her white foster parent, Sarah McMann (Betty Suttor), including the words of ‘Little Baby Jesus’, which she sings each bedtime. Joe (Paul Clarke), the narrator of the story, describes how difficult it is for Sarah McMann to teach Jedda ‘white people’s ways’. The use of this hymn in Samson and Delilah refers to the influence that Christianity and missionary life have had on the lives of many Indigenous

4 Australians. My third conceptual tool, the sonic spectre, belongs to voices and forgotten stories, some of which are hidden and silenced, that I name ‘ghostly remains’. For example, in The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Flanagan 1998), at times Maria returns as a sonic spectre, her ghostly presence audible to her daughter Sonya as well as to the audience.

Using qualitative research methods, I have interviewed seventeen professionals from the Australian film industry as well as those with a background in teaching film and media studies, many of whom are Australia’s leading and most experienced sound professionals. This interview material forms a crucial part of my research because it provides a history of the Australian film sound industry that pinpoints the development of an ‘Australian film sound’. The interviews also help to explain how particular sounds were initially used to convey certain meanings and how these sounds came to be used differently to connote new meaning in Australian transcultural cinema. Further, the interview material is important because this is the first time qualitative research has documented the formation of the Australian film sound industry and the material provides a detailed understanding of the use of sound in Australian cinema.

Sonic semantics

I use the term ‘Australian film sound industry’ to refer to Australia’s film sound professionals and sound studios. It is a term widely used in the Australian film industry to describe a group of professional practitioners that has its own affiliated organisation, the Australian Screen Sound Guild (ASSG), and an annual awards event. I also use a number of other terms widely used in the film and sound industry, and I explain what these terms mean where necessary. However, it is important to clarify from the start how I use certain terminology and why I have developed certain terms as part of my methodology. The terminology developed by Michel Chion (1994) is particularly helpful and I use a number of his terms, such as ‘temporal linearization’ and ‘acousmatic’, throughout my thesis. Chion’s terms aid my investigation of how sound and image operate in Australian transcultural cinema.

As a sound professional working in New Zealand and Australia, I adopted the industry’s use of the terms ‘music track’ and ‘soundtrack’. When I am discussing the soundtrack, I refer to the effects, atmospheres, Foley and dialogue tracks. Diegetic music is laid up in the edit and ‘treated’ in the sound mix as a sound effect. When I am discussing diegetic music, I refer to it as a sound component on the soundtrack.

5 When discussing the non-diegetic music – a score written specifically for the film or a collection of previously published popular songs used in the film – I refer to it as the music or music track. This thesis is concerned with how Australian transcultural cinema actively and critically engages with pressure points, traumas and absences in Australian social, political and cinematic history through the redeployment of particular sounds. Sound effects, atmospheres and dialogue tend to play a more important role in these soundscapes and in their critical sounding back than does music; for this reason, music is less central to this study than other sounds. However, it is important to note that music acts as a form of commentary, often giving voice to characters that have been rendered silent in some way. Music can produce layers of meaning, defining a time, a circumstance, a historical moment, and is often a powerful strand in the final sound mix of a film.

When carrying out any audiovisual analysis, there is an immediate problem with finding a word that adequately describes the audiences’ experience of both viewing and listening to the film or digital product. Audiovisualist is the term now recognised for the creative personnel who work with both film and sound. The audiovisual experience continues to expand as new technologies, changing modes of lifestyle and interaction with new media continue to proliferate and change. Most spectatorship theory fails to address the fact that the cinematic (or other screen) encounter is both audio and visual. As Philip Brophy argues in his article ‘Where Sound Is: Locating the Absent Aural in Film Theory’: How a film theory can even begin to address identity, psychology and spectatorship without distinguishing between sight ‘displacing’ the self and hearing ‘incorporating’ the self is a frightful indication of the ocular fascism that strangles audiovisual discourse (2008d, p.430).

The fascination with the ‘ocular’ in spectatorship theory may be part of the reason why a term that encompasses both listening and watching has never been adopted. In his book Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen,4 Chion touches on this issue when describing the ‘audiovisual contract’ as being: not natural but rather a sort of symbolic pact to which the audio-spectator [emphasis added] agrees when she or he considers the elements of sound and image to be participating in one and the same entity or world (1994. p, 222).

In a later work, Film, a Sound Art, Chion expands on his use of the term audio-spectator by identifying ‘audio viewer’ as being ‘more accurate than viewer or spectator to emphasize that the experience of films, television, or other audiovisual texts involves

4 Hereafter referred to as Audio-Vision

6 sight and hearing in interaction’ (2009, p. 468). For this reason, drawing from the above discussion I use the terms ‘audience’ and ‘audio-viewer’ to describe the audiovisual cinematic experience.

Australian National cinema: Australian transcultural cinema The four terms I predominantly use when referencing Australian films are: ‘Australian national cinema’, ‘New Australian Cinema’, ‘Australian transcultural cinema’ and ‘Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains’. Australian national cinema is a term that frames films under the auspices of certain ideals tied to a national identity (O’Regan 1996). In addition, the term ‘national’ tends to brand films by funding, mode of production, distribution and audience address. New Australian Cinema refers to the Australian film production period of the 1970s and 1980s when government initiatives, including training and funding, instigated an Australian film renaissance. As I have already mentioned, Australian transcultural films started to be produced from the late 1980s. Falling under the umbrella of Australian national cinema, most receive state and/or federal government funding and use the same industrial and distribution practices. The Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains is my term for a subgroup of Australian transcultural films that I argue often backtrack over Australian and migrant histories; through the soundtrack, through a release of sociological hauntings, history is revisited, memory is reactivated and social issues are explored.

In The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses,5 Marks argues that the term intercultural ‘indicates a context that cannot be confined to a single culture. It also suggests movement between one culture and another…’ (2000, p.6). The term intercultural does not quite encompass all the attributes that I put forward as identifying an Australian transcultural cinema. Filmmakers of Australian transcultural cinema may be carrying the memories of their parents and grandparents, memories that form very real parts of the writers’ and filmmakers’ lives. Therefore, the films I discuss may draw from memories belonging to more than one generation as well as to more than one culture. Because of this, I am extending Marks’s argument of geospatial cultures to include different temporal, generational movements. However, there are numerous similarities between the films Marks describes and those that fall under my scrutiny. For instance, as Marks discusses: Hybridity does not simply turn the tables on the colonizing culture: it also puts into question the norms and knowledges of any culture presented as discrete, whole and separate (2000, p.8).

5 Hereafter referred to as The Skin of the Film

7 One of the crucial components of Australian transcultural cinema is its hybrid nature, the way it makes use of, or plays with, numerous elements including genre. I provide close listenings of a number of films, examining the key points I mention above.The films includeNight Cries: A Rural Tragedy6 (Moffatt 1989), Radiance (Perkins 1998) and The Goddess of 1967 (Law 2000).

I identify many of the traits that form what Naficy calls a transnational film genre as belonging to an Australian transcultural cinema. In his essay, ‘Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational Film Genre’ (2003),7 Naficy describes a transnational cinema that is generated by filmmakers who are immigrants, refugees or in exile. Again, the term transnational does not quite define the range of films I am investigating. There are two reasons why this is the case. As I have mentioned, the filmmakers of Australian transcultural films encompass many different backgrounds, including Indigenous, Anglo-Celtic settler and more recent migrant heritage. Further, by using the term cultural instead of national I am able to include films that may otherwise escape the definition of national cinema.

In her book Loving & Hating Hollywood, Mills puts forward the argument for a transcultural cinema with porous boundaries open to global cultural flows and movement: cinemas that do not stay fixed in the national but draw from and give to other cinemas, various genres and different cultures. She asserts that ‘blurred boundaries create havoc with our sense of cultural permanence and fixity’ (2009, p.67). Mills is in turn indebted to Arjun Appadurai’s ideas outlined in his essay, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, where he discusses the global follow-on effect of cultural exchange. He proposes that every society is connected, transformed and influenced through what he calls ‘the five dimensions of global cultural flow’ via various ‘scapes’ that he identifies as ‘ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes’ (1990, pp. 6-7). In my argument for an Australian transcultural cinema, a term that comprehensively covers the expanse of films I am examining in this thesis, I am indebted to Laura Marks, Hamid Naficy, Jane Mills and Arjun Appadurai whose work on intercultural and transnational cinemas, boundaries, and global and cultural flows I draw upon and extend.

6 Hereafter referred to as Night Cries 7 Hereafter referred to as ‘ Phobic Spaces’

8 Critical framework

Each chapter in this thesis builds on my investigation of why the soundtracks of Australian transcultural films have powerful and interactive pathways that challenge and formulate old and new knowledges and debates concerning home and nation. Each chapter operates under the guidance of its own theoretical schema. However, throughout my thesis I draw on a number of different debates and theories to support my claims; these include Australian studies as well as sound, film and post-colonial theory. I argue that the advance of audio reproduction technologies and the impact of globalisation on the movement and accessibility of texts has supported a sonic convergence of cultures, a blurring of the local and the translocal. Australian transcultural cinema has utilised and drawn from these changes, pulling from both local and ‘global cultural flows’ (Appadurai 1990). Using as my starting point critical theorist Homi Bhabha’s proposal of a Third Space, I argue that this space is operating within the soundtracks of Australian transcultural films as a site of tension, a place of translation and negotiation (Naficy 2003). Drawing on Marks’s and Naficy’s understandings of intercultural and transnational cinema, I conceptualise Australian transcultural cinema as a genre. This allows me to investigate how semantic and syntactic elements belonging to genre are readily used in Australian transcultural films.

In questioning why and how iconic sounds from Australian national cinema are used differently in Australian transcultural films, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis’s book, Australian Cinema After Mabo (2004), provides a useful starting point. They question why certain themes in Australian cinema such as the ‘black tracker’ have been revisited in post-Mabo Australian cinema; that is, films produced after the 1992 Mabo case.8 Collins and Davis argue that this re-examination is part of what they call the ‘afterwardness’ of colonialism; a reflexivity of Australian national cinema.

Moreover, Collins and Davis utilise current theoretical debates concerning the representation of memory, trauma and shock to suggest that the History Wars and the Mabo case have significantly influenced a number of films produced since

8 In 1992 in the Mabo versus Queensland case, the Australian High Court ruling overturned the legal fiction ofterra nullius. Terra nullius did not recognise the Indigenous people of Australia or their social organisation prior to the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1788, therefore ‘ownership’ of the land was able to be claimed by the newly arrived settlers. Not without pain and repercussion, what has become known as the ‘Mabo case’ has allowed native title rights to be legally recognised though land claims that are often heavily debated and limited in terms of ownership rights.

9 the early 1990s.9 The authors assert that the return to old storylines has allowed for a re-evaluation of history, one that expresses the ‘shock of recognition’ (2004, p.8). Collins and Davis draw on the work of Walter Benjamin to explain how Australian national cinema has points of rupture that have been created when ‘the past and present collide’ (2004, p.8). By using the Mabo case as a point in time, Collins and Davis ‘backtrack’ over certain national iconic themes, providing a lively discussion of how certain contemporary films readdress history. The authors use the term backtracking as a metaphor for a recent process in Australian cinema that has seen contemporary Australian films revisit and reinterpret earlier narratives, landscapes, icons and characters. They argue that backtracking is a form of mourning and a reassessment of history in the wake of the Mabo case. What I am undertaking here is a ‘sonic backtrack’ through Australian transcultural cinema, highlighting how iconic sounds have been reworked and repositioned and in this way have helped to provide a reassessment of how history in Australian cinema has been represented.

Chapter one

Sound collisions in Australian cinema

Chapter one develops a method for defining how, and understanding why, specific sounds and sound designs in Australian national cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s have been modified, silenced and relocated in the soundtracks belonging toAustralian transcultural cinema. This process creates a space that forces new interpretations, inviting an audience to question the ways Australian society has been interpreted in Australian national cinema.

In this chapter I start to explore how sound is used in Australian transcultural cinema to investigate and give voice to the implications of colonisation and migration, including buried histories and memories. Drawing from post-colonial theory, I investigate the concept of an Australian transcultural cinema and explain how iconic sounds (including wind, animals and birds) in the films from the NewAustralian Cinema are being moved, modified and silenced in this cinema. To provide examples, I examine the soundtracks of films from the New Australian Cinema such asWalkabout

9 The History Wars in Australia became public with Labor prime minister Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech in which he declared that crimes had been committed against Aborigines; including the taking of land, the spread of disease, the dispossession and murder of innocent people and the forced removal of children. Fought predominantly by politicians and historians, the main battle is over the acknowledgement, legitimacy and magnitude of these crimes.

10 (Roeg 1971) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975) and highlight the changes that can be heard in the soundtracks of Australian transcultural films. I provide close listenings of films that includeRadiance (Perkins 1998) to support this argument. I reinforce my argument by explaining how my analytical tools – the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact and the sonic spectre – operate and help to define the soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema. Moreover, using the filmBeneath Clouds (Sen 2002) I clarify how important silence is as a key component of a soundtrack and particularly why it is such a powerful component for the soundtracks of Australian transcultural films. In addition, I draw from sensory debates and psychoanalytic theory to explain how film sound as a sensation is a powerful component tied to memory. Sound, I argue, is able to bypass boundaries and challenge the very meaning of space. It travels through and is absorbed by many materials; solid, liquid or gas. As well, sound travels as soundwaves via air, entering the ear canal before being lodged in the brain. Absorbed by audiences, sound instigates emotional reactions so pervasively that it operates as a powerful device in Australian transcultural cinema.

Chapter two

Listening to the cinematic soundscape

In chapter two I provide a conceptual framework for a close listening of Australian transcultural cinema. I put forward an argument for listening to cinema, examining different critical debates that discuss the role of sound and listening across different societies and over time in Western culture. I argue that there needs to be a ‘second hearing’ of cinematic soundtracks.10 I provide a method of deconstructing film soundtracks into ‘cinematic sound events’ for a closer analysis. This method provides a way to listen to ‘sound events’ with more intent, scrutiny and purpose than has often previously been granted to them. Providing a clear method for critically ‘listening’ to Australian transcultural films makes it possible to hear how the soundtrack is used as a means for history, diaspora, memory and trauma to be played out.

By highlighting the importance of the knowledge that can be gained from listening to and interpreting soundtracks, I situate my research within recent sensory debates taking place within a number of disciplines and research fields that include history, geography, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, media and film theory. By connecting the auditory system with the cinematic experience, I explain how sound

10 Discussed in detail in chapter two.

11 operates within individuals and across cultures; outlining the connection between perception, hearing, listening, memory, and brain and body processes. This chapter takes these auditory experiences into consideration when engaging with the following question: By listening to the soundtrack, how is it possible to hear sound operating as a site for interpreting history, migration, diaspora, trauma and memory in cinema? What is pertinent to my field of enquiry is that by addressing the ear inAustralian transcultural cinema, I am opening up a new debate that speaks directly to, and fills the silence left by, sensory and film theory discourses.

Chapter three

The emergence of an Australian transcultural cinema

Chapter three examines the development of an Australian transcultural cinema in more detail. In this chapter I examine a collection of films that I identify as belonging to an Australian transcultural cinema. I support my argument for an Australian transcultural cinema by drawing from Marks’s (2000) argument for an intercultural cinema and Naficy’s (2003) use of the term transnational cinema. I investigate the similarities and differences between the cinema I am discussing and those that Marks and Naficy describe. I explain that Australian transcultural films fall under the umbrella of Australian national cinema and that these films are produced with similar funding, production values and industrial and distribution practices. However, where they differ is in the storylines and the way they reflect Australia’s past and present social history. Further, what is most important for my argument is the way that the transcultural cinema sounds back to the films of the New Australian Cinema.

In the 1970s and up until the late 1980s, most of the films funded byAustralian film-funding bodies were audiovisual representations that reflected onAustralia’s white colonial history. During the late 1980s and 1990s new government policies started to address the need to more accurately reflect and represent IndigenousAustralians as well as Australia’s diverse multicultural immigrant populations. These funding and policy changes influenced Australian filmmaking and helped to create a burgeoning transcultural cinema. Many of the films produced by an Australian transcultural cinema highlight and convey very different experiences of colonisation, repression, migration, trauma and diaspora to those examined in the films from the New Australian Cinema. For this reason, it is this period of Australian filmmaking, from the late 1980s to the present day, that I choose to focus on for this thesis.

12 Chapter four Sound speak: the sound of Australian cinema

This chapter outlines a history of Australian film sound. In so doing, it draws attention to why the components of Australian soundtracks are so fundamental when analysing the sound of Australian cinema and examining the role that the soundtrack has played in the construction of Australian stories.

Using qualitative research methods, this chapter brings together interviews with some of Australia’s most influential filmmakers, sound designers and film education and industry personnel. Covering the advent of an Australian film sound industry, this chapter examines the influence that key personnel, training initiatives and technology had on the development of Australian film soundtracks. Through the use of interview material, this chapter provides an insider’s understanding of the development of an Australian film sound industry. As well, it examines the complexity behind the development of the ‘Australian film sound’ or ‘soundscape’.

Chapter five

Sound speak: sound changes

Using the same qualitative research methods as chapter five, this chapter focuses on the changes that started to be heard in the soundtracks of Australian cinema, particularly in relation to the advent of an Australian transcultural cinema, the development of new technologies, and the influence of directors and sound personnel. UsingAppadurai’s concept of ‘global cultural flows’ (1990, p.3), I discuss how changes in the soundtrack have emerged for a number of reasons, including new technologies, budget constraints and the development of an Australian transcultural cinema.

The interviews in chapters four and five provide original and significant research material: it is the first time such scholarly research has been undertaken on the Australian film sound industry. Because this is such original and significant research, I let it stand alone in two chapters, rather than incorporating it into all the other chapters. However, I do use some of the interview material in this introduction as well as in chapters three and seven, where its inclusion helps to explain and support my central arguments. I also use the interview discussions on Samson and Delilah in chapter eight.

13 Chapter six

Conceptualising Australian transcultural cinema through genre

In this chapter I use genre as a strategy for analysing and identifying how particular sound conventions within Australian cinematic history have been utilised, challenged and changed in transcultural films from the late 1980s onwards to convey very different Australian stories to those told by Australian national cinema. Marks suggests that intercultural cinema can be considered a genre and Naficy argues for a transnational film genre. Using Marks’s and Naficy’s arguments, I explain the importance of conceptualising Australian transcultural cinema through genre.

Drawing on Rick Altman’s (1999) semantic and syntactic approach to genre, I outline how Australian transcultural cinema utilises the semantic and syntactic systems operating in the melodrama, road movie and Gothic genres in its own mode of storytelling. I examine and explain how the syntax – such as the road, the journey, home and family, the silenced and repressed, the uncanny and hauntings – belonging to these three genres is used in both challenging and creative ways to tell stories about home, belonging, trauma, memory and the recording of history. Further, the sonic semantic markers belonging to the melodrama, road movie and Gothic genres are redeployed in Australian transcultural cinema, creating a sensory jarring; disturbances that cause rents along the foundational genre lines of Australian cinematic sonic storytelling. I call my three analytical tools into play – the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact and the sonic spectre – to explain how these sonic devices operate both within and alongside the sonic semantic markers so easily recognisable from Hollywood genre films.

To support my argument, I provide a number of close listenings of scenes from Australian films, includingMad Dog Morgan (Mora 1976), Careful, He Might Hear You (Schultz 1983) and Payback (Thornton 1996). I also provide a close listening of The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Flanagan 1998) that examines the use of the syntax belonging to the melodrama, road movie and Gothic genres in Australian transcultural cinema. Using this film, I explain how the sonic semantic elements belonging to these three genres are repositioned and adapted in Australian transcultural cinema, and in this way generate a series of dialogues, audible releases or hauntings that emerge from the buried histories and unspoken memories belonging to Australia’s inhabitants, history and recent past.

14 Chapter seven

An Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains

In this chapter I examine a particular haunting that is audible in Australian transcultural cinema and I put forward an argument for what I am calling an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains. Having explained why the melodrama, road movie and Gothic genres have a particular significance for my research, I now extend this argument to show how the Gothic operates as a mode in Australian transcultural cinema and that it instils itself in the road movie and is often prominent in the melodrama. I argue that the Gothic mode operates as a form of expression, giving voice to those silenced and repressed.

I explain the importance of Australian colonial Gothic literature to Australia national cinema, outlining how this writing helped colonists to interpret how they felt about their environment; describing Australia as an uncanny, wild and frightening place. Through a close listening of Henry Lawson’s 1892 tale ‘The Bush Undertaker’ (Gelder & Weaver 2007) and the filmsWalkabout (Roeg 1971) and Lucky Miles (Rowland 2007), I examine how the sounds from Australian colonial Gothic literature, such as bird, wind and tree sounds, were transposed onto Australian national cinema, and how they were then moved, manipulated and silenced in Australian transcultural films.

In exploring the ghostly resonances operating in Australian transcultural cinema, I argue that it can be examined as a repository for society’s ghostly remains (Gordon 1997). In many Australian transcultural films it is the everyday that becomes unfamiliar, a post-colonial nightmare where Self and Other become sonically disorientated: sounds belonging to the everyday start moving, creating disorientation or a series of aftershocks; sonic artefacts and fetishes become disturbed and reactivated, throwing up a plethora of distorted recollections; ghostly spectres become activated and once loosened by time and space constraints are located at any site that questions nation, history and identity.

Chapter eight

Conclusion

In my final chapter I consolidate and summarise each chapter’s key concerns and reinforce my argument that the soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema are crucial in any discourse concerning Australian cinema that touches on such themes as

15 nationhood, state, colonisation, diaspora, Indigenous Australia, migration, memory and trauma.

By providing a close listening of Samson and Delilah (Thornton 2009b), I address each of the key findings that I have outlined in this thesis. Like manyAustralian transcultural films,Samson and Delilah re-sounds the way Australia is heard and can be examined through the cinematic soundtrack. Further, interview material recorded with director Warwick Thornton, sound designer Liam Egan and sound recordist David Tranter is interwoven through chapter eight as an extra layer of discourse. This interview material provides a level of knowledge and decision-making that clarifies and supports my chief arguments.

Released in 2009, and therefore not the most recent Australian transcultural film, Samson and Delilah is particularly valuable for my research for a number of reasons. It is an Australian transcultural film that encompasses many of my arguments, not only catching the attention of a local audience but achieving international acclaim, including winning the Caméra d’Or at Cannes for best first feature. Set in CentralAustralia, the film’s soundtrack challenges and rearranges the soundscape that has become attached to the cinematic landscape of outback Australia. The film does this in a number of ways: it provides an authentic soundscape that situates the audience in Country. Iconic sounds from Australian national cinema are mostly missing, but when they are used their purpose is very different from how they have been used conventionally. For instance, wind is used to ground the characters in the landscape. It is also used to help convey the shock and horror of an assault. However, in the New Australian Cinema the use of wind usually signifies an uncanny and unsettling landscape.

In Samson and Delilah there is a lot of communication but very little dialogue to interpret. This prompts the brain to search for other sounds it can decipher, and this does several things. It challenges the vococentric hierarchy of dialogue over other sounds, locates the audience sonically in place and makes the audience more sensitive to the audible shocks that are positioned throughout the soundtrack. In Samson and Delilah sounds shift; a community does not stick to the ethnographic travelogue, although its shifting cultural borders throw up a heterogeneous mix of transnational influences that are largely driven by the soundtrack.

I explain how in Samson and Delilah the Gothic mode operates along with the melodrama and road move genres to tell the story of a young Indigenous couple

16 struggling to survive and find their place in 21st century Australia: an empty community is brought to life, home is hard to find and the road proves difficult. However, it is through the sonic semantic markers, the use of silence and breaks in the soundtrack, that shocks are created, providing a sequence of ghostly hauntings. The questions and reckoning that emerge set up a dialogue around the aftermath of colonisation for Indigenous Australians, particularly Indigenous youth. Through breaks in the soundtrack, audible shocks appear; many signal a time long after colonisation has taken place, in a moment belonging to the everyday. Further, Samson and Delilah backtracks over landscape films of the New Australian Cinema and many of the sonic shocks it produces occur in a time considered as after the event (of colonisation), where the trauma and memory of the past are brought into the present via the soundtrack in order to be reinterpreted.

Thus this final chapter of my thesis draws together and reinforces my chief concerns and arguments for an Australian transcultural cinema that re-sounds how Australia has been sonically interpreted in the films of the NewAustralian Cinema. The transcultural cinema brings to the fore themes concerned with memory, diaspora, trauma and silence and in this way, predominantly via the soundtrack, challenges and reinterprets issues relating to Australian recent history, home and belonging.

17 Chapter one

Sonic collisions in Australian cinema

Introduction

In this chapter I use my analytical tools – the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact and the sonic spectre – to investigate and explain how and why the movement of key sounds and the play of sound and silence in the soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema provide such a potent site for exploring the tensions and fissures created in these films. I argue that we need to start listening more closely to the soundtracks of Australian cinema. When considering sound and silence, in this chapter I ask two key questions: How is the auditor interpreting what they are hearing? And why is sound as a sense so important in Australian transcultural cinema?

I outline how the fissures in Australian film soundtracks challenge perceptions and raise questions about the position and portrayal of non-Anglo-Celtic migrants and migrant families in Australian cinema. The same questions are also raised about the position of Indigenous peoples in Australia because, as Leela Ghandi claims in Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, texts are the most ‘significant instigators and purveyors of colonial power and its double, postcolonial resistance’ (1998, p. 142). Within Australian Film Studies, much debate has centred on reading representations of political and cultural change from the narrative and the image. By positioning the soundtracks of recent Australian cinema within a post-colonial discourse, I am charting new territory in the study of Australian cinema. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha discusses the place that exists between Self and Other, cultural difference and diversity, and language and enunciation (1994, pp. 50–56). He describes this locus as a site of tension, a place of translation and negotiation which he calls the ‘Third Space’. Moreover, as Tom O’Regan argues in Australian National Cinema, ‘Australian films and film institutions negotiate cleavages of ethnicity, gender, race, class and nation’ (1996, p. 10). Using Bhabha’s concept of a Third Space in the context of the soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema, I explore the following questions: What happens when cultures collide and/or converge? What are the aural resonances that emanate from this rupture? And what can the soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema tell us about Australia’s national and social history?

18 In essays and books concerning Australian national cinema, the term ‘sublime’ is often used to describe a landscape that is both beautiful and frightening. A related concept that is relevant to Australian transcultural cinema is ‘uncanny’. In Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation,11 Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs use this concept of the uncanny, which is helpful in exploring the sonic resonances that are generated within the Third Space in transcultural cinema. Gelder and Jacobs draw on Freud’s use of the terms heimlich, meaning ‘home’ and ‘a familiar or accessible place’, and unheimlich, meaning ‘unhomely’ and ‘unfamiliar, strange, inaccessible’, to explain how the uncanny operates in post-colonial Australia (1998, p. 23). In addition, they use Julia Kristeva’s argument concerning the ‘foreigner at home’ (1998, p. 27) from her book Strangers to Ourselves (1991) to argue that ‘a certain anxiety results which stems from the difficulty of disentangling what is one’s “home” from what is not one’s “home”—what is “foreign” or strange’ (1998, p. 26). I argue that in Australian transcultural cinema, it is the soundtrack that manoeuvres, manipulates, initiates and gives rise to a sense of the uncanny.

Locating history in sonic bodies

In order to understand the relevance of the changes that have been occurring in the soundtracks of Australian national cinema, it is important to be able to recognise the significance of certain key sounds and sound design elements that were created and used in the soundtracks of national cinema in the 1970s and 1980s.

In his article, ‘Sound Worlds’, anthropologist and music professor Steven Feld recognises both the physiological and psychological influences that sound has on cultures and societies. Feld explores how ‘sound locates abilities, histories, habits and practices’ and how ‘sound figures in bodily ways of knowing and being in the world’ (2000, p. 173). As he argues, ‘social formations are indexed in sonic histories and sonic geographies’ (2000, p. 175). He suggests that sound maps the body. ‘Soundscapes’, he writes: are invested with significance by those whose bodies and lives resonate with them in social time and space… sound both emanates from and penetrates bodies; this reciprocity of reflection and absorption is a creative means of orientation, one that tunes bodies to places and times through their sounding potential… (2000, p. 184).

Feld further asserts that with the advance of audio reproduction technologies and the impact of globalisation on the movement and accessibility of texts, there has been a

11 Hereafter referred to as Uncanny Australia

19 sonic convergence of cultures, a blurring of local and translocal: …sound recording has intersected histories of travel, migration, contact and isolation, conflict, colonization, missionization, domination, diaspora and displacement, and of course, reclaimed, renewed and reinvented traditions. In the current moment this history has created a rapid traffic in global sounds, one where cultural separation and social exchange are mutually constituted, one where musical identities and styles are more transient, more in states of constant fission and fusion than ever before. The cumulative effect is an uneven global soundscape, a contentious sound world, where we can see and hear equally omnipresent signs of struggle over augmented and diminished acoustic diversity (2000, p. 175).

As Feld implies, there is a great deal of political and cultural significance to be found in a soundscape. My research investigates how Feld’s argument translates into the sonic negotiations that are presented by the soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema.

Australian cinema has developed particular sonic characteristics that have become recognisable to both local and international audiences. For instance, the sounds of the didgeridoo and birma (clap sticks) are frequently used as representations of the ‘Indigenous’ and usually serve to connote the Other. The sounds of wind, rain, birds and crickets are often used as sonic signifiers of what is ‘Australia’ when this is understood as an uncivilised landscape. To explore further, I provide a close listening of the soundtrack of Walkabout (Roeg 1971) because it provides good examples of the sonic characteristics that I am investigating. It also provides the perfect sonic backdrop for investigating the tension and fractures that occur in the soundtracks of Australian transcultural films.Walkabout represents an Anglo-Celtic account of Western modernity and the notion of childhood innocence juxtaposed against a familiar discourse that invokes outback Australia as an ancient, uncanny desert landscape with an Indigenous, uncivilised and infantilised dying race. Its soundtrack is a rich, cohesive and layered text that foregrounds key iconic sounds and positions them in a desert landscape. The film uses sound to supply subtext. Animals and insects are given voice and these sounds are juxtaposed against moments of silence that highlight the vast Australian desert landscape. The sonic signification of radio technology juxtaposed against the sounds of nature support the narrative of Western culture meeting the unspoiled outback. Winds are created from detailed and dynamic layers of different sounds that support and highlight the lost child motif, a theme that is well represented in Australian cinema, art and literature.12 Walkabout’s soundtrack offers a classic study in how Indigenous and

12 For more information concerning the representation of lost children in Australian film, art and literature, please refer to: (Pierce 1999). For a discussion of the theme of lost children in Walkabout, please refer to: (Nowra 2003). Film examples include: The Back of Beyond, John Heyer, 1954; Walkabout, Nicholas Roeg, 1971; Evil Angels, Fred Schepisi, 1988; One Nght the Moon, Rachel Perkins, 2001. Film examples with narratives concerning the stolen generation include Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, Tracey Moffat, 1989; Terra Nullius, Anne Pratten, 1993; Radiance, Rachel Perkins, 1998. 20 colonial roles have been sonically played out in Australian national cinema, and it is for this reason that this film is such a powerful resource for my work.

Sonic fetishes and sonic artefacts in the Third Space

The term sonic fetish refers to iconic sounds or sonic stereotypes that have the power to impose a particular interpretation. Sonic fetishes have the capacity to conjure up and instigate a certain belief or memory. I draw on the ideas of Laura Marks (2000) and Homi Bhabha (1994) for their interpretation of the word fetish. Bhabha argues for a reading of the stereotype as fetish and asserts: The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (which the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation [emphasis in original] of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations (1994, p. 107).

The sonic fetish is a powerful concept for my research because it comes laden with meaning and knowledges. It is distinguished from what I will call the sonic artefact. I have created the sonic artefact to operate as the sonic equivalent of what Marks in The Skin of the Film, describes as ‘fossil’, or the ‘recollection image’ (2000, p. 84). Marks draws on the work of Deleuze and Benjamin in defining her use of this term. She discusses how the fossil carries memory and meaning, that it ‘bearing[s] witness to forgotten histories’ (2000, p. 84). I argue that sound can ‘act’ in the same way: it contains as well as resonates memory and sonic history.

Walkabout: a close listening

The following close listening of Walkabout’s soundtrack prompts me to suggest that it needs to be listened to again to discover what has previously been missed. This provides a new understanding of the importance of the role of sound in Australian cinema and of why key sounds have been repositioned, silenced or given voice in Australian transcultural cinema. The first image of the title sequence shows a close- up of textured brown rock. Contrasted against this image are the industrial sounds of the mechanical age that merge with an assortment of radio tuning sounds; screeching and scratching static and in and out of phase-gabbled speech. The image and sound cut to a brick wall and as the camera pans across and down, a male voice-over politely calls out a greeting in French, ‘Faites vos jeux, messieurs et madames, s’ils vous plait’ (‘Please place your bets, ladies and gentlemen’). As the camera tracks along the brick wall and enters a bustling city street, reverberant with pedestrian, traffic and general

21 city hum, sounds synonymous with any cityscape, a didgeridoo starts playing. The film introduces three of its protagonists, a father and his son and daughter, each separately going about their daily routine of work and school. In an audiovisual montage, the hubbub of city, school playground and elocution lessons is intercut with close-up shots of kangaroo and chicken meat preparation and sale, and a cultivated park full of tropical palms and ficus trees. The camera cuts back and forth between these images. What binds the images is the didgeridoo which, juxtaposed against image, invites a dialogue around the representation of the mystical and Indigenous Other against the civilised and repressed Anglo-Celtic Australian colonialists. Halfway through this opening montage the camera slides across the brick wall a second time, exposing an empty expanse of desert. The didgeridoo keeps playing over image, but this time the introduced sounds of car traffic and car horns are juxtaposed with the image of a desert landscape.The didgeridoo connects the images by what Michel Chion in Audio-Vision calls ‘temporal linearization’. Chion explains: When a sequence of images does not necessarily show temporal succession in the actions it depicts—that is, when we can read them equally as simultaneous or successive—the addition of realistic, diegetic sound imposes on the sequence a sense of real time, like normal everyday experience, and above all, a sense of time that is linear and sequential (1994, pp. 17–18).

The sound of the didgeridoo not only creates spatial links by connecting the different city locations, desert and the characters, it also creates a temporal link, moving the images across time from morning to late afternoon. The iconic sound of a didgeridoo along with the sounds associated with 20th century modernity (i.e. city street noise) and the heavily static radio broadcast all act as sonic fetishes. Marks explains how fetishes and fossils are: two kinds of objects that condense cryptic histories within themselves and that gather their peculiar power by virtue of a prior contact with some ordinary object. Fetishes and fossils are nodes, or knots in which historical, cultural, and spiritual forces gather with a particular intensity. They translate experience through space and time in a material medium, encoding the histories produced in intercultural traffic (2000, p. 89).

In the opening scene of Walkabout the sounds, locked in temporal linearisation, move forward in one direction. The images become locked and fetishised by the soundtrack into some kind of ethnographic discourse.

Sonic representations of the Other in Walkabout A. Vocalisation: just breathe

The Other is represented sonically in Walkabout in a number of different ways. The didgeridoo as sonic fetish is foregrounded throughout the entire opening sequence

22 except at three points where there is a rupture caused by the vocalisations coming from an elocution lesson in a girls’ high school. These ruptures, or sonic breaks, create bold sites of contestation.

In the first sequence from the high school class the sound of the didgeridoo cuts suddenly to the sound of the girls doing their breathing and vowel exercises. The female vocal sounds of the elocution lesson are musical in nature, rhythmic and breathy. Lips slightly parted, the girls pant in unison and this extends in the second sequence to humming. The note, sounded in unison, holds through the next shot connecting to the father as he drives through the city streets to work. In the final sequence the girls practice ‘oh, oh, oh, oh, u, oh, u, oh, ba, ba, ba, ba, ti, ti, ti, ti’ and finally the vowel sounds ‘a, e, i, o, u’, all of which provide a primal sensuality. The didgeridoo representing the Other butts up against the breathy, sensualised sounds that signify the ‘coming of age’ to create a disturbance. In this final sequence, the sound of the girls’ vocalisations spills over and connects the girl to her brother and father. Over a shot of the son talking to friends in his school playground, the didgeridoo suddenly cuts, to be replaced by the sound of the daughter’s elocution class reciting received pronunciation. The image cuts to the classroom where the girls mechanically tune their vocal cords to the necessary vowel sounds that will grant them future employment and societal success. The girls’ breathy exercise fades under the interior sounds of a busy office that float in the next shot, an exterior looking up through the plate windows at the father’s office. The sound of the elocution lesson cuts as the shot cuts to pedestrian traffic; the didgeridoo re-enters at this point and carries through to the end of the opening montage. Voice and didgeridoo, producing sounds created by the movement of vocal cords, carry the montage. In the opening sequence of Walkabout, the didgeridoo signifies Indigenous Australia. And although he does not appear until later, the young Aboriginal male protagonist is also sonically represented by the sound of the didgeridoo, which serves to position him as Other, stereotyping him as exotic and mysterious. The female protagonist, however, situated between childhood and womanhood, is sexualised and made audible, both as integral to the film’s journey and as a counterpart to male Indigenous sexuality. At this problematic sonic site there is a fusion of primal and colonial beliefs that are sonically fetishised within Walkabout’s colonial discourse.

B. Effects and atmospheres

As discussed earlier, in Australian national cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, the sounds of animals, birds and natural elements have all been heavily replied upon to signify

23 both physical and psychological attributes. In an early scene from Walkabout, the two English children wander lost in the desert. The siblings are serenaded by the sonic structured layering of winds, a sound that has become synonymous in Australian cinema with supernatural elements, the Other and the uncanny and which I investigate in more detail later in this chapter.

The desert landscape that the two white children travel through is deafening, throwing up a sonically rich palette of animal and bird sounds. The soundtrack provides what Chion describes as ‘added value’ (1994, p. 21) to the iconic visual representations of close-ups of animal, insect and bird life. The sounds ‘add value’ by heightening the auditory and therefore the visual experience of the images, placing the images under greater scrutiny. These fetishised sonic representations of nature create a surreal, richly populated desertscape, but the created symbolism forms a site of contention that opens up a debate surrounding the exoticising of the Other. Bhabha describes this site as being ‘the discursive and disciplinary place from which questions of identity are strategically and institutionally posed’ (1994, p. 68). He discusses how the fetish gives ‘access to an ‘identity’ which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it’ (1994, p. 107). Within Walkabout, ‘myths of origin’ and Othering form an exotic and contested site of ambivalence. The closely recorded, or close-up, sonic fetishes of the desert landscape offer a reading that implicates the film as a colonial text that can be read within a post-colonial discourse.

Sounding back

In discussing fetishes and fossils, Marks argues that ‘colonial power relations in particular, with their propensity for cross-breeding Indigenous and imported meanings, are prime sites for the production of these objects (2000, p. 89). She further contends that fetishes and fossils are ‘rubble in the ruin of recent history’ (2000, p. 88) and attests: Bricoleurs—people who take the rubble of another time or place, invest it with new significance, and put it to new purposes—create the possibilities of new history. The displaced person is the preeminent bricoleur (2000, pp. 88–89).

The concept of bricolage is important to my argument because Australian transcultural cinema takes central themes from Australian national cinema of the 1970s and 1980s and, utilising similar movie-making techniques and traditions, tells the stories from the Other’s point of view. In this way these films ‘write back’ to the films of the 1970s

24 and 1980s. I am interested in how the sonic bricolage from these films is used in the transcultural cinema. Rebecca Moore Howard, in her paper ‘The Consequences of Writing Back: Negotiating Cultural Premises within National Media’, describes writing back in post-colonial thought as ‘an interplay where one cultural practice – commonly called the Western – is being modified, resisted or abandoned to give room for alternative modes of expression and creation’ (2003). As I now explain, Indigenous filmmaker Tracey Moffatt’s film Night Cries (1989) can be described as the work of a bricoleur.

The first scene ofNight Cries opens with terrified screams enmeshed with the sounds of insects, wind, trains, harsh metallic strains of industry and the tortured breaths of humans and animals. This Gothic soundtrack is juxtaposed against the title card that bears some of Rosalind Russell’s scripted lines from the Hollywood movie, Picnic (Logan 1955): ‘Look at the sunset Howard!… It’s like the daytime didn’t want to end… like it was gonna put up a big scrap and maybe set the world on fire to keep the world from creepin on…’. The frenzied vociferous soundtrack builds until abruptly the title card cuts to black. The soundtrack starts to fade, leaving room for the piercing shrieks to continue building, becoming heightened and more hysterical over the opening title: ‘Night Cries – A Rural Tragedy’. The opening sequence pays homage to both Gothic and melodramatic techniques. At this point, however, it is a reading of the piercing screams as sonic artefact that is significant for my thesis. The hysterical screaming is directly ‘writing back’ to the soundtrack of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975). In this film, one of the protagonists, a young woman called Edith (Christine Shuler), witnesses the ‘possession’ and disappearance of her school friends. As the pubescent school girls disappear into Hanging Rock, the camera foregrounds Edith who, not enticed by the spirit of the Other, starts calling to Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert). Edith’s pleading to Miranda to come back turns into deranged screaming. Edith’s screams are physically forced from her body and they drench the landscape in a sonic allegory that highlights the role of the supernatural, the Other and the landscape as uncivilised and uncanny in the myth building of colonial Australia. In Night Cries, Edith’s screaming is savagely projected from a confronting story of colonisation, memory and loss.

In addition to Marks’s explanation of fossils as memory remnants, Leela Ghandi’s use of the term ‘postcolonial schizophrenia’ to explain sites of contestation between the coloniser and the colonised (1998, p. 12) is valuable to my argument. I argue that Edith’s scream operates as a sonic ‘postcolonial schizophrenic memory’ that fractures and destabilises to create tensions and feelings of unease. Acting as a sonic

25 artefact, this scream that is excavated from Picnic at Hanging Rock and repositioned in Night Cries highlights a different tragedy and history at play, that of the impact of colonialism on the Indigenous peoples of Australia.

Listening to what haunts in history

In Night Cries, time is controlled by the main protagonist’s breath, which acts as a trajectory, projecting the character back and forwards in time. The film has a soundtrack that destabilises history and challenges notions of home and nation. The film utilises iconic sounds as well as silence to unsettle and problematise earlier sonic representations of Othering. In Australian Cinema After Mabo, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis (2004, pp. 82 and 142) argue that Night Cries provides a powerful post- colonial response to earlier works such as Jedda (Chauvel 1954) and Walkabout. The soundtrack writes back to these canonical Australian films by repositioning sounds as sonic artefacts and sonic fetishes in an Australian cinematic archaeological dig. The soundtrack examines and repositions iconic sounds in such a way that it creates a violent aural shock to the senses, often in what Ghandi refers to as a ‘schizoid’ address to earlier films. For instance, in a powerful flashback sequence, the daughter inNight Cries remembers herself as a child spending a day at the beach with her mother, who leaves her momentarily under the playful eye of two little Indigenous boys. The sound of a wild surf’s low ominous rumble, the high-pitched shriek of seagulls and the undertone of a single child’s cry play over and over, a sonic loop that is disturbingly both repetitive and disjointed. As the boys start teasing the little girl, her visible distress is caught up in the frenzied soundtrack, accompanied by fervent drum beats. But voices, human sounds, are all silenced and lost under the frenetic schizoid sonic soundscape. The images form a montage of single moments, cutting back and forth between past and present. The humming of a Christian hymn by the elderly mother and her daughter is intercut between the seaside scenes and shots of Indigenous singer Jimmy Little. Strong in Christian faith, Little is known for his ballads, including Christian songs. But Little’s voice is silenced as he continues to go through the movements of singing his song and these images are intercut with those of the mother and daughter humming and those of the day at the seaside. The picture cuts become frantic and the soundtrack frenzied, forming a scene that is visually as well as aurally disturbing. By the end of the sequence the little girl is left isolated and visibly distressed. The sound design supports the subversive nature of the images: elderly white mother and her adopted Indigenous child, the Indigenous boys, and Jimmy Little whose song offers a link to Christianity and the missions involved in the Stolen Generations and the large-scale removal of

26 Indigenous children from their families. The painful memories, too difficult for the film to give voice to, are sounded out in a different way. What the soundtrack provides is the sonic ability to write back by addressing the impact of colonisation and the forced separation of children from their families. It does this by sonically repositioning and therefore undermining the earlier use of key iconic sounds to represent Indigenous Australians as Other. For example, juxtaposed against the images of this flashback sequence are the violent sounds of what can be identified as seagulls but are sonically treated to become demonic spirit birds, a sound used in earlier films such asPicnic at Hanging Rock and The Fringe Dwellers (Beresford 1986) to connote the Other. Creating a juncture, the bird sound as sonic fetish also acts as a sonic artefact, writing back to these and other earlier films by destabilising and problematising established iconic sonic representations. As discussed above, in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the school girls become entranced and are led away by the alluring sounds of the Other, the ghost- like sounds of demonic spirit birds. In Night Cries, these sonic fetishes are positioned quite differently. Sounds that have connoted the Other in earlier films become post- colonial sonic fetishes. In doing so, they subvert earlier texts by signalling, in this case, the loss, trauma and despair created under the colonising influence of the missionaries, the assimilation laws and the land-grabbing tactics of the colonisers. As Marks writes: The cinema of cultural displacement often focuses on loss: of language, of custom, of one’s place in a community. However, a discourse of loss alone cannot explain the transformations and new productions of culture and consciousness that occur in diaspora (2000, p. 195).

When sound and silence are positioned differently in a cinematic landscape the ear starts stretching and, disorientated, finds gaps and silences; it reaches out to the brain for clarification, memory or resonance, something that will help it to orient itself within a new sonic positioning.

The sonic spectre

In many Australian transcultural films there is a ghostly presence, one that is often bound to memory and trauma. To explain how this presence operates sonically, I have created the concept of sonic spectre. Michael Chion (1994) uses the similar and related term ‘acousmatic’ for sounds that are not bound to a physical source, and the term ‘acousmêtre’ for a voice that is not attached to a body. Both Chion’s terms are helpful when discussing the presence of the sonic spectre in Australian transcultural cinema. But my term, sonic spectre, differs from Chion’s in that it relates specifically to those sounds that haunt, or to sounds that reveal a ghostly, or absent, presence.

27 In Picnic at Hanging Rock, for example, there is an acousmatic presence belonging to the landscape that possesses the girls but which the audience never sees. However, in a radical 180 degree turn, Radiance (Perkins 1998) produces an incorporeal body that is not terrifying but reassuring and comforting. Radiance is about three women who are brought together by the death of their mother, and it is the ghostly presence of their mother that interests me. The sisters’ shared history starts to unravel in the family home (the iconic Queenslander) as they battle with the fallout of colonisation, rape, assimilation policies, land rights and loss of identity. The film is an example of Australian transcultural cinema that has an audible discourse of loss and transformation. It is a film that puts both the home and the post-colonial landscape under observation.

Mae (Tricia Moreton-Thomas) and Cressy (Rachel Maza) the two oldest siblings, try to locate themselves in their dead mother’s mirror and it is her reassuring and instructive voice they hear singing back to them. As the acousmêtre sings, the daughters are enveloped and there is transference of life and substance, from mother to daughter, in an audible mirroring. This is what Mary Anne Doane, in her article ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’, calls the ‘sonorous envelope’ (1985, p. 170), a term first created by Guy Rosolato (1974) and since extended by a number of notable academics including Julia Kristeva (1980) and Kaja Silverman (1988). Doane argues that the sonorous envelope is predominantly the mother’s voice surrounding the child in the womb and that this sound is the first instance of ‘auditory pleasure’ (1985, p. 170). As Doane maintains: Memories of the first experiences of the voice, of the hallucinatory satisfaction it offered, circumscribed the pleasure of hearing and ground its relation to the fantasmatic body. This is not simply to situate the experiences of infancy as the sole determinant in a system directly linking cause and effect but to acknowledge that the traces of archaic desires are never annihilated… the voice appears to lend itself to hallucination, in particular the hallucination of power over space effected by an extension or restructuration of the body (1985, pp. 169–70).

In The Voice in Cinema, Chion discusses how the mother’s voice can ‘subvert boundaries’ and ‘transcend time and space’ (1999, p. 112). However, Britta Sjogren positions the voice a little differently. In Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film she explains how the voice: threatens a heterogeneous contradiction to both the ‘image’ and the ‘sound’ tracks – it is somewhere in between, neither interior nor exterior, speaking from and of the body, rendering the corpus in space, as it floats alongside images to which it appears, at moments, to bind (2006, p. 37).

Sjogren argues that the body can speak through the voice. In addition, I argue that a voice can represent not just one body but a multitude of ‘bodiless’ bodies floating in the

28 psyche of the voice. The voice is not innocent but remembers; it is built on memory, vocal traits passed down through generations and remembered from everyday life experiences. All these vocal memories have implications for my project. In Radiance, the ancestral voice as sonic artefact and, I argue here, also as sonic spectre, as container of memory and knowledge, can be located in the Third Space. Their land is lost, stolen; their language is gone. Mae, the eldest sister, recounts the last days of their mother’s life and the questions she has been left with: Who are you?, who is me? I’d ask her again and again, but she wouldn’t tell me. That thing wouldn’t tell me, yet I looked after her. I wanted to know where I came from. I wanted to know why my grandparents got thrown off that island. I wanted to know about my father, about her…

Then on the morning of the last day she stopped screaming at me and was looking at me with love? I didn’t know – then like she was possessed by the devil she got this energy and she started to scream, her eyes on fire, scream and scream, and I screamed back!

A temporal and spatial rupture occurs as Mae screams back, her vocal cords forming an ancestral chant passed unknowingly to her by her mother. Within this Third Space time slows, images of the land and sea are underscored by Mae’s ‘screaming’. Sound valorises image; as the stylised montage of iconic images are ‘projected’, Mae’s voice fades out under the emergence or ‘summoning’ of a metaphysical wind, a sonic artefact that moves across Mae’s image.

The stylistic montage in Radiance both visually and sonically undermines traditional Western representations of ‘Indigenous’. The stylised landscape shots are borrowed from earlier cinematic representations that have depicted a barren, silent and threatening landscape, something in need of the taming and colonising influences of predominantly white masculinity. In Australian films such asPicnic at Hanging Rock, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Schepisi 1978) and Wake in Fright (Kotcheff 1971), the landscape is depicted as an uncanny menacing environment, waiting to be ‘taken’ and civilised. In Radiance, these images are not silent; a female ancestral voice, a sonic spectre, sings ownership and connection to the land. As this voice dies, the metaphysical wind as sonic artefact is reclaimed, connecting land to traditional owner. What happens in this powerful sonic sequence is that the Other becomes situated in the Third Space and in this sequence is able to renegotiate its position and its own representation. Bhabha argues that the negotiations taking place within the ‘Third Space of enunciation’ challenge stereotypes and that this ‘disruptive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of the Western nation…’ (1994, p. 54). The montage sequence in Radiance that I discussed above challenges stereotyped images of Indigenous Australians and unsettles ideas surrounding land ownership. Sonically it decentres and reworks earlier

29 iconic representations, providing a powerful post-colonial address.

In Radiance, the ‘uncanny’ is called forth by the sonic resonances heard in the montage. When the ancestral voice takes hold of Mae, it resonates through her and reverberates across the landscape, fading out under incorporeal winds. The ‘uncanny’ is situated in the Third Space where sonic negotiations are taking place that challenge and decentre the colonial position.

The power and potency of silence A. Listening to the soundtrack and hearing silence

In his article ‘Re-Sounding Silences’, Philip Peek, an authority on African visual and verbal arts, discusses how silence holds different meanings for different cultures. He challenges the hierarchy of sound over silence: It is assumed that there is a shift from inchoate silence to meaningful sound. This portrayal of human development has it that first there is absence, no human speech or song, but only later do significant utterances and sounds occur. In reality, many world cultures move from sound to silence, most easily demonstrated in religious contexts. But as well as this, we can quickly realize that neither sound nor silence is comprehensible without the other (2000. p, 16).

Silence is able to change the way we hear and see the sound film, and this is central to understanding how the soundtracks of Australian films exemplify cultural change within Australian society. For instance, in Beneath Clouds (Sen 2002) the separation of sound from image in several cutaways is abrupt and the change in temporality that this produces creates what Bhabha, citing Benedict Anderson, describes as ‘a symbolic structure of the nation as “imagined community’’’ (1994, p. 226). This leads me to consider how global and local politics and cultural influences help to create and challenge the soundtrack, and the implications of this for Australian cinema. When the soundtrack forms more questions than it gives answers, as in Beneath Clouds, or when it is intentionally played low, the brain begins the cognitive processes in its search to be able to understand. The ‘ear’ starts to ‘turn itself up’, to ‘tune’ itself in, and in this sense these films ask their audience to listen and not simply to hear. In his article ‘Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing and Auditory Space’, Paul Carter defines the difference between listening and hearing thus: hearing can [emphasis in original] be conceptualized (like looking) as a detached registration and classification of eternal phenomena…but listening is engaged hearing. Its social equivalent in the visual sphere is the experience of eyes meeting and the sense that this produces of being involved in a communicational contract (2004, p. 43).

I argue that to really listen is to engage not just with sound, but also with silence. By

30 privileging silence, I can build a construct, using it as a key factor in understanding the tension and negotiation that is taking place within the sonic cleavages of Australian transcultural cinema. By arguing that silence is a purveyor of change within soundscapes, I can investigate sounds that rupture, reconfigure and defamiliarise the hegemony represented in Australian transcultural films. Des O’Rawe, in his article ‘The Great Secret: Silence, Cinema and Modernism’13, argues that: Silence is not simply the absence of sound any more than black is only the absence of colour. Silence traverses all manner of contexts: it is never absolute and achieves significance in relation to what it denies, displaces or disavows. It is impossible to think, speak or write about silence without invoking sound (Winter 2006, p. 395).

O’Rawe’s comments here are particularly valuable for thinking through the soundscapes of recent Australian cinema in which silence and sound have started to be positioned differently in a reconfiguration of memory and history.

B. Listening to a silent landscape: Beneath Clouds

Beneath Clouds takes place on the roads and highways of rural New South Wales. In Daniel Browning’s interview for Message Stick (ABC TV), director Ivan Sen states that the film is set ‘in the “real” Australia: the places in between the city and the country’ (2002, p. 1). Sen insists that he ‘just wanted to write a story about a couple of kids who I kind of knew and one of them was me’ (2002, p. 2). Lena and Vaughn, the two central protagonists, are both struggling under what it means to be Indigenous in contemporary Australia. As ‘displaced persons’ they are searching for some resonance of ‘home’ along a route that has been surveyed, carved up and tar sealed as part of the colonisation process. Their journey could be considered an Indigenous modern-day ‘walkabout’.14

In Beneath Clouds, the cutaways of ‘wildlife’ pose in deadly silence. These images are in stark contrast to the iconic and mostly live ‘wildlife’ cutaways of earlier films such asWalkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Sen’s silent images are ambivalent, and by writing back they refer directly to Anglo- Celtic forms of Indigenous representation, diaspora, and questions of identity and ownership. The silence that accompanies the cutaways in Beneath Clouds directly undermines and problematises the forced representation of life and vibrancy depicted by the iconic cutaways from the earlier films I have just mentioned. Marks describes

13 Hereafter referred to as ‘The Great Secret’ 14 See Renay Walker’s article ‘Blood on the Tracks’ in Metro Magazine, Winter, no. 133, 2002, pp. 12–15, for her discussion of Aboriginal diaspora, ‘walkabout’ and the road movie.

31 the use of silence as a place where memory is situated and argues that ‘many works of transcultural cinema begin from the inability to speak, to represent objectively one’s own culture, history, and memory; they are marked by silence, absence and hesitation’ (2000, p. 21). As Marks acknowledges, her book does not offer a detailed analysis of the role of sound in transcultural cinema. Drawing on her work here, however, allows me to position and develop my research within a sensory, transcultural environment.

As a transcultural film, the cutaways inBeneath Clouds are sonically subversive in their silence. The mute cutaways disrupt and destabilise the soundtrack in such a way that they become a problematic site that directly addresses the social and cultural implications of colonisation. The colonist’s desire to name, identify and survey is directly challenged by silent images, colonial fetishes that have lost their meaning. In his essay ‘Theory of the Film: Sound’, film theorist Béla Balázs notes that: in silence even things drop their masks and seem to look at you with wide-open eyes. If a sound film shows us any object surrounded by the noises of everyday life and then suddenly cuts out all sound and brings it up to us in isolated close-up, then the physiognomy of that object takes on a significance and tension… (1985, p. 119).

When compared with Walkabout, Beneath Clouds provides a landscape that is uncannily silent. The atmospheres in Beneath Clouds provide temporal linearisation, but most importantly they provide an ambivalent sonic layer for the narrative to work against. The characters are not part of this landscape, they are verbally trying to negotiate a way through it. The sounds of thunder and rain do not provide a dramatic sense of ‘nature as native’ in the landscape tradition, they are merely sidelined to create subtle turning points in the storyline.

The application of silence within the soundtrack of Beneath Clouds creates a destabilisation and decentring of the narrative. The atmosphere track has a narrow dynamic range, and a sound level that barely fluctuates. It provides an ambivalent backdrop that is a dramatic move away from the vibrant sonic soundscapes that usually represent the landscape of Indigenous Australia in national cinema.

C. Listening to the silence between the dialogue: Beneath Clouds

In Beneath Clouds, the gaps and silences within the verbal debate, central to the storyline, warrant close investigation. In the opening scene, Lena (Dannielle Hall) decides that she has to escape from the depressing reality of her home life. Surrounded by teenage pregnancy, unemployment, crime, alcoholism, violence and an indifferent mother, she sees no other option but to leave before she becomes another sad statistic.

32 Lena decides to travel to Sydney to find her Irish father. If she embraces her white Irish heritage she could possibly escape the pain, anger, futility and hopelessness she sees in her Aboriginal community. Lena has enough saved for a bus ticket to Sydney, but the comfort of the bus is soon exchanged for the road when she is accidently left behind at a rest stop. Forced to hitch to Sydney, Lena soon forms an ambivalent alliance with Vaughn (Damian Pitt), a young Indigenous man on the run from a detention centre. Vaughn is trying to get to Sydney to see his sick mother, who he has been told is dying. In their article, ‘Ivan Sen and the Art of the Road’, Adam Gall and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey describe Lena and Vaughn’s relationship as one that does not sit comfortably within the constructs of the iconic ‘mateship’. They observe that: it is uncertain, argumentative and often close to breaking down, playing out racial conflict between whites and Aborigines. Lena provokes Vaughn along conservative white lines. She argues with him about Aboriginal and white history…’ (2006, pp. 434–35).

The conversations that take place on the highway to Sydney are a rethinking of history, a negotiation of white/Indigenous Australian relations. Vaughn asks Lena, ‘What’s your story?’ But Lena is running away from her story and her response to Vaughn is a retort, making a connection between the Indigenous field workers they pass who are ‘chippin’ cotton and black American slaves. Vaughn, misinterpreting her frustration, tries to confirm her identity by stating, ‘Well, you’re fuckin’ white, aren’t ya?’. Vaughn places Lena historically in the role of ‘white fella’ in a story about race relations in post-colonial Australia. Lena’s response to Vaughn is an ambivalent, ‘Is that right?’, a response that goes unanswered: instead it is left to resonate in the diasporic Third Space as a negotiation of Indigenous/settler relations.

In Beneath Clouds, the silent wide open spaces of rural New South Wales are juxtaposed against claustrophobic car interiors, and these two locations form the backdrop for Lena and Vaughn’s exchanges. The spatial and temporal qualities of these spaces are highlighted by the slow and deliberate hesitations and silences within their conversation. In Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag contends that silence provides ‘time for the continuing or exploring of thought’ (1969, p. 19). Gall and Probyn-Rapsey comment that, ‘Sen’s pauses and his attention to gaps in the narrative, uncertainties, shyness, indicate the time and space that is necessary to attempt to read and hear stories of Aboriginal movement and belonging’ (2006, p. 427). The authors assert that ‘these ‘‘gaps” in time between the answers and the questions also indicate points of no entry (no road) for the viewer’, and they concede that ‘there are going to be many points in this film that are unavailable to the viewer, especially if they are non-Aboriginal’ (2006, p. 427). As Lena and Vaughn volley exchanges, their questions about history and race

33 fall into the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations, a Third Space that is open for the audience to interpret.

In Beneath Clouds, the audience is instructed to ‘listen’ to the gaps in the dialogue and this can be problematic. Narrative-based film soundtracks are ‘vococentric’. In Audio Vision, Chion argues that soundtracks are vococentric because they align to the human ear by privileging the voice through the reproduction process, and this gives a ‘guarantee of effortless intelligibility of the words spoken’ (1994, p. 6). I am extending this term to include the process whereby the brain starts to ‘stretch’ its cognitive processes to make sense of the questions being raised by the dialogue tracks of Australian transcultural films. When gaps appear in the dialogue, disorientation and decentring occurs. In Beneath Clouds history is played out in the dialogue and its gaps, and as audio-viewers we are being asked to listen up. What this means is that we are given the silence to gather our thoughts and to try and make sense of what is being negotiated by the narrative.

D. Listen up, what are they saying?

In many Australian transcultural films, the silence of the characters at key dramatic moments is common, and this silence creates a space for questions to resonate, and at times for other sounds to highlight and support the subtext. In Ana Kokkinos’s film Head On (1998), the main character, Ari (Alex Dimitriades), is caught somewhere between sound and silence, a place I argue is the Third Space. The burden Ari carries on his journey of self-discovery can be heard in the sound of his breathing, which is foregrounded as a site of tension and negotiation. The son of Greek migrants, Ari’s trajectory is a diasporic negotiation of the Australian, Greek and queer worlds he inhabits. The fissure or Third Space provided by the collision of these worlds is a problematic site that is possible to hear in the soundtrack. Throughout the film, Ari struggles to find enough air, his lungs suck up the substance as if each breath is his last. He inhales, exhales, gasps, gulps and wheezes his way sonically through the film as he tries to locate himself within the three different worlds he inhabits. Ari is unable to rationally verbalise his pain and confusion; as he gasps and lunges for air, so too does the audience. In his article ‘Acting and Breathing’, Ross Gibson explains that: even in film, where the warm, ventilating body of the actor is only virtually present, a performance can press into our flesh. The body of the spectator can be changed in its spirit, which is to sayin its breathing [emphasis in original], in the energy of its pulses and temperatures. (Let’s remember that breath and spirit are words for the same mystery. Inspire-expire-inspire: this rhythm keeps breath in our body and so keeps us spiritual as well as merely material) (2006, p. 39).

34 Gibson writes about the intimate connection that is formed between the spectator and the actor via the potency of breath, or life force. In Head On, Ari finds it difficult to verbally articulate his distress. He isolates himself by listening to music turned up loud on his Walkman, punctuated only by his laboured inhalations and exhalations. As audio-viewers we consciously or unconsciously start simulating Ari’s breathing, and this forms an empathetic connection with the character. This Third Space that Ari sonically inhabits and which the audio-viewer becomes responsive to is situated within Ari’s breath, a sound that is often not consciously heard or considered but which resonates in the audio-viewer’s unconscious. Breath has the ability to locate and to connect, it also serves as a sonic vehicle for transporting memory back and forth in time, as Marks suggests, ‘free[ing] time from causality’ (2000, p. 27).

Within Australian national cinema it is useful to consider the films that have a ‘silence’ created by characters who are unable to speak, who are ‘silenced’ by circumstance. Philip Peek states: From those disciplines devoted to the evolution of human phonation and communication, we learn that we are ‘hard wired’ for sound and apparently programmed for speech. We cannot not learn a language. Perhaps reflecting that primacy of speech, many origin myths around the world have speech as the first of human accomplishments. We are also programmed for hearing. Cultural systems can be properly considered as extra-somatic systems of survival. In other words, to compensate for our lack of sharp senses and physical abilities we have the means to call out a warning to others or shout for help. Surely signing can do much of this and obviously writing serves such functions, but the point is that it is speech that allows us to live as we do. Therefore, when humans choose silence, one must listen carefully (2000, p. 16).

Muteness has, in fact, been a recurrent theme in Australian cinema. In Amy (Tass 1998) and The Quiet Room (de Heer 1997), the young protagonists become mute as a result of trauma. Ada, the main character in The Piano (Campion 1993), stopped talking when she was six, but there is no given explanation as to why.15 Where the Green Ants Dream (Herzog 1984) has one of the most disturbing and powerful representations of a silent character in Australian cinema.16 One of the protagonists, an Aboriginal elder, is the last surviving member of his Country, of his language group. The elder cannot speak

15 The Piano is an Australian/French co-production. Jane Campion is New Zealand born but has been based in Australia since the late 1970s. Set and shot in New Zealand, The Piano was post-produced in Australia. I mention it here because of the colonial history that Australia and New Zealand share and also because The Piano examines, as Felicity Coombs and Suzanne Gemmell explain, colonial history using a post-colonial discourse (1999, p. viii). 16 Where the Green Ants Dream is a German/Australian co-production, directed by German director Werner Herzog with German funding. Released to mixed reviews, Andrew Hurley explains that ‘the final source and overarching frame for the film were Herzog’s own socio-critical meditations about the state of Western civilisation’ (2006, p. 6).

35 of what he has observed and experienced, he is not only alone but also silenced. The historical implications of genocide and shame that resonate in the silence created by the Indigenous elder in Where the Green Ants Dream can also be found in Beneath Clouds, in the hesitations and gaps that create a Third Space between the lines of dialogue.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have explored the role of the soundtrack in Australian transcultural cinema to outline how and why the soundtrack serves as a key site for examining the ways history, social policy, memory, trauma and diaspora are negotiated in Australian national cinema. Drawing upon sound, film and post-colonial theories, I have engaged with a number of debates and theories to support my claims. My innovative conceptualisations of the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact and the sonic spectre have enabled me to explain how the soundtrack operates within Australian transcultural cinema. Moreover, these three sonic concepts have helped me to explain how iconic sounds from Australian national cinema of the 1970s and 1980s have been repositioned in the transcultural cinema to renegotiate the meanings and myths of nation.

Drawing from film and sensory debates, I have highlighted the importance of silence and the need to listen to the gaps. I have also demonstrated how silence is utilised in the soundtracks of Australian transcultural film.

I placed three strands of the soundtrack under examination – the effects, atmospheres and dialogue tracks – and identified how they have been used to transverse time and space and give voice to history and culture, and to those silenced and displaced. This chapter has argued for the role and potency of the soundtrack and its position as a powerful resource in Australian transcultural cinema. I have also touched on the need to listen more closely to the soundtracks of Australian intercultural cinema; this is something I discuss in more detail in the next chapter.

36 Chapter two

Listening to the cinematic soundscape

Introduction

In this chapter I build on my argument outlined in the previous chapter by providing a point of reference between sound as sensation and sound as something that can be closely analysed for meaning. I do this by providing an in-depth analysis of how hearing and listening operates within individuals and across cultures. I examine more closely the connections between perception, hearing, listening, memory, and brain and body processes. I provide a method for close-listening closely to Australian transcultural films and use Choo Choo Choo Choo, one of the trilogy of films inbeDevil (Moffatt 1993), as the example. By connecting the auditory system with the cinematic experience, I am able to outline the bearing that the film soundtrack possesses and the significance this has for the audio-viewer. When discussing the position of the audio-viewer, I draw from a number of debates within spectatorship theory to highlight how the gaze has taken precedence over sound in this area of Film Studies.

I focus on the importance of sound and of listening in Australian transcultural cinema and engage with the following question: By listening to the cinematic soundtrack, how is it possible to understand how sound operates as a site for interpreting history, migration, diaspora, trauma and memory? In response, I identify how Australian transcultural cinema foregrounds the sonic and how it enables and requires particular kinds of listening from the audio-viewer. The importance of aurality has often been overlooked in Film Studies, therefore this chapter shifts the above debates into new terrain.

Sound history

The connection between sound and history ties into sensory debates which support my argument that listening to Australian transcultural film soundtracks can reveal a great deal about past and present cultural ideals and national issues. In Hearing History, Mark Smith writes: Rather than positing aural history as qualitatively new, it is perhaps more accurate and helpful to see the recent flurry of interest in the topic as extending a deep genealogy, one now flourishing partly as a result of changes in the nature of historical research and partly as a consequence of the growing importance of auditory technologies – television, radio recorded sound, telephones – in modern life (2004, p.ix).

37 As Smith argues, aural history has become increasingly important for extending and building on questions regarding social and cultural histories. His argument provides a starting point for me to investigate more closely why the history of listening and the importance of sound are essential when analysing any activity of social or cultural relevance. Furthermore, his assertion that sound technology has been a key factor in the recent interest in questions of aural history connects with earlier assertions proposed by Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Ong argued that developments in technology have created a ‘secondary orality’ (1982, p. 136). This secondary orality is not to be regarded as a replica of primary orality but as something that has emerged out of a convergence of technologies as well as cultures. This secondary orality forces people to listen. In The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Marshall McLuhan describes how mechanical shifts are resulting in ‘a sort of twist of the kaleidoscope of the entire sensorium’ (1971, p.55). David Howes, in The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, discusses the implications of the changing of sensory ratios: The senses are shapers of culture, but they are also bearers of culture, and that means that one can never assume in advance what their ratio (in the fullest sense) in another culture will be (1991, p.17).

Howes’s argument supports the need to listen closely to the changes that occur at the place where cultures meet, at the place between Self and Other. It is also important to listen to the point of contact between culture and technology.

In Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity, James Lastra argues that of all the senses, it is vision and hearing that have been most influenced by, and in return have been the most influential in, the development of sensory technological innovations that have emerged since the late 19th century: The institutional deployment and industrial exploitation of cinematic technology ramifies throughout the culture we call modern, shaping our experience of others, of history, of ourselves. Still, cinema, the most pervasive mechanism for disseminating technologically mediated sensory experiences, is, and was from its very inception not a visual phenomenon but a resolutely audiovisual one (2000, p.4).

Lastra’s argument foregrounds the emergence of cinema as a chronicle of cultural movements and change. His observations also bring to attention the fact that film theory has predominantly treated cinema as a ‘visual phenomenon’ not an audiovisual one. To remedy this, I propose that there needs to be a ‘second hearing’ of cinematic soundtracks. Film soundscapes need to be deconstructed and broken down into ‘cinematic sound events’ for analysis. These sound events need to be ‘listened’ to

38 with more intent, scrutiny and purpose than has previously been granted to them. By providing a clear method for critically ‘listening’ to Australian transcultural films, it is possible to hear how social memories, histories, traumas and diasporas have been positioned, and in some cases repositioned, within these soundtracks.

Listening to sonic events

The concept ‘sound event’ is not new. There seems to be strong agreement among scholars that since the 1960s, a Western focus on visual culture has been changing to that of a more sensual approach as the West tries to understand the world in a postmodern context. In his article ‘World as View and World as Event’, Ong writes of an ‘outmoded hypervisualism’ (1969, p.644) and the need to adjust to a ‘physical universe’ where each of the senses ‘impinges on the human life world differently, particularly with regard to awareness of interiority and exteriority’ (1969, p.637). He argues that ‘technologized man’ needs to move away from looking at the world as an ‘object’ and start interpreting it as an ‘event’ (1969, p. 634). In discussing the importance of voice and listening in non-writing cultures, Ong states: The concept of world view may not only interfere with the empathy necessary for understanding such cultures but may even be outmoded for our own, since modern technological man has entered into a new electronic compact with sound (1969, p. 634).

Ong saw the possibility of an event world thus offering up the opportunity for analysing the world in a sensory way. Psychologist Michael Forrester, in his article ‘Auditory Perception and Sound as Event: Theorising Sound Imagery in Psychology’, picks up Ong’s concept of event world and explains how in scientific terms sound is described as ‘acoustic signal or sound waves’ (2000) but that the interpretation our brain gives us is not seen as a wave but heard as an event: Although we understand scientific descriptions of auditory perception, phenomenally we don’t ‘hear’ acoustic signals or sound waves, we hear events: the sounds of people and things moving, changing, beginning and ending, forever interdependent with the dynamics of the present moment. We ‘hear’ the sound of silence (2000).

Forrester is discussing a sonic description of a scene, or a sound event taking place. For each sound event there are myriad layers that are interpreted by the brain and laid out as a sonic scene. A sound event can be played out in various ways, depending on what sounds trigger the auditor into actively listening and also on what the auditor more consciously decides to listen to. The auditor has the ability to randomly change how they listen to the sonic events. Foreground sounds can be placed in background and background sounds brought up to the surface for examination. Within the cinematic experience, a similar relationship takes place between the auditor and the

39 soundtrack, but what is fundamental in this encounter is the omniscient presence of the sound designer. The sonic clues or ‘crumbs’ thrown down by the sound alchemist (designer) support a transformative effect, enabling a possible triggering of memory and knowledges generated by the auditor’s cultural background and life experiences. Lastra discusses the impact technological media has on the audio-viewer: Regardless of its myriad other causes, the experience we describe as ‘modernity’ – an experience of profound temporal and spatial displacements, of often accelerated and diversified shocks, of new modes of sociality and of experience – has been shaped decisively by the technological media. The cinema above all has come to stand for ‘modernity’ itself, seeming to emblematize in the most compelling and even visceral way, the frequently violent shifts in social and cultural life, especially the newly possible (if not inevitable) forms of spatial, temporal, and sensual restructuring (2000, p.4).

Lastra highlights how cinema examines ‘social and cultural life’. With its ability to shift spatial and temporal borders, it operates as a powerful and dynamic cultural force. Cinema is an audiovisual medium, but by foregrounding the role of the soundtrack I offer a strong argument to support my claim that the soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema offer a range of sensory experiences that, once experienced, can destabilise and shock the audio-viewer. The ability of the sound designer to create contentious sound events that can evoke, transmute and shock is a powerful yet underrated dynamism and needs to be explored further.

Listening to shared knowledge

When creating a soundtrack, the sound designer relies on two processes occurring during audition: firstly, the influence of the auditor’s personal profile, which includes culture, age, gender and social background; and secondly, the auditor’s ability to evaluate new knowledges by making key connections between the audiovisual material they are subjected to and their life experiences, which are stored as memories. Two key components arise here that deserve closer investigation. First, the haptic properties of the soundtrack felt by the auditor, and secondly the transformative effect this has in response to social history and memory.

It is worth noting that cognitive scientists are making connections between different forms of audition processing. Stephen MacAdams and Emmanuel Bigand in Thinking in Sound: The Cognitive Psychology of Human Audition, suggest that there is a link between the ‘more elementary aspects… (sensory information processing)’ of audition and the ‘more abstract aspects (symbolic information processing)’ (1993, p.1). The authors assert that ‘the role of the cognitive aspects of audition is… primarily to remind us that auditory information participates in a fundamental way in the

40 development [emphasis added] of knowledge’ (1993, p.1). In Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, Joseph LeDoux, a scientist well known for his research into the brain mechanisms that operate emotion and memory, argues that the process of hearing interrelates with the other senses. Thus this ‘development of knowledge’ via the senses is shared knowledge. LeDoux suggests that the human brain is directed by ‘a combination of genetic and environmental influences’ (2003, p.307). He explains how early life experience is considered to be part of the developmental process, whilst later development is considered to be ‘learning’ (2003, p.307). He states that there are different systems within the brain that operate separately but work together on the same event. One system processes sight, another sound and yet another smell, but there are additional systems that operate within each of these senses. All this information about the one event gets stored by the visual, auditory and olfactory sensory systems, which meet in convergence zones that form memory systems. LeDoux argues that within these zones there is ‘a kind of shared culture [that] develops between the various systems because they are exposed to similar environmental circumstances’ (2003, p.308). In the same way, people who share histories, culture, geography and so on, but have never met each other, still share some similar experiences and belief systems. LeDoux explains how: in convergence zones like the hippocampus, it is possible for completely independent sensory representations to be synthesized into memory representations that transcend the individual systems involved in the initial processing. Thus, while different systems may form independent memories of separate aspects of an experience, memories formed in, or by way of, a convergence zone are multifaceted – they include information extracted from different systems. Such memories reflect the whole experience of the organism rather than bits and pieces of an experience recorded by other systems. But because the bits and pieces are the raw materials, there is a kind of unity of experience between the memory established by a convergence zone and by its lower connections (2003, p.318).

LeDoux suggests that these sensory memories can be aroused separately or via the convergence zones. For the audio-viewer, the soundtrack is experienced as a multifaceted sensual experience, one that is enriched by stored knowledge and memory. Sound is stored both physically in the body and in memory, and this suggests that it is a powerful tool in filmmaking, and an important site for analysing cinema. Further, the meeting of the senses in the convergence zones highlights the need to closely examine the sound/image relationship as a contested zone within the Third Space. When listening to a cinematic soundtrack, it is important to remember that this experience is influenced by physiological as well as psychological human experiences.

41 Listening to transcultural cinema: haptic aurality Marks offers potent support for this argument for how the senses can trigger, resurrect and create both old and new truths and realities in cinema. In The Skin of the Film she describes how ‘intercultural cinema draws from many cultural traditions, many ways of representing memory and experience, and it synthesizes them with contemporary Western cinematic practices’. Explaining that ‘cultural knowledges are lost, found and created anew in the temporal movement of history and in the spatial movement between places’ (2000, p.24), she argues: that many of these works evoke memories both individual and cultural, through an appeal to nonvisual knowledge, embodied knowledge, and experiences of the senses, such as touch, smell and taste (2000, p.2).

Marks describes how film can be felt as a ‘skin’, and how there is a form of communication that takes place between the audience and the film, using the term ‘haptic visuality’ (2000, p.xi) to describe this relationship. To take this concept of touch in a different sensory direction, I am introducing the term ‘haptic aurality’ to define the practice of being touched by the cinematic soundscape. In this thesis I use the concept of haptic aurality to refer to the way sound touches an audio-viewer. My analysis of how sound can operate haptically within transcultural cinema shifts and builds in a different direction to Marks’s interpretation of the process. In discussing the possibilities of haptic sound, Marks maintains that ‘we cannot literally touch sound with our ears’ but that ‘hearing can perceive the environment in a more or less instrumental way’ (2000, p.183). She connects the haptic with hearing, explaining that the space that exists between experiencing and interpreting sound can be described as haptic. What I propose is a haptic aural experience that draws from old and new sensory information and can be ‘felt’ by the body. A soundtrack is textural, created from sonic threads woven together to form sonic structures that are able to reach out and touch; an experience that is more intimate, more invasive and therefore more shocking than Marks describes.

In Hearing Essay, profoundly deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie uses the term ‘touching the sound’ to describe the haptic experience she has with sound. She describes sound as ‘a specialized form of touch’, explaining how ‘sound is simply vibrating air that the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain’ (1993, p.1). Discussing how these vibrations can be felt by the body, she comments on how her communication with acoustics is often in relation to the changing thickness of the air moving around her. Glennie points out that the individual listening experiences we all have are not the same, the aural interpretations that are given to a sound event are built by the brain in response to a grouping of different processes. Paul

42 Rodaway, in Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place, points out that while the ear is the main sensory organ for hearing, it is not the only way that we hear. He asserts that ‘geographical experience is multisensual and ecological, that is we can “hear” with more than our ears and the context, or environment itself, plays a key role in what or how we hear’ (1994, p.84). In Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, David Tomas (1996) addresses difference between cultures, and points out that to ‘listen’ does not necessarily mean that each individual hears the same thing. In ‘Sound and the Self’, Steven Connor comments on the haptic quality of sound and its ability to ‘disintegrate and reconfigure space’ (2004, p.56): … the singular space of the visual is transformed by the experience of sound to a plural space; one can hear many sounds simultaneously, where it is impossible to see different visual objects at the same time without disposing them in a unified field of vision.Where auditory experience is dominant, we may say, singular perspectival gives way to plural, permeated space. The self defined in terms of hearing rather than sight is a self imagined not as a point, but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as a channel through which voices, noises and musics travel (2004, p.56-57).

The use of the word ‘membrane’ suggests something transparent, breathing, alive; the relationship between cinematic sound and the audio-viewer forms a haptic connection. The response to this experience may be apperceived, building on past and present knowledges that loosen time/space relationships in an integration of a mind/body sonic sensory negotiation.

What’s audibly missing in spectatorship theory?

In foregrounding listening, it is important to investigate some of the arguments put forward in spectatorship theory concerning the apparatus, the gaze, and spectatorship. Judith Mayne, in Cinema and Spectatorship, concedes that in spectatorship theory ‘the relationship between the “subject”, the position supposedly assigned to the film viewer by the institutions of the cinema, and the “viewer”, the real person who watches the movies, has never been resolved’ (1993, p.8). Moreover, in ‘White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory’, Jane Gaines suggests that ‘we have overemphasized the ideological function of ‘‘signifying practice” at the expense of considering other ideological implications of the conflicting meanings in the text’ (1990, p.209). In ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’ bell hooks supports this by asserting that opening up a new space creates ‘diverse representations, [and] new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity’ (1992, p.130). Mayne suggests that ‘what is needed…is a recognition of the flexibility of different modes of address, as well as the hypothetical quality of any spectator imagined by film theory’ (1993, p.8). Further, inViewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, Linda

43 Williams declares that the theoretical underpinnings of the 1970s and 1980s work on gaze theory remains invaluable, but that possibly ‘any theory of spectatorship must now be historically specific, grounded in the specific spectatorial practices, the specific narratives, and the specific attractions of the mobilized and embodied gaze of viewers’ (1997, pp.18-19). By providing close listenings of Australian transcultural films and acknowledging the spectator as an audio-viewer this thesis generates different ways of knowing, creates a new approach and opens up a new method for analysing Australian cinema.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, many feminist film theorists became interested in the role of address in the ‘women’s film’, or melodrama. What emerged from this research was the importance of the female voice in these films. Utilising women’s classic Hollywood films of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, feminist theorists focused on a more audible method of ‘reading’ women in film. Most notable are the works of Mary Anne Doane (1985), Kaja Silverman (1988), and Amy Lawrence (1991). Lawrence searched for ‘gaps’ that emerged with the transition of silent cinema to sound. She asked if these gaps provided a place where the representation of women could be read differently and questioned if women could be ‘heard’ in film at this historical moment. Lawrence’s questioning and search is pertinent to my research as I listen to what can be heard in the gaps found in Australian transcultural cinema; that place where Self and Other meet. Taking the work of these theorists into consideration, I turn my focus directly to the ear and discuss the influence that listening has on the audio-viewing experience.

Listening and the mutated gaze

In regard to the theoretical dialectic that concerns the auditory, discussing radio plays, Connor talks about the ability of sound to stimulate the ‘mind’s eye’. He calls this method of audition where sound stimulates and revives memory the ‘listening eye, a gaze mutated into the conditions of hearing’ (2004, p.60). He discusses how ‘the essential condition of the auditory is to be grasped in the synaesthetic transitions it enables; the coalescence of the visual and the auditory is itself a kind of auditory effect’ (2004, p.60). My research interest lies in how the ‘mutated gaze’ operates in cinema. How does the soundtrack change how the audio-viewer experiences the image? What are the transformative effects of the collaboration between sound and image? With the coming of a ‘second orality’ (1982, p.182) and the exploration of the senses by many disciplines, it is perhaps timely that Film Studies starts to recognise the gaze as ‘mutated’ in support of a more cognisant sensual approach to film analysis.

44 Read my lips and other aural debates

It is important to engage with those arguments that challenge the silence in regards to the soundtrack in spectatorship theory. Rick Altman discusses the sound/image hierarchy in his article ‘Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism’. Arguing for a ‘redundancy of the image’ (1980, p.6) in film theory debates, he writes: If we were to formulate descriptive rules defining the probability with which any given phenomenon might appear in a classical narrative film at any given moment, we would undoubtedly soon be led to a rule such as this: an individual who speaks will in all probability be the object of the camera’s, and thus of the audience’s, gaze (1980, pp.67-68).

Altman challenges the hierarchy of image over sound, suggesting that ‘actors may gain the right to a place in the image by virtue of having previously obtained a spot on the sound track. I speak, therefore I am seen’ (1980, pp.67-68). Altman opens up a discussion within apparatus/gaze theory by including the soundtrack, stating: Portraying moving lips on the screen convinces us that the individual thus portrayed – and not the loudspeaker – has spoken the words we have heard. The redundancy of the image – seeing the ‘speaker’ while we hear ‘his’ words – thus serves a double purpose. By creating a new myth of origins, it displaces our attention 1) from the technological, mechanical, and thus industrial status of the cinema, and 2) from the scandalous fact that sound films begin as language – the screen- writer’s – and not as pure image (1980, p.69).

In response to the dialogue track, Altman positions the audio-viewer within the cinematic space, and gives them ears. Not only this, he develops the concept that the soundtrack is able to introduce characters and events as well as remove the audio-viewer from the theatrical domain of the cinematic apparatus to the realm of the imagination and the unconscious. In his construction of an image-sound/audio-viewer relationship, Altman destabilises the position of the image by providing a theory that is grounded in a collaborative process between technologies, creatives and the audience. This move to embrace rather than divide creates space for further debate on the influences and responses happening in the wake of a modern world, one that is influenced by cultural difference, globalisation and new technologies. Additionally, the mimetic relationship that occurs between the film and the audio-viewer is one that is carefully constructed to engage all the senses. In engaging with the different responses that are created when sound and image operate together and the influence this has on the audio-viewer, Altman suggests: If the human audience accepts the cinema’s unity, it is because it cannot affirm its own without admitting the cinema’s; conversely, the cinema appears to assent to the unity of the human subject only in order to establish its own unity. This collusion resembles the symbiotic relationship discussed earlier whereby image and sound count on each other to erase each other’s mode of production. Only when mirrored in the other does each side seem complete (1980, p.71).

45 In his article ‘The Sonic Playground: Hollywood Cinema and its Listeners’, Gianluca Sergi supports and amplifies Altman’s ideas. Sergi acknowledges that an intrinsic obstacle in film criticism has been the idea that ‘the image structures our perception of the soundtrack’ (2001, p.122). He recognises that both sound and image technologies, as well as culture and the participatory nature of the cinematic experience, influence the audio-viewer’s experience. Sergi explains that ‘when we go to the cinema, our experience of the event is informed and aided not only by past cinema attendance, but also by our culturally specific understanding of sounds and images and the way they interact’ (2001, p.122). What Altman and Sergi are clearly arguing is that image is not acting on its own. In cinema, sound and image have a relationship that is interdependent, but what is fundamental is the insertion of the audio-viewer into this equation. The synergetic relationship that occurs between the audio-viewer and the soundtrack/screen opens up endless possibilities. In Audio-Vision, Michel Chion describes the impact the soundtrack has on the cinematic experience: Due to natural factors of which we are all aware – the absence of anything like eyelids for the ears, the omnidirectionality of hearing, and the physical nature of sound – but also owing to a lack of any real aural training in our culture, this ‘imposed-to-hear’ makes it exceedingly difficult for us to select or cut things out. There is always something about sound that overwhelms and surprises us no matter what – especially when we refuse to lend it our conscious attention; and thus sound interferes with our perception, affects it. Surely, our conscious perception can valiantly work at submitting everything to its control, but, in the present cultural state of things, sound more than image has the ability to saturate and short-circuit our perception.

The consequence for film is that sound, much more than the image, can become an insidious means of affective and semantic manipulation. On one hand, sound works on us directly, physiologically (breathing noises in a film can directly affect our own respiration). On the other, sound has an influence on perception: through the phenomenon of added value, it interprets the meaning of the image – what we would not otherwise see, or would see differently. And so we see that sound is not at all invested and localized in the same way as the image (1994, p.33-34).

Chion’s argument highlights the influence the soundtrack has on the audio-viewer’s cinematic experience. In Australian transcultural cinema the soundtrack is a powerful component. Broken into sound events, it is possible to hear how the soundtrack brokers between the past and the present, connecting internal with external, in effect underscoring life. Within its cinematic position, the soundtrack has a strong influence on the audio-viewer.

Listen up, what can you hear?

To ‘listen’ to cinema entails an engagement with not only the soundtrack but with the idea that there is a synergetic relationship taking place between the audience and the film. In Tracey Moffatt’s filmChoo Choo Choo Choo, the audio-viewer hears a train

46 and recognises it as such, but to listen to this sound creates an audible contested site containing past and present histories. Choo Choo Choo Choo tells the story of a town bedevilled by the ghost of a young blind girl, hit by a train some years previously. Moffatt mixes film style, genre and modes of address in the telling of this story that she remembers from her childhood. By listening to this film it is possible to recognise the influence the soundtrack has on the collapse of time and space. This process enables a dialogue around colonisation, hybridity and multiculturalism to take place.

Choo Choo Choo Choo opens at the close of day, on the veranda of an isolated homestead. A young Ruby (Tracey Moffatt), her husband, children and sister-in-law are visually disconcerted by a low rumble, the type that heralds an earthquake. The vibrations seem visual, but it is the creaking of the house that confers that something powerful is approaching. Low demonic winds become sonically entangled with the wail of the distressed baby. As Ruby runs out of the house, the sound of a heartbeat joins the warning dog barks. All herald the arrival of something that is not seen but is anticipated with trepidation by the inhabitants of the old country homestead. A hard cut shifts the focus away from the homestead to a set of railway tracks running parallel to, and in close proximity past, the house. The sound of a large train is now clearly audible; the harsh metallic discord as well as creak, groan and complaint of wieldy carriages. These sounds (not images) push into the young Ruby, who has run to the edge of the tracks, creating a spectral force that she physically braces against. As the train rushes past to its ghostly destination, Ruby sinks to her knees and yells into the ground, ‘She’s here’. The film title appears and the sound of the train dies away, replaced by a 1960s sci-fi musical sting that fades out on the image cut.

This is a brief description of a sound event that can be closely listened to on its own or with the scenes that follow. What is the significance of the sounds we are listening to, and how does this sound event affect us? The subjective experience is this: to ‘hear’ this sound event is to identify what these sounds are; that is, I know that is the sound of a train, I have seen and heard this sound before and I can identify it. I know the sound of a crying baby, a heartbeat, and the signature 1960s sci-fi musical sting. As well, there are sounds that I cannot identify, but I know they are relating information that tells me that something weird and scary is taking place. However, to ‘listen’ to this soundscape is to question the very essence of each sound; that is, the components that make up the sounds of the train, or the very ‘grain’ of these sounds. What do these sounds say to each other, what meaning do they have in relation to the image? Do the characters hear all of these sounds or are some of them used as instruction for the

47 audio-viewer so that they understand the emotional state of the characters, or are they representative of the environment? What do these sonic inscriptions mean? How can they be interpreted? How do they provide an impression or deepen an understanding of the image track? As an audio-viewer, what meaning can be made of these sounds that slip through time and space, transporting and appropriating memory and culture and inherently creating new meaning(s). Are they the sonic inscription of a colonial past or of a turbulent post-colonial present day?

To investigate these questions, I draw on useful concepts created by Murray Schafer outlined in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1994). Schafer has developed serviceable tools for ‘auditioning’ film soundscapes. His ‘soundscape’ positions the auditor in the centre of the sonic environment in what Rodaway considers to be an ‘auditory experience’, one that entails an ‘engagement with the environment’ (1994, p.87). Schafer utilises the term ‘keynote’ (a musical term) to describe sounds belonging to the landscape that are: created by its geography and climate: water, wind, forests, plains, birds, insects and animals. Many of these sounds may possess archetypal significance; that is they may have imprinted themselves so deeply on the people hearing them that life without them would be sensed as a distinct impoverishment. They may even affect the behaviour or life style of a society (1994, pp.9-10).

I am appropriating Schafer’s use of the term ‘keynote’ and use it to describe not a natural sonic environment, but a cinematic one. I identify the primary layer or atmosphere track of the soundscape as the keynote. As well, it can represent an individual tone or sound (sound effect), such as a single bird effect sound recording, or it may be formed by a connective layer of sounds, a sonic sphere, for example made up of the bird effect with wind, water and trees. The keynote may or may not be consciously ‘heard’. It is a sonic thread, key or link that connects the auditor to time, space and memory – it forms the stratified essence of a haptic aural experience.When creating a soundtrack the keynote carries the core, or the heart emotion; sounds that sit or move within or are situated around this layer help to embellish it.

Schafer calls the sounds that indicate a need to be listened to ‘signal sounds’ (1994, p.10). These are sound effects that tend to float with some separation from other sounds in everyday life, such as the sound of a police siren. Within sound design ‘signal sounds’ can signal a turning point in the narrative. For example, in Beneath Clouds (Sen 2002) a clap of thunder is used at points in the narrative where difficult experiences happen or are discussed, or to provide momentum for action. A third Schafer term that is useful is the ‘soundmark’, derived from the term ‘landmark’. A soundmark is a sound

48 that is central to the community; it could be the sound of ship horns in a harbour town or city. Species of trees have specific ‘wind’ sounds and this wind sound can form a soundmark; it can also work as a keynote or signal sound. For example, in The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Flanagan 1998) wind operates as the keynote and forms a large component of the atmosphere track. It is also very much part of the Tasmanian hydro camp and operates as a soundmark in this harsh and mountainous environment. At times when the past rises up to haunt the main protagonist, the wind operates as a sound signal.

A closely aligned sound often used in film soundtracks is commonly referred to as a ‘signature sound’, one that belongs to a particular character or an environment. It can be a certain shoe sound or a dog growl whenever a character appears, something that belongs to and passes on extra information about that character. In Head On (Kokkinos 1998), Ari’s intense breathing becomes his signature sound.

The keynote, signal sound and soundmark in Choo Choo Choo Choo In Choo Choo Choo Choo, the sound of the train is a powerful sonic signifier that operates on multiple levels. As a soundmark and sonic artefact, it constantly positions the auditor within a post-colonial ghost story, connecting the modern technological age with the past; and in this way it refuses what Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs in Uncanny Australia suggest is the ‘usual binary structure upon which much commentary on Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations is based’ (1998, p.23). As a signal sound and sonic artefact, the train moves backwards and forwards in time, cropping up in both outback and township. The train sound is recognisable as the uncanny; it has become a central character in the township and local outback, joining older Aboriginal myths as part of the knowledge and history of the area. The ghost train is local history shared by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal residents. Gelder and Jacobs suggest that: we often speak of Australia as a ‘settler’ nation, but the ‘uncanny’ can remind us that a condition of unsettledness folds into this taken-for-granted mode of occupation. We often imagine a (future) condition of ‘reconciliation’, and indeed, a great deal has been invested in the packaging of this image as a means of selling it to the nation – but the ‘uncanny’ can remind us of just how irreconcilable this image is with itself. It is not simply that Australians will either be reconciled with each other or they will not; rather, these two possibilities (reconciliation; the impossibility of reconciliation) coexist and flow through each other in what is often, in our view at least, a productively unstable dynamic (1998, p.24).

The train as soundmark creates an unstable dynamic in Choo Choo Choo Choo. It operates in the Third Space, throwing up a sonic unease in places, and this effectively destabilises the image track. A particularly powerful sonic event occurs in a scene

49 mocking television cooking shows where Ruby and her friends prepare a meal of haute cuisine bush food. The scene is set years later than the opening scene of the film and Ruby (Auriel Andrews), now middle aged, has returned with her family to the empty and dilapidated homestead. Chastised for poor presentation by the chef, Ruby retorts, ‘Okay, you don’t need to carry on, bloody Queen Victoria of bush cuisine!’. In irritation, Ruby grabs a yabby out of the pan and as her hand touches the yabby, the train as signal sound/sonic artefact becomes forcefully and disturbingly present, collapsing both space and time. As the clamorous rumble and rattle and expulsive groans and grunts of a train start to build, Ruby turns her back to camera. The discordant blast of the train whistle sounds out as a signal sound, ‘signalling’ that it is time to start listening closely. The train whistle increases in amplification as the image cuts to a midshot on Ruby’s turn, catching her fiercely wrestling with the shellfish. The signal creates an unease that builds, and this becomes heightened as Ruby agitatedly tears and bites; train sounds becoming enmeshed with the tearing and crunching sounds of flesh and shell.The signal sound reaches a peak, working as artefact as Ruby gazes left of camera; connecting present with past. Space does not change, but our location in narrative time is ruptured as Ruby is sonically transported back in time. Ghost train slams against present-day train, which ricochets off the past train, and this sonically transports an older Ruby back in time. The image cuts to young Ruby standing by the tracks, pushed back by the force of the ghost train.

The sonic juncture created as Ruby bites into the yabby forms a contested site that questions memory, history and representation in Australian cinema. This Third Space is doubly powerful because it is also a significant meeting place for sound and image. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image,17 Gilles Deleuze explains that the ‘break-up of the sensory-motor schema’ creates ‘the rise of situations to which one can no longer react, of environments with which there are now only chance relations, of empty or disconnected any-space-whatevers replacing qualified extended space’. I argue that the stop-start sensory-motor schema throughout Choo Choo Choo Choo challenges both time and memory, and asks for a closer listening to both the past and the present. In ‘Image, Affect and Memory: Relations of Looking in Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil!, Brigitta Olubas discusses how: beDevil’s ghost train dramatises this shock, with its repeated, insistent, shuddering approach and the transitions it impels in those who witness it. And this happens in all the different times of the film, for remembering and remembered characters, actors and viewers.The train – heard over and over but not seen – is finally generated visually through the intensity of involuntary memory, in

17 Hereafter referred to as Cinema 2

50 an ironic but compelling Proustian moment of the bite into the yabby, with which we are all swept from the comedy of the bush cuisine routine back to the nightmare insistence of the train. Here again it’s the sensory, the material interaction that crosses the membrane of film, camaraderie, camera lens, with the shattering of the yabby shell, the taste of culinary ‘thyme’ (Spring 2005, p.5).

Across this ‘membrane of film’, the sonic signal/artefact positions the different events within the same space, conjoining them via a haptic aural experience that is a schizoid post-colonial address that challenges notions of history. Carol Laseur, in her article ‘beDevil: Colonial Images, Aboriginal Memories’, argues that: Moffatt is not antagonistic to black/white relations of power and dispossession in the binary sense, rather she is interested in a utilisation of the power of memory to reconstruct not an idyllic past, but a past that is strangely entangled and caught up with present debates on what it is to be in the intersubjective sense of experience. Her concerns are with the way in which the construction of race, identity, subjectivity and image are interconnected through memory, place and story. The site of story and formation of subject are inseparable in beDevil. A lack of recognition of this connectedness in the social world continues to impede implementations, strategies and measures of Aboriginal policy making by delegated non-Aboriginals (1993, p.7).

Like many of Moffatt’s films, beDevil does not ‘speak’ of ‘one nation’ but instead solicits difference, and by doing so not only opens up a dialogue that acknowledges different cultures, histories and memories, but does so through the powerful repositioning of sound and image. In beDevil it is the soundtrack that throws up a jarring repositioning of history and memory, creating ‘new’ knowledges that shift uncannily back and forth in time and between Self and Other.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have provided a method and the means for a ‘second hearing’ of the soundtracks of Australian national cinema. Putting forward my argument that soundtracks need to be broken into ‘cinematic sound events’, I have used Murray Schafer’s terminology to discuss Choo Choo Choo Choo as an example of how the soundtracks in Australian transcultural cinema are a locus for the exploration of colonisation, memory, trauma and diaspora.

Within spectatorship theory, the soundtrack is often ignored. I have addressed this omission that results from an ocular obsession by providing a strong argument for including the auditory experiences of the audio-viewer. As Chion (1994) argues, ears do not have eyelids, therefore the potency of sound to ‘touch’, to be absorbed, to surround and to generate both memory and sensation needs to be acknowledged far more than it has been in Film Studies.

51 In the next chapter I examine the influences that have created what I am calling Australian transcultural cinema. I compare this type of cinema to the intercultural cinema that Marks describes and the transnational cinema that Naficy examines.

52 Chapter three

Sonic collisions in Australian cinema

Introduction

Drawing on and expanding Laura Marks’s arguments for an intercultural cinema as outlined in The Skin of the Film (2000) as well as Hamid Naficy’s notion of a transnational cinema as discussed in ‘Phobic Spaces’ (2003), in this chapter I explore the emergence of an Australian transcultural cinema. This body of films is characterised by a number of features. It is geographically bound but draws from global influences. Its aesthetic is influenced by its position within Australian cinema, and this includes industry practices and the use of drama as its main storytelling device. What is particularly relevant is the way it often backtracks over earlier Australian films, particularly those of the 1970s. Australian transcultural films often have storylines that address colonisation and Anglo-Celtic settlement, contemporary issues belonging to Indigenous Australians, portrayals of postwar migrants and their children as well as narratives belonging to the steady stream of immigrants entering Australia since the 1970s.

While Australian transcultural cinema shares many similarities with global transcultural filmmaking, it diverges in its geographical location and in its relationship with the national, self-funded cinema. As part of Australian national cinema, the transcultural cinema has been supported, funded, influenced and has also relied upon the industry practices common to all government-funded films. This is important to note because it means that similarities and differences between groups of films can be more readily mapped. It is particularly important to my argument because it makes it possible to highlight how and why the soundtrack plays such a key role in Australian transcultural cinema. In this chapter my focus is on how the relationship between Australian national cinema and the Australian transcultural cinema has played a role in the formation of the latter. Arguing that the transcultural cinema emerged in the late 1980s, early 1990s in part because of government, social and cultural policies, I investigate three key influences. These three influences are: the emergence and development of the New Australian Cinema in the 1970s and 1980s; the establishment of Australian Indigenous media and filmmaking organisations and initiatives; and the creation of agencies and guidelines that stimulated the desire and production of films telling stories about Australian multicultural experiences. This government and

53 industry support was further stimulated by global cultural flows of power, capital, ideas, technologies and culture.

Similarities and differences between the cinemas

Naficy and Marks argue that the 1980s and 1990s were an important time for the development of intercultural, transnational filmmaking because of the political and cultural changes that influenced both filmmakers and funding bodies. Both agree that intercultural, transnational filmmakers have been influential in cinema from early days but maintain that it is the period since the mid 1980s that carries so much significance for analysing cultural and racial issues in society. In ‘Phobic Spaces’, Naficy focuses on the filmmaking of migrant and displaced persons who have settled in Europe and the United States. The films he examines are non-commercial, made outside of the large studio systems such as Fox or Warner Brothers without the support of government film organisations and industries. He suggests that transnational films are ‘products of the particular transnational location of filmmakers in time and place and in social life and cultural difference’, which means that these films are ‘more prone to tensions of exile, acculturation, and transnationalism, and…should and do encode these tensions’ (2003, p.205). Marks’s research focuses predominantly on short and experimental films made in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada between 1985 and 1995, though she stresses that a small number of intercultural feature films were also produced during this time. Marks explains that the emergence of intercultural cinema was stimulated by ‘funding for non-commercial cinema in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom; and an intellectual climate characterized by the disintegration of master narratives and a growing conceptualization of knowledge as partial and contested’ (2000, p.2). She argues that the ‘difference between intercultural cinema and other kinds of experimental and mainstream cinema is that it ‘stresses the social [emphasis in original] character of embodied experience: the body is a source not just of individual but of cultural memory’ (2000, p.xiii). Further, Marks claims that because of this, intercultural cinema is able to formulate new ways of expressing and representing ‘cultural history and memory’ (2000, p. xiv).

Australian transcultural cinema has developed out of a social and political climate that in many ways is similar to those that Marks and Naficy describe. Transcultural films are full of characters in exile, whether Indigenous Australians exiled in their own country, migrants trying to integrate or assimilate, children of migrants psychologically caught between cultures and countries, or the offspring of colonists still

54 struggling to come to terms with the baggage of a contested colonial past. Hence, within the transcultural films produced in Australia it is easy to observe similar themes to those discussed by Naficy and Marks. Australian transcultural cinema has created powerful and interactive pathways for challenging and formulating old and new knowledges and debates about Australian history. The tensions produced from the engagement of different cultures within Australian society come under investigation; national and personal histories are questioned; and the elusiveness of silences, lies and memory is scrutinised. The cloying overriding sense of diaspora and the impact of trauma are often overriding storyline features. And finally, the problematisation of time and space are also constant themes in Australian transcultural films as the past is re-evaluated in the present.

In contrast, the defining differences between Australian transcultural cinema and what Marks and Naficy describe as intercultural and transnational respectively are its geographical location and its mode of production; Australian transcultural films are primarily funded and supported by the national film industry. However, most important to my study is the way the transcultural cinema uses the soundtrack as a key device to give voice to buried memories, silenced histories, diaspora and loss. Australian transcultural cinema was a key part of the nation’s contemporary cinema at the century’s turn and it has benefited from and made use of this relationship.To explore this relationship, I next address how various government policies and initiatives, industry, technologies, audience, and film distribution have all played a role in the development of an Australian transcultural cinema.

Australian state and federal government film policies and the advent of the New Australian Cinema

The political and social climate of the 1960s stimulated lobbying campaigns that led to Australian Government policies in the 1970s that supported the development of a reinvigorated Australian film industry: in 1970 the Australian Film Development Commission (AFDC) was formed (later the Australian Film Commission [AFC]). There was and still is much debate over what makes an Australian film commercially viable, nationally valued and internationally recognised. In an important study, The Screening of Australia: Anatomy of a Film Industry,18 Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka (1987) explain that following the film industry’s re-emergence in the 1970s, pressure was placed on government film bodies to create an industry that could culturally define and

18 Hereafter referred to as The Screening of Australia

55 represent Australia to Australians and to the rest of the world. Filmmakers had to agree to make films that were both commercially viable and culturally acceptable – films that were seen as promoting the Australian way of life and Australian values. During the Labor Whitlam years (1972–75) there was a call for a return to ‘nationalism’ and pride in the nation. Funding policies sought a particular cinematic representation of nation that was Anglo-Celtic; ‘civilised and cultured’ on the one hand, but built on the back of fair dinkum Aussie battlers on the other. Films had to be marketed toward local and international audiences. Sunday Too Far Away (Hannam 1975) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975) both met this criteria. Sunday Too Far Away is set in an outback shearers’ shed and carries the ideals of the Aussie battler and mateship. Picnic at Hanging Rock is set in a private girls’ school and contrasts a romantic mystique against the Gothic foreboding of the sublime Australian outback. Like a number of other film productions developed at this time, both films were promoted as Australian ‘art films’, produced and funded under the premise of having artistic qualities and commercial potential, and reflecting the nation’s culture and values.

Representation of ‘nation’ might have seemed straightforward in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s a growing unease with the concept of nation, and with the nation’s history, started to be felt by filmmakers and critics alike. In his essay ‘Whatever Happened to National Identity?’, Graeme Turner argues that ‘the film industry seemed to have been incorporated, albeit imperfectly, into an official process of nation formation’ (1994-1995, p.32). Dermody and Jacka, in The Screening of Australia, explain how phrases such as ‘adequately reflect our way of life’ and ‘show Australians to themselves’ (1988b, p.120) continued to be used well into the late 1980s and early 1990s. As they describe, such problematic terms were often being referenced in media- related academic papers and government submissions.

Securing distribution for Australian films was a continual problem, particularly because of the dominance of blockbuster Hollywood genre films; the release ofVHS onto the home market only exacerbated the problem. The tension between distribution and Australian content brought forward the recurring debate about commerce versus culture and the question of what could be considered ‘true’ cinematic representations of ‘Australia’. In arguing for more Australian content, and partly because of distribution issues and box office numbers, Australian cinema continued to try and reference an ‘accurate or authentic representation of Australia’ (1988b, p.120). At the same time that discontent grew within the industry concerning the flooding of the local market by overseas content, the government introduced the now notorious private investment schemes known as 10B (1978) and 10BA (1981).

56 The 10B and 10BA era

In the period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, the 10B and 10BA schemes aimed to attract private investment in order to invigorate the industry and remove some of the emphasis on government financial support. During this period the Minister for Home Affairs had responsibility for deciding which films would be funded, but the guidelines omitted any mention of, or instruction in how to represent, the Australian ‘way of life’. This helped to influence a period of filmmaking when filmmakers broke away from reflecting the clichéd tropes of ‘Australia’. Instead, many of the films presented warped and wonderful caricatures of ‘nation’ and in this way startled, horrified and confronted film critics and government bodies alike. InThe Imaginary Industry: Australian Film in the Late ’80s, Dermody and Jacka describe how at first there were no ‘prototypes’ or ‘aesthetic’ belonging to Australian cinema. This led to a ‘defiant localism, a concern with Australian group rituals and social life – and its failings – from a point of view that flirted openly with “ockerism”’ (1988a, p.77). In discussing the films that came to form what is now known as Ozploitation cinema, they point out how: their less guarded, more idiosyncratic, even accidental routes to production remind us of what has been repressed in a haphazard, frustrated, half-coherent fashion. But incoherence can be more suggestive, more persuasive, and even more articulate than the polished surfaces, discreet charm and self-conscious innocence that our institutions have tended to endorse (1988a, p.80).

Often the film investors were not serious about filmmaking but more interested in saving tax money and many of the films produced during this time were extremely poor, attracting neither critical acclaim nor box office success. However, there are also a large number of films from this era that created challenging projections of nation. Films such as The Cars that Ate Paris (Weir 1974) and Long Weekend (Eggleston 1978) struck discord for the very reason that they helped to highlight what was possibly wrong with the more respectable government-sanctioned cinematic representations of Australia. In the comic horror filmThe Cars that Ate Paris, the inhabitants of the township ingeniously create a car salvage industry and hospital brain trauma unit to save their isolated town from dying out. Unsuspecting travellers venturing too close to Paris fall prey to car accidents, which bolster the township’s two thriving industries. In Long Weekend, nature takes its revenge on a young city couple spending their long weekend camping out in the bush. In films such as these, reflections ofAustralia take on a more sinister and distorted angle; the nation and its inhabitants aren’t all they initially seemed in the more tasteful art films. During the late 1980s and 1990s screen stories highlighting the ideals of an imperialist, white frontier nation started to be challenged in different ways.

57 Despite Labor and Liberal government support, the tax cuts were widely seen as an increasing burden for the taxpayer and many of the films held little merit, by 1989 the scheme was no longer a lucrative prospect for investors. In 1989 the Australian Government created the Film Finance Corporation (FFC), which became the main financial support for Australian filmmakers. The Australian Film Commission (AFC) became primarily responsible for the development, marketing and research activities related to the Australia film industry. A growing awareness of cultural, feminist and third-world issues saw marked changes in policy and funding decisions in many Western and postcolonial countries. In Australia, a political upheaval such as the Mabo decision (1992), which allowed Indigenous Australians the right to claim native title over their lands, provided some of the context in which the Australian film industry could start to redefine its position in relation to the concept of nationhood.Australian transcultural cinema emerged in the late 1980s, 1990s partly because of changes in government policies and the support and development of alternative storylines that encompassed the broader Australian community.

The development of an Australian Indigenous film industry

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Australian cinema started to produce films that provided new impressions and representations of Australia and the ‘Australian way of life’. In 1993, one year after the Mabo decision, the AFC commissioned Aboriginal senior advisor and academic Professor Marcia Langton to research how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had been, and were best, represented through screen media. Her research culminated in the book Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television..., in which Langton documents key issues that had guided ‘the politics of representation’ (1993, p.7) in Australian media, particularly film. She argues that it was not just the lack of support for Indigenous people to produce their own images at issue. Rather, it was the representation of Indigenous peoples through a colonial racist gaze that was so disadvantageous: ‘in film, as in other media, there is a dense history of racist, distorted and often offensive representation of Aboriginal people’ (1993, p.24).

So how did the AFC move from a position of funding films that reproduced colonising racist images of Indigenous Australia to commissioning Langton to write a detailed analysis of the representation of Aboriginal people in the media? In ‘Indigenous Screen Culture: A Personal Experience’, Lester Bostock (2007) discusses how Indigenous Australians were the subject but not the makers, dating back to the earliest ethnographic documentaries of the late 1900s. He argues that these constructed

58 images were not made for Indigenous audiences, many of whom had restricted access to cinemas for the better half of the 20th century. Bostock states that a number of crucial imperatives supported the emergence of Australian Indigenous filmmakers. First, in the 1950s there were repeals of some of the restrictive and discriminatory laws that saw the disbanding of various Aboriginal Protection Acts. Second, in 1967 a referendum was held that allowed the Commonwealth to make laws regarding Indigenous affairs. Positive outcomes of the referendum included the inclusion of Indigenous Australians in the national census survey. Another important outcome was the establishment of a number of government Acts that started to address issues such as land rights and self- management. During this time, Indigenous people started to move more freely across the country and voice their own opinions. Third, Indigenous Australians interested in filmmaking started to meet and formulate ways in which they could make films and represent themselves on screen. In the 1980s Indigenous media organisations such as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) were created to support both training and production. In ‘Australian Indigenous Film, a Community of Makers’, Keith Gallasch discusses how lobbying by Indigenous organisations, along with what he describes as ‘a substantial cultural shift reflecting broader social changes’ (2007b, p.14), helped form the Indigenous Branch of the AFC in 1993. What followed was a collaboration between various agencies that helped to stimulate growth in Indigenous filmmaking in Australia.

In 2008 Screen Australia became the new screen body, formed from the merger between the FFC, the AFC and Film Australia. Film finance was once again placed in the same government body as film production, distribution, marketing and research.At the same time, the AFC Indigenous Branch was renamed Indigenous Programs and has continued to collaborate closely with the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC TV), the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS TV) and what was SBS Independent (SBSi). Other organisations that Screen Australia Indigenous Programs works closely with to provide workshops, funding and promotion for Indigenous filmmakers include the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) as well as state government and Indigenous media agencies.

Rachel Perkins and Ivan Sen, whose transcultural films I analyse in this thesis, are just two of a growing number of Indigenous filmmakers who have developed through this system. They made their first feature films,Radiance (1998) and Beneath Clouds (2002) respectively, with support and financial backing from agencies that

59 included the AFC, the New South Wales Film and Television Office (NSWFTO), now Screen NSW, and SBSi. Both films tell stories in which Indigenous characters negotiate the diaspora, trauma and loss associated with colonisation while undergoing some form of transformative journey. It is important to note that although ABC and SBSi are radio and television broadcasters, the films I discuss in this thesis which haveABC and SBSi investment are produced for theatrical release. This means they carry soundtracks designed for cinema with cinematic specifications. Part of the sound postproduction delivery package includes a separate mix for television broadcast.

The development of Australian multicultural stories and film production

In 1980 SBS television was created as a government agency to service a growing multicultural community. In 1994, SBS Independent (SBSi) was established to commission multicultural drama and documentaries. The website of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) promotes SBSi as providing programs that: are not just enjoyed by Australians – they carry images of the diversity and strength of Australia’s culture internationally. SBSi’s cross-cultural programming provides a much-needed hook into an increasingly competitive international market place – some 60 per cent of SBSi programs are sold internationally, and its film projects attract high levels of foreign investment (6 February 2008).

Two key issues are addressed in this statement. One is the fact that SBSi was addressing the need for more screen representation of a culturally diverse Australia. The second is the fact that one of the ongoing key requirements of Australian film funding, which is to be competitive in the marketplace, was being met; as they state, as well as attracting foreign investment, SBSi was selling 60 per cent of its programs internationally. The social and cultural policy changes in the 1980s and 1990s that had such a positive impact for Indigenous filmmakers also created the initiative for stories belonging to Australia’s multicultural and diverse communities to be produced for the screen. Films include: La Spagnola (Jacobs 2001), explores the trials and tribulations of a young Spanish/Australian woman and the upheavals caused by her family life. Head On (Kokkinos 1998), set among the Greek community in inner-city Melbourne; Floating Life (Law 1996) about a Hong Kong immigrant family; and Moving Out (Pattinson 1983), the coming of age story of an Italo-Australian. Many of the central themes of diaspora, memory, loss and belonging, explored in these films can also be located in the films that Marks discusses as intercultural and Naficy defines as transnational cinema.

60 Industry practices

Both Marks and Naficy discuss the absence of government funding and support in the body of work they explore. However, Australian transcultural cinema relies heavily on the national cinema’s funding bodies, networks and incentives. Industry personnel and resources are also therefore more frequently deployed in the transcultural cinema. In the 1970s, when government policies and initiatives stimulated the revival of a film industry, there was very little existing infrastructure to influence and guide it. As a result, the government mandate to represent the ‘Australian nation’ on screen provided the emphasis for many aspects of the fledgling film industry. A large proportion of films produced at this time explored the relationship between Anglo-Celtic Australians and the national landscape, and the soundtrack supported these storylines, as sound designer Liam Egan explains: …the sounds of Australia, the organic sounds of the country were reinterpreted by filmmakers to create another feeling. Sounds of nature were used and subverted to make the environment threatening, which I think is how we particularly as white people in Australia deal with the environment in that sense that it’s a bit threatening and mysterious, but beautiful at the same time. And I think that there is an aspect of this that has been reflected inAustralian films (Egan 2009).

Whereas in many films of the 1970s and 1980s the sounds of nature were used to create a threatening and mysterious environment, these sounds are silenced or repositioned in Australian transcultural cinema. In this way, the more recent transcultural films ‘sound back’ to earlier films. One of my key arguments is that it is primarily through the soundtrack that the transcultural films explore such issues as colonisation, migration, diaspora, trauma and loss, and in a later chapter I investigate in greater depth the dynamic between the national film sound industry and transcultural cinema. However, my primary focus in this chapter is to explore the institutional, industrial and political factors that have shaped Australian transcultural cinema.

Marks explains that intercultural films are derived from various sources and formats and cover different styles, genres and forms (2000). Naficy discusses how transnational cinema allows for the boundaries between different forms of filmmaking – including ‘documentary, avant garde, fictional and ethnographic – to be blurred’ (2003, p.205). However, Australian transcultural cinema often uses drama – with its fictional storytelling techniques – to open up aspects of history, memory and experience that may be too personal or painful to be explored in other ways. Erica Glynn, Head of Indigenous Programs at Screen Australia, explains: ‘A lot of our filmmakers cross the documentary/drama divide and they are doing it consciously because they cannot tell the stories they want to make in documentary, it is too hard so they go to drama to

61 say what they want to say’ (Glynn 2009). What is particularly pertinent to my thesis is how Australian transcultural cinema constantly adopts the use of three genres – the melodrama, the road movie and the Gothic – that have been influential in the national cinema. The defining feature of the transcultural cinema is the way it uses both genre and the soundtrack to create the location, space and time to revisit the past and to tell stories that reflect Australia’s history of colonisation, settlement and immigration.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have put forward and substantiated my argument for an Australian transcultural cinema. I have explored the similarities between Australian transcultural cinema and what Marks describes as intercultural cinema and Naficy defines as transnational cinema. Similarities include the way these three cinemas dig up history and memory, exploring topics such as colonisation, memory, history, trauma and diaspora. All three cinemas hybridise genres and film styles. Space and time are often temporised and sense of place and belonging challenged. What this does is throw up numerous ambiguities about time, place and history. As well, in all three cinemas, past and present experiences are explored through the senses in a move away from the ocular to a more sensory embodied approach to knowledge and memory.

Additionally, I have extended Marks’s and Naficy’s arguments by outlining what distinguishes Australian transcultural cinema from the cinemas that Marks and Naficy describe. I have explained how Australian transcultural cinema emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s due to a number of key factors. These factors include: changes in state and federal government policies governing the freedoms and rights of Indigenous and migrant Australians; the development of new film-funding and training initiatives; and the establishment of SBS television and radio broadcasting and Indigenous film, television and media organisations. These three influences helped enable a new generation of filmmakers to tell Australian stories from a different perspective to the predominantly Anglo-Celtic fictions that had dominated Australian cinema up to that point. However, the crucial difference between the cinemas that Marks and Naficy describe is the way that Australian transcultural cinema sounds back to Australian films of the 1970s and 1980s as well as those made prior to this time. It does this through the hybridisation of the melodrama, road movie and Gothic genres. In chapter six, using Marks’s and Naficy’s approaches as a starting point, I look more closely at the way Australian transcultural cinema draws on the melodrama, Gothic and road movie genres. I argue that transcultural cinema can also be conceptualised as a genre, one that has its own syntax and particular use of sonic semantic elements.

62 In the next chapter I extend my investigation of the development of an Australian transcultural cinema by examining the history of the Australian film sound industry. Drawing from interviews I recorded with some of Australia’s leading filmmakers, sound professionals, educators and industry personnel, I examine the different influences that created the iconic sounds and the soundscapes of Australian cinema.

63 Chapter four

Sound speak: the sound of Australian cinema

Introduction

In this chapter I investigate and explain how the emergence and development of an Australian film sound industry came to provide such a rich resource forAustralian transcultural cinema. I draw from interviews I conducted with some of Australia’s most experienced filmmakers, academics, industry professionals and educators to highlight the importance of personal influences as well as the creative process in shaping the identifiable and distinctive characteristics that make up Australian film soundtracks. This material enables me to bring a practical understanding of the emergence and development of the Australian film sound industry to my investigation.

This chapter focuses on the direct outcome of government policies since the 1970s that have created, influenced and governed the Australian film and television industry, particularly in relation to the development of an Australian film sound industry. I also examine the development of film sound training and education, the influence of individuals and the role and impact of technology, including film and computer technology. To do this, I asked the interviewees a series of questions including: Name the key influences in the style and sound of Australian national film and television, taking into consideration training bodies, sound and film facilities, mentors, influential films, national cinemas and sound designers.

In what ways, have Australian film and television soundtracks been influenced by government policies?

What role do you think the soundtrack plays in reflecting and interpreting concepts of nation, as well as rethinking Australian history?

How has technology influenced the sound of Australian cinema?

As I explained in the thesis introduction, the interview material offers original and significant knowledge that sheds new light on how government policy has helped shape a specifically Australian film sound. Furthermore, it pinpoints some of the key issues concerning the production and creation of soundtracks and how awareness (or lack of awareness) by funding bodies, producers and directors is tied to the audible repercussions of tight budgets and short sound postproduction periods. These influences need to be closely examined when charting the development of the Australian film sound industry, including industry practices, technology and the overall design and

64 sound of Australian film soundtracks. Most importantly, this chapter supports my claim that particular sounds have come to hold meaning and resonance in the national cinema and that these sounds can be understood through my concepts – the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact and the sonic spectre. By examining the emergence and development of the Australian film sound industry, I am able to highlight crucial points that verify how and why the soundtrack in Australian transcultural cinema has become a sonic receptacle for interpreting, negotiating and hearing diaspora, memory and trauma. What has been sonically produced in Australian transcultural film soundtracks are the reverberant repercussions of a history of colonisation and immigration that challenge concepts of nation, home and belonging.

Where did it start?

In 1969 a government blueprint recommended that the floundering Australian film industry be given more support. Accepted and funded by the Gorton Liberal government, the adoption of its recommendations led to the formation of a National Film School and the Australian Film Development Corporation. These and other initiatives led to a cinematic renaissance, an era of New Australian Cinema between 1970 and the late 1980s. During this time there was a sudden need for extra sound people who could record and create soundtracks. Often the picture editor would cut the sound, but this did not solve the problem of who would record and mix the soundtracks. It seemed only natural that some of the early sound professionals would come from radio. Film and radio have a common legacy of vaudeville and drama, and the radio technicians were already familiar with recording equipment, radio editing, recording drama, commercials and ‘live to air’. From working on radio where they had to think on their feet, work to fast turnaround schedules and create a sonic connection between human beings and technology, they moved almost seamlessly into film work. Peter Fenton can chart his career as a film sound mixer from the 1960s through to the development of digital surround sound in the 1990s. Like many of the early sound professionals, Fenton moved into film from radio. As he explains: …television happened in Australia in 1956 and the bottom really fell out of radio production. All the big plays and serials were dead because the big sponsors like the soap companies and the petrol companies started spending their money on television advertising. So I went to work in film.And I went to this little production house called Supreme Sound at Paddington. I mixed thousands upon thousands of television commercials, which were all little films because they were shot on 35 mm film and edited on magnetic film, and the soundtrack was mixed as it was for many years until stereo and digital happened…

…Australia had been great at making movies well before a lot of other countries, but it had all just fallen away once the Second World War had ended because the Yanks had tied up all the distribution outlets. So we [Australia] were just a distribution place for American movies

65 really, except for the occasional co-production that was made with the Brits or the Yanks, like The Sundowners [Zinnemann 1960], where they would send out the English actors and the Australian technicians would get a go (but not generally in key roles). So occasionally co-productions were made, but generally speaking we didn’t make pictures any more.

Gorton’s mob [Liberal government] organised the Australian Film Development Corporation and taxation relief, which was the main thing for investors in Australian pictures. And even when Gorton lost out to Whitlam, the next Labor government, he [Whitlam] went the same way.… Suddenly there was an enormous amount of Australian pictures being made in the early seventies and I was sort of top dog as a mixer at that time, and I got this job with United Sound Studios and I mixed, I would say, between 1972 and 1997 when I finished, 150 feature films. This is something you would not have believed could have happened when we first started (Fenton 2009).

In a career spanning over almost fifty years, Phil Judd has worked in all facets of film sound, but he is most recognised for his work as a sound mixer. Like Fenton, Judd started in radio, noting that in previous years those working in sound had had to pick up skills from radio and from working on British and American film productions filmed in Australia, such as The Overlanders (Watt 1946) and On the Beach (Kramer 1959). He was eight when television arrived in Australia and he recalls growing up spending every Saturday at the studio with his father Noel Judd, the host of the Astor Showcase, Australia’s first live variety television show (Channel 7 1957-1959). It was here that he got to observe how it all operated. When Phil was sixteen his father got him his first job, as office boy at the 2GB radio station, but within eight weeks he was promoted to panel operator. Judd stayed with radio for two and a half years then moved on to a television series called Skippy: The Bush Kangaroo (1967–1969). He recalls: I ended up getting the job on the Skippy series as the studio assistant. Les Mackenzie was the sound recordist and the head of the sound department; he was out on location [with] a boom swinger by the name of Peter Appleton and I was back at the studio end. Being a three-man crew, and in those days without the technology, my part of it was fairly comprehensive. Not only was it doing the logical things of the day-to-day transfers, there was no sound effects library in those days, there was no CDs, there was nothing. Only 78 [rpm] records, which were the Chappell library, and some 45 [rpm] records from the BBC library. Nearly all of those were wartime based – aircraft, guns, London bells, nothing related to the Australian bush and outback. These sounds had nothing to do with this country.

So virtually every single sound effect used in Skippy had to be recorded and manufactured from somewhere, so that became part of my job, you know, to go and make the effects. If we needed bush atmospheres, I would get up at dawn and go off with the Nagra and record things; if we needed the effects of a car, I would head off to some road somewhere and record the car. So I spent a lot of time doing what would be considered in today’s terms the work of a sound designer, but I did not see it as that. …When the rushes came in, I would filter, compress, equalise and noise gate the dialogue at transfers because there was not the technology to do it in the theatre… So theoretically I was the dialogue mixer as well, but I never thought of it that way.

I made the sound effects library. I became the maintenance man in the sound department because I had the soldering iron and the screw driver. So all of a sudden the camera department were asking, ‘Hey, we need a new battery charger’, so I would be making them that,

66 and they would be bringing me up the Arriflex 16 mm BL camera saying there was something wrong with it, so I was pulling it apart and servicing it. The editing department would say, ‘Our Moviolas aren’t working’, so I was then servicing and fixing those as well. So I got this incredible broad experience of not only working in the industry but making the industry work because there was no knowledge to draw from, there were no film schools, there was nothing. Nobody had any training as they do today because there wasn’t any training (Judd 2009).

Growing out of radio, and later television, a fledgling film sound industry created many of its own rules, its own unique methods of production, its own sound libraries and its own specific sounds and sound designs.

Training and education

In the 1970s the sudden investment and interest in the film and television industry saw the emergence, expansion and development of a number of production companies and other related organisations that included: Artransa Television, Fauna Productions, Eric Porters, APA, United Sound Studios, Film Australia (previously the department of Interior [DOI], then the Commonwealth Film Unit [CFU] and now part of Screen Australia), the Australian Film Commission (AFC) and the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC). The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), which became the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1983 (ABC), became a television broadcaster in the 1950s. It introduced a training program in Sydney that expanded in the 1970s to produce many of Australia’s new filmmakers. Crawford’s in Melbourne started as a radio production house in 1945. It expanded into television and became a major training ground for young filmmakers. In 1973 the Australian Film and Television School (later the Australian Film Television and Radio School [AFTRS]) opened its doors to its first twelve students. These organisations became the first training grounds for the sound people who were keenly sought to create the soundtracks for the new wave of films being made. Government and industrial training programs reached their peak in the 1980s with the 10BA policy, which created an enormous amount of opportunity for anyone interested in starting a film and television career.

Philip Brophy’s interests, influence and experience span four decades and covers film, music and art. He is a filmmaker who also composes, performs and produces music, lectures in film, creates and curates audiovisual installations and has published widely. Brophy discusses the influence of early industrial training and practices on the development of the Australian film industry: …you really couldn’t go to many places in Australia to actually learn specifically and within an educational environment how to do sound for film; people trained industrially. Going back to the sixties, there was Crawford Television, where they produced a lot of television drama from the

67 sixties into the seventies and that was a training ground. Other people went through documentary houses like Film Australia, so they were trade trained, like a plumber or an electrician; you’d do it within the environment, as it were, within the industrial applications and situations… (Brophy 2009). The government policies that created the resurgence and development of the Australian film industry were not a response to a need to cultivate the auteur filmmaker, instead they aimed to produce a full contingent of key film creatives. The national cinema became, and still is, heavily influenced by its key craft personnel.

A. Informal acquired knowledge and understanding

In chapter two I discussed a number of sensory debates including the way that humans interpret sound through both stored memories and present experiences. It is important to note what influences the interviewees consider to be important in how they sonically interpret the films they help to create. Music, films, university studies (particularly in film and music) and mentors as well as childhood experiences and an early affinity and sensitivity to rhythm, sound and music are among the influences they cite most often as shaping their career path. Australian director Rolf de Heer describes his influences succinctly: ‘All of it, the sum total of everything I’m born with and everything I’ve experienced since then, all put together.’ De Heer lists films, conversations, his parents, his childhood growing up in Holland, Indonesia and Australia, living on the edge of the bush and inner city life as all being influential (de Heer 2009).

Annie Breslin has worked across all facets of sound editing and design. Qualified in adult education, she has taught sound design at various tertiary institutions and film schools and from 1995–2001 she was Head of Sound at AFTRS. Breslin recalls how her passion for sound was probably cultivated by a childhood rich in sonic experiences: My dad used to cart us off to listen to Greek Orthodox Masses at St Mary’s Cathedral. And I would be lulled to sleep with the sound of various steam train recordings… and he had reel-to-reel recorders, so I grew up with quite a heightened aural sense (Breslin 2009).

Jane Paterson started her career in community radio in the 1980s before moving into film where she trained and worked as a sound editor. Paterson is qualified in adult education and has taught sound design at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and AFTRS. She recalls ‘being taught by a nun, Sister Antonio, who did these Murray Schafer ear-opening experiments with us; this was when I was about ten.19 And that was

19 Murray Schafer is a composer and scholar who researches, writes and teaches extensively on the acoustic environment. ‘Ear cleaning’ is a series of exercises he has designed to train people in listening.

68 great, this really focused critical listening and it really stayed with me’ (Paterson 2009). Liam Egan also started his career in radio prior to moving into a career in film sound. Egan has worked in all facets of sound production, but he is best known for his editing and sound design. Egan discusses early film sound influences: …there were two Australian films which influenced me from a sound perspective. The first one was The Cars that Ate Paris [Weir 1974]…there were just things in the soundtrack that kept me on edge and just the sound of the cars…shortly thereafter I saw The Last Wave [Weir 1977] and remember feeling suffocated by the sounds and the organic feeling of the sound effects. It was a very emotional film and I think a lot of that came from the sound. Both films were done [sound edited] by Greg Bell… And this was the first time that I thought I could possibly do that as well, and that was a very strong influence (Egan 2009).

James Currie’s career in film sound began in the 1970s. With one degree in music and another in film, he settled on a career in film sound. He works across all facets of location and postproduction sound. I asked Currie if he had any particular influences: …looking back, my main influence came from American rock and roll records, such as Tower and Sun records. People who were using instruments and sounds in a different way and what was most striking (like the whole basis of Ten Canoes [de Heer 2006]) was the use of reverb, which created these tentacles which kept coming back. The band that I kept playing to Tom Heuzenroeder [sound editor] and myself during Ten Canoes was the Beach Boys because they used reverb like a weapon. Immediately a Beach Boys record plays you know what it is, you only have to hear a second and a half and it hooks you in. You know what it is, where it places you and what is meant by it…but this understanding has come to me over time, with a lot of maturity; it was not apparent to me in the seventies (Currie 2009).

Craig Carter never completed his history degree, opting instead for a music arranging course with the ABC where budget cuts gave him the opportunity to move into documentary and then film. With over thirty years of experience as a sound editor, he cites many influences including Bruce Lamshed, with whom he worked early in his career: Bruce would use anything, basically, to get the story the way he wanted it… I saw another level that I couldn’t possibly have seen in a bureaucratic institute like the ABC [where Carter started his career] at that point… Certainly I have been influenced by directors, musicians, other sound designers… In my work, everything is an influence. Not just films and music, it’s a book I read, or going to the theatre. It’s anything I might experience… Each individual working in this field does have their own innate way of doing something, but they’ll be drawing on everything they know, or they’ve been influenced by (Carter 2009).

The renaissance of Australian national cinema generated a film sound industry with film personnel who brought a wealth of experiences, influences and ideas that have been integral to the development of Australian sound design practices and the emergence of the unique sound of film soundtracks.

The sound practitioners I interviewed cite different pathways that led them to train as sound professionals, but there are common points of reference including

69 having a strong interest in film and music (including formal university music training and study), working in community or commercial radio, working in another area of film and television. Whether or not their career paths into film sound were intentional, straightforward or convoluted, ultimately the underlying propulsion into the world of film sound was through the attraction of being able to create and tell cinematic stories with sound.

B. Training

In 1955 the ABC enlisted the services of technicians from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to train staff for the advent of their television station, which first went to air on 5 November 1956. Starting his career at the ABC, Wayne Pashley has over thirty years of experience as a sound editor in the film and television industry. He cites ABC producer Ray Alchin and ABC editors Tony Kavanagh, Peter Townend and Neil Thumpston as being particularly influential: ‘These guys brought a sensibility to Australian cultural filmmaking; they were living it. And they were a huge influence for me at that time’ (Pashley 2009). So where did this influence and ‘sensibility’ originate? Pashley recalls that many of the early filmmakers came from England: ‘NeilThumpston and Alex Cullen [ABC film officer and editor] were British, there was a lot of British influence…[at] that time’ (Pashley 2009).

The ABC became a key training ground for a large contingent of filmmakers until the late 1980s when budget cuts saw an extensive reduction of staff numbers, drama production and to their training program. In the 1980s ABC sound personnel started to move out of television and filter into the freelance film industry. Breslin recalls how she recently looked at her colleagues at Big Bang Sound Design studios and realised that, like herself, many of them had initially trained at the ABC. She started her career as a picture editor and she was aware that there were very few women working in sound editing, recalling that it was Sara Bennett’s name as dubbing editor on film credits that helped to inspire her career choice. Breslin loved music and the idea of images and sound coming together and saw sound on film as something that was able to connect to people’s emotions in a particularly powerful way.

Many sound editors began their careers as picture editors, particularly documentary editing because on documentaries it was often the picture-editing assistants who would create the soundtracks at the end of the picture-editing process. Breslin discusses her move from picture to sound editing:

70 I worked at the ABC and that was in [picture] editing, and editing and sound were exactly the same thing; you used spools of film or you used spools of sound mag [magnetic tape], it was the same technology. One room was for sound and the next room was for picture…you came on to the film at a different time, at a different part of the process, but you were always working together. I personally liked the fact that I could so easily create mood and emotion from the soundtrack.

I remember finding and editing in my very first sound effect. It was for a scene in an office and it was a mundane sound – the sound of a filing cabinet drawer opening and closing. It just blew me away how a simple background sound effect could create a sense of espionage and secrecy and how, when I laid the sound of the filing cabinet drawer sliding and bumping closed, it punctuated and ended the scene so perfectly. I realised the addition of sound could stretch and condense time… (Breslin 2009).

As Breslin explains, because the picture and sound-editing processes were closely linked, the editors were often conversant in both of these processes. This created a cohort of editors who had a strong understanding of the potency of image and sound in relation to each other and how the play of these components dramatically affected each other and the storytelling process.

Sound mixer Peter Smith started his career at the SAFC in the 1980s, benefitting from the 10BA policy which saw a rapid increase in both productions and budgets. Riding on this wave, the SAFC became a training ground for those interested in a career in film and television, including Smith: There were many, many films that were coming through and so a) you saw how to do things efficiently, because we had to just move through them, and b) you were able to experiment a fair amount as well within those guidelines. So that’s where you get to observe – as an assistant or whatever – you get to see how people were doing it. I was fortunate enough to do ten years on a contract for the Film Corporation, they had filming facilities and picture and sound editing so you could sit and talk to the sound editors in a casual way and you’d see how they were laying up their sounds, what they were doing (Smith 2009).

In the early 1980s, the first wave of sound graduates of the AFTRS started to emerge. Interviewees who studied at AFTRS spoke of the mentorship they received, the time they spent experimenting and the creative benefits of new technologies. Liam Egan’s experience in radio, recording bands and camera operating led him to apply to AFTRS: Film school was where I got very excited about the possibility of what you could do with sound. I started to play with film sound, so that was where I guess my passion was created and I was lucky to go to film school with some other very passionate students who really cared about sound and wanted to play and just loved doing things with sound and so that obviously influenced me, learning that you could have a lot of fun with it. There was a lot of encouragement to try new things and to experiment. I think at that stage the staff at the school, who were fantastic and inspirational, came from much more of a technical, and quite often from a television technical background, so applying creativity to sound was something relatively new to them, but it was something they encouraged but did not necessarily teach (Egan 2009).

Although sound personnel entered the industry via a number of different pathways, they

71 all cite the encouragement, ideas and craft skills of their mentors as being influential in their development as sound practitioners.

The sound of government-funded cinema

Government funding bodies left their indelible mark on the soundtracks of the national cinema in a number of ways. Since the early 1970s, federal as well as state governments have continued to consult, analyse and instigate new initiatives to stimulate the industry. The directors I interviewed felt that their artistic endeavours were well supported by these funding bodies. However, the sound editors talked of a different experience.

One government initiative that a number of interviewees discussed was the directive to support new directors at the expense of mid-career filmmakers.This, as Judd explains, can be heard in the soundtracks: …for the last ten years or so, at least, there’s been this constant push by industry bodies to discover new talent. The amount of first-time directors I’ve worked with in the last ten years has been greater than the amount of experienced directors I’ve worked with…because they’ve never done it before, they’re inexperienced and this causes all sorts of problems. They have very little idea what’s involved. I mean, I’ve had directors sit in this mixing room and say, ‘What are you doing?’ They don’t even understand what I’m doing at a console. They know it has to happen, but they don’t know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, and more importantly what it can do for their film…it’s been happening for too long, and I think overall, it’s actually been a big negative in the industry, that continual trying-to-find-the-next-Baz Luhrmann or the next Peter Weir (Judd 2009).

Other interviewees agreed that inexperienced production and directing teams had a negative impact on the sound of Australian films – even more so in the last ten years or more. Low sound budgets and the lack of insightful pre-production and production planning have also had a negative influence. As Egan explains: As a funding body they can say, ‘Oh no, you don’t need that much money for sound’, and I have heard that… And I think it comes out of a place of ignorance, from not understanding what is involved in putting together a film soundtrack and not understanding where it makes sense to compromise. You know the fact that somebody who is going to approve or disapprove certain funds can’t read through a script and say ‘Well, there’s all these crowd scenes’ or ‘the car they drive around in is a convertible and every time they sit in the convertible they are talking about important plot points so you have got to hear all that dialogue, but it is a convertible so it is going to be noisy so it is probably going to involve some ADR [automated dialogue replacement]. If you can’t read the script and realise the implications of that for the soundtrack, then you are unlikely to take it into account.

…I think there is a lot of pressure on producers and directors and they are so desperate to get their projects up they are not going to say, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to make my film because you are not letting me have enough money for sound’. Instead, they go, ‘Oh great, you are going to give me that money and I’m going to take that money and I’m going to run and I will deal with the problems later on’ (Egan 2009).

Cleaning up the dialogue tracks and recording ADR creates a significant dent in a

72 soundtrack budget. As well, limited postproduction periods and a lack of resources means that the atmospheres and effects are often taken from pre-recorded libraries and broad brushstrokes are relied upon in the sonic storytelling process. Inexperienced creative teams and the lack of proper planning and budget for sound production are a common occurrence. Sound practitioners are left in the final stages of postproduction having to rectify problems caused by a lack of knowledge, budget and preproduction planning. This has meant that there has been a steady stream of films where less time is spent on the creative aspects of the soundtrack. However, the above has also established sound practitioners as a key influence in the development and design of film soundtracks, as Pashley explains: I think that through discovering sound, I found that you could have autonomy over a film, without being always ridden by the higher echelon of directors and producers because I think that sound is largely ignored by people who don’t necessarily understand it, or are even slightly afraid of it. I’ve noticed that some filmmakers see it as a kind of necessary evil, because it’s something they can’t really grasp. I think that seeing that ability to change a story and influence a story and to have a place in Australian cinema history; that was one of the great joys of going into sound.

And I’ve found that there were those like Bruce Beresford, George Miller, Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong, they understood the power of sound, they understood that in a postproduction sense, even against budget, that sound is cheap, with the highest return. That’s one of those wonderful things, because ultimately sound can make a low-budget film seem like it has a higher budget, and I have experienced this with some low-budget films such as the ones which Bill Bennet has made in the past (Pashley 2009).

Pashley raises two important points, both of which have helped to shape and influence a low-budget Australian national cinema: first, the virtual autonomy that sound practitioners experience over the creation of Australian film soundtracks; and second, the ability of sound to give a high return on investment, which means that sound is often heavily relied upon to push the storyline. Some directors understand this and the soundtracks that emerge from strong collaborations between directors and sound designers include Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975), Mad Max (Miller 1979), The Fringe Dwellers (Beresford 1986), Kiss or Kill (Bennett 1997) and Oscar and Lucinda (Armstrong 1997). The soundtracks belonging to these films carry an incredible weight in the storytelling process, and some have been highly influential in the creation of an identifiable ‘Australian film sound’.

Australian cinema is a relatively small national cinema. The Screen Australia 2011–2012 annual report reveals an investment of approximately $18 million in film drama production; of this, three films had budgets under two million, ten had budgets between two million and six million and three had budgets over ten million. Instead of relying on the visuals to unravel the meaning within complex scenes, perform large

73 explosions and car crashes or create the subtle intricacies required for a subtext, the soundtrack is a far more cost-effective and less time-consuming option for providing or embellishing such details. This is another reason why in Australian film the soundtrack is such an integral element in translating the layers of meaning held within these films to their audience.

New technologies: changes in the soundtrack

The Australian film industry has always been quick to take up new technologies, adapting them to suit both a particular working style and individual film production needs. This is partly because low budgets have created the need to improvise and to use any new piece of equipment, modification or idea that will add value to the film without increasing the budget.

Andrew Plain’s passion for film led him from university to a career at the ABC as a picture and sound editor, prior to working freelance in the industry. Plain has over thirty years of experience and observed many changes since he started working in the film industry in the 1980s. He comments on the film industry’s attitude to new technology: The way the Australian film industry… has always been, and why it embraces new technologies much quicker than, say, the United States, is that we can’t afford the infrastructure they have, we don’t have films churning through all the time. And so the technology has got to service how we work, it’s got to be much more flexible (Plain 2009).

The critically acclaimed Australian film writer, director and producer Rolf de Heer works closely with all facets of the filmmaking process. Asked if new technologies and multimedia have changed the way he considers the soundtrack in his films, he replied: I don’t think too much about new technologies. I simply think about, ‘How do we get this, and what do we need for that’. But Jim [Currie] and I do think about technology as such to overcome problems. There’s the whole Bubby [Bad Boy Bubby, de Heer 1993] business which was recorded as binaural, which nothing else had been at that time, and it was a particular solution to a particular sort of quest. And we developed a new recording system for Ten Canoes [de Heer 2006]…and again, it was simply… ‘Okay, how do we solve the problem of this?’ And it so happened that a particular piece of new technology adapted to do something it wasn’t designed to do, but that could work for us. It’s not about the new technology… I think Jim’s best microphone is one he’s had for 15 or 20 years, and it still is the best microphone (Heer 2009).

Australian film sound practitioners’ openness to experimentation has led them to adapt quickly to new ideas and to incorporate new sound and film technologies as well as other technologies (including, industrial, computer and internet technologies) that could benefit their sound design processes.

74 In 1981 Australia produced its first Dolby stereo film,Mad Max 2 (Miller). Suddenly there was the ability to create a ‘surround’ auditory experience with more dynamic range. With the new 24-track recording devices, sound editors were able to lay up and listen back to 24 tracks of sound. The potential for sonic storytelling was enormous. In 1987 Dolby SR was introduced. This superior noise-reduction system challenged sound editors and mixers with the task to salvage far more location sound, and lay up and mix a greater number of soundtracks and layers than previously possible. The advent of Dolby noise reduction and surround sound created the opportunity for a greater clarity and a wider sonic environment in the soundtracks of Australian films. The next leap came in the 1990s with Dolby digital – six channels of completely discrete clear digital sound, with even greater dynamics. The switch to digital sound on celluloid was the first time analogue optical noise was completely eliminated from 35mm film. The changes I mention above have been influential in Australian cinema for a number of reasons, and I discuss further in chapter five. Smith describes how with new technologies the process of sound design became more complex: Back in the seventies the director had to be there at the mix because we didn’t have the automation or the ability to store track information with computers like we do today. So you had to mix the scene as you went…(not that I was mixing in the seventies), the whole ten-minute reel of film in one go. So if the director’s not there then the decision’s had to be made without them, we couldn’t go back and just change a little bit here and there as we can now. So it was this broad brushstroke of a bird goes there and that’s it. It was far simpler, and the sounds were more representative in broad brushstrokes rather than having all the fine details that we have now…

…there are more choices now and I think that side of it gets a bit confusing for everyone. For example, whereas before we could all get away with having a wind, and that wind would be doing its job, now, because of all the other movies that we’re exposed to, people have got their own, personal opinions and ideas of how a particular wind should sound, so it’s not good enough just to have a wind, it needs to be the right type of wind. So even though the budgets have become smaller and the technology has become quicker, there are now more decisions to be made and the decisions are being deferred in the sound editing and mixing process, so that no one makes a decision until the very end of the final mix, because the director will say, ‘Look, I can’t decide now. Just put them all in and we’ll decide when we get there on the day’ (Smith 2009).

At the same time that new technologies offering the possibility of endless creative options were emerging, film finance and budgets were decreasing. The rapid growth in technology expanded editing, mixing and therefore creative options. However, there have also been limitations caused by static budgets, poor budget planning for sound production and a general lack of understanding about the role and potential of the soundtrack. What these issues have created is a film sound industry that often feels stressed, frustrated and under-resourced. Australian sound professionals have to work hard to create and construct soundtracks that often do not reflect their modest budgets.

Have budget issues played a role in defining the sorts of changes in the

75 soundtrack that this thesis is considering? Yes, my research indicates that budget problems still create the need for broad brushstrokes to be relied on in the production of film soundtracks. As well, sound practitioners have had to become skilled at adapting their work practices to suit both the film and the budget they are working with.They have also become quick to adapt new technologies to suit their needs from one film to the next.

Because sound on film is able to give a good return on investment, the ability to rely upon iconic sounds and to be able to move and manipulate these sounds has paved the way for new interpretations of Australian culture, history and identity to emerge via the soundtrack. This has proven to be particularly invaluable for Australian transcultural cinema where questions about nationhood, history, belonging and loss are often addressed.

Where did the sounds come from?

So what is it that makes the sound of Australian cinema so recognisable, even today? Prior to the late 1960s there were few recorded Australian sounds. Sound recordings belonging to the Australian bush or urban landscape did not exist. While filmmakers identified the landscape as something integral to Australia, sound professionals identified that it was the soundscape which grounded the audience in this unique location. The soundscape, they argued, would position the audience in place and time of day, and once this was established the sounds could be manipulated to change or define an understanding of that place or character(s). In this way, the sounds of the landscape became the recognisable signature of an Australian crafted soundtrack. In describing the iconic sounds of Australian cinema, Judd recalls the rich mix of birds and bush sounds that make up the background atmosphere track to Skippy (1967–1969), one of Australia’s most successful television exports. In the summer of 1966–67, Judd became the ‘voice’ of Skippy the bush kangaroo: Skippy is a great example of an iconic Australian sound which has proliferated through the whole world! You can go almost anywhere and say, what noise does a kangaroo make and people go ‘click click click’. Being the only person in in the sound department at the studio, I was the one who had to come up with the majority of Skippy’s noises, so I guess I can credit myself with being the voice of Skippy (with the exception of some episodes). The background bush atmosphere that was running in Skippy a lot of the time was a mix of different birds that I had recorded. Magpies, occasional kookaburras, various Australian bird and bush sounds mixed all together on quarter inch magnetic tape into what became the bed of most of the Skippy series, this background is an iconic Australian atmosphere embedded in the minds of tens of millions of viewers around the globe (Judd 2009).

One of the initial problems in creating film soundtracks was locating existing recordings

76 of relevant sounds belonging to the Australian landscape, such as birds and winds. This meant that most of the atmospheres and effects had to be recorded from scratch. Because of this, a particular camaraderie developed between sound editors that was built on the need to share resources including sound effects and creative and technical ideas. Bartering sounds and sharing ideas became a dynamic of the culture, something that continues today.

During his time as an assistant at the SAFC, Smith observed how the sound editors would record and collect sounds for each production. Because there was such a limited supply of library sounds, the editors had to rely on sourcing some of their sound recordings from other editors: …for a while I know there was a bit of a trade between different editors, which also included overseas sound editors. I remember when there was great excitement about the arrival from Alan Splet in America of tape copies of the Dune wind from the filmDune [Lynch 1984]. I think it was Craig Carter who traded some sound of his for the Dune wind. It became the much coveted wind sound effect that you heard in films for quite some time. Because, you know, for a while there were only a few sound editors that had this type of material. I remember there was also thunder from Poltergeist [Hooper 1982], which was used a lot!…

… Of course they still do this [trade sounds] and sometimes you work with a sound designer and they will hear a particular sound effect; there might be a particular bird, there might be a particular car, it could be a particular dog bark, or whatever, and they’ll react quite strongly to it and say, ‘No, no, no. That’s the dog bark from Police Rescue [1989–1996]! I’ve heard that so many times!’ I mean, maybe this has something to do with the sound of many of the earlier films. Because there were only so many sounds and they were being reused over and over again…it’s usually those sounds that were hard to get, like plovers or dingoes, and they would just appear time and time again… Many of the older sound editors will still go, ‘Oh, I had this really good bellbird that I used in Mad Max 2 [Miller 1981] that we’ll put in here’. And I think that these environmental sounds, rather than other kinds of sounds such as great explosions, create this sort of sound continuity in the sounds that we hear in our films (Smith 2009).

Australian sound editors created their own sound libraries, which were collected from each film they worked on as well as resourced from other environments.As explained by Smith, sounds were also bartered. The atmospheres and effects used on films came from a variety of sources, but certain key sounds came to have a significant impact in Australian cinema.

Early technologies and the sound of Australian cinema

During the 1970s and early 1980s, technology had a profound influence on what was creatively possible. Until the mid 1980s, sound was recorded in analogue; it was mono, noisy and easily distorted, had a limited dynamic range and limited frequency response. The equipment was minimal and there were a limited number of tracks for mixing. The sound mixer had to work hard with little more than tone controls at his disposal to make

77 the dialogue stand out above the tape noise, and the backgrounds of location recordings, as well as successfully bedding the dialogues in with the music, sound effects and atmospheres. Limited tracks and the sonic clarity required to allow the dialogues to cut through above the other sounds helped to dictate a film’s sound design. The limitations of sound technology and the modest sound libraries saw the creation of iconic sounds that soon could be identified as bestowing certain meanings. Using as examples the soundtracks of films such asWalkabout (Roeg 1971), Gallipoli (Weir 1981) and Barry McKenzie (Beresford 1972), Pashley discusses how the use of certain naturalistic and atmospheric sounds became key in examining cultural significance in many early Australian films: I think things like atmospherics and sound effects play very, very specific roles in terms of focus. I think the soundtracks were often quite heavy handed in showing off a side of our isolated island to the world. Often the dialogue was very clear in these films and it allowed room for, say, odd- sounding birds like a kookaburra. I don’t know if there was a whole lot of subtext considered, in terms of soundtracks in those days, but what was there was very clear. They were mono for a start, so there was not much latitude so they were very focused. So when a noise or a sound was specifically assigned to an environment, or a story leak to change an idea, you had one shot, really, because you didn’t have much bandwidth. So therefore it had to be very specific (Pashley 2009).

The soundtracks that materialised out of this crucial mix of technology, creativity and collaboration produced distinct sounds and sound design concepts. I use my sonic tools – the sonic spectre, the sonic fetish and the sonic artefact – to investigate not only the creation and development of key sounds and sound concepts in the national cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, but also the deployment, movement and manipulation of these sounds in Australian transcultural cinema.

Sounds like Australian cinema

In the 1970s, the AFC mandate dictated that government-funded films needed to present a representation of nation to the Australian public and the world, as the first annual report states: 5. (1) The functions of the Commission are – (a) to encourage, whether by the provision of financial assistance or otherwise, the making, promotion, distribution and exhibition of Australian films; (b) subject to the approval of the Minister, to make, promote, distribute and exhibit any films and, in particular – (i) films that serve the purposes of a Department of State or an authority of Australia. (ii) films that deal with matters of national interest to Australia: and (iii) films that are designed to illustrate or interpret aspects of Australia or the life and activities of the Australian people. (Australian Film Commission, Appendix 1 1975)

78 Australian film soundtracks were crafted to support and enhance the films funded under this mandate. What other influences can be heard in the soundtracks of Australian films? Industrial practices have certainly been influenced by the British film industry. As Pashley (2009) mentioned, a large contingent of British personnel helped to set up Australian television broadcasting and trained many of Australia’s filmmakers. Another influence was the American film industry, which has dominated the Australian distribution market since the 1930s.

Prior to Dolby noise reduction and digital processes, noise was a major problem in the creation of film soundtracks. Clear dialogue in a soundtrack is essential and for this reason it became standard practice in Hollywood to dub or replace film dialogue (ADR) and therefore the entire soundtrack. But what happened in Australian cinema was very different, as Judd clarifies: I’ve always thought that Australian films have had, to a degree, their own specific sound. For a little while I think we tried to follow the Hollywood template of sound, but not all the way, especially in those early days, the sixties, seventies – even Hollywood from the thirties, because there wasn’t the technology to get the recordings right, and because of the background noise problems, here in Australia we would try and mask these problems with atmospheres and effects. In Hollywood they just dubbed the entire film. That was their practice and they had the money for it. If you look at almost any Hollywood film that was made before the seventies, eighties, they’re all post-sync. They’re all dubbed films. That was the American way. …Whereas we didn’t have the budgets or the technology or the actor expertise (Judd 2009).

Judd makes a significant point: the use of atmospheres and effects to hide noise in the tracks not only became a key technical issue, it helped shape the sound of Australian cinema. One of the key reasons why Australian soundtracks are identifiable is because of their use of location sound recordings as well as their use of atmospheres and effects such as wind and birds. Smith talks about the development of and ability to recognise Australian film soundtracks: I think we [sound professionals] recognise and reference the sounds of early Australian films. I think if each generation keeps referencing back earlier films as well as listening to theAustralian environment then a sound language will get passed on. So whereas a person coming through film school now may not reference a really early film, they might reference Lucky Miles [Rowland 2007b] or Japanese Story [Brooks 2003], and these films carry references to previous films. So there is that sound language that is almost being passed on…

I went to the Cannes Film Festival with The Quiet Room [de Heer 1997] …and saw a lot of films – French, Indonesian, German films, whatever – this whole palette of films and they all had their own sound. And then I’d hear an Australian film and I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s all the sounds that we know’. So you’ve got a different connection with those films than you do with the others. …the tone or accent of the voices is different, but I think it’s the environment as well, it sounds different. I’ve worked on productions that have had overseas producers, and you put in the sound of a magpie warbling along and they have no idea what it is, because they’ve got no reference to it and it’s just this crazy sound. They just go, ‘What’s that?’ Whereas we go, ‘Oh, it’s morning, isn’t it?’ For an Australian audience, if you see a person in bed, and you hear that sound

79 of the magpie, then you know what time of day it is, but for an international audience, they might not (Smith 2009).

Smith’s observations support my argument by pointing to how the soundtracks can locate audiences and connect them to a specific environment. His comments also highlight how certain sounds or groupings of sound carry meaning; that is, many Australian audiences have come to recognise the sound of magpies as signifying morning.

Conclusion The Australian cinema renaissance created an industry that drew from overseas expertise and influences but quickly adapted technology and practices to suit specifically Australian production styles. As many of the film sound professionals I interviewed indicate, atmospheres and effects have played a crucial role in the soundtracks since the 1970s. These sound components have been a key means through which filmmakers have been able to engage with the government mandate to present the Australian nation to itself and the world within the budget constraints that categorise Australian film. As Judd explains, during this period, the industry did not have the financial resources, technology or expertise to dub entire film soundtracks, therefore atmospheres and effects were used to cover track noise thus creating an emphasis on atmospheres and effects. Smith points out how Australian atmospheres and effects are unique and readily identifiable by a local audience. The soundtracks of Australian films act as both a resource and a reference for Australian sound practitioners. As well, the influence and ideas generated by mentors and work colleagues, along with the bartering of sounds, have helped to create a sonic continuity in the soundtracks of Australian films.

Drawing on interviews with key Australian film personnel, this chapter has examined the effects of government policy and funding, training, the advancement of equipment and technology, and changing methods in soundtrack design. All these factors influenced the sound of Australian cinema. The interviewees shed important new light on why key sounds belonging to the Australian natural environment, such as birds and wind, became so prominent in the soundtracks, and how these sounds came to convey certain meanings in Australian cinema. They also help explain why atmospheres and effects became so important and why particular sounds were crafted and used to convey certain meanings, thus highlighting some of the reasons why Australian soundtracks can be recognised as structurally and sonically different from other national cinemas.

80 My findings support my argument that iconic sounds, particularly those with components originating in the natural environment, were created and have been utilised extensively in the soundtracks of Australian cinema. The findings further support my argument that the soundtracks of Australian cinema – and, indeed, what is variously recognised as the sound(s) of Australian film – are characterised by a use of sound in which the sonic fetish (iconic sounds), the sonic artefact (sounds tied to memory) and the sonic spectre (sounds of haunting) have played key roles.

In chapter five I examine how, with the advent of an Australian transcultural cinema, the soundtrack became vital in creating new ways in which Australia could be heard and Australian history could be interpreted.

81 Chapter Five

Sound speak: sound changes

Introduction

In chapter five I focus on how the sound of Australian films started to change in the late 1980s and 1990s in response to government film funding policies which supported screen plays reflecting a multicultural nation.

The interview material highlights how changes in film storylines stimulated new approaches to thinking about sound and soundtrack design. The filmmakers also comment on the role of sound as a sonic signifier in Australian films in response to these questions:

How has the move away from a predominantly Anglo Celtic national cinema to a more diverse and multicultural one shaped the soundtracks of Australian film and television? (a) How have you sonically interpreted these new themes and storylines? (b) What has influenced your interpretations?

In what ways have new technologies influenced your creative work and practice.Taking into account; budgets, schedules, crews, and the more creative aspects of sound design?

Because of the advent of Australian transcultural cinema, specific iconic sounds that had previously been used to describe an uncanny Australian landscape or reckoning, or an Anglo-Celtic urbanscape, started to be reconfigured, shifted or removed entirely, leaving space for new interpretations to emerge. As Indigenous filmmaker and poet Romaine Moreton explains: …I’m really aware in my own work how I want to subvert how Western storytellers have used sounds, how they have related to place through the crow as the omen, the demonic presence. For me this is sacrilege, for me the crow and the raven family is such a sacred family that I would never think of using it in that way. The challenge becomes as a filmmaker, as an Indigenous filmmaker, who wants to subvert the dominant meaning that has been promoted through cinematic history, how do we do it? We find other ways to express the tonal elements of drama (Moreton 2009).

In this chapter I highlight the pivotal role the soundtrack has played in the construction of Australian cinematic stories. Particularly important is how the significant changes that I have detected in Australian transcultural cinema have opened the way for Australia to be heard differently through its films.

82 Hearing the changes in nation

In the 1970s and 1980s, the New Australian Cinema responded to the government dictate to represent the nation to Australia and the rest of the world. Many of the stories presented an Anglo-Celtic population still trying to understand itself in a habitat often presented as uncanny and harsh. Indigenous Australians were represented as the ‘natives’ of a wild and unrecognisable landscape and, as Philip Brophy mentions, the didgeridoo became one of the key recognisable sound bites; a sonic signifier of Indigenous Australia: I can think of other things but the didgeridoo, I think, is very much a constant. …lots of people employ the didgeridoo in order to create a sense of nationhood, an idea of Australia, and a very specific ideological image of Australia. …representations of nationhood only come about through subconscious or unconscious manipulations of iconography, of icons. … So, something like the didgeridoo; …it’s a sound bite that you can use without having to ever come into contact with Indigenous culture in any way whatsoever, and that’s what makes it even more ideal for being exploited and used to conjure up nationhood (Brophy 2009).

As I discuss in detail in chapter four, it was not until the cinematic renaissance that a recognisable Australian film sound industry was established. Sound libraries had to be created from scratch and soundtracks were limited by both dynamic range and the noise of the reproduction systems. This helped to create a homogenised sound that mapped Australia sonically, as Moreton discusses: …the natural elements, such as the insects, were heightened and I think the sound of a lot of early films revealed for me how much out of place and dislocated and displaced the colonial story is. A lot of the sonic elements, more than the visual I think, actually relayed this idea that there is another story attempting to lay itself in this country and there is no cohesiveness with the natural elements… For instance I try to avoid using the didgeridoo in my work as a poet, and I will continue [to do that] as a filmmaker, unless it is relevant, because didgeridoo is not my instrument, it’s not from my area of Country so I’m not going to whack it in, say ‘I’m Aboriginal’, you know. So where people’s first response is to say ‘That would sound great with a didgeridoo’ – well, I would say, ‘No, it won’t…’ (Moreton 2009).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, new government policy instigated the development of screen bodies such as SBSi and the AFC Indigenous Branch. New cinematic interpretations of Australia as a nation started to emerge; they covered all facets of Australian life, including migrant and Indigenous stories. This, in turn, created the need for sound personnel to interpret the new stories and images differently. The soundtrack became key in interpreting difference, whether from an Indigenous or non-Indigenous perspective. Jane Paterson discusses how SBS, community radio and Australian transcultural cinema have helped to educate the ear and influence the sound of the nation’s cinema: I think SBS has probably really tuned people’s ears to different styles of voices. There are times when directors subtitle what people are saying, and there’s times when they don’t, and I think generally people are attuned to a wider variety of voices now, partly through SBS. Because of

83 policy, it became official – official to hear different voices! Community radio too, I think, probably has influenced this. I listen to Muslim community radio a lot, and most of it I have no idea what they’re talking about because they’re talking in Arabic, but I just love listening to the rhythms of those voices. It’s just gorgeous.

One of the things I like about Head On [Kokkinos 1998] is that it’s an English language film, but heret are moments where you’ve got people talking in other languages that don’t get translated. And I love that, it’s intriguing, because, you know, there’s these layers. So you’ve got people in the audience who understand exactly what’s going on all the time, because they understand both languages, or as many languages as are being spoken. And you’ve got other people like me going ‘I don’t understand it’. But…you don’t necessarily need that word content to understand it. Just the texture of those voices, and the rhythms of the voices, it’s usually pretty obvious what’s going on. And even if it’s not, that’s also kind of part of the charm of it, of, ‘Oh! am I supposed to understand that? Or aren’t I?’ I think a shift that has happened is where audiences will accept that there might be some dialogue they don’t understand. I think that, say, back in the seventies, people wouldn’t have stood for this (Paterson 2009).

As Paterson discusses, community radio and SBS through its radio and television stations provided the opportunity for Australia’s different ethnic communities to be heard. With the emergence of SBSi and the AFC Indigenous Branch, how Australia had been sonically heard in cinema started to change quite radically. Sound editors had to start reinterpreting the storylines and rethink their ideas in regards to what clarity and authenticity in their soundtracks now meant. In ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Arjun Appadurai discusses the tensions that arise between ‘cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization’. He argues that ‘the new cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models’ (1990, p.6). In Australian transcultural cinema, these tensions are being played out in a number of ways in the soundtrack. The homogenous sound of Australia as interpreted through the national cinematic soundtracks of the 1970s and 1980s is changing and the sound of the landscape is being redefined by the need to provide authentic sounds of both time and place. This ‘re-sounding’ of the soundscape in transcultural films includes a myriad of voices belonging to Australians of different ethnic heritage as well as the information and sonic overflow that converges and is audible through ‘global cultural flows’ (Appadurai 1990). Andrew Plain explains how getting some notion of ‘difference’ into the soundtrack is an important aspect of recent transcultural films.Whereas previously: …in most Anglo-Saxon films there has not been a growing notion that your next-door neighbours might be from a different ethnic background, or, if there is, it’s made a big deal of, rather than being part of the background.

… It has now become a lot more specific. We have done soundtracks for films set in Marrickville [Sydney] and we’ve spent a lot of time recording Vietnamese voices, in shops and around the area, rather than just using your standard Australian streetscape. It’s getting some notion of ‘difference’ into the soundtrack (Plain 2009).

84 Today, the transcultural cinema is influencing the sound of the national cinema and the sonic representation of Australia as a nation on the screen. It challenges iconic sounds and ideals, such as the didgeridoo to represent the whole, and all aspects of Indigenous Australia. And it challenges the ideal of a white Australian nation by providing the sounds of streetscapes that ring with a variety of accents and languages.

The emergence of Indigenous voices in Australian cinema

The AFC’s Indigenous Branch (now Screen Australia’s Indigenous Programs) has been highly influential in the development and support of a strong cohort ofAustralian Indigenous filmmakers. These filmmakers have challenged the way Indigenous Australians have been portrayed both visually and sonically and how the landscape has been sonically mapped. Through the drama and documentary initiatives, Indigenous Programs has helped talented filmmakers create and showcase films that are both meaningful and exceptionally well-crafted works. Sally Riley, Head of ABC TV’s Indigenous Department,20 and Erica Glynn, Head of Indigenous Programs at Screen Australia, nourish and support this talent. In discussing why Indigenous Programs is proving to be so successful in their drama and documentary initiatives, Riley has this to say: What we do is to try and give them [the filmmakers] the courage to be strong enough to keep pushing for their own vision in the storytelling and not let people take over and say ‘That’s not how we make a film in the real world’, because with our films, the form comes from the content. We don’t impose a three-act structure, though sometimes that is what ends up happening naturally (Riley 2009).

Glynn adds: And it is a different view of the world, and we have found that people are interested and want to see these stories. ... In some ways what is unique about Indigenous films and sets them apart is that they take you to a world, a real world that in some cases is quite unique, such as in Samson and Delilah [Thornton 2009b]. The world has not been taken to these communities in this way before, so it is refreshing for audiences to see this new and special thing… (Glynn 2009).

The sound editors working on transcultural films found that being taken to ‘these communities’ created the need for new interpretations and approaches in soundtrack design. I asked director Beck Cole about the sonic representation of Indigenous Australia in Australian national cinema: I think there’s a difference in the way sounds are represented in films these days when it comes to Aboriginal people, and I think that’s probably because there are quite a few Aboriginal filmmakers now. There wouldn’t be many people that would dare use a didgeridoo you know, it’s beyond

20 Riley was the Head of Screen Australia Indigenous Programs at the time of this interview, prior to becoming Head of ABC TV’s Indigenous Department.

85 cliché, it’s just boring and so predictable. But if you’re doing tongue in cheek, then that might be something else (Cole 2009).

In the 1990s, Indigenous Australians emerged as a presence both in front of and behind the camera and realistic representations of Indigenous Australia started to emerge. As I will discuss, this created radical changes in how Australia was sonically interpreted for the screen.

Sonically mapping the landscape

Many of the films made in the 1970s and early 1980s were told from anAustralian settler or Western sensibility and portrayed a young Federation and an Anglo-Celtic population struggling to make sense of their position within the Australian landscape. The steady stream of stories produced for the screen carried themes of unease: unease of self, country and of the Other. Sound editors had a small select arsenal of sounds from which to interpret and reinforce what was to become the homogenised sound of Australia and the outback. It is uncanny how the natural sounds of the landscape so obligingly fulfilled this task. Moreton discusses the problems with the cinematic sonic landscape belonging to Australian films from this period: I think you have to be very careful when you use natural crows and currawongs and magpies. Currawong has a beautiful song, so many different elements. I was in Marrickville, and I spent quite a bit of time just listening to bird conversation and I went to Braidwood [Southern Tablelands, NSW], I went down and listened to the birds and they had of course a different song, their voice was so different and I thought of this in terms of colonialism, of homogenising not just Indigenous people but regional animal sounds (Moreton 2009).

Sound recordist and director David Tranter has lived in Alice Springs and Central Australia all his life and one of the ways he is intimately connected with Country is through sound. With the development of the Indigenous film initiatives, he has been in demand as both a drama and documentary sound recordist. Over the years Tranter has streamlined his equipment and perfected a way of sound recording that focuses on producing clean dialogue, picking up the sounds of the environment and, particularly important, providing a respectful and comfortable way of recording Indigenous interviewees and actors. He likens his use of matching shots and sonic perspective when sound recording to an artist working with colour and visual perspective. His recording style creates a layer of sound, grounded in the real, which the sound editor can then ‘polish’ and consolidate: I grew up around the bush and in Alice Springs. I worked on a station when I was thirteen, sixteen, you know, so I am familiar with how things tick, how reality ticks up here. So everything from a community aspect, I already knew, there was nothing that Liam [Egan, sound designer on Samson and Delilah] could tell me to get from a community that I did not know about because I lived on a community, and I have been working around communities all my life … I went over to Hidden

86 Valley community and recorded the phone there; we couldn’t mock one up because a community phone sounds quite distinctive, different from a normal pay phone. Sometimes the phones may be a little wrecked and they might have a bit of character about them, even the dial and the ring tone. You don’t want to get a phone off a disc, you want to hear that ambient sound in the background (Tranter 2009).

Through the work of a growing number of Indigenous filmmakers such as Moreton and Tranter, sound editors are being educated to listen to Australia differently, to re-track the soundscapes of previous films, and in this way to give voice and authenticity to Country. Plain discusses the changes that are emerging in the consultation process with filmmakers: My background is Anglo-Saxon, and this forms a large part of my history…, therefore I have to do a lot more consultation, even before I start playing with sounds. Even if it appears on the surface to be a fairly straightforward narrative, you do a lot more talking to people about what specifics might be invoked, or the kind of particular sounds that they’re interested in. Once an outline is established I then think about whether there’s much difference in what I would usually do… And one thing that has certainly changed over time is that now people seem to be very particular about specific sounds… (Plain 2009).

Filmmaker Beck Cole spent time on the mix of Samson and Delilah, a film directed by Warwick Thornton and sound designed by Liam Egan. Her discussion of the mix process supports my argument that Indigenous filmmakers are significantly changing the sound of Australian cinema: Especially when it comes to birds. I spent a lot of time with Warwick and Liam on Samson and Delilah, and Warwick would spot the wrong bird, even if it was just a little ‘chirp, chirp, chirp’ in the background. And Warwick would just say, ‘No, no, no!’ And Liam’s response was, ‘But it’s from the Top End, still in the Northern Territory!’ and Warwick’s saying, ‘It’s not from the desert!’… And working with David [Tranter], I guess because David’s from where we’re from, he has the same sensibility, and he’s always listening and goes out of his way to pick up particular sounds that are important (Cole 2009).

Sound designer Liam Egan, who has worked on many of the Indigenous productions produced by Screen Australia Indigenous Programs, explains: If I can be extremely generalised, one of the things I notice when I work with Indigenous filmmakers is that there is a lot more rigorous attention and awareness of specific sounds for specific locations and I’ve noticed that with things like birds and wind. If it is not right, I will be told, ‘Oh, the wind never gets that heavy around here’ or, ‘The wind through those leaves is the wrong sort of wind for here, the leaves are softer in those trees and it is more of a whistling wind’. They have particular stories they want to tell and it is important through the sound to provide an authenticity to that story, to that voice they are trying to express. So they are trying to tell stories that are generally relevant to their culture and to our culture and as long as I’m being as sensitive as possible to the authenticity then I think that is the biggest challenge that I have (Egan 2009).

Stressing that his working relationship with sound designer Jim Currie influences the sound of his films, Rolf de Heer discusses the use of atmospheres in his filmThe Tracker (2002). The film backtracks over Australia’s contentious colonial history; it follows the journey of the local constabulary, their black tracker and a local Anglo-

87 Celtic landowner as they hunt down an Indigenous fugitive. The sound of this film is notable, especially the use of winds and birds, because of the way the sounds ground both audience and character to landscape in an affirming way while also providing the necessary storytelling elements. As de Heer explains: The atmospheres, which are so significant in giving the sense of the countryside, they were all recorded on location. But they’re not simple, they’re quite complex recordings, and they make up a whole bed of atmospheres. We spent weeks going through atmospheres and matching the right ones and getting the right feel for it, which is not something that in the seventies people particularly did. You stuck in an atmosphere; it didn’t matter where it came from as long as it was roughly right, rather than try and be there listening to it, and trying to find a way to capture the synthesis between the film and the reality – what is required to capture the reality, but what is also correct cinematically. We tend to think about that sort of stuff a lot; I think about it a lot. …

On The Tracker I actually went back to do one thing, which was to record the sound of breeze through casuarina trees. It was a very particular sound that I was after, and that’s what belonged to that scene, but it hadn’t been recorded at the time. And so I drove five hundred kilometres back to the location to try and record it myself. You could possibly manufacture it or find it in a library somewhere, but in the end it’s not organic to the place, and somehow that reduces the strength of it, from my point of view (de Heer 2009).

In the early 1990s, Australian transcultural cinema created the impetus for the sonic remapping of the nation’s cinematic landscape. It has stimulated strong collaborative processes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers and sound practitioners. Further, it has changed the way Australian sound practitioners think about and create the soundtracks.

Changing Australian soundscapes: many voices, many stories and different sounds

In Australian cinema, the films produced in the 1970s and 1980s and earlier did not have much room for non-Anglo-Celtic voices; accented voices belonged to marginal characters in the storyline. Moreover, atmospheres and effects were used to highlight difference. In the late 1980s a small number of films, such asNight Cries (Moffatt 1989), were notable because they centred non-Anglo-Celtic Australians in the storylines. In the 1990s, this number started to grow significantly and the soundscapes started to change in response. Paterson discusses: I love it when Australian films have been track laid appropriately so that you can hear the location, such as in the filmLittle Fish [Woods 2005], which is set in Cabramatta. This kind of polyglot is different from anywhere else. …in the Australian urban polyglot, there’s a lot of European accents and language in there, such as Italian and Greek, but there’s also a lot of Asian languages as well. It’s a really particular mix that we’ve got here (Paterson 2009).

Re-creating the sound and creating the layers of sound that make up the different locations in a film is not a cheap or simple task. Paterson describes the tensions between low-budget filmmaking and being able to build the sound of Australia’s diversity into a film soundtrack:

88 …there are not enough different voices being heard. When you listen to a lot of the Australian television series, such as Home and Away [Seven Network, 1987– ], the voices are still so incredibly ‘white’ with the occasional different ‘voice’ or accent. It is partly budgets which dictate what you hear because having the money to record a wide variety of voices or backgrounds is usually low priority on a low-budget film. You have to worry first about the principal voices. So, to have that mosaic of voice takes both money and planning and small budgets are now a big problem (Paterson 2009).

Budget constraints mean that it is difficult to represent the cultural diversity that can be heard in the Australian soundscape. This is one of the reasons why the iconic sounds of films from the 1970s and 1980s have become so useful and act as powerful sonic elements in Australian transcultural cinema. Already identifiable, when iconic sounds from these earlier films are repositioned, silenced or manipulated, they can provide clear pivotal points in the storytelling relatively cheaply.

Plain discusses the importance of collaboration in designing the soundtracks for Australian transcultural films, and touches on how memory is a strong component in the storylines, planning and sound design. Discussing the filmLa Spagnola (Jacobs 2001) he explains: the actual sounds and the design was created by the Huzzah sound crew. But the film was based on the producer Anna Maria Montecelli’s childhood, so I talked to her about her memories and what needed to be invoked and what this meant in terms of the film. So a lot of the ideas were initiated from my conversations with her. …We [Huzzah sound team] have worked in the same way with Indigenous filmmakers. For instance, we did the soundtrack for the series FirstAustralians [Cole & Perkins 2008], and again, we usually come up with a concept but their suggestions were very important.

We created the soundtrack for Two Fists, One Heart [Seet 2008], which is a boxing film about an Italian family. We ended up having to spend a lot of time talking, not to the director but to the screen writer Rai Fazio, who has an Italian background. And we talked to other people as well who knew what sorts of sounds were important, what would you hear around the house, at parties, and even levels of noise. And they were very specific, such as ‘In this situation there’d be women mainly talking’. Ethnic radio was discussed, when it’s listened to and how pervasive it is. What they would hear from next-door neighbours, for example, whereas lawn mowing in an Anglo film becomes suggestive of Saturday afternoon, when it’s a film about Italian families, the sounds they associate with Saturday afternoons are different (Plain 2009).

Paterson’s and Plain’s comments and experience support my argument that Australian transcultural cinema is changing the way the nation is being sonically interpreted and heard. The transcultural cinema has provided both challenges and changes in the collaborative process between directors and sound designers and in the way film soundtracks are constructed.

New technologies and changes in the soundtrack

Egan discusses how changes in technology have made it easier to be authentic:

89 Some of the biggest changes in recent times is that it is now much easier to go out and record your own sounds for a film, even the completely under-resourced ones, rather than relying on pre- existing libraries. I think about this all the time, how you can be authentic with whatever you are recording, and it is easier to be authentic now than it used to be (Egan 2009).

The rapid advancement of new technologies from the late 1980s, which included digital technology and advancements in noise reduction coincided with the emergence of Australian transcultural cinema. For this reason, it is important to examine the influence new technologies have had on the soundtracks. Plain provides a good explanation of how new technologies have supported the drive for authenticity in the soundtracks: I think it is a combination of people being more selective, more careful about using particular sounds, but I also think it’s a technological question because of surround sound and a much greater dynamic range. When I first started we were working in mono, you had a couple of iconic birds, and some sort of background atmosphere that usually had to be played quite low in order for the dialogue to come through, or else it became just mush. You could call it a fill background. Whereas now, if you’re talking about six-track, there are dialogues coming out the centre speaker, and that leaves five other channels that sound can come from. And it actually does become an environment (Plain 2009).

…People have become a lot more careful about the sonic landscape, and that’s because now there is an acknowledgement that there is a soundscape, that it’s not just something to fill the track and support the dialogues, that surround sound might actually be creating the space you’re in… And I think people just became a lot more careful when sound became so clear… (Plain 2009).

Ten Canoes (2006), a collaborative project between de Heer and the people of Ramingining in Central Arnhem Land, links past to present in a story evoked from a photo taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson in the 1930s. The film capitalises on surround sound as part of its storytelling technique. I noted a strong physical response to the sound in this film, my heart and breath started to engage organically with the way the sound was pushed into the surrounds and sucked back out again; I became submerged inside this aural landscape. De Heer discusses the use of the surrounds in this film: We thought a great deal about things like the difference between the black and white sound – ‘black and white sound!’ and the colour sound. They’re profoundly different, even though they’re both made up of largely genuine stereo atmospheres… There are definite areas where it does feel like the sound is getting sucked in, and one of the reasons that has to happen is because it has to be able to wind back out again… The wider and the broader and the more enveloping the sound can be, the better. For it to be truly enveloping, you’ve got to suck it out in other places (de Heer 2009).

De Heer’s accounts highlight the haptic properties of the soundtrack, which he has taken full advantage of in his films. In negotiating time and space, he and sound designer Jim Currie were able to make full use of the surround capabilities of the soundtrack, which is particularly important in a film that backtracks and digs up the past, as many transcultural films do.

90 I talked to Breslin about changes she may have observed because of the tensions arising between technologies and budget, and how this might affect the sound design and therefore the sound of Australian films in the future. We also discussed how new media and new technologies had influenced her work and sound-designing practices: Technological change has influenced the way I work in two distinct ways. Firstly, it has changed the way I work in the processes and the prioritising. Technology has taken away the labour- intensive and equipment-heavy processes that used to allow for more time in a schedule. These days, with shorter schedules, the producers don’t want the multi-layering that we used to do; they seem to want the sound to be economical, it has to have a reason to be there. There is nothing extraneous about it, so there is an economy of the sound that works well if they have thought about it in the story.

Secondly, technology has changed the way we hear our world. I remember being really excited with the sound opportunities that came with the advent of personal mobile phones. During pre-production of The Monkey’s Mask [Lang 2000], I sent reading material to the artdirector and asked that in the city street scenes he put people talking on mobile phones. Whereas a daytime city street soundscape had traditionally had a certain calm homogeneity of traffic and pedestrian footsteps, I now had the opportunity to play up the alienation (of our main protagonist) with the subtly frustrating rhythms of many one-way phone conversations (Breslin 2009).

Peter Smith describes how the desire to be true to story, location and genre, as well as the move from limited sound options to greater diversity in soundtrack design, have helped to define the soundtracks of transcultural cinema: Back in the seventies and earlier, there wasn’t a whole lot of variety of sounds to choose from and so you would put some wind in a scene to depict it being desolate or whatever. But now, because of recording techniques and the abundance of sounds that you can get your hands on and also make, now you have got a huge palette to choose from. So before, as a mixer, you’d have a wind, which is just one track, now you can have eight or nine 5.1 tracks of a whole variety of different winds, going from a whistling wind or a buffeting wind underneath, and through that you can start to shape the sound of the wind and change it that way. So I think the winds are probably doing the same thing…it’s the same device, but it’s a bit more sophisticated now. There was also the use of big Aussie birds, it’s that whole thing of, if you want to depict the outback you put a crow in! And crows have also come to be used to signal something foreboding; impending death or bad things happening, not only just empty and desolate.

What I’ve noticed is that you can use the same sound, but it’s being used in a variety of different ways. And so long as there’s a pattern, then you can pretty much get away with it because you’ve actually mapped it for the audience so that, subconsciously, if you were to put the bird sounds in an ad hoc manner then it’s just birds for the sake of birds being in the environment, but if you add a particular location where you hear those particular birds, then you’re using it for some other dramatic signpost. And then, you know, you might go to a location and then not hear them, so the audience (subconsciously, I think) will recognise that those birds aren’t there, but they were there every other time. Something’s different; something’s changed. Yeah, it’s a thing of establishing something and then taking it away to make it noticed (Smith 2009).

New technologies have provided the ability to create sonic environments with soundscapes that are more textured and nuanced than the mono and stereo tracks of the 1970s and 1980s. A productive tension is created between low budgets and the endless possibilities created by new technologies resulting in more flexible recording

91 techniques. There is now both the need and the ability to provide authentic soundscapes that reflect the various communities that make up Australia. Importantly, as Smith suggests, even though the sounds are often more sophisticated, the iconic sounds are still used for their signification. However, in Australian transcultural cinema the sounds are manipulated, repositioned or silenced to support the new storylines.

Listen up: educating the ear As described earlier, Australian transcultural cinema is helping to educate the ear by taking audiences to locations with which they might not be familiar. Moreover, this cinema brings to the fore sonically, a culturally diverse Australian population. Tony Vaccher discusses his thought process when interpreting and tracklaying the dialogues on Radiance (Perkins 1998): I was the dialogue editor as well [as the mixer] and I found myself struggling with the way the Indigenous actors were delivering some lines because to a Western ear it’s not always easy to interpret what they are saying. Rachel seemed to be happy with the performance, but I was often editing the words and sometimes shifting the emphasis. Often there would be a lean on a word or an inflection in a spot which I was not used to. So I often used a combination ofADR [additional dialogue replacement], alternate takes and I changed the shape of the envelopes of some of the words. I tried to give it what I thought was the performance, so I did actually change performance in a lot of lines and on reflection I wonder whether that was the right thing to do. … It’s something that if the opportunity came up [again] I would sit down and have a coffee with Rachel and ask her about it… (Vaccher 2009).

Vaccher’s discussion concerning the dialogues on Cedar Boys [Caradee 2009] and The Combination [Field 2009] is also important. Aside from the music, it is the dialogues that articulate difference in these films: Cedar Boys is dialogue driven; it is the voice, the particular vernacular, and the music which tells you that this film is about Australian Lebanese culture. ADR was only used when there was no other choice. There are lines in both of these films which are difficult to understand, and they needed to be subtitled! And we’d go, ‘Gee, it’d be good to ADR that’, but they’d go, ‘Oh, no, that’s good, works fine’. It’s just part of the new ‘let’s keep it real’ style, I suppose. Once everything had to be done to a technical perfection, or you were expected to strive for technical perfection, and you could say that’s cultural. But now, depending on the production, technical perfection is the last thing they’re interested in. And I can easily go with that because it works, it feels right. To keep that sense of being there rather than having a pristine soundtrack, this is important for more directors now than I can remember (Vaccher 2009).

Vaccher outlines how in Australian transcultural cinema the priority is not to shape the dialogues to suit an Anglo-Celtic ear but to stay true to the vernacular and to the different inflections of the voices in these films. This process is educating the audience’s ear and providing more realistic interpretations of the population than have previously been heard in the national cinema.

92 In a large number of films by Indigenous filmmakers, room is made for the characters, and therefore the audience, to simply breathe. This does not mean silence; rather, it is a space created by the cutting rhythms during the picture-editing process that allows more room for the soundtrack to tell the story. This space provides an invitation for the audience to think. According to Paterson: …the sound of Aboriginal films is interesting, the spaciousness in the dialogue is, to me, really apparent, such as Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds [2002]. That sense of not having to say everything, but there’s a lot of unspoken communication going on. That whole thing of ‘show; don’t tell’. I mean, a lot of the time you don’t need to ‘yap, yap, yap, yap’. In Beneath Clouds there is this spaciousness which I love; the characters have a space to develop, it’s really gorgeous. Warm Strangers [Sen 1997] has one line of dialogue in it, and you want for nothing in the story. And in some ways I think it makes a story richer; because there are ambiguities, you don’t need to have everything absolutely up front and present.

Because a lot of the Indigenous films have been set in outback or country areas, there is also this ability to use the sound of natural elements, birds once again, animals and critters, to do storytelling, and create a sense of place. And the way that the brain works is that dialogue is the first thing that you’ll pull out of a field of sound, because it’s a survival thing. So you get this kind of sense of spaciousness, and being able to listen to and be in that environment, rather than it just being there behind the dialogue (Paterson 2009).

Cole discusses how growing up in the desert influenced the particular use of sound and silence in her films: I grew up in Alice Springs, so I’ve grown up in a small town in the desert. I didn’t ever live in the town, I lived out of town and I guess I’ve got a real appreciation of silence, and of the sounds of nature. I think this comes across, especially in Plains Empty [Cole 2005]. I was really drawn to the sounds that you really do hear when you’re home alone. When you live in a remote place like we do, you pay attention to every sound and you notice every sound that’s not right, or comes from somewhere else. If a sound doesn’t belong, you pay attention to it, and it’s interesting to use these sorts of sounds to build a feeling of tension, or anxiety, or loneliness. I choose to live in Alice Springs because I can’t stand the constant buzz of people and city life, I just hate not having silence around me and I guess where I come from formulates what my relationship to sound is (Cole 2009).

Many Indigenous films are set in the Australian outback. These not only remap the sounds of the natural landscape, they also move, manipulate and silence the iconic sounds that were so prominent in the films of the 1970s and 1980s. It is not only the remapping of the physical landscape that is heard. In Toomelah (Sen 2011) the actors speak in a vernacular that has evolved in their Country over a few hundred years or so, since colonisation. Through its dialogues, Toomelah speaks to its residents, the people from this part of Country, but its strength also lies in the way it invites an audience unfamiliar with this Country and culture to listen. Egan discusses the increasing use of Indigenous vernacular in Australian films: I guess one of the things I notice when working on films with Indigenous filmmakers is that there is very much an attempt to keep alive certain linguistic terms in these films; so somebody will be referred to as a womba [crazy, mad], or they might say ‘That’s deadly!’ Just terms that are very

93 much from the Australian Indigenous population. So, for example, the filmmaker may choose to refer to an echidna as a porcupine or a pussy cat rather than a cat because they have grown up in an Aboriginal community within their own culture using terms like that rather than echidna… I’ve recently completed a film where the word for rooster is wagkun, which is that particular community’s word for a rooster.

I am noticing that there is a very real attempt to keep alive that vernacular. So even though a white audience might not appreciate the specifics of some of those particular words, they are aware that there is a living language that is being developed over the years of white colonisation. I’m now hearing in films Aboriginal words, patterns of words that are unmistakably Australian Aboriginal rhythms, phrases that have become part of the Indigenous English, the vernacular (Egan 2009).

As Egan describes, Australian transcultural cinema is highlighting ‘Indigenous English’ as part of, and contributing to, the changes in the national vernacular. The transcultural cinema not only re-tracks over the past, re-sounds Australian cinema to give voice to lost memories and to those silenced, it makes space for the voices of Australia’s ethnic and Indigenous communities to be heard and recognised.

Mapping the movement and interpretation of iconic sounds: the sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic spectre

The movement and use in the last twenty to thirty years of iconic sounds that belong to Australian films of the late 1960s and 1970s can be tracked by analysing the soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema. As I have mentioned, one of the reasons the national cinema has produced so much drama is because of budget constraints: the soundtrack is often relied upon to develop certain aspects of the story and this can create the sense of a bigger budget film. Australian cinema has relied heavily on the soundtrack to create a sense of both the physical environment the characters inhabit and their psychological states. As technology and storylines changed, so did the use, placement and interpretation of early iconic sounds. Smith explains: A lot of the Australian films that I do are dramas and they are about people’s situations, so the sounds that are used need to be visceral and add to locations rather than just, ‘Oh, well, we’ll put a dog bark in here’. It’s more in the environment and how that affects the characters. Heaven’s Burning [Lahiff 1997] was always music-driven…but my memory of the soundtrack is the atmospheres. …it started in the city and moved to a country town and then right out into the country. There was this whole thing of taking a foreigner, this Japanese girl [Midori], out of her comfort zone and then putting her into this alien environment. Similar to Japanese Story [Brooks 2003] where the sounds are busy in the city and then as they go further and further out into the desert, it becomes more about his [the Japanese character Hiromitsu Tachibana] experience out in that landscape, and she [Australian Anglo-Celtic character Sandy Edwards] wasn’t so comfortable being out there. It is the sound that signals what is dangerous.

But then when you get Indigenous films it can be in the same type of location, and the sound can be the same sound, but in this case it is comforting. In Rolf’s film, Ten Canoes [de Heer 2006], they are at home out there, so it’s not an alien environment. It’s the same sounds, but they are sounds of life, so it means that it’s a food source or there must be water around somewhere and

94 all of those kinds of things, whereas it’s using the same sounds but it’s now in a different context (Smith 2009).

Smith’s point here, that the same sound takes on different meanings when used in different contexts, is an important one. In Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975), for example, the crickets as sonic fetish are played foreground on the track, and as such they reinforce the uncanny and sublime. But in an Australian transcultural film, they are more likely to be sitting within the atmospheres and played as part of the natural environment.

My research has created a forum for this important point to be expressed and noted. The sound designers interviewed for this thesis discuss the use and development of iconic sounds in Australian cinema; sounds such as birds and wind. Their explanations and examples of how these sounds have been used and manipulated over the last forty years or so highlight how useful my sonic conceptual tools – the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact and the sonic spectre – really are. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, an Australian film from the 1970s, insect and bird sounds were manipulated to create a sense of something fearful, menacing and uncanny; sonic fetishes. In Long Weekend (Eggleston 1978), an Australian exploitation (Ozploitation) film, the manipulation of animal and bird sounds, which can be considered sonic fetishes, become nightmarish banshees that haunt a young couple camping in the Australian bush; a story of nature versus a corrupt modernity. In Rabbit-proof Fence (Noyce 2002), an Australian transcultural film, sonic fetishes are applied differently. In this film winds, camel roars (nuzzing) and dog barks are manipulated to help define the terror of an Indigenous family as three young girls are ripped from the arms of their mothers and thrown into the back of a police car.

At the opening of Plains Empty (Cole 2005), Sam’s (Ngaire Pigram) partner has to travel away for work, leaving her and their dog, T-bone, at home; an old shack in a deserted mining area surrounded by dangerous mine shafts. Unfortunately, T-bone races after the departing vehicle and fails to return home. What follows is a ghost story that connects Sam and her lost dog to the ghost of a young Indigenous woman. The ghost starts to visit Sam who, frightened at first, starts to wonder what it is that the spectre wants from her. She finds out that the young woman was the ‘property’ of a morose white landowner who instructed her one night to go out and search for his missing dog. Carrying a lantern, she disappears into the night and, like the dog, fails to return. Cole discusses how she did not want the ghost girl to represent something scary and uncanny: In Plains Empty we [Cole and sound designer Liam Egan] did not want to create a feeling of

95 eeriness because I didn’t want the ghost girl to be really scary, like, that, ‘ooga-booga’ kind of vibe. I wanted it to be more about a historical place. I was interested in playing with themes of space and time, and timelessness. And we came up with this idea of using a kind of a wind that becomes a bit of a drone. And I wanted to use this sound to connect the past and the present with a sound that told you that this girl didn’t die last year, she’s from an earlier time. And also, we were trying to go against the grain, to use the sound to connect the two women (Cole 2009).

In the short filmPlains Empty, a young woman left callously at the bottom of a mine shaft reaches out from the dead. When her body is found by Sam and she is finally acknowledged, she disappears. As Cole explains, in the film’s soundtrack wind recorded from that location is used as the main component to represent the ghost woman. As sonic spectre, the wind does not invoke a horror as in Australian films of the 1970s and 1980s; in this transcultural film it encapsulates a presence, a young neglected woman whose story needs to be heard and acknowledged.

Romaine Moreton’s directorial debut, The Farm (2009), is set in a market garden in rural New South Wales. It follows the story of a young woman who, through her psychic ability, discovers a connection to the land and to the ancestors and uncovers a buried history belonging to the landscape. Moreton highlights specific aspects of the use of sound in her film: It’s about growing up picking beans and being in that space, but it’s also about transience because we [Romaine’s family] were moving through those spaces, we were not from them, and the idea for me is of different rhythms of time. … The main character is sonically represented by wind. She was the wind through the casuarina trees and when we were with her from her POV [point of view], we heard that wind. …with the mum character, we get to hear her song and her sounds, which are her breathing and her heart beat. For me, having an explicit understanding of what everything represented made it much more satisfying, so there is a lot of intent in this film, which is what I loved because within that intent there is also the other people’s rhythms coming through the collaborators, whether it is through the composer or the sound designer, the editor or the DOP [director of photography].

… I remember that moment Erica [Glynn] and I went in and the sound design was happening and there was a cow on the farm and it was totally out of place. And so [Erica] goes, ‘What do you hear here?’, and I said ‘I hear a bell’. So the bell went in there, which is interesting because it is from another place; that is, actually it wasn’t from that farm, that environment. The bell itself is from my family living on a church mission environment and how the bell was used there and the whole indoctrination that the bell represents [for Indigenous Australians], you know (Moreton 2009).

Moreton’s short film exemplifies how the sounds from the environment in Australian transcultural cinema are used to transverse time and space and to represent characters. It is important to note the use of the bell in Moreton’s film. As sonic artefact, the bell connects back in time to an era when the church tried to regulate the Indigenous population by the Western concept of time.

96 Filmmaker Sue Brooks maintains that it is probably her childhood spent in a small quiet town that has led to her appreciation of silence and strong sound components over ‘noise’. In discussing silence and sound, she says: I love using silence in film. Same as I love using stillness in performance. I think it was because I grew up in a small town where there was a very particular soundtrack. It was a rich soundtrack, but the basis of it was uncluttered. So you were aware of small shifts. You could recognise the different sounds of each person’s ute. The sounds of particular birds, dogs, voices. If the wind picked up, people were aware of it because they were always listening for possible changes in the weather. There was no rumble of traffic confusing the sounds. One car passing was clearly defined. You knew where it came from and which way it was heading. This attention to sound gave you a sense of place.

But this ‘silence’ is never just silence, there is always something there. And that something has to be precise. Not only the right bird, but the right bird sound for that time of day. Also, how far away is it? Is it moving? If you have a precise soundtrack, you pay attention more. And for me, it means I engage more with the film than a soundtrack that bombards me with ill- defined noise.

In Japanese Story (2003) and Road to Nhill (1997) I was looking for all of that. There was always that moment in the mix where I say ‘what is that crow doing there?’ At the time you feel like a sound pedant, but I don’t think that is just about being sonically accurate. I think it is more than that. It is like hearing the wrong note being played in your favourite piece of music. It is not only wrong, it hurts the ear. But the right note always gives you pleasure, no matter how often you hear it.

Brooks discussed that she hates the way that the audiovisual representation of the landscape in Australian film has been vilified, presented as an alien place where terrible things happen. Like a number of filmmakers, Brooks is re-tracking theAustralian landscape and one of the ways she does this is through her use of sound and silence. In Japanese Story, the landscape is not an entity full of strange ‘critter’ sounds that are threatening and alien. Sonically, the desert landscape is spiritually enlightening and provides the space for the two characters to listen and breathe and to negotiate their own journeys.

To the future

To investigate possible changes that may be heard in the future, I asked my interviewees to comment on any policy or social, cultural and technological changes they could foresee that could have repercussions for soundtrack design. Paterson mapped the changes that she has noted in the soundtracks of Australian cinema from the 1970s to the foreseeable future: There was the seventies with the Australian accents, and this constructed realism and ‘pride in being an Aussie’. And then in the eighties there was that kind of maturing of the Australian voice, and I think this happened in all post-colonial worlds, such as Canada and New Zealand. And then in the nineties, suddenly there was globalisation and arts within a global setting and the rise of the prosumer, consumers suddenly being able to participate through new media. And I think this is

97 both a good thing and a bad thing. But, you know, I look at the film school [AFTRS] and wouldn’t it be great if there were a whole lot of different types of voices here? And there just aren’t. This is not a direct government policy, but fees have gone up and so I think it cuts out a whole lot of minority voices… (Paterson 2009).

Since the mid 1990s new technologies have reduced the necessity for sound assistants. This means that the sound studio as a traditional training ground has all but disappeared. This is of concern because the loss of the traditional studio training and mentorship and the cost of higher education mean that Australia’s diverse population is not adequately mirrored in the backgrounds of those coming through higher education institutions. The current political climate and changes in higher education have seen a reduction in financial support for both institutions and students. Vaccher discusses the rise of independently funded, low-budget filmmaking and his experience as mixer onThe Combination: It’s about Lebanese youth culture and it’s set in Guilford, in a low-rent area with a lot of industry. Not a lot of trees and not many birds, so you would think that this environment would sound ‘dirty’. … But what was very different is that there was no attempt to create this ‘Australian suburban home and neighbourhood’ where you would hear the lawnmower, and the clock had to be ticking in the living room. It was driven by the music, which is fairly ethnically oriented music with a modern hip-hoppy beat to it as well. The music in this film does the signposting for the script.

There’s now people making films out of their bedrooms or independently funded, people who have never made a film in their lives. So there’s a new culture of people who don’t carry the baggage of what went before them. So I think this is also a reason why films are feeling different (Vaccher 2009).

Appadurai speaks of the ‘imaginary landscapes’ (1990, p.5) that have emerged from the global flows created from globalisation and new media. He states that these virtual landscapes are a ‘pastiche’ of ‘worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe’ (1990, p.7). Paterson discusses the impact that global cultural flows have had on filmmaking and the sound design process: And then, there’s now a kind of global culture. And I guess with the internet and online technology there is much more crossover. It is interesting whether globalisation homogenises everything, which in some ways it does, in that kind of American way. But at the same time, I also think that globalisation connects minorities. I read something recently that described how since globalisation, local dialects and lingo have actually become stronger…

But I think with globalisation you have your online community, which can be physically scattered but is connected by technology. And, you know, I figured there are probably little groups for every kind of minority interest out there these days, and that is a good thing. How does this affect the sound of Australian films? I’m not sure, but I think it probably means that people do at least have access to a wider variety of cultures. I think globalisation, in some ways, is probably a bit of a door into Otherness for people (Paterson 2009).

If the New Australian Cinema’s mission was to represent the nation, then the

98 transcultural cinema extends this vision by providing more real and diverse representations of society and culture. Much Australian multicultural cinema has ‘communicated to a white middle-class audience’ (Brophy 2009) something that Vaccher touches on when describing his dilemma while working with Indigenous and Lebanese inflections. But this is changing, particularly in regards to dialogues and atmospheres, as Egan explains: I think that people are much more aware of what sounds they are putting in place. Rather than thinking, ‘Oh, that bird sounds spooky, I’ll use it here’, now they are more likely to say, ‘That bird comes from this region of Australia, it would be inappropriate to use it on the East Coast when you wouldn’t find it here’. For example, now [in a film set in Sydney] you wouldn’t use a flock of budgerigars, which are from Western Australia, but you would be more inclined to have the sound of a flock of rainbow lorikeets because [that sound is] sourced to that location (Egan 2009).

The influence of new technologies, new media and globalisation is pushing against the homogenising influence of ‘funding bodies and distributers trying to maximise the audience’(Brophy 2009); instead, as Brophy suggests, long term there needs to be a move towards ‘building audiences’ for the ‘niche cinema’ (Brophy 2009).

Conclusion

Australian transcultural cinema as part of the national cinema is created under the same industrial practices and government funding bodies, and shares many of the same key creatives, as other government-funded, low-budget films. Films produced under the umbrella of government funding usually have assistance from both state and federal government film-funding bodies. Moreover, many Australian transcultural films have had funding assistance from the ABC and/or SBSi. Therefore, the transcultural cinema has evolved from a sharing of ideas and resources and because of this it has been both influenced and influential in this exchange.

This chapter has highlighted how the advent of an Australian transcultural cinema, along with new and digital film, sound and computer technologies, influenced a rethinking of the role of sound in Australian cinema. Australian transcultural cinema also helped to shape new practices in film sound design. Using authentic sounds belonging to the landscape in the atmosphere and effect tracks that locate Australia’s diverse population sonically in the picture have been important changes in soundtrack design. The sound practitioners in this section offer significant and new knowledge about how the advent of new technologies and changing storylines forced them to redefine their working methods and reconsider the use of specific sounds in their sonic storytelling. The directors provide new insight into the use of sound in their films.

99 These observations support my argument that the soundtrack in Australian transcultural cinema is a powerful component in storytelling practices and is a key site for locating diaspora, memory and trauma in these films. Further, through the use of the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact and the sonic spectre and the manipulation of key components of the soundtrack, this cinema challenges, redefines and brings to life hidden and silenced stories belonging to Indigenous Australians. Moreover, it brings to life a silenced soundscape and the many voices that make up the different ethnic communities that form Australian society.

In chapter six I investigate how Australian transcultural cinema can be conceptualised as a genre, using the sonic semantic markers and syntax of the melodrama, road movie and Gothic genres to re-sound the films of the NewAustralian Cinema.

100 Chapter six

Conceptualising Australian transcultural cinema through genre

Introduction In this chapter I expand my argument for an Australian transcultural cinema by conceptualising it as a genre. I draw from Marks’s (2000) assertion that intercultural cinema can be considered a genre and the argument Naficy (2003) proposes for a transnational genre. I argue that predominantly three genres – the road movie, the melodrama and the Gothic – are used by Australian transcultural cinema to highlight and tell stories of colonisation, repression, migration, trauma and diaspora. Following Rick Altman’s syntactic and semantic approach to genre as outlined in Film/Genre, I also explore how Australian transcultural cinema can be seen to create its own syntax. I argue that it does this by hybridising the Gothic, melodrama and road movie genres. Further, I investigate how Australian transcultural cinema relies on the audience’s understanding of genre to manipulate sonic semantic signals and in this way provides the space for buried histories to be resurrected and for silenced voices to be heard.

Australian cinema draws heavily from Hollywood genre films, particularly the road movie, the melodrama and the Gothic, in representing an imagined ‘Australia’ on the screen. And the syntactic elements of these genres lend themselves easily to the type of stories that make up Australian transcultural cinema. For example, the road movie tends to include the encounters that happen on the road as well as the questions of life and freedom that arise as part of the road quest. The melodrama lends its key themes, home and family, as well as its intense use of emotion and crisis. And the haunting, the uncanny and secrets are some of the Gothic syntactic elements that have proved so useful for Australian transcultural cinema. However, it is the sonic semantic elements that have proven so powerful in the manipulation and re-tracking of Australian cinema. Conversations on the road challenge freedom and belonging, the sounds belonging to these spaces connect the travellers to the landscape as part of the storytelling device. In the melodrama it is the silence of those unable to speak – especially the vocalisations of those rendered mute, the verbal and non-verbal anguish belonging to crisis, and the music track – that proves so powerful.

In this chapter my primary focus is on how Australian transcultural cinema can be conceptualised as genre. While it operates according to the same funding, industrial

101 and creative practices as Australian national cinema, it diverges in the way it takes three genres – the road movie, the melodrama and the Gothic – and manoeuvres their syntactic and semantic elements to tell stories from an Indigenous or ethnic Australian point of view. Further, it is primarily through the manipulation of the soundtrack that the transcultural cinema sounds back to the national cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, and in this way gives voice to those unheard, to buried memories and to lost histories.

Genre and Australian transcultural cinema

In Genre and Hollywood, Steve Neale asserts that ‘Genre as a term has been used in different ways in different fields, and…many of its uses have been governed by the history of the term within these fields – and by the cultural factors at play within them’ (2000, p.28). In Film Art: An Introduction, David Bordwell and Kirstin Thompson explain that ‘most scholars now agree that no genre can be defined in a single hard and fast way’ (2013, p.330). Genres differ from cycles: the former are generally defined by semantics and syntax; the latter are identified by theme and, asAmanda Klein argues in American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures, ‘film cycles are also subject to defined time constraints: most film cycles are financially viable for only five to ten years’ (2011, p.4). In Cinema Genre, Raphaëlle Moine discusses how: …genres, because they have an ideological and social function, are subject to redefinition as well as semantic or syntactic shifts that respond to, and perpetuate, historical, social, cultural, and cinematic changes… This process is the key to the phenomenon of genrificaton (2008, p.205).

Marks’s and Naficy’s arguments for intercultural and transnational cinema as genres reflect much of what Moine describes, particularly as they maintain that these cinemas serve certain ‘ideological and social functions’ thus creating new definitions that address ‘historical, social, cultural and cinematic changes’ (2008, p.205). In The Skin of the Film Marks discusses the emergence of an intercultural film genre in the 1980s and 1990s, one that is ‘a body of works with shared concerns about style and content’ (2000, p.2). Naficy, in ‘Phobic Spaces’, explains how transnational cinema draws from different ethnicities and global experiences; that it is its aesthetic which is important and that ‘forcing together’ (2003, p.205) a group of films that includes documentary, avant garde, fiction and ethnography allows for new interpretations to arise. Naficy asserts that transnational cinema sits outside usual forms of categorisation such as industrial, technological, distribution and audience influences. He claims that creating a transnational film genre forces a conversation between three different approaches to Film Studies ‘that are usually kept separate for fear of contaminating one other: generic,

102 auteurist, and cultural studies’ (2003, p.205). As he suggests, ‘genres are not reflections of reality; rather, they are a means of processing and structuring reality through narrative conventions, industrial practices and authorial decisions’ (2003, p.206).

I argue that Australian transcultural cinema carries many of the same traits as those that Marks argues define intercultural cinema as a genre as well as the attributes that Naficy claims identify transnational cinema as a genre.These include: the hybridisation of style and content thus creating an aesthetic that produces new and challenging meanings; moving across various boundaries, including geographic, cultural and cinematic; and borrowing from a broad range of knowledges and experiences, including filmmaking styles, culture, music and other global cultural flows. However, unlike the cinema that Naficy describes, Australian transcultural cinema is heavily influenced by and also borrows from the Australian national cinema’s film-funding agencies, industry practices, distribution networks and marketing campaigns. Marks’s concept of intercultural cinema ‘draws from many cultural traditions, many ways of representing memory and experience, and synthesizes them with contemporary Western cinematic practices’ (2000, pp.1-2). Australian transcultural cinema also deploys these methods by taking the road movie, the melodrama and the Gothic and hybridising them to produce new meanings about settlement, history, memory and belonging. Importantly, it is through the use of the soundtrack that ‘embodied knowledge’ (2000, p.2) is resurrected and released.

It is not the first time a national cinema has created its own genre. In‘Injuns!’ Native Americans in the Movies, Edward Buscombe explains how ‘the genre of the Western began at a particular historical moment, in response to a particular set of circumstances, and this determined to a great extent its special characteristics’ (2006, p.30). And in Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology, Barry Keith Grant discusses how German cinema developed two distinctive genres in the 1920s and 1930s: ‘the mountain film’ and the ‘homeland film’ (2007, p.106). An Australian transcultural film genre developed because of a number of factors. These include the development of an Australian film industry, the ‘rise of multiculturalism as an intellectual and policy issue’ (2000, p.2) and the emergence world wide of organisations fighting for Indigenous rights. The latter two factors stimulated changes to government social policy. All three factors supported the emergence of Indigenous film bodies and filmmakers as well as the development of film agencies that support and encourage a more realistic audiovisual representation of Australia’s diverse multicultural society. Australian transcultural cinema can be seen as a genre in part because of the way it deploys the

103 syntactic and semantic elements of the melodrama, Gothic and road movie genres in order to sound back to the Australian cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. Iconic sonic semantic elements designed for Australian films of the 1970s and 1980s are moved, manipulated or silenced, and in this way they help to challenge the earlier storylines by renegotiating how Australia as a nation has been represented on the screen.

In Film/Genre, Altman discusses how prior knowledge of a genre conditions spectators to associate the genre’s semantic elements with the syntax to which they have been connected: ‘This syntactic expectation [emphasis in original], set up by a semantic signal [emphasis in original], is matched by a parallel tendency to expect specific syntactic signals to lead to predetermined semantic fields’ (1999, p.225). He also argues that ‘generic values’ will ‘dominate’ at the crossroad that forms at the point where ‘generic pleasure’ and cultures meet (1999, p.154). In Australian transcultural cinema, the ‘crossroads’ where genre and culture meet are challenging places. This is because many of these films re-track over Australian films of the 1970s and 1980s and by doing so problematise the concepts of nation that they conveyed. The transcultural cinema uses the melodrama, road movie and Gothic genres to challenge these earlier films and to explore the areas of culture and society largely ignored by the films of the 1970s and 1980s. In this re-tracking process, the transcultural films use genre to provide an agitation in the storylines where truth can be felt, uncovered and questioned and where cultural crossroads are challenged, and this is integral to understanding how these films operate. By overcoming the dominant culture’s ‘cultural crossroad’, they provide new alternatives. Marks notes the same process: There is a moment of suspension that occurs in these works after the official discourse has been (if only momentarily) dismantled and before the emerging discourse finds it voice. There is a moment of silence, an act of mourning for the terrible fact that the histories that are lost are lost for good. Yet this moment is also enormously suggestive and productive. It is where these works begin to call upon other forms of cultural knowledge: it is where the knowledges embedded in fetish-like objects, bodily memory, and the memory of the senses…are found (2000, pp.25-26).

Cultural crossroads are established by the soundtrack in Australian transcultural films to scrutinise and challenge earlier cultural and historical constructions of home and nation. I argue that it is possible to hear how sonic semantic signals are loosened, shifted and modified in a way that evokes and critically displaces the ritualistic and ideological functions of earlier Australian films such asWalkabout (Roeg 1971) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975).

104 Australian transcultural cinema and sound

What is so potent about analysing sound in conjunction with genre is that genre relies upon the auditor having prior knowledge and experience of how certain sounds are going to be played out against image. For example, a Gothic film such asPicnic at Hanging Rock relies heavily on the soundtrack to create a sense of something eerie and ominous belonging to the landscape. Some of the sonic semantic signals used in other Gothic films of this time include the howling or whispering of winds, the shrieking and flapping of birds and a manipulation of these sounds that often references the presence of a spectre.

In the same filmmaking period, it is the dialogue, silences and music referencing the melodrama that are recognisable. In Careful, He Might Hear You (Schultz 1983), two sisters, Lila (Robyn Nevin) and Vanessa (Wendy Hughes), fight for custody of their nephew, PS (Nicholas Gledhill). Lila and husband George (Peter Whitford) are working class but happy, whereas Vanessa is extremely wealthy but lonely. The class divide is heard in the difference between the working-class and upper-class vernacular. When Vanessa is given the boy, she struggles to know how to love him, so she showers him with gifts, elocution lessons and riding and dancing tuition in the hope that these things will win his heart – but to no avail. PS becomes silent, almost mute in response to his powerlessness over his life. The film is driven by heightened emotion and crisis, and the silent anguish and music carry these sensations. Family and home, silence, muteness, the Australian vernacular with its class/cultural divide, and music-driven soundtracks are all syntactic and semantic elements that help to identify melodrama. These key features are used frequently in Australian transcultural cinema.

Australian road movies of the 1970s and 1980s relied on the sound track as well as images of the road, although the road is often located on wide expanses of desolate landscape and may be little more than a sandy track. The journeys in these films often revolve around outlaws, law authorities, characters compromised by lack of money, home and identity. The vehicles, such as those in The Cars that Ate Paris (Weir 1974), usually grunt, roar and squeal in cannibalistic delight. In The Cars that Ate Paris, the cars signal the madness of a township infected by an uncanny and hostile land. In the bushranger filmMad Dog Morgan (Mora 1976), the bush track replaces the road, and the sonic semantic signals belonging to hooves, saddle movements and the exertion of horses and humans along difficult terrain displace the sounds of cars, motor bikes and tarmac that are usually associated with the road movie.

105 The sonic semantic references mentioned above relay certain meanings within an Australian film context and as such are expected and recognisable. Within the transcultural cinema these same sonic semantic signals are repositioned, re-engineered and silenced, further destabilising the already jeopardised syntax of the genres. For example, in Wake in Fright (Kotcheff 1971) John Hunt (Gary Bond), trapped in a nightmarish surreal outback landscape, gasps in panicked breathlessness. In Wind (Sen 2002), this sound is transformed into the viscosity of a different type of turmoil that erupts from Boy’s (Bradley Byquar) larynx. Boy’s emotional battle is fought over his identity as an Indigenous Australian and his position as a blacktracker in the colonial constabulary. The shrieking predatory bird cries from Long Weekend (Eggleston 1978) are both sonically and visually silenced in Lucky Miles (Rowland 2007). In Lucky Miles, the birds do not flap or shriek, instead their raucousness is pronounced as simply irritating in a long stream of complaints made by an illegal Iraqi refugee about the country to which he has escaped. For this new wave of settlers to Australian shores, it is not about claiming and controlling but about trying to understand and reconcile the differences between countries and cultures.

In the transcultural cinema the soundtrack acts as a key site for questioning the past, and the appropriation of sonic semantic signals is one way these films raise key historical, political and social issues. Sound is a powerful creative tool in making and analysing transcultural films, particularly because it is written through by the melodrama, Gothic and road movie genres in which sound and listening are especially important. Sound and silence are powerful signifying forces within these three genres and it is the soundtrack that has the ability to convey, embellish, implicate and even hide what the narrative is trying to unfold along the image track.

To understand how Australian transcultural cinema uses sonic semantic signals, I next analyse how these signals perform as, or operate alongside, sonic fetishes, sonic artefacts and sonic spectres.

The sonic artefact, sonic fetish and sonic spectre

The sonic fetish, the sonic artefact and the sonic spectre all underscore and resonate with the nation-building motifs of Australia’s national cinema, many of which are sonic semantic signals that signpost genre.

These sonic tools are interrelated. The sonic fetish refers to sounds that have become so laden with meaning they have become stereotypes. Any movement or even

106 subtle change within the key sonic elements of the fetish can create a disturbance. For example, in The Cars that Ate Paris, which uses both Gothic and road movie genres, wind and birds are used to create a sense of a sinister landscape. However, in the transcultural filmFloating Life (Law 1996), the landscape has changed dramatically: the birds and winds are crafted and positioned in such a way that they signal difference and renewal for a recently migrated Chinese family rather than menace. Archaeological heritage conservationist Denis Byrne, in Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia, sheds light on my concept of the sonic artefact when he discusses how, ‘over the last few decades Indigenous peoples and voices for the non-West in general have been insisting that the past and present are a lived continuum’ (2007, p.ix). Byrne uses the term ‘archaeological traces’ to define the tangible links that can be found between the present and ‘fairly recent past’, explaining that ‘if we acknowledge that governments and elites often work to deny visibility to some of these traces, then we might think of such “suppressed” traces as constituting a kind of underground’ (2007, p.x). In the same way, the sonic artefact often operates as an anthropological trace that provides the opportunity to exhume and examine the implications of the past in the present day. These are sounds that relate to memory, mnemonic sounds that express and carry memories of cultural and personal significance.The peeling back in an investigation of the sonic inscriptions and layers belonging to the sonic artefact creates a disruption in time and a disturbance in history and memory. In Yolngu Boy (Johnson 2001), church bells and the cries and grunts from Baru, Botji’s totem and spiritual ancestor, collide as Botji (Sean Mununggurr), out of his mind on petrol fumes, rampages through one of the local community buildings. The church bells function as sonic artefact and ring out a legacy of mission and colonial rule over Indigenous lives. Baru as ancestor is a sonic spectre. Sonic spectres can move readily across culture, time and space. In Australian films of the 1970s and 1980s, sonic spectres were uncanny and threatening in their haunting. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the sonic spectre lures the young school girls into the rock. However, in Yolngu Boy, Botji wrestles with himself when he psychically wrestles with Baru.

All three analytical tools operate within Marks’s concept of intercultural cinema, which ‘moves through space, gathering up histories and memories that are lost or covered over in the movement of displacement, and producing new knowledges out of the condition of being between cultures’ (2000, p.78). The meanings and interpretations make their way back through a mirror maze, along the way picking up new signification and knowledges for the protagonists and the cinematic worlds they inhabit. Marks discusses how cinema is able to ‘follow an object in an attempt to elicit

107 its cultural biography and to read the knowledge it embodies: to engage with the object discursively’ (2000, p.97). In the same way, sonic fetishes, sonic artefacts and sonic spectres actively resonate with past and present meanings and knowledges that can be listened to and interpreted within the context of Australia’s cinematic history.

What is it about these sonic semantic signals that make them so aurally identifiable and connected to the myths of Australian nationhood? As I have outlined, government policies have helped to support and construct cinematic images belonging to a nationalist bent. These images were accompanied by rich and varied sounds and soundscapes that enhanced and gave a complexity to the representation of Australia as an Anglo-Celtic imperial outpost.

This process is highlighted in the short film, Payback (Thornton 1996) by Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton, where both the sonic fetish and the sonic spectre are teasingly resituated, reconstructed and played with, and this creates both agitation and a dark comic relief. In the opening scene, the Gothic genre is clearly conveyed through the use of sonic semantic signals, wind as sonic fetish and the Indigenous chant as a sonic spectre. But what this film does so cleverly is to take these sonic semantic signals and reposition them into a narrative that interlaces the Gothic and the comedic, creating a black comedy. The wind as sonic fetish and the chant as sonic spectre intertwine to connect with the visible form of the spectre, an Aboriginal elder (Charlie Matjiwi) who has come to tell Paddy (George Djilaynga), a prison inmate, that tomorrow is ‘payback’. The next day, the sonic spectre resonates around Paddy as he makes his way through the prison security system to the outside world. As he steps outside, prison staff wheel a hospital trolley towards him. Photographers surround the newly released inmate, the sound of flashbulbs and reporters mix with the sound of the spectre, who weaves in and out of the media representatives, moving in a confrontational manner towards Paddy. Both sound and image are challenging and disorientating as they cleverly write back to both ethnographic documentaries and Australian national cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. In the last scene, Paddy gets speared by the spectre and is placed on the trolley and loaded into an ambulance. The spectre (now more material than spectral) happily accepts a ride in the ambulance and accompanies Paddy to the hospital. In Payback, Thornton plays with his knowledge of both genre and sonic semantic signals to bamboozle and problematise earlier representations of Indigenous Australians in films of the Australian cinema renaissance.

In Australian transcultural cinema, characters are often linked to time and place

108 by an assortment of recollections and sensory memories, sonic linkages belonging to both the inhabitants and the landscape. It is these sonic linkages – the sonic fetish, artefact and spectre – that, once activated, are able to force, summon up and haunt the national cinema. In the next section of this chapter my focus is Richard Flanagan’s film The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998). I provide a close analytical listening of some of the formal and narrative elements of this transcultural film to explain how the sonic fetish, artefact and spectre all operate in defining the thematic elements of memory, trauma, history, negotiation and reinvention within the in-between, or Third Space, which this film produces. All three sonic tools operate in this film in a manner that helps to sonically subvert earlier texts.

A close listening: The Sound of One Hand Clapping

The Sound of One Hand Clapping is a story about a young pregnant woman, Sonya Buloh (Kerry Fox), who returns to her childhood home in Tasmania to face the ghosts of her past. Through her memories, the story is recounted of the Buloh family’s arrival in Tasmania from Slovenia as post-World War II immigrants, part of the Australian ‘populate or perish’ policy of the time. In her essay, ‘Richard Flanagan’s Novel and Film The Sound of One Hand Clapping and Australia’s Multicultural Film Genre’, Adi Wimmer points out that the Poles, Serbs, Slovenes and Croats made up a large percentage of postwar immigration in Australia: Richard Flanagan’s description of their bumpy careers, their struggle against social marginalization and deprivation in work camps of Tasmania’s ambitious hydroelectric programme of the 1950s reaches backwards into the horror of World War II and makes plausible why many narratives from that time [are about] incommunicable trauma. Such narratives must necessarily go against the 20th century Australian master narrative, which sees the nation as ‘God’s own country’ and all who dwell in her as blessed and cherished. But there are at least two sides to each story, and if one side is suppressed, we get a cliché, or rather a non-narrative, as the seemingly oxymoronic title of ‘The Sound of One [emphasis in original] Hand Clapping’ suggests (2004, p.179).

The Bulohs are told that Australia is where they will receive ‘the great gift of civilisation, the English language’ (Flanagan 1998). For Bojan (Kristof Kaczmarek), Maria (Melita Jurisic) and their daughter Sonya, their marginalisation as ‘wogs’ proves to be as harsh as the bush camp in which they have found themselves. One night the trauma she has encountered during the war proves too much and Maria, apologising to her infant daughter, leaves the cabin and walks out into night. The next day some of the camp men find her body hanging from a tree. Bojan and Sonya become a tight family unit, but Bojan’s work and his drinking create a fraught and unstable childhood for Sonya. In the opening scene, Sonya visits the migrant camp of her childhood: the site

109 of her memories is bleak. Winds howl as the camera tilts down the monstrous monolith of a dam to display a plaque paying tribute to the migrant workers who ‘harnessed nature for the betterment of all men’ (Flanagan 1998). The wind as sonic fetish is a time traveller that belongs more to Sonya’s psyche than to the Tasmanian landscape. Connecting to Sonya’s past, the wind is not an unknown menace but the ghostly spectre of her ancestry and past which refuses to stay quiet in the ‘New World’. Connecting Sonya’s worlds is a child’s fine china tea set. The tea set is an artefact that is bound by all the senses, but it provides the sonic component that echoes what Marks writes about in her argument concerning sense knowledge, memory and intercultural cinema: When language cannot record memories, we often look to images. When images fail to revive memory, we may look to the well-kept secrets of objects. Unpacking the secrets encoded in images and objects, we find the memory of the senses (2000, p.195).

In The Sound of One Hand Clapping, it is through sound that memories are made tactile. As discussed in chapter two, sound can be haptic, it can be felt. The tea set is both visually and sonically haptic. As sonic artefact it has many different sound components: the soft stroking of fingers and hands on china, brittle clatter of teapot lid and rasping clinks of teapot, cup and saucer hitting against each other, dulled sound of the tea set on a wooden surface covered in an elegant white tablecloth while Sonja pretends to make Turkish coffee: ‘Turska kava for Artie, turska kava for Mama, turska kava for Sonja’ (Flanagan 1998). When young Sonja deliberately drops the teapot, there is the resonant discordant sound of china falling onto hard stone. Sometimes the tea set carries a wide range of frequencies from low-mid to high, sometimes the images are silent, but all these aural components connect Sonya to her past. All of these sounds connect Sonja as well as the audience to memory, history and loss through touch and sound. The sounds belonging to the tea set link to memories, and as such operate as excavated artefacts that are played out over and over throughout the film.

Sonya visits the site in the Tasmanian forest where her mother was found dangling from a noose tied to a tree. Excavating at the site of her mother’s suicide, she uncovers the pieces of broken teapot and their discovery sets up a train of disturbing memories. Again, it is the tactile, rasping, crisp china sounds that are heard, broken pieces of artefact – sounds that resonate throughout the film and, as the trajectory back to Sonya’s trauma, appear harsh to the ear or uncannily silent. Marks describes something similar when she writes: ‘So when some earthquake happens years later or continents away, these objects [artefacts] surface, bearing witness to forgotten histories’ (2000, p.84), ‘The burden of explanation’, she continues:

110 is why people who are moving between cultures find that their luggage gets heavier and heavier. Their familiar objects are fossilizing. What was taken for granted in one culture becomes incomprehensible in another, and it becomes the immigrant’s responsibility to build up and to excavate those layers of impossible translation (2000, p.91).

I argue that in The Sound of One Hand Clapping the haptic sounds of hands moving against china and of broken pieces of china reverberating against surfaces, are sonic artefacts; that is, they are sounds that carry memory, sounds that are buried sonic artefacts and have travelled through time. Maria tells Sonya that ‘to have a future, you must forget the past’, but Sonya is held tightly by the past through audible haptic connections. Through recollection images and sounds, which I will describe, it is left to Sonya to piece together her past and to reconcile the two worlds she inhabits.

In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze proposes the concept of the recollection image, which ‘refers us back to a former present’ (1989, p.39). While my argument focuses on recollection sounds, I draw from Deleuze’s discussion of recollection images. He examines the position between ‘stimulation and response’, describing their power and potency: ‘recollection-images already intervene in automatic recognition; they insert themselves between stimulation and response, and contribute to the better adjustment to the motor mechanism by reinforcing it with a psychological causality’ (1989, p.47). The two different memories that surface time and again throughout The Sound of One Hand Clapping act as sonic recollections. In one set of memories the tea set is whole, complete, able to make sounds that highlight Maria’s experience that ‘our world is upside down, and, to have a future, you must forget the past’. The other memory, played over repeatedly, has young Sonya breaking the teapot and in this set of memories the sounds rupture, break the surface and are harsh, sharp, violent, shocking to the ear. The potency of these sounds can be explained through Deleuze’s understanding of the recollection image (if one substitutes ‘sound’ for ‘image’), which he asserts: comes to fill the gap and really does fulfil it, in such a way that it leads us back individually to perception, instead of extending this into generic movement. It makes full use of the gap, it assumes it, because it lodges itself there, but it is of a different nature (1989, p.47).

Within this ‘gap’, this space between cultures and worlds, Sonja’s trauma, memory and loss are played out. Haptic sonic recollections propel her backwards and forwards in time. As she stands in familiar surroundings, the winds of the past combine with the sound of the acousmêtre or spectre, the voice of the unseen mother singing of her sadness and loss, caught in the space between worlds. Sonya calls up her mother’s voice time and again, sometimes as acousmêtre, floating, drifting apart, and sometimes as something more solid, but always moving away. As Maria explains to her daughter, ‘I’m sorry, Sonya, I have to go, I cannot stay’. This is not the menacing spectre of the

111 unknown, the Other, attached to colonial representations of the Australian landscape; this sonic spectre is operating under new interpretations.

During the course of the film Sonya goes through a transformative ‘rebirth’, merging the past and present into a newfound place of acceptance and peace. This process builds to a climax during the birth of her daughter. Lapsing in and out of a dream-state, Sonya’s mind creates a cinematic montage, piecing together the many road trips she took as a child, journeys that encapsulate her childhood. The melodrama, road movie and Gothic genres operate together in this sequence to provide a reconstruction of Sonya’s trajectory through life.

Within this dream-state a non-diegetic music score with heavy European folk influences and a foregrounded violin temporises the images.The iconic Gothic images of a dark and menacing Australian landscape offer an uncanny representation in itself; but when doubled with a stereotypical European folk music motif that represents the ‘migrant Other’, it creates an even more disturbing representation. The car travels along darkened tree-lined roads, moving backwards and forwards in time. The people inhabiting the car and Sonya’s nightmare belong to different time periods of her childhood and move towards and away from her throughout the sequence. The symbolism within this scene is played out within the constructs of not only the Gothic but also the road movie and melodrama genres. The road provides the perfect foil for Sonya’s life to be laid out as events that can be interpreted as witness to her psychological state of mind. In ‘Hitler Can’t Keep ’em that Long: The Road, the People’, Bennet Schaber’s description of the role of the journey in road movies not only provides an example of the potency of the road, but also suggests why the Gothic and the melodrama genres operate so well when hybridised with the road movie: On the road there are, inevitably, encounters, which have to do with precisely how men, women, things, and places will be with one another. For the road movie, even those of limited ambition, there is a relation, a belonging together of ‘what happens’ and ‘happiness’. This is what makes the stakes of the road movie so often and so explicitly ethical or political; the road enacts a symbolic circulation so that the traffic of events come to bear a meaning far in excess of itself (1997, p.22).

In her nightmare, a young Sonya sits beside her father as he drives along the darkened desolate road that connects their migrant camp to the township. Bojan turns to her and says helplessly, ‘I’m sorry, Sonya’. As she looks away, the figures of three woman (which include her mother) loom towards the car window. Looking anguished, the women reach for the girl, gesturing and crying out in muted words. The car moves on and the spectres fade away. In this scene, highlighting the melodramatic mode in which this film operates and its privileging of muteness, the only audible dialogue

112 belongs to the two men present in the car. Less sympathetically, a frightening male figure from Sonya’s past taunts her with, ‘Your mother didn’t love you’ otherwise ‘she would be here now’. To reinforce the weakness of the men around her, Bojan repeats drunkenly, over and over, ‘We have a wog flat’. In her introduction toHome Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, Christine Gledhill writes: ‘melodrama touches the socio-political only at the point where it triggers the psychic, and the absence of causal relations between them allows for short-circuiting between melodramatic desire and the socially constructed world’ (1987, p.37). Sonya’s psyche struggles to come to terms with her ‘wog’ heritage and her maternal abandonment and paternal inadequacy. The female figures floating outside the car in the dream sequences are visual but silent spectres, decidedly different from the spectres that are found operating in many earlier Australian films, which are depicted sonically as the monstrous Other. The powerlessness attached to these mute female figures as they struggle to reach through the glass barrier to Sonya highlights her own powerlessness over her life. In ‘Melodrama Revised’, Linda Williams discusses the lack of, or fight for, words, which in the melodrama is often heightened: Melodramatic denouement is typically some version of this public or private recognition of virtue prolonged in the frozen tableau whose picture speaks more powerfully than words. Each play is not only the drama of a moral dilemma but also the drama of a moral sentiment – usually of a wronged innocence – seeking to say its name but unable, in a postsacred universe, to speak directly (1998, p.52).

When the young Sonya finds her voice by crying, sobbing, sucking and gasping for air, these sounds tear the visual haptic membrane, rupturing time and force their mucilaginous way along the larynx to re-emerge in the present. Lying in bed, she wakes in horror as her childhood tries to audibly vent itself by forcing its way out using her as orifice. Fighting like an asthmatic for air, she tries to find her voice but her cries are forced upwards and are silent, mute, stifled by her fist as she pushes back against the rushing tide of emotion. It is at this point that a female voice breaks free. As Sonya goes into labour, the voice of the acousmêtre, her physically absent mother, starts singing to her. Taking her back in time to the point of initial maternal abandonment, sound and image meet as Maria sings to her daughter. Harsh winds howl around the migrant camp. The sonic fetish binds this moment within the themes of diaspora and trauma that are embedded in Sonya’s psyche. With the birth of her daughter and her own rebirth, Sonya is released from the nightmares belonging to both herself and her parents. This release is played out sonically as the sonic fetish – the sounds of the wind hanging over the Tasmanian landscape that have served to haunt the newcomers – disappears in the new life Sonya shares with her daughter.

113 As a transcultural film,The Sound of One Hand Clapping uses the melodrama, road movie and Gothic genres to explore the themes central to its own tropes – those of diaspora, trauma, memory, loss and history. Through its cathartic soundtrack, it gives voice to suppressed stories of new migrant life in Australia, utilising the sonic fetish and sonic spectre to deliver sounds belonging to an earlier period in Australian national cinema and reinvigorating them with new and more powerful meanings. Through the use of sonic artefact, suppressed memories and histories are able to be excavated and interpreted cinematically in the present.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have mapped out an argument for an Australian transcultural film genre, one that draws predominantly from the melodrama, road movie and Gothic genres to tell stories that respond to colonisation, diaspora, memory and loss. Drawing from Marks’s notion of an intercultural genre and Naficy’s argument for a transnational genre, I have outlined the similarities and differences between the cinemas they describe and an Australian transcultural cinema. This, I argue, is a cinema that hybridises various filmmaking practices, relying heavily on the senses as a means to interpret experience and knowledges that are difficult to formulate and enact by other means.

Using Altman’s argument for a semantic and syntactic approach to genre, I have explained how Australian transcultural cinema uses the sonic semantic elements belonging to the road movie, the melodrama and the Gothic to sound back to Australian films of the 1970s and 1980s. The national film industry has produced films that have relied on an audience’s understanding and acceptance of Hollywood genre films. This is particularly important because in Australian national cinema these three genres have been used extensively to tell stories that respond to a sense of ‘nation’ from a predominantly Anglo-Celtic colonial perspective. This has helped to make Australian national cinema a significant and considerable resource for the transcultural cinema, which not only relies on the same funding bodies and industrial practices but takes these stories and rewrites them from an Indigenous or ethnic Australian perspective.

By providing a close listening of a number of Australian transcultural films, I have highlighted how these films sound back to earlier films. In the transcultural cinema, characters are often linked to time and place by an assortment of recollections and sensory memories that are sonic linkages belonging to both the inhabitants and the landscape. It is these sonic linkages, carried by the sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic

114 spectre, that once activated are able to force and summon up forgotten and silenced histories, diaspora and loss and in this way, haunt Australian national cinema.

In chapter seven I trace the movement of iconic sounds from Australian colonial Gothic writing to the New Australian Cinema. I explore more closely how through the melodrama and road movie genres, and driven by the Gothic mode, Australian transcultural cinema uses these iconic sounds for a very different purpose and in this way provides the audible release of society’s ghostly remains.

115 Chapter seven

An Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains

Introduction

In this chapter I explore why the Gothic has been heavily used in Australian cinema since the 1970s and how its popularity and prolific use eventually led to a category referred to as New Australian Gothic Cinema. I examine how, in the late 1990s, the Gothic lent itself to questioning and challenging the past. I use the term ‘Gothic mode’ and explain how it is frequently used in combination with melodrama and the road movie in Australian transcultural cinema to produce what I call an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains.

To understand why the Gothic mode has played such an important role in Australian transcultural cinema, I investigate the movement of the Gothic in Australian literature and film. Starting with Australian Gothic fiction from the 18th century, I explain how the key Gothic traits – including the uncanny, the haunted house and ghostly presences – provided early colonial writers with a vocabulary that helped them describe what it was like to live in a ‘new’ and alien country. I identify how the Gothic in Australia has continued to be used in art, literature and, later, cinema up to the present day. The Gothic mode is extensively employed by transcultural cinema because its storylines often revolve around memory, trauma, home and the repressed and its traits have proved particularly useful for examining the psyche of the nation.

Genre

In Australian National Cinema, Tom O’Regan argues that ‘Australian films and film institutions negotiate cleavages of ethnicity, gender, race, class and nation’ and describes the national cinema as ‘an object of knowledge [emphasis in original] that narratively and discursively connects Australia, society, the cinema, genre and various cultural differences’ (1996, p.10). Australian transcultural cinema has developed its own system to both explore and reconceptualise some of these concepts. As explained in chapter six, the transcultural cinema is characterised by a specific syntax that includes the way it backtracks over history, draws from memory, and sounds back and challenges early representations of the nation’s cinema. I have also outlined how the transcultural cinema moves across geographical space and time in its investigation of history and cultural

116 experience. In this way it often revisits old sites to open up new dialogues surrounding how the past has been interpreted and to give voice to forgotten or buried historical truths. What is particularly pertinent is the way the transcultural cinema draws on truths enlivened by the ‘memories of the senses’ (2000, p.xi). Transcultural films such asThe Goddess of 1967 (Law 2000) and Shit Skin (Boseley 2002) invoke the senses and in this way are both audibly and visually haptic. For example, in the closing scene of Shit Skin, Grandma Nina (Freda Glynn) makes an emotionally painful journey back to Country. When she physically connects with the land, she is sonically enveloped in an afflatus, an exhalation, release and rumble generated through the sounds of wind, thunder and water that are released as sonic fetish. In this way, Nana is welcomed home by the ghostly sounds of spectre.

Australian national cinema has widely embraced the semantic and syntactic elements belonging to particular genres as a means of exploring and defining issues surrounding Australian history, settlement and culture. In ‘Tooth and Claw: Tales of Survival, and Crocodile Dundee’, Meaghan Morris explains that in the search for a story and an audience, all genres are ‘plundered’ and ‘reworked’ (1987, p.43). Australian transcultural cinema uses genre for the very reason that it can be considered ‘unoriginal’, and as Morris suggests, ‘unoriginality’ is not such a ‘bad thing’ (1987, p.42). She argues for a: fully positive [emphasis in original] unoriginality, a context in which for critics the privileged metaphors of postmodernism can come into play – image-scavenging, borrowing, stealing, plundering and (for the more sedate), recoding, rewriting, reworking (1987, p.43).

In many respects, Australian cinema is a genre cinema. As I explain in chapter six, genre films carry, draw on and reference specific semantic and syntactic elements that are easily recognised by audiences, and this is particularly useful for Australian transcultural cinema because it relies on an audience’s understanding of genre. As well, and as discussed in chapter three, budget constraints of a relatively small national cinema have had a significant impact on helping to shape and influence the types of films being produced. As O’Regan explains: With their smaller budgets, their greater reliance on dialogue – telling as much as showing – their limited capacity to stage spectacle, the one-off character of production and their difficulties in working on the technological cutting edge of special effects, national cinemas like Australia’s are more ‘sociologically’ and ‘people’ reliant. They rely more on social texts, on human proportions, on modest backdrops and upon the techniques and strategies of what the video shops call ‘drama’ (1996, p.261-62).

Many of the features that O’Regan identifies here are particularly significant in the transcultural cinema, which is partly defined by budget constraints. Every part of the

117 filmmaking process is costly and, as O’Regan states, spectacle does not come cheap, nor do special effects, and the majority of transcultural films are low budget.

Three popular genres in Australian cinema – the road movie, melodrama and the Gothic – can all be effortlessly adapted for low budgets. Their main tropes – the journey, the family and the uncanny – are easily recognised by an audience and therefore are effortlessly adapted. What these genres provide are syntactic structures from which personal and public histories can be laid out, resurrected, investigated, mourned and critiqued within the limited budget constraints of government-funded, low-budget filmmaking. These genres are enlisted by Australian transcultural cinema to tell often deeply personal and difficult stories of a fractured and hybrid nation.As I have already mentioned, the Gothic is particularly important in Australian transcultural cinema because of its allegiance with the silenced, the maligned and the ghostly. Other useful traits belonging to the Gothic include the play of movement across time and space and the capacity to bring secrets to the surface, including the ability to resurrect the dead and buried. All these Gothic characteristics provide useful tools for reflecting on the nation’s complex history.

Interpreting the national through the Gothic

To understand how and why particular sounds emerged and took on certain meaning in Australia’s national cinema, it is important to understand the role of the Gothic in Australian literature, which was particularly important because it enabled colonial writers to articulate their experience of living in a strange, new land and those in post- colonial times to reinterpret and re-examine these concerns.

The Gothic has been as useful in Australian national cinema for exploring issues surrounding colonisation, race, gender and identity. In fact, many screen plays come from adaptations of Gothic novels and short stories, including Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975), from the novel by Joan Lindsay (1967), and The Well (Lang 1997), from the novel by Elizabeth Jolley (1986). By following the development of national myths through literature, it is possible to understand why certain sounds became so potent in the New Australian Cinema and therefore have become such powerful sonic conceptual tools for the transcultural cinema.

In The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia, Ross Gibson explains how Terra Australis was dreamt up by philosophers and explorers

118 centuries before its discovery in the late eighteenth century. He traces the development of national myths through Australia’s colonial history and the writing that mapped the development of the nation over time, arguing that: ‘the way that Australians (and the rest of the world) regarded themselves would always be influenced to some extent by the way the country was first interpreted’ (1984, p.xiii). He highlights the importance of acknowledging certain periods of writing as those that inscribe Australia with its: ‘quasi-myths’, or perhaps more accurately, ‘proto-myths’. Certainly they have influenced the formation of a national sense of identity, but they have become truly mythic only at second-hand and retroactively because their stories have penetrated the ‘collective consciousness’ through imaginative interpretations by modern writers (1984, p.xiii).

Formed on a backbone of myth and experience, the sounds and images troped in Australian nineteenth century writing ranged between purgatory and paradise. The literature describes a country that was so foreign to the new inhabitants that its abundance for the most part was overlooked by the fact that nearly every facet of the country was unrecognisable; from the animals and birds that inhabited Australia to the landscape that was considered for the most part impoverished and barren. It was also a landscape determined as terra nullius and inhabited by a people who moved as easily as ghosts through the seemingly hostile country.

In Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction, Gerry Turcotte discusses how the Gothic genre became useful for nineteenth and early twentieth century writers. This, he explains, is because it is ‘linked to a fear of dismemberment, of being pulled apart between two worlds, old, and new, without hope of fullness in either world’ (2009, p.57). Much colonial Gothic literature is terrifying and, as Turcotte notes, it is terrifying because it is written mainly by colonists, the first white Australians, people living not on the outside, in England, but in Australia, in a type of exile in the middle of their own nightmare: Characters, disoriented in their new, unfamiliar landscape, are often displayed attempting to bring into alliance the separate worlds that inform their ‘vision’. Traditional concepts of seeing do not permit vision in its strictest sense, since the new land is not ordered according to learned systems of codification. Suffering from this ‘inescapable doubleness of vision’, the colonist tries to blend – to transform – the two worlds and to create a ‘third’ world, or somehow to impose order on ‘a chaotic environment’ which, strictly speaking, exists largely in the mind (2009, p.63).

The Gothic provided the means for writers to explore the process of colonisation through the various tropes and vocabulary made available through the genre. One of the key issues that these colonial writers explored was the relationship of the various settler characters to the landscape, and to Indigenous Australians. The characters that inhabited homestead, cell or garrison carried secrets, fears and paranoia that are all readily

119 examined in the literature. Turcotte explains that ‘Gothic fiction, with its structural, ideological and thematic peculiarities, is used in much nineteenth century fiction as a way of providing the unreadable landscape with a written history’ (2009, p.104). He suggests that in a sense, the Gothic was useful to colonial writers because it was a form that gave voice to what they were experiencing and feeling about life in the young country.

During the twentieth century, Gothic literature started to reflect the thoughts, feelings and politics of an emerging and developing young federated nation. The Gothic’s hybrid nature also led to the emergence of a ‘postcolonial voice’ (Turcotte 2009, p.233), one that started to speak back to earlier literature and which I identify as relating to Australian transcultural cinema.

The movement of sound from literature to film The most sonically potent of the Australian Gothic stories are those written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As I will discuss, it is possible to hear how this sonically descriptive writing was lifted from the pages of Australian colonial Gothic literature and audibly translated into the new Australian Gothic cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. In The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver discuss how the Gothic ‘especially relishes the aural effects of the bush’, an environment inhabited by something menacing that is audible in the way it ‘animates and spectralises’, and makes itself present (2007, p.4). Within this genre, road, home and landscape are often audibly blighted and strange, as is apparent in William Sylvester Walker’s short story from 1899, ‘The Evil of Yelcomorn Creek’: As the first ringing stroke of the flashing blade fell upon the nearest tree, ‘Coo-oo-ee’, very faint and far away, came to my ears, and there was a trembling cadence in the cry – a sort of quivering despair that wrung my heart, and almost made it stop beating. It seemed to float nearer and nearer till it mingled with the whispering of the leaves in the tree tops. Ah, the despair of that cry, the misery of it! It was a death cry if ever there was one yet!

‘That’s not black fellows,’ thinks I; ‘they’re demons [emphasis in original]. We’re in a land of spirits’… (Gelder & Weaver 2007, p.211).

The homestead in Hume Nisbet’s 1894 short story ‘The Haunted Station’ is just as alien: Hush! Was that a laugh that wafted from the house, a low, but bloodcurdling cachinnation such as an exultant devil might utter who had witnessed his fell mischief accomplished, followed by the wail of a woman, intermixed with the cry of a child!

Ah! What a fool I was to forget the cry of the Australian king-fisher… (Gelder & Weaver 2007, p.181).

120 In Barbara Baynton’s 1902 short story ‘A Dreamer’, wind in Sheoaks takes on a spectral quality, making ‘ghostly music’, ‘savagely snapping’, ‘lashing’, ‘growl[ing]’, yelling ‘will you?’ (Gelder & Weaver 2007, p.214) at the terrified colonial. These sonic references have been heavily influential in shaping the sound of the Australian landscape in literature and film. InSeven Versions of a Bad Land, Ross Gibson (2002) discusses how early explorers and colonial writers helped to shape the image of the land. What has received less attention, and what I examine in this chapter, is how colonial Gothic fiction helped to shape the sound of the land. With the emergence of a national cinema in the 1970s, the film industry adapted colonial stories for the screen in its bid to produce a cinema that would reflect something of Australia’s history and in this way, help to install and support a national identity. But by bringing to life Australia’s uneasy and restless past, what was sonically generated was a preponderance of unnerving silences and unearthly sounds. The sounds that emanated from barren landscapes, miles of dense bush, lonely roads, tracks and bedevilled homesteads included menacing winds, predatory birds, strange beasts, exultant devils and the spectres of haunted souls – all desolately forlorn, often frighteningly raucous or terrifyingly silent. These sounds were audibly translated into an Australian cinema that utilised the Gothic, as well as road movie and melodramatic conventions, to tell historical as well as more contemporary stories belonging to a settler nation.

The New Australian Cinema drew on both the key sounds found in Australian Gothic fiction and the centrality of the sonic in this literary genre to tell similar stories of an uncanny Australia. In Australian transcultural cinema these sounds are also drawn from, but here are silenced, manipulated and repositioned to take on new meaning and tell very different stories of colonisation and multiculturalism. To demonstrate how this Gothic mode and its sonic haunting has been differently deployed in the New and the transcultural cinema, I will explore how key sounds from colonial Gothic fiction were used in the New Australian Cinema and how these same sounds were redeployed in Australian transcultural cinema. I will do this through close listenings of the tale, The Bush Undertaker (Lawson, 1892), and the films,Walkabout (Roeg 1971) and Lucky Miles (Rowland 2007b).

A close listening: The Bush Undertaker, Walkabout and Lucky Miles

In Henry Lawson’s short story The Bush Undertaker, after digging up and bagging the remains of ‘an old black fellow’, a shepherd is ‘hunted and haunted’ by numerous visits from greasy black goannas with ‘…long snaky neck[s]’ looking ‘fightable’ that

121 ‘clamber’, ‘slither’, ‘glide’, ‘rustle’, ‘convulse’ (Gelder & Weaver 2007, pp. 140–43). The shepherd exclaims: ‘The thunderin’ jumpt-up thing! It’s that same danged first gohanna a-follered of me home, ’n’ has been having his dinner of Brummy, and a-hauntin’ of me into the bargain’ (2007, p.145). Lawson’s character is clearly spooked, his digging around in Country raises more than just the dead. The settler’s nerves are pitted against the uncanny presences inhabiting the landscape. The journey home for the shepherd provides no safe path but is criss-crossed with a ‘flock’ of ‘uncanny goannas’, slithering scaly demons (2007, p.143). The shepherd’s hut provides no solace. There was a ‘peculiar rustling sound on the roof” and the dog ‘crept close to his master and whimpered, and the old shepherd, used, as one living alone in the bush must necessarily be, to all that is weird and dismal, felt for once, at least, the icy breath of fear at his heart’ (2007, p.144). All night the shepherd is disturbed by strange sounds, but he finds nothing until morning when he spies what has been ‘a-hauntin’ him (2007, p.145).

Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 filmWalkabout can be categorised as belonging to the New Australian Gothic Cinema. Though it is set eighty years after Lawson’s Bush Undertaker, some of the themes are similar. The screenplay was adapted from Donald G. Payne’s 1957 novel The Children, which was republished in 1961 as Walkabout. Payne wrote the book under the pseudonym James Vance Marshall, the name of a friend of Henry Lawson who kept a journal of his life as a sandalwood-cutter in the Northern Territory. According to The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1995) Payne had permission to use Marshall’s notes to write his novel (Nowra 2003, p.6-7).

The Bush Undertaker and Walkabout share similar tropes and features. These include the portrayal of Indigenous Australians as the primitive Other and the landscape as fearsome and uncanny. In Walkabout, the two children accompany their father into the desert for what seems to be a picnic outing. But what starts as a pleasant day out turns dramatically into the horror of family murder and suicide. The father, on failing to kill his children, turns the gun on himself. The children, now abandoned and alone, start to walk across the desert in search of civilisation. Their plight takes place in desert terrain that is juxtaposed as both harsh and abundant. Wildlife includes lizards that hiss with darting tongues and scuttle and slither noisily away when startled. The children, close to perishing and sheltering under a solitary tree at a dried-up waterhole, drift into sleep. High-pitched ringing begins on the soundtrack and is joined by layers of crowd conversation interwoven with radio static. The air suddenly starts vibrating with the pulsating sounds of insect and wildlife. The flap and sway of a predatory bird is joined by the screaming death throes of a small reptile being swallowed whole by

122 a goanna. Civilisation and the desert become sonically entwined in a sickening post- colonial schizophrenic address. The children, however, wake to nothing more than the eerie wind that has been accompanying them on their journey. They soon become aware of a moving speck of life on the horizon that becomes distinguishable as a young man, played by now well-known Indigenous actor David Gulpilil in his first film role. Walking towards the children, he leaps, bounds and runs after a large goanna that is fleet but audibly cumbersome of foot – spearing it after a few attempts. Hanging from his waist is a decorative and culinary belt of dead lizards. Bloody and buzzing furiously with insect life, these lizards are as uncanny in death as in life, representing all that is foreign and threatening in the Australian landscape. In both The Bush Undertaker and Walkabout, the lizards represent creatures that are monstrous in their difference. In both short story and film, their connection to Indigenous Australians takes on a mystical haunting quality. The sounds attached to these ‘familiars’ are sonic fetishes, highlighting how the Australian wildlife has been heavily relied upon to represent the Other, all that is threatening, mystical and ungodly in the landscape. The sonic portrayal of the lizards in Walkabout highlights how easily many of the ideas that were formed in Australian colonial writing were able to be transplanted into Australian cinema via the soundtrack.

Director Michael Rowland describes his filmLucky Miles as being: based on a handful of true stories where people paid to come to Australia, got dropped off by [Indonesian] fishermen on the remote coast of Western Australia and were told that over the sand dunes there would be a bus and road. …there was no bus, there was no road and they would walk inland and of course there was nothing. … (Rowland 2007a).

Set in 1990, Lucky Miles tells the story of Iraqi and Cambodian refugees who are dropped off on the remote coast of Western Australia by an Indonesian fishing vessel. When the boat catches fire, the Indonesian men find themselves in the same predicament as the refugees – lost in the Pilbara desert. Cinematographer Geoff Burton explains that Lucky Miles is ‘about landscape’, which he describes as ‘not just a space for actors to perform, the landscape is a character, a player in the story’ (Rowland 2007a). The Bush Undertaker and Walkabout also feature the landscape as a ‘character’, however, whereas the landscape is uncanny and menacing, in Lucky Miles it features as an unknown quantity. What is relevant for my research is the way the soundtrack is used to make this distinction.

The soundtrack in Lucky Miles sounds back to many of the films from the New Australian cinema as well as to Australian colonial Gothic literature. It does this by redeploying sonic fetishes in a very different way to how they were used in the New

123 Australian Cinema thus giving them new meaning. For example, in Lucky Miles, Youssif Al-Samer (Rodney Afif), one of the Iraqi refugees, complains that ‘the birds are not musical’. Later, a loud buzzing has him protesting loudly ‘Ow! That is the second fly to bite me, is this happening to you?’ To which Arun (Kenneth Moraleda) retorts ‘No, she must like you!’ In Lucky Miles, bird and insect life are not heightened; they don’t represent the sublime or ghostly murderous presences, rather, for this group of 21st century refugees, they are merely irritating.

In another scene from Lucky Miles, Ramelan (Sri Sacpraseuth), the troublesome nephew of the boat owner, is a solitary figure in the desert landscape. Lost and marching across the sand dunes in the hope of reaching Broome, he sets up a series of audible defences against his involvement in the abandonment of refugees on the isolated coast line and in the destruction of the fishing boat. Aside from Ramelan’s arguments, there is little sound – no eerie winds, rustling wildlife or shrieking birds. Instead, what is eventually heard is the audible pound and thump of running feet. A large goanna enters frame and launches itself with a loud ‘thwack’ onto Arun’s back, who, in wide shot, runs screaming across the sand dunes, right, out of frame – lizard firmly attached. Lucky Miles has fun with earlier concepts of the Australian desert as an alien, uncanny environment and one of the ways it does this is through the manipulation of sonic fetishes. In Lucky Miles the sounds of wildlife as sonic fetish do not represent the uncanny or the Other, instead they provide comic relief to the plight of the lost refugees and boat crew. In this film, the goanna does not slither, slide or rustle, instead it comically manoeuvres itself through the desert with all the explosive detonation of a tank.

As I have argued, in the late 1980s and 1990s stories told from migrant and Indigenous perspectives started to appear on Australian screens. By this time Australia’s sound practitioners had collected, assembled and created sounds that had become sonic tropes with easily identified meanings. Filmmakers heavily capitalised on the iconic sounds of Australian cinema by using them in Australian transcultural cinema in a way that wrote back and gave new meaning to Australian cinema of the 1970s and early to mid 1980s. In this transcultural cinema, these same sounds are reworked, repositioned or silenced and, in this way, speak back not only to early constructs of nation and the national cinema but also to Australian colonial writing.

124 Gothic genre: Gothic mode

The Gothic has proven to be a particularly adaptable mode for Australian cinema to use in its investigation of past and more current political and social issues. Dermody and Jacka created the term ‘new Australian Gothic cinema’ and refer to it as a film cycle that emerged in 1970 with Jack and Jill: A Postscript (Adams & Robinson 1970) and ended with Those Dear Departed (Robinson 1987) (1988a, p.50). They define this cinema as black, with perverse and slightly off-kilter and at times malevolent characters who populate surreal urban locales and remote landscapes. Included in their examples are Wake in Fright (Kotcheff 1971), Mad Max (Miller 1979) and Malcolm (Tass 1986). Dermody and Jacka’s concept has been developed by Jonathan Rayner in ‘Terror Australis: Areas of Horror in the Australian Cinema’ (2005) and by David Thomas and Garry Gillard in ‘Threads of Resemblance in New Australian Gothic Cinema’ (2003). They describe how the new Gothic cinema readily explores the undercurrents of colonisation, eliciting the help of various genres including melodrama, the road movie and science fiction in the telling of uneasy Australian stories. Rayner argues that this provides an enormous potential for constructing and deconstructing Australian national history: Australian Gothic envelops and recruits a panoply of generic forms in its elucidation of a culturally specific horror. The recurrence of familial conflict vindicates Sobchack’s [cinema and media theorist and cultural critic] amalgamation of horror and melodrama, while the loathing and menace of the landscape as a judgment on Australian society connects the gothic [sic] with the ‘natural attack’ form of the disaster movie. In its hybridized and self-conscious (in both filmic and cultural terms) approach, the Australian Gothic encapsulates a specific deployment of horror, in application and interpretation, attuned to post-colonial experience (2005, p.112).

In Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction, Rayner characterises the use of the Gothic as a mode, a particular ‘stance and an atmosphere’ (2000, p.25). However, discussing melodrama, Linda Williams argues in ‘Melodrama Revisited’ that a mode is not a genre but an operational system that relies on certain forms of expression to deliver its truths (1998, p.42). In their discussion of literature in Teaching the Gothic, Anna Powell and Andrew Smith explain how the ‘Gothic is a vibrant, flexible mode, mutating to fit changing cultural and ideological dynamics’ (2006, p.2). Taking these ideas into consideration, I argue that in Australian transcultural cinema the Gothic mode provides the necessary means for filmmakers to backtrack over the stories of a haunted uncanny nation, those recorded since first colonial settlement.

In Australian transcultural cinema, ideas of history, memory, home and belonging are tested through the Gothic mode. Where it differs from the New Gothic Cinema is in its interpretation of the Other, the uncanny, ownership and belonging.

125 Its biggest divergence from the New Australian Gothic Cinema is through its form of expression, one characterised by ghostly resonances that often seek healing and revelation through the audible release of unvoiced memories and past histories. Further, I argue that many transcultural films draw on the melodrama and road movie genres and are characterised and written through by the Gothic mode. I explain below how the key traits of the melodrama and the road movie genres lend themselves to the Gothic mode, and I argue that these films can be classified as an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains.

The road movie genre

The road movie genre has been readily adopted in Australian cinema, not least because it supports a myriad of stories concerning freedom, or the lack thereof. Unlike the American road movie with its connection to popular American culture, ‘freedom of the road’ and the modernity of mechanical movement, the Australian road film is less concerned with dreams and liberation and more focused on defining space, and this is particularly important in the nation’s transcultural cinema. In ‘Bitumen Films in Postcolonial Australia’, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey argues that in Australian film ‘the road is a liminal space, both a “sign” of, or material semiotic form of, settler occupation, but it is also a site for its critique’ (2007, p.97). Many Australian road films use what Probyn- Rapsey considers to be: …the association between the road and identity, with the road film providing the space in which Aboriginal identity is asserted under conditions of restraint, while white identities are present as threatening and threatened. The films demonstrate the strategic appropriation of colonial and postcolonial apparatus… (2007, p.100).

The fascination with the road and track in the national cinema has left an impressive legacy of films that includeThe Cars that Ate Paris (Weir 1974), the Mad Max trilogy (Miller 1979, 1981, Miller, Ogilvie 1985), Beneath Clouds (Sen 2002) and The Tracker (Heer 2002). Australian road movies grapple with such themes as colonisation, migration and ownership, frontiers and boundaries, isolation and annihilation, diaspora and loss. The road problematises the landscape with narratives of unresolved pasts and troubled presents. It is less about moving along the road and more about the dilemmas that arise when stepping out on such contentious sites. Set on roads and tracks, the stories mirror back uncanny connections to the nation’s strongest hopes and fears. Supported by film-funding bodies, producers, directors and the public, these films provide a mimetic response to some of the dilemmas that face a post-colonial multicultural nation.

126 Australian transcultural cinema uses the space and temporal dynamics of the road film to punctuate and flesh out an environment for backtracking over past events. In Seven Versions of a Bad Land, Ross Gibson suggests that digging into the landscape along a stretch of road will only ‘uncover many more murder-scenes from the bloody past of Australia’s colonial frontier’ (2002, p.50). In this manner, Australian cinematic highways and byways operate as a fulcrum on which the Gothic mode is able to lever itself.

The melodrama

In ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, Christine Gledhill proposes that the term melodrama ‘refers not only to a type of aesthetic practice but also to a way of viewing the world’ (1987, p.1). If the road provides the necessary means to view the world, then melodrama provides a certain ‘aesthetic practice’ whereupon human experience and emotion can be played out. This is one of the reasons why melodrama is so successful in conveying stories that highlight and implicate Australian society and history. In her work on melodrama and the melodramatic mode, Williams argues that a ‘dual recognition’ is at play in the melodrama, which tries to fulfil its purpose through a tireless examination ‘of how things are and how they should be’ (1998, p.48). Issues examined include: the arduous journey towards something that might have been, and melodrama’s fascination with the home and its inhabitants. As Gledhill claims, melodrama ‘[works] less towards the release of individual repression than towards the public enactment of socially unacknowledged states’ (1987, p.31). In this respect, it is not surprising that melodrama as genre and as mode has played and continue to plays a key role in Australian transcultural cinema. In this cinema, experiences and memories commonly belonging to powerless and silenced characters, both past and present, are given voice. Further, it is the muted pathos belonging to melodrama and the melodrama mode that plays out in the transcultural cinema through the Gothic mode.

The Gothic, melodrama and road movie: the Gothic mode

In Australian transcultural cinema, the Gothic has lent itself very successfully to the telling of stories that restructure and subvert ideas of nation. This is because the Gothic’s syntax and its semantic elements can be used to highlight, question and destabilise historical and contemporary representations of both society and culture. The post-colonial Gothic intensifies this ability because, as GinaWisker argues in ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, the very nature of the post-colonial Gothic is to ‘query, undercut, question, and problematize the imposed, internalized values and interpretations of

127 history and of the colonizer’s world view’ (2006, p.168). In the same way, Australian transcultural cinema, through the Gothic mode, uses the sound track to problematise and challenge cinematic representations of concepts of nation and its history from the cinematic renaissance period and earlier.

The road movie, the melodrama and the Gothic all offer a particularly rich resource for Australian transcultural cinema in that each enables an investigation or problematisation of particular aspects of colonisation, diaspora, loss, trauma and memory. All three genres have the ability to grind down their protagonists in a tireless struggle – and to release them from that struggle – in an endless journey of identification and acknowledgement. These particular traits make these genres likely choices for negotiating national debates concerning home and nation. Moreover, working as an operational system, the Gothic operating as a mode foregrounds the melodrama and permeates the road movie genre. This creates a release for a haunted history housed or buried alongside roads or dirt tracks, or liberated via the catharsis of the journey itself. Both the road and the melodrama provide the means through which the Gothic mode can disrupt history and provide a voice for the spectres of the past as well as a re- examination of both past and present. The ghostly resonances belonging to the Gothic mode render the hidden audible and therefore visible. In an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains, the mute, the inflicted, those buried by history, haunted by the past and who carry the pain and burden of wrongdoing are all given voice at some time, in one way or another.

Ghostly remains

In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida suggests that certain questions need to be asked of the spectre, ‘Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost. What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or the presence of a specter…?’ [emphasis in original] (2006, p.10). In responding to these questions, Derrida finally declares: ‘Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology’ [emphasis in original] (2006, p.10). Gerry Turcotte, in ‘Ghosts of the Great South Land’, argues that there is something haunting that ‘underwrites Australian Nationalism’ and that Australia’s ‘historical and ontological ghosts’ need to be investigated ‘as part of a larger project of accountability, reconciliation, and resolution with the subaltern that haunts the nation’ (2007, p.109). Along with the ghosts of Australia past, with each new group of arrivals on the nation’s shores comes a fresh wealth of hauntings to decipher.

128 In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination,21 Avery Gordon argues that ‘to write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories. To write ghost stories implies that ghosts are real, that is to say, that they produce material effects’ (1997, p.17). My focus is how haunting operates sonically in Australian transcultural cinema – what could be considered a hauntology. I argue that it is through the Gothic mode, and via the soundtrack, that spectral presences and hauntings are sonically released. What emerges are the audible hauntings of Australia’s repressed and difficult history, the ghostly resonances of ‘historical and social effects’ (1997, p.190). I further argue that in the transcultural cinema of ghostly remains, these spectral presences make themselves heard through the application of the sonic artefact, sonic fetish and sonic spectre.

Haunting

Ghostly remains have a habit of manifesting on the sound/image track where ruptures, gaps and fissures are created. These interstices provide not just a space; less a silence or absence and more a site for some form of listening or dialogue to take place. In ‘The World and the Home’, Homi Bhabha speaks of ‘the uncanny voice of memory’, that which springs from neither fact or fiction but as an ‘enunciation’ (1997, p.450). In the Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains, at the site of rupture, within this Third Space, home and world collide, and as Bhabha suggests: in a feverish stillness, the intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorientating (1997, p.445).

Australian transcultural films often weave together stories of fact and fiction, carrying what could be considered ‘archaeological traces’22, reminders of the past that reside in the present. In The Skin of the Film, Marks discusses how intercultural cinema is not focused so much on ‘finding the truth of a historical event as much as making history reveal what it was not able to say’ (2000, p.29). I argue that Australian transcultural cinema’s way of moving away from the visual image in order to be able to fully explore ‘cultural memory’ (2000, p.xiii) allows for new forms of expression or language to emerge. It provides signposts and, as Marks argues, a film can re-create not the true historical event but at least another version of it by searching the discursive layers

21 Hereafter referred to as Ghostly Matters 22 David Byrne, in his book Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia, suggests that ‘archeological traces’ remain as ‘underground’ reminders, capturing moments belonging to the past in the present (2007, p.x)

129 surrounding it. In ‘A Deleuzian Politics of Hybrid Cinema’, Marks observes that intercultural films ‘confound official history, private recollection and simple fiction, and point to the lacunae that remain, refusing to be filled by the truth of any of these’ (1994, p.245). She points to the fact that many of these films play with image and sound in a way that challenges the order of space and time; as she argues, these films ‘express the disjunction between official and private memory’ (1994, p.245).

A large number of Australian transcultural films, includingThe Goddess of 1967 (Law 2000) The Tracker (Heer 2002) and Samson and Delilah (Thornton 2009 b), operate from a place where the global, the public and the personal as well as the past and the present all collide. This place and moment in time can be called ‘unhomely’, ‘the shock of recognition of the world-in-the home, the home-in the world’ (1997, 445). In the Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains, breaks in the audiovisual tracks create shocks and release a particular haunting, one that is ‘unhomely’ and resonates with the sonic articulations of the past – the ghostly remains.

A sonic haunting

The cinematic soundscape has the potential to powerfully connect with the audience in both physical and emotional ways. Amplified, the soundwaves emerge from the speakers as a sonic propulsion of liquid frequencies, a fluid trajectory that moves through space and becomes absorbed by human membrane and the auditory and neurological systems. These felt sonic vibrations are interpreted on a number of sensory levels where codes are deciphered, memory is activated and interpretation becomes a complex relationship between what a film activates and each audience member’s cultural background and personal experience. When sound is loosened from images, an audience consciously and unconsciously starts processing these merging and manipulative sensory semantic messages. What is formulated from this activity – through the physical splicing of time, space and location – are sonic portals, pathways between past and present, reality and fiction. In Australian transcultural films, the soundtrack makes it possible for the manipulation and movement of both time and space to take place. And it is through the application of the sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic spectre that history and memory are excavated and evoked in the present.

In chapter one I described how Michael Chion uses the term acousmatic to define sounds that are not tied to a tangible source, and acousmêtre to describe a voice that is not connected to a body. As I have explained, ‘ghostly remains’ appear

130 at interstices, or sites of rupture between the sound and image tracks of a film. Unearthed or unleashed at these sites, ghostly remains are audible through the use and manipulation of the sonic artefact, sonic fetish and sonic spectre, which are often unleashed in the form of the acousmatic and the acousmêtre. The sonic fetish is often acousmatic; for example, wind and bird sounds are repeatedly used in films from the New Australian Cinema to signify an uncanny presence and, as I have discussed (see chapter one) this feature operates in Radiance (Perkins 1998) through the maternal wind that embraces one of the characters during an emotional outburst.

Close listening: Nice Coloured Girls

In the next section of this chapter I provide a close listening of Tracey Moffat’s Nice Coloured Girls (1987). This is a good example of an Australian transcultural film that manipulates space and time, creating a discourse between past and present. In this film, the observations of Watkin Tench, David Collins and Lieutenant William Bradley, colonial figures from Australia’s past, are brought to life by the voices of acousmêtres.

Nice Coloured Girls brings 18th and 19th century Sydney into a close dialogue with 20th century Sydney. In ‘An Analysis of Nice Coloured Girls’, Lisa French writes that the film ‘confronts orthodox histories of colonial race and gender relations’ (April 2000, p.2). This is a powerful film that unhinges and destabilises history and memory through the manipulation of both the sound and image tracks. However, the film relies heavily on the soundtrack and it does this through the use of both acousmatic and acousmêtre sounds, released as sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic spectre.

Nice Coloured Girls is set in Kings Cross, Sydney, and captures the night-life of the late 1980s. The story follows three young Indigenous women, ‘girls’ who, out for a night on the town, entice a ‘captain’ to pay for their evening’s entertainment. The women communicate with the audience through subtitles, one of which explains that the term captain has been passed down from their grandmother’s time and equates to sugar daddy or provider. Catching the eye of an already drunk captain, the three women spend the night in his company, entertaining him while he picks up the tab. The film ends with the women running down the street and jumping into a taxi; the subtitles explain that: ‘When we want to leave we roll him and leave him for dead’. ‘It has usually been a good night’ (Moffatt 1987).

In Nice Coloured Girls, the sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic spectre are actively deployed to summon the past through the spectral acousmatic and acousmêtre

131 devices. The film juxtaposes a contemporary scene in Kings Cross with a soundtrack that throws up the acousmatic sounds of early colonial settlement belonging to boat, sea, wind, bird, and horse and carriage – all operating as sonic artefacts. The voices of Eora women and their white colonial companions float up as acousmêtre belonging to early colonial times in Australia.

The film opens with a high-angle shot of Kings Cross at night-time.The sound of traffic floats up, and as the camera zooms in closer to the city, the cry of gulls, the strenuous breathing of a man, and the rowing movement of a small craft through calm harbour waters can be heard. William Bradley has arrived back in Sydney as a sonic spectre. A subtitle appears against the sound of Bradley’s exertive efforts: ‘One of them came into the water to the side of the boat, we ornamented this naked beauty with strings of beads and buttons round her neck, arm and waist.’ William Bradley. A Voyage to New South Wales, 29 January, 1788 (Moffatt 1987).

As the camera zooms closer into Kings Cross, the sound of traffic and street life fade up as Bradley’s excursions are faded out. Cutting to the busy street life, the sound of heels introduces the film’s three main protagonists, their point of view of ‘the Cross’ intercut with shots of their heeled legs striding out and their smiling, laughing faces. The girls’ laughter and chatting, their heels, the street conversations interspersed with horn and traffic noise all fade under the sounds of twittering bird and bush sounds, and female voices – the sounds of sonic fetishes, sonic artefacts and sonic spectres. These sounds are joined by the voice of an acousmêtre and sonic spectre: If ever they deign to come near you to take a present, they appear as coy, shy and timorous as a maid on her wedding night. But when they are, as they think, out of your reach, they hallo and chatter to you, frisk and flirt and play a hundred wonton pranks, equally significant as the solicitations of a Covent Garden strumpet (Moffatt 1987, original source unknown).

The three protagonists explain that their grandmothers and mothers do not want them to have the life they had, but that a night out is costly and the women find that providing an evening’s company to a drunken captain is payment enough for their evening expenses. The girls find a table in a busy public bar, and soon a captain drunkenly weaves his way to the table and offers them drinks. When the women enter the bar, the acousmatic sounds of twittering birds and the voices of Eora women as acousmêtre and sonic spectre start up and become part of an enlivened sonic environment. The bar reverberates with sounds and images of both past and present day. The past is inserted into the bar scene as images: ocean waves, an Eora woman as spectre, and paintings from colonial Sydney that create the backdrop to visual storytelling and the observations of the colonial acousmêtres. The sounds accompanying these images are the sounds of

132 ocean, seagulls, colonial male voices, horse and carriages, and of Eora women talking and laughing. As the sonic artefacts, sonic spectres and the sounds from the bar move between the past and present, the colonial male acousmêtres, reading from their journal entries, recount the relations between colonial men and Indigenous women. Arms reach across the 17th century picture and a purse as a form of payment is finally wrenched, with laughter, from a man’s grip. A rock is used to smash the glass on one of the paintings, and the sound of breaking glass creates a shock that continues through the accounts of a colonial acousmêtre, recalling how a mother held her baby over the smoke of a fire so that the soot would colour the child to the same hue as her other children.

I have previously argued that many acousmêtres give voice to those who have been rendered speechless. In Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique,23 Bliss Cua Lim suggests that ‘in the spectral logic of ghost films, the temporality of haunting is that of a betrayed past that returns to call the living to ethical responsibility’ (2009, p.88). In Nice Coloured Girls the spectres that are pried from history generate a dialogue about Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations. Bradley, Collins and Tench are brought to life as acousmêtre, and their 18th and 19th century Western anthropological accounts come to life in the present day; in this way, out of time, they form a sonic backdrop for a contemporary story about Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in present-day Sydney. Moffatt brings to the surface issues surrounding gender, the recording and validation of history and the post-traumatic fallout belonging to a post-colonial Australia. This is created through the disturbances on the sound/image track. In an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains, shocks instigated by the soundtrack are produced at these sites of agitation where past and present butt up against one another. Sound or ‘shock’ waves break through what Collins and Davis call a type of ‘historical amnesia’ (2004, p.78), giving voice to a myriad of stories, those belonging to Indigenous Australians as well as the wide variety of migrants who have settled in Australia over the last two hundred years or so.

Listening to shock

In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues that if cinema can be examined, critiqued and used to extend philosophical discussion then it must be because of the ‘theory of descriptions which it implies’ (1989, p.45). In highlighting the role of description, he uses Henri Bergson’s concept of two different forms of recognition to argue for the potency of

23 Hereafter referred to as Translating Time

133 recollection-images. Delueze explains that Bergson’s idea of ‘automatic’ or ‘habitual recognition’, along with his notion of ‘attentive recognition’, provide an understanding of how film throws up a series of signs that can be read in two ways: first, through an automatic recognition of what is on the screen; and second, through ‘attentive recognition’, which moves away from movement and ‘enters into relation with a “recollection-image” that it calls up’ (1989, pp.45-46). Exploring recollection in relation to transcultural cinema, Marks draws from both Walter Benjamin and Deleuze. She argues that in cinema, the audience draws from their own individual experience and recollections, as well as those from the culture to which they belong and the place and society in which they reside. Further, Marks suggests that ‘collective memory comes as a shock: mémoire involontaire is not simply the individual unconscious bucking up, but the traces of collective life that inform the structure of perception’ (1994, p.257). Establishing an argument that outlines how audiovisuals are interpreted by an audience is important to understanding why disturbances and breaks in the sound and image tracks are able to provoke and shock. Again, Marks draws on Deleuze in arguing that when there is a ‘suspension of motor extension’, a shock occurs, and ‘it takes a shock to unroot a memory, to create a flow of experience’: The ‘shattering of the sensory-motor schema’ that characterizes time-image cinema describes a suspension of the usual relations among the senses and their automatic extension into movement. This shattering thus intervenes into the commonsense patterns of sense experience, leaving some space in which perception can be experienced anew… Put differently, the suspension unsettles hegemonic forms of perception, creating space for culturally variant forms of perception (1994, p.258).

In Australian Cinema After Mabo, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis suggest that if we consider history in relation to modernity, what arises are ‘questions of memory and the peculiarly modern sensory experience of montage and shock’. Referring to Benjamin’s ‘concept of cinema as an optical unconscious’, they argue that cinema’s capacity to produce the past ‘not as it really was’ in the present challenges the very concept of a ‘national past imagined by a flagship national cinema’ (2004, p.78). In the process of creating a national cinema, the constructed and then projected cinematic sounds and images were often sold as being realistic of the Australian landscape and way of life. The questions that arise from these sonic and visual projections, alongside the act of recognition and the memories that emerge, are not so much a reminder of the past but a point in time where new negotiations about past and present can take place. In an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains, when individual memory is combined with that belonging to the collective past, when audiovisual disturbances are created, a shock or series of shocks occur. And when sync purposely starts to slip, what emerges are new forms of meaning. When the semantics and syntax belonging to certain

134 genres migrate to new positions, signification becomes challenged and questionable. And when the spatial and temporal dynamics of a film start moving backwards and forwards in time, it might be wise to listen.

Clara Law’s filmThe Goddess of 1967 is a good example of an Australian transcultural film that deconstructs and challenges the representations ofAustralia that were central to Australian national cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. It undertakes this challenge through its use of sound. In this film, a young Japanese man (JM) buys a prized 1967 Citroen Goddess over the internet and travels to Australia to collect the car. When he arrives at the address he’s been given, he finds a blind girl (BG) and the recently murdered car owner. JM (Rikiya Kurokawa) leaves with BG (Rose Byrne), and the pair embark in the Goddess on a road trip.

Attired in sun hat and mosquito netting, reminiscent of a colonial pith helmet, it is only appropriate that JM, intrepid explorer, should swerve the 1967 Citroen Goddess to a screeching halt in front of a sun-basking goanna. Overcome with excitement, he leaps out of the car and declares: ‘Beautiful lizard, I want it’! The interior of the Goddess is enveloped in noise; sonic flotsam and jetsam of two hundred years or so of generated national identity. Outside the car, the landscape is no less sonically challenging. The Goddess has stopped in the middle of pastoral country; there is nothing in sight except the car, its occupants and the goanna. The landscape is quiet except for a loud moo that resonates across a close-up shot of the lizard. A Japanese man in French/ English colonial headdress hunting Australian wildlife on a length of highway set within a pastoral setting is disorientating. Habitual recognition suggests that there is a cow close by, situated in this rural setting. But there is no cow in this picture. Attentive recognition/sonic recollection tells an audience familiar with Australian cinema that Australian wildlife shrieks, hisses, slithers, rustles, slides, jumps and thumps its way through the terrain. The goanna sits silently, it is not enticed by the bribe of a lettuce leaf – a loaded offering if history is to be recalled. Instead, as JM tries to take ownership of the creature, it grabs hold of his finger, and BG makes the point: ‘The lizard will not let go until it has forgiven you’. In ‘Materialism and Spiritualism in The Goddess of 1967’, Fiona Villella claims that the Goddess: is like a vessel, a veritable time-travelling machine that links one generation to the next. The various scenes in which the characters are driving in the car and the accompanying strange surreal feel as though the car were floating, wonderfully illustrates this idea of the Citroen as a personalised vessel travelling in an alternate time-space continuum (2001).

JM and BG’s ‘time-travelling machine’ provides the impetus for a disconnection of

135 the sensory motor schema. The gap that is created makes way for a series of sonic recollections and repetitions to emerge. What is released through the soundtrack is a series of dialogues around time, history and representation. The Goddess stops along the roadside to investigate audible hauntings, and for this reason it can be considered part of a transcultural cinema of ghostly remains.

Conclusion In this chapter I have put forward an argument for an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains. In support, I have explained how in this cinema the Gothic operates as a mode that draws from both the melodrama and road movie genres. I have examined how the syntactic and sonic semantic elements belonging to the Gothic, the melodrama and the road movie were first used in Australian literature prior to being used and becoming popular in Australian cinema. The loaded sonic descriptions from 18th and early 19th century literature supported storylines that outlined a country experienced as strange, desolate, uncanny and at times hostile. In the New Australian Cinema, with its federal government mandate to create films that represented the Australian nation, these sounds proved important to describe a landscape often portrayed in a similar manner to the earlier texts. Particular sounds belonging to the natural environment, such as birds, wind and animal life, travelled in a trajectory from colonial Gothic literature to the New Australian Cinema. These same sounds have been used and manipulated to take on new meaning in Australian transcultural cinema.

In arguing for an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains, I have shown that through the use of the sonic spectre, the sonic artefact and the sonic fetish there is a release of a particular type of haunting that questions and gives voice to unspoken histories and those silenced and lost in official history taking. I have described how, through a series of shocks or disturbances on the soundtrack, memory traces or hauntings are released, often by way of acousmatic and acousmêtre sounds. In the transcultural cinema of ghostly remains, sociological hauntings are generated by the sensory-loaded soundtrack, which audibly sounds out, questions and challenges Australia’s burdened history. This cinema provides a hauntology where Australia’s past is revisited, reassessed and brought into the present to be readdressed. And it is through the soundtrack that these hauntings, the whisperings and murmurs of ghostly remains, are given voice and can be heard.

In my next and concluding chapter I bring my arguments outlined in this thesis together through a close listening of Samson and Delilah (Thornton 2009b).

136 Chapter eight

Conclusion

Introduction

In my final chapter, the themes and concerns I explore throughout the rest of my thesis to address my research questions are revisited. By providing a close listening of Warwick Thornton’s filmSamson and Delilah (2009b), I end this chapter, and thus my thesis, by summarising each of my research questions to particularly outstanding effect. Through this process I support my argument for an Australian transcultural cinema and the three sonic tools I have created and in doing so, highlight my original contribution to this field.

Sounding back to sonic cinematic history

Close your eyes; a gentle breeze stirs up a schhhhh through the trees, you can hear the black cockatoos so it could be morning (Thornton 2009a). Cheeky crows chatter away and if you strain your mind’s ear you might just hear the distant sound of the community; dogs barking, generator humming, kids laughing. The veranda band (Desert Mulga Band) settle into their sluggish rhythm for the day and the phone starts ringing. Listen more closely, the hooh of aircraft offering some kind of escape, a shame it’s so unattainable at 30,000 feet. Closer still, with a methodical squeak, rubber wheels can be heard to move shakily over soft crumbling rock and dirt. Focus your ear and you will hear the flapping of open shoes and the light step of a young person pushing a heavily breathing adult in a wheelchair.

‘Vroomm’… Samson (Rowan McNamara) physically propels himself across rough ground, a road of sorts, in a dilapidated wheelchair. He passes Delilah (Marissa Gibson) wrestling a matching contraption containing nana Mitjili (Mitjili Napanangka Gibson); they are on their way to the health clinic. Nana laughs, she’s enjoying the informal courtship between Samson and Delilah. Both vocalisations ring out, filling the space, carrying a slight echo caused by the rugged hillside behind. Cinematically familiar through numerous earlier depictions in Australian films, the projected image is wide; craggy crumbling hills settling on flat land, straggly trees, dry, red earth. This image is startling for a number of reasons. First, it places contemporary Indigenous Australians in the picture. Second, the image is an everyday domestic scene that

137 challenges numerous depictions of Indigenous Australians as the Other; mystical, absent, menacing, and so forth. Dwarfed – modern against ancient – the three characters are embedded in this landscape by their day-to-day existence of getting by. Morning reverberates through the few sparsely foliaged trees that help form the backdrop. Gentle winds and birds provide a sound bed for the human-powered machinery being pushed across rough terrain.

Read as a depiction of post-colonial apocalypse, this scene provides a much more optimistic picture for Indigenous survival than what has been depicted in many Australian films from the 1970s, 1980s and earlier. In ‘White Panic orMad Max and the Sublime’, Meaghan Morris reinforces the argument that the Mad Max trilogy (Miller 1979, 1981, Miller & Ogilvie 1985) can be read historically as ‘revis[ing] the dreams and nightmares of white settler mythology’ (1998, p.241). In the three Mad Max films, the surviving population is white (aside from Tina Turner in the final film) and predominantly male. White crusaders propelled along by fuel-injected hybrids morphing into throbbing cyborg, as much grunt and roar as the speaker systems can handle. The asphalted horizontal and vertical lines form a civilisation miniaturised by an expansive empty landscape, conjuring up references to the sublime, as Morris suggests: The sublime displaces the often bloody human conflicts of colonial history with a pale metaphysics of landscape in which Man confronts the Unknown. Aboriginal peoples are written out of this scenario as it creates its terra nullius [emphasis in original], if in North America the ‘Western’ genre conceded that there was violence between settlers and indigenous people, in this country ‘there happened – nothing’ (1998, p. 243-244).

A landscape made barren, an Indigenous population out of sight, wiped off the screen. Over twenty years ago, Mad Max travelled along this contentious road. In Mad Max, the landscape is silenced by the febrile whines and vociferated rumble of hot metal on tarmac. Surviving wildlife has taken the form of predatory winged creatures that caw and signal with piercing eye and beak, startling in their likeness to the now much maligned crow. However, Samson and Delilah tells a very different story.

Why Samson and Delilah?

In this final chapter I turn to a film that undertakes a particularly dynamic sounding back to films from the New Australian Cinema. The film does this in a number of ways: the meticulous crafting of the atmosphere and effect tracks provides a faithful sonic representation that situates the audience in Country. The soundtrack speaks to a local Indigenous audience and it also invites an outside audience to audibly experience a part of Central Australia that they would have heard about but most likely not have

138 visited. The soundtrack also sounds back to films of the New Australian Cinema by audibly positioning Indigenous Australians in the reality of the 21st century where, like everybody else, their life experiences are influenced to some extent by global cultural flows.

In chapter three I examined how government policy, training, industrial practices and funding helped to shape and influence the soundtracks of Australian cinema. This is particularly the case for most Australian transcultural films because they are heavily reliant on federal and state government broadcasting bodies’ funding and support. In this chapter I examine how these factors have influenced the soundtrack ofSamson and Delilah. The interview material strongly supports my findings and also confirms how in the 1990s the soundtracks started to change to support the new storylines.

In an interview on ABC Radio National, Warwick Thornton explains that this film is not an easy place for ‘white or black audiences’ (Browning 2009) and I argue that it is through the use of the soundtrack that Samson and Delilah creates both a dialogue and a space for listening. Iconic sounds from the national cinema are mostly missing, but when they are used their purpose is very different. For instance, wind is used to ground the characters in the landscape. It is also used to help convey the shock and horror of an assault. However, in the New Australian Cinema the use of wind usually signifies an uncanny and unsettling landscape. InSamson and Delilah there is a lot of communication but very little dialogue to interpret. This triggers the brain to search for other sounds to decipher, creating a number of key changes. It challenges the vococentric hierarchy of dialogue over other sounds, locates the audience sonically in place, and makes the audience more sensitive to the audible shocks that are positioned throughout this film on the soundtrack. InSamson and Delilah, cinematic sound hierarchy is challenged and sounds are transposed, but as well, a community with shifting cultural borders throws up a heterogeneous mix of transnational influences that are largely driven by the soundtrack.

Samson and Delilah: synopsis

Samson and Delilah live in a remote community outside of Alice Springs in Central Australia. Samson spends his days sniffing petrol and following Delilah as she goes about the ministrations of caring for her elderly nana. Samson’s family life is represented by the tenuous relationship he has with his brother, while Delilah seems to be alone also, except for her nana Mitjili. Family seem absent from this picture. Daily

139 life in the community has a certain routine and monotony, but it is during the day-to-day rhythmic repetitions of community life that an ambivalent romance slowly blossoms between the pair.

The routine of daily life changes when nana Mitjili dies. Accused of neglecting her nana, Delilah is severely punished by the community elders. Meanwhile, Samson is having his own family problems with his brother. Community life for Samson and Delilah suddenly proves too difficult and they decide to leave. Departing at night in the community’s only vehicle, they make for Alice Springs. When they finally arrive, they take refuge under a bridge within walking distance of the town. The bridge is home to a local ‘parkie’ called Gonzo (Scott Thornton). The pair, now even more isolated, quickly fall into the category of homeless untouchables. Their attempts at self-sufficiency prove futile; hungry, alone and vulnerable, it’s Delilah’s abduction and subsequent rape that proves to be the catalyst for the spiralling of the pair into a shocking state of distress and neglect.

Christian missions have had an enormous impact on the lives and beliefs of Indigenous Australians. In the biblical story (Book of Judges, chapter 16) Samson is betrayed by Delilah and is captured and tortured by the Philistines. But Samson regains his strength and brings down the temple on the Philistines, and in doing so, and by sacrificing his own life, he finds redemption. However, for the characters in Thornton’s film, Delilah, a young Aboriginal woman, finds the strength and courage for both characters to start another day, back home, in her Country.

Samson and Delilah

Samson and Delilah is a love story, one that ends in hope and redemption – ‘out of the dark comes the brightest day’ (Pomeranz 2009). But it is also a tough story about the breakdown of family, child neglect and the problem of troubled Indigenous youth in Central Australia. As Thornton explains, ‘these kids go through the absolute ringer’ (Browning 2009). In ‘Shooting from the Heart’, Steve Miller tells us that Thornton’s people (Kaytej) are located ‘200 kilometres out of Alice Springs’ (May 2009, pp. 4–5) but he grew up and lives in the regional tourist town of Alice Springs and is familiar with both town and community life. His film relates a story with which he is intimate and one that he felt compelled to tell (Browning 2009). In Making Samson and Delilah, Thornton explains that it ‘came from my growing up in Alice Springs, pretty well everything I wrote in this film I have seen personally’ (Cole 2009b). He started his

140 career in the 1980s, spinning records and making radio plays for the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA): They were designed exactly like a film; there were scripts and sound effects and each character had a created pitched voice which had been effected through the old Fairlight systems. So that was my background and I have grown up listening more than I have been watching. I got into cinematography because I got sick of being in a radio studio (Thornton 2009a).

Thornton moved into cinematography at CAAMA and then honed these skills at AFTRS. The following year he shot his first feature,Radiance (Perkins 1988). His sensitivity to sound, along with his expertise as a storyteller, cinematographer and director, have culminated in his award-winning first feature,Samson and Delilah (2009b), and an impressive catalogue of short films, documentaries and audiovisual and multimedia art.

Government: industrial practices

As I discussed in chapter three, government-funded films are shaped to a large extent by their low budgets and limited finances, which influences many aspects of a film’s production including the choice of style, use of genre and soundtrack design. This is particularly the case for Australian transcultural cinema. Although Samson and Delilah received support and funding from Screen Australia’s Indigenous Programs, the ABC, Screen NSW and the Adelaide Film Festival, the budget was nonetheless small.

Both Thornton and producer Kath Shelper have discussed how the budget for Samson and Delilah was intentionally small because in terms of style and production, this story needed an intimate portrayal, a paring back to the essence (Siemienowicz 2009). A small budget also meant that a completion guarantor was unnecessary and less scrutiny and interference by the financiers was warranted in the actual filmmaking process. Every detail in this film is there for a reason. The tight, micro and visceral nature and immediacy of this film was supported by a very small crew, many of whom Thornton had collaborated with in the past. Tightly crewed and scripted, Samson and Delilah did not get lost in a sea of information overload and choice, something that often occurs in larger projects. Relying on key crew, the intimate nature of the film set provided a supportive environment for Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson, the two inexperienced young actors. It is a very physical film because there is little dialogue and the communication is built on look, hand gesture and composition of frame, as Thornton explains in an interview for the ABC1 program Sunday Arts: …we have this whole dialogue that is done through sign language…it actually created an awful amount of hard work because every little look that is written in the script has got a reason and

141 either comes back later or is specific to that scene so Kath Shelper and I had to focus incredibly hard and make sure that every scene got it right because we didn’t have that classic ‘I’m angry’ or ‘I’m happy’ dialogue (Kernebone 2009).

This was the first acting role for the two main protagonists, andThornton wanted it that way. He wanted the characters in his film to be reinforced by raw acting, for the engagement with character to come straight from McNamara’s and Gibson’s own life experiences and observations while growing up in Central Australia. Thus Samson and Delilah’s feeling of authenticity for both place and character springs from the film’s low-budget independence, the non-industrial method of location production and the use of untrained actors. Further, the carefully constructed sound and music tracks speak closely to, and for, both place and character.

Listening to the unhomely

Thornton likes to make films that entertain and educate, setting up opportunities to get the audience thinking: You get the audience asking questions, rather than just lying in a chair numb, just watching, being spoon fed chocolate ice cream cinema. You get them working, you get them thinking, you get them enjoying it and you are educating them (Thornton 2009a).

This education starts from the first opening frame of black. No ‘wide brown earth’,24 not a glimpse of Uluru standing majestically centre stage, just black. The carefully constructed soundtrack tells the audience that this is a community – not necessarily Indigenous – somewhere in rural outback Australia. The location is an actual abandoned community, a ‘ghost town’ that Thornton brought back to life to use as the main location for his film. A haunting reminder of their original purpose, many of these rural communities continue to function as repositories for consigning Indigenous Australians to land that may not necessarily be their Country, but, as importantly, land not seen as desirable by enterprise and industry. For this reason, the community location in Samson and Delilah is both haunting and ‘unhomely’. In ‘The World and the Home’, Homi Bhabha explains how ‘unhomeliness’ is created at the point where world and home become intermingled, an uncanny space through which when disturbed: …another world becomes visible. It has less to do with forcible eviction and more to do with the uncanny literary and social effects of eviction and enforced social accommodation or historical migrations and cultural relocations (1997, p.445).

Thornton brings back to life a community, using it as a starting point for a conversation

24 Brian McFarlane, 1987, ‘Mates and Others in a Wide Brown Land: Images of Australia’ in Australian Cinema 1970–1985, Heinemann, Melbourne.

142 about the effects of colonisation, home, belonging and representation amongst other things. Listening closely to the opening of Samson and Delilah, it is not difficult to hear how the spectral advances of the unhomely are sonically present, heard living between the lines. A technological ghosting appears to bring back to life an empty community. But this town does not operate in a vacuum; it is an uncanny place, ‘unhomely’, audibly challenging and resounding cinematic history.

Listening to black

Under colonisation, and aligned to skin colour, black came to represent something dark, primitive, sinister even. In the same way, silence has often been aligned with darkness, causing an unease that has crept into Australian cinematic soundscapes as well as critical writing. Des O’Rawe, in ‘The Great Secret’ (2006, p.395), argues for a new defence of silence and suggests trying to listen for what is being withheld. O’Rawe’s proposition invokes thought on the role and hierarchy of sound and silence in both social and cultural contexts. As there is little dialogue in Samson and Delilah, by letting go of the spoken word the audience is challenged to stop for a while and listen. Sound designer Liam Egan and Thornton discuss the design for the opening black sequence of the film. Thornton: I said [to Liam] ‘Look at this, there’s all this black and text’. The audience is going to read this stuff in split seconds, and they are not really going to be training their eyes too hard, but they are going to be listening a lot harder. Let’s turn this into a sense of place, the crows, the telephone, generator, kids playing, all that sort of community sound. So it was brought in and faded out and some of the sounds such as the birds and the crows hung around. You can hear the kids, the telephone rings, this sort of community sense of place happens in that black, over those titles. So you kind of get this feeling that you are going to be in a small village or community. You don’t know that it is going to be an Aboriginal community… (Thornton 2009a).

To which Egan adds: …because it is just black, you don’t know anything about the film, we wanted to set it up so that people would be intrigued and engaged straight away… Why is this soundscape the way it is? You know it sets up the environment, but beyond that what is it doing? (Egan 2009).

Opening with a black screen, a single crow introduces the audio-viewer to this Central Australian Aboriginal community. There are no eerie winds to precede this crow call or to open the story, but sounds that are more firmly positioned in this community, in this part of Country. The humdrum of daily life: a cacophony of sonic ingredients that include jet engines, generators, dogs, gossip, local radio. The ear is not greeted by a suggestive didgeridoo but is serenaded by the more upbeat, offbeat tones of ‘Skanky Reggae’ being diligently mastered by the community’s makeshift veranda band.

143 Remapping/re-sounding Country

Samson and Delilah benefited from an intelligent use of budget and a sound-savvy director with an audible knowledge of Country. In chapter two I discussed how Australian transcultural cinema creates the space for new ways to listen and that the haptic quality of sound can provide an intimate connection between film and audience. The strong collaborative relationship between Thornton, sound recordist David Tranter and sound designer Liam Egan helped create a complexity in the soundtrack that situates the audience within an authentic sound of Country. In this way it challenges the homogenous soundscapes belonging to landscape films of the New Australian Cinema, and it provides an audience with a haptic connection to Country. The use of local sounds grounds an audience in the geographical space, and the minimal dialogue encourages the audience to listen and hear in different ways. As discussed in chapter four, sound recordist David Tranter is from this Country and is very familiar with the rhythms and sounds belonging to the different seasons and different times of day. He collected extra location sound during the shoot, but additional sounds were needed in postproduction to create a greater authenticity of place. Budget constraints prevented Egan from flying back to Alice Springs to make extra recordings, but he was able to benefit from Thornton and Tranter’s knowledge of Country to identify and collect the extra sounds that were needed. As mentioned in chapter four, new technologies also make this process much simpler for low-budget films today.

In chapter one I discussed how the sounds of animal and bird life became fetishes and that their sounds were used to create a sense of the Australian landscape as sublime and Indigenous Australians as the Other. However, the eerie winds and the heightened sounds of animal and bird life that represent these things in Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975) are passed over in Samson and Delilah for authentic bush sounds that position the audience in Country. Thornton talks about the need to be true to location: …the sounds have to be very specific, very local to that place. For me personally, if the sound is not from there, let’s just get rid of it. That bird does not come from our Country, so we shouldn’t have it in there, and it is that easy. So it works that way, if you are going to shoot in the Coorong you should do all your desert dune sounds there rather than just going and grabbing some classic dune sound off a sound library. It is very easy to go, ‘Yeah, I’ve got crickets’, but I made sure David [Tranter] recorded crickets so that we used ‘our crickets’, because they are the right crickets, and it feels better that they are the right crickets (Thornton 2009a).

In Samson and Delilah, the sonic fetish is used in very different ways to the films of the New Australian Cinema. Close-up fetish shots of wildlife and birds – with menacing caw, squawk and squeal and heightened rustle and slither that signal foreboding nature

144 as adversary – are replaced or used differently. Birds signal Country and time of day and lend their sounds and personalities to the film’s two young protagonists. Egan discusses how certain birds came to take on character roles: One of the things Warwick said to me earlier on in the piece was that Samson was a crow and Delilah was a cockatoo. So, particularly around the bridge when things are happening to one or other of them or together you will hear cockatoos and crows; not in an overt, in-your-face sort of way, but part of the overall ambiance. But you know, when Samson is doing something a bit cheeky or whatever you are more inclined to hear crows off in the distance (Egan 2009).

The one close-up of bird life in this film can be considered symbolic, not because of fetishised raptor, sharp beak, cold eye, dark glistening plumage but because of the silence held in the over-the-shoulder shot from Samson’s point of view of a dead and decaying cockatoo. Reminiscent of a similar shot used by Ivan Sen in Beneath Clouds (2002), again the information imparts a certain hopelessness under adversity and a difficult truth about Indigenous youth.

The soundscape in Samson and Delilah does not just consist of bird, animal and wind sounds; it is audibly humming with the sound of communication technology. Central Australia has a long history of communication technology. The building of the Overland Telegraph Line between Adelaide and Darwin began in the 1860s. In 1872, the Tennant Creek telegraph station in Central Australia became operational. In 1935, the Post Office replaced the telegraph station. In 1939, the ABC started broadcasting radio to outback Australia. In 1972, television arrived in Alice Springs. In 1980, CAAMA was established. And in 1988, Imparja Television, the first Aboriginal-controlled television station, began broadcasting from the Alice. However, in New Australian Cinema, Indigenous Australians are rarely portrayed as having knowledge, understanding, or experience of modernity or technology. In Samson and Delilah community radio, amplifiers, electric guitars, the hum of the generator and the community telephone all form part of the soundscape, including the sound of jet engines, as Thornton explains: There was this incredible sound that we heard, it was a jet at 30,000 feet and it had this hoooh and you couldn’t see the planes but you could always hear them. And it sounded like something out of phase, you know when they go ‘shou shou shou’ and I said to David ‘Can you record that?’ And every single day at the exact hour or whatever, it happened, as the planes were all flying over Central Australia to go to Sydney or Bangkok or India or vice versa or wherever. So he started collecting those sounds and we used them as an atmos for the community, the community has always got this sort of phasing jet plane…like someone’s going somewhere or someone’s trying to escape something. …you know, getting on a plane to go somewhere else. I got Liam to feed in that sound, especially in the quiet moments, to just give that feeling of trying to escape (Thornton 2009a).

The placement of particular sounds that create the atmosphere track in Samson and Delilah forms a tension and speaks directly to the soundtracks of New Australian

145 Cinema. It does this by challenging the earlier sonic representations of the landscape and the audible positioning of non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australia in this space. In this way, the soundtrack releases or gives voice to a cinematic landscape that in the past was often silenced or sonically mapped with a foreign sonic history.

Sonic shock

In the opening black sequence of Samson and Delilah the sonic overtures of home life are reassuring – we hear birds, dogs, kids, gossip. The audiences’ educated ear tunes towards the sounds of any sort of day, somewhere in rural or outback Australia. Soothed, the audience settles back, lulled by the atmospheres surrounding them in the theatre. The next cut is hard: the atmospheres are sucked out of the surrounds as Charley Pride (on the radio) starts serenading ‘It’s a sunshiny day’ to the petrol-sniffing Samson. The human auditory system is compelled to follow the gravitational pull of the atmospheres towards the image, and the melody juxtaposed against the image creates a shock that is nearly complete as the audience’s intake of breath combines with that of the young Samson as he inhales. The warm tones of Charley Pride’s liquid voice and the heartfelt lyrics grate against the space Samson inhabits at that point. The sound feels so right, but the image looks so disturbingly wrong, an ambivalence forced by the music that can be described as having an ‘anempathetic’ relationship with the image. In Film, a Sound Art, Michel Chion argues that this type of relationship releases ‘the entire weight of some human destiny that it simultaneously summarizes and disdains’ (2009, p.431). As the audience sits frozen in time, trying to make sense of what they are experiencing, Pride’s catchy rhythms carry on, defying the image, inviting audiences to move in time. A split second later we see Samson’s fist start beating out the tempo. Time and space vanish as audience and character merge, locked by image and sound into a shocking embrace that horrifies and implicates. Thornton discusses his ideas behind this opening scene: That opening sequence where he sniffs, it’s really dark, not a dark exposure image but a dark concept image. He’s waking up, he’s sniffing, he’s in poverty, we have the sound completely juxtaposed, which is everything is going to be okay it’s going to be a sunshiny day. So that’s the sense of style of the film. It’s saying to the audience, this film is probably going to be different to anything you have ever seen before, this film is going to contradict and its going to play and muck around and show/go to really dark places and it’s going to go to really beautiful amazing places too (Thornton 2009a).

The audible resurrection of a forgotten community out there in the middle of nowhere immediately haunts the audio-viewers in a story in which, in the very act of observing, they are implicated. Through the soundtrack, a community is brought back to life for the very purpose of inviting a wide audience to observe and to listen. Samson and Delilah

146 contests earlier representations of landscape films by providing evidence of a traumatic living legacy of colonial invasion. One way it does this is by setting up a series of visual and sonic shocks that challenge an audience to rethink Australian history in a post- colonial and globalised world.

Hearing post-colonial schizophrenia

Egan discusses how it was important for the film to make the community a ‘comfortable environment for our two main protagonists’ in order to create a contrast between the familiarity of the community and the alien environment of the township: As soon as they hit Alice Springs, the first thing they hear is this big train then they are in a supermarket with all these babies crying and beeping of checkouts and hums of flouros, and eventually they end up under the bridge where there is constantly the sound of cars clunking over the bridge, so suddenly it is a very alien and quite awkward kind of environment (Egan 2009).

The soundscape belonging to the community is repetitious; each day sounds out like the last, the band starts up, the phone rings, black cockatoos signal that it’s probably morning and the crows carry on regardless. The auditor’s brain becomes attuned to these rhythms to such a degree that a familiarity is formed. When the two young people leave the community, the audience registers the soundscape of Alice Springs township as foreign – hostile even. Egan highlights the reasons behind building up a repetitive sounding community: When you watch the film the band is playing the same track a lot, we called it ‘Skanky Reggae’. By the time we leave the community for Alice Springs, the audience is quite familiar with that track, and this helps to highlight the repetitive nature of life in the community – it doesn’t change much from day to day, could be a bit boring. Later on in the film when things start to go wrong in Alice Springs and Delilah rings the community for some help and support, (nobody answers the phone, of course) we cut back to the community and we hear that ‘Skanky Reggae’ track again. The idea is partly [that] nothing has changed back in the community, but also partly to create an environment where after the stress of what is going on in Alice Springs, and we as an audience cut back to a community, there is a sense of comfort and familiarity so that, oh, thank God we are back here again, we thought it was bad earlier on, now we know it’s paradise (Egan 2009).

The soundtracks of landscape films from the New Australian Cinema convey civilised townships caught within large tracts of harsh and menacing wilderness. In a radical disorientating flip, the community and township inSamson and Delilah become sites of sonic rupture as the township becomes foreign and the community becomes the safe haven. Bhabha’s use of the word ‘unhomely’ (1997) and Leela Ghandi’s term ‘postcolonial schizophrenia’ (1998) both resonate here because they help to explain the sensations that arise around these sonic sites of contestation.

147 Immersed in the sonic envelope

As I explained in chapter one, humans are vococentric, in that they interpret language before decoding other sounds. Cinema operates in the same way; clear dialogue usually sits in a hierarchical position above the other components in the soundtrack. What happens in a film such asSamson and Delilah where nothing much happens and even less gets said? The binaural nature of the ear shifts focus away from centre speaker (the dialogue channel) and is permitted to bathe in the sonic envelope provided by filmmaker, sound team, sound system and auditorium. Without language to decode, sound is felt intuitively and this includes language when the coding system is not understood. As Thornton explains: you ‘feel it’ (Thornton 2009a). In the same way, when standing under the bridge while filming on location, Thornton realised that cars travelling across the bridge produced a low-end rhythmical sound similar to a heartbeat. He had Tranter record this sound, which was used in the soundtrack as a rhythmic haptic aural device, the internal, immersive quality easily connecting to the heart, blood and breath of the audio-viewer. Egan explains that the source for the rhythmic bridge boomph/heartbeat sound laid up on the left side came from the original bridge location. However, the sound effect laid on the right side was a recording from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Both of these sounds were laid up on the effects tracks and manipulated in different ways. Sydney was the original point of colonisation, and in Samson and Delilah the boomph/heartbeat sound from the right side of the bridge is different from that on the left side, creating an echo, a point of difference that sounds out the past, creating a dialogue around the reality and predicament of forgotten Indigenous Australians in the 21st century.

As I discussed in chapter seven, in many transcultural films the road is continually used as a prop against which a variety of issues surrounding Australian history, settlement and migration are played out. In Samson and Delilah, tarmac joins town to community; it is a short journey, but in terms of resources and opportunities a very wide gap. On arrival in Alice Springs, Samson and Delilah seek shelter under a nearby bridge. Here they are welcomed by Gonzo. Their host sets down the ground rules for staying in his home: ‘Now, in order for us mob to survive, you mob are gonna start chucking in, ’cause these noodles ain’t cheap.’ And later: ‘If you are going to live in my house, you’re gonna have to talk to me!’ This particular home is stripped bare, adult ability to help is limited by alcoholism and Gonzo’s guidance and concern is contradictory as he anaesthetises himself on wine while at the same time advising Samson on his own brain and pain-numbing petrol habit: ‘You wanna cut that shit out, it will fuck up your brain.’ Under the bridge, Samson and Delilah become ghost figures,

148 joining Gonzo on the periphery. They become refugees in their own ‘home’. In ‘Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production’, Marlene Goldman and Joanne Saul propose that: ‘Home’ as a constant has become less of a given, as more and more people are ‘unhomed’ – often forced to exist in a kind of liminal space traditionally associated with the ghost. The sense of ‘neither here nor there’ experienced (albeit in profoundly different ways) by the traveler, immigrant, migrant, and refugee can all be related to the in-between space of the ghost (2006, p.648).

The soundscape belonging to this liminal space (under the bridge) and its ghostly inhabitants starts to sound familiar. There are the exterior, foreign and hostile sounds of the township resting up against the bridge location that is dominated by a series of sonic washes made up predominantly of traffic and wind sounds. Spotted within these atmospheres are night crickets and the sonic signifiers belonging to Samson and Delilah, crow and cockatoo. The rhythmic heartbeat belonging to both bridge and protagonists is the key, most crucial sound for connecting characters to audience, particularly when these sounds are dropped or woven around silence at the three crisis points, in an intricate weave of sonic storytelling that carries the narrative along a difficult trajectory. In a film that is all about listening, it is ironic that one of the main characters, Samson, is not only partially deaf but also has speech difficulties, most likely caused by a history of ear problems. Thornton talks about why it was highly probable that one of the characters would have hearing damage, and how, during the sound mix, they aimed to educate the audience to listen more closely through Samson’s predicament: Samson is deaf in one ear, and we played with the stereo and the band – being muffled in the left ear and his right ear is clear… When Delilah gets abducted and then when she gets hit by the car, it all happens on Samson’s left side; he is not only stoned off his head, but he is also not hearing properly as well. This works great for the film, but the reality is that 70 per cent of Aboriginal kids in communities have massive hearing problems because they get infections which go untreated and then the ear is damaged. The eardrum becomes perforated and then they are deaf in one ear, and a lot of Aboriginal kids have this purely because of lack of clinics and nurses and doctors, and also through not having families who are educated in how bad this stuff can get (Thornton 2009a).

As well as the hearing problem, Samson’s petrol habit encloses him in an insular world, and the soundtrack produces this sensation for the audience to experience. In the auditorium the audience is fed sounds that mimic how a chemically impeded, hearing- impaired person would experience the world. The scenes where Delilah is abducted, hit by a car, and later when she collects a broken and distressed Samson are for the most part experienced from Samson’s position of hearing.

Samson, walking in front of Delilah, fails to see or hear her being abducted; instead he continues walking. A sonic wash starts this scene with low wind, birds and

149 insects, particularly cicadas. The sound of an approaching car, saturated with reverb and slight phasing, joins the mix. As Delilah is grabbed from behind, the atmospheres change dramatically from a hallucinatory wash into a disturbing sonic nightmare. The heartbeat starts up, initiating an agitation that is heightened by bottom-end car engine, high febrile whine, and a hollow sounding and unearthly wind. The sound of the car revving up and speeding off finally alerts Samson who, turning around, finds he is too late to help Delilah.

The sound is carried by the wind element that, already part of the backdrop for the bridge location, is mixed to provide an uncanny sound that backs the lead-up to the abduction and Samson’s unawareness. There is a juxtaposition of image, Samson against Delilah, as well as image against sound as Samson walks on, oblivious to Delilah’s kidnapping. In Cinema 2, Deleuze suggests that: The screen itself is the cerebral membrane where immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future, the inside and the outside, at a distance impossible to determine, independent of any fixed point… The image no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristics but topology and time (1989, p.125).

In this scene, it is through the soundtrack that a space is created that opens up topology and time as well as joining past with present. The elements making up the sonic wash of wind atmosphere challenge the use of wind in Australian films as chilling, haunting sonic fetish. The wind atmosphere in this particular scene from Samson and Delilah does not signal a haunting, uncanny landscape inhabited by unknown creatures and Indigenous figures. Instead the wind as sonic fetish connects past with present, a haunting reminder of the violence that has been perpetrated against Indigenous Australians as well as the predicament of Australia’s Indigenous youth. In this way, the atmospheres provide a shocking and haunting reminder of a history of ambivalence, inertia and a lack of healthy respectful responses towards a population in trouble.

Musical signs and universal language

Music used or scored for the New Australian Cinema and earlier films mostly depicts the outback as menacing and underpopulated and the Indigenous inhabitants as primitive, or Australia as a romanticised utopia. Read against these earlier films, Thornton’s choice of music is challenging. Chion writes that sometimes ‘God is a disc jockey’ (2009, p.407), meaning that lyrics and melody have the power to propel a film’s protagonists along the storyline. Thornton gives voice to a different story of the outback; he is able to be that ‘God’ which Chion talks about, and to offer a contemporary social commentary by providing music as ‘latent speech’ (2009, p.423). As Thornton explains,

150 lyrics and song compositions were formulating in his mind as he worked on the script: All the music, every single song in that film, was chosen before we actually shot the film. Every single song was chosen lyrically to talk. The first song, the Charley Pride song ‘Sunshiny Day’, is uplifting but this kid’s sniffing, he’s living on the ground and there’s no glass in the window behind him, you know that kind of contradiction. And the last Charley Pride song, ‘All I Have to Offer You is Me’ [says that] there will be no mansions on the hill; you know they are living in a little tiny shack…its speaking for Samson…he never says anything in the film, but when Charley says, ‘all I have to offer you is me’ and [Samson is] looking at her [Delilah], Charley is singing for Samson, talking for him. So I was choosing these songs and the lyrics in these songs very specifically, to help tell the story (Thornton 2009a).

The music in Samson and Delilah works in a number of ways. As a social indicator of the times, Thornton discusses the role of contemporary music in Indigenous communities where people often have nothing to do and ‘there is always a guitar’ (Thornton 2009a). The hundreds of bands that formed in Central Australia in the 1970s and 1980s when Thornton was young were pure rock with a shift in the 1990s to reggae: So it’s telling the story, even the music, that repetitious piece of reggae is part of the communities. … So this sound is chosen, this sound says a lot about Samson’s older brother who plays in the band, about his generation, that sort of dope-smoking, reggae kind of stuff – and he’s sort of practising all day. He has nothing to do as well, he is probably 22, 23 and he’s got nothing to do but practise the same two cords, you know… And that’s all backed up with the actual sound of the band… (Thornton 2009a).

The repetitious nature of ‘Skanky Reggae’ helps to reinforce that space described by Patrice Petro in ‘After Shock/Between Boredom and History’ as being an aftershock, ‘an intermediary zone between boredom and history’ (1995, p.265), a ghosting of what is left when the initial shock has subsided. The repetitive sounds of community life also provide a familiarity that is highlighted when the young protagonists leave the relative safety of the settlement for Alice Springs.

In two of Thornton’s earlier short films,Mimi (2002) and Green Bush (2005), music places Indigenous Australia rightly in a transnational global world, one where technology and communications are accommodated, utilised and transformed. Thornton uses the music in Samson and Delilah to perform the same task by confirming that a small Central Australian community is situated and operating firmly in the centre of the global universe. The linguistic capabilities of Indigenous Australians are highlighted in an account by Thornton of hanging out as a young man with friends: I grew up on country and western, and one of the biggest names was a guy named Freddy Fender, who was a Mexican country and western singer, and he sung most of the stuff in Spanish…so here we are in the middle of Central Australia, you know, we’ve got about six Aboriginal languages… we’ve got English, and then we are all sitting around a campfire singing Spanish!And having no idea what the words he is singing are, what the words mean, but also singing because we are feeling it, feeling these Mexican love songs… So when I came across Ana Gabriel, the woman who sings those Latino Mexican love songs in the actual film, it was just this instant connection.

151 When you hear those songs, you know, you just feel that they are actual love songs and that was fantastic, I thought it was absolutely perfect for an audience (Thornton 2009a).

‘Como Olvidar’ meets ‘Warlpiri Woman’

In chapter seven I discussed how melodrama lends itself to Australian transcultural cinema; Thornton uses melodrama to up the stakes in this love story. The heightened sensation created by music and melodrama helps to substantiate that a romance between this unlikely pair, against all odds, is possible. Delilah jams a tape into a stationary vehicle’s cassette player and settles back, ready to be transported to any place else under the assured guidance of songstress Ana Gabriel singing the love ballad ‘Como Olvidar’. At the same time Samson decides to plug the radio into the band’s amp, creating a dance space on the veranda, and pounds out his restless energy in time to the Lajamanu Teenage Band’s ‘Warlpiri Woman’. At first irritated by the interruption, Delilah starts drawing Samson into a finely tuned focus through the sonic merger with, then takeover of, ‘Warlpiri Woman’ by ‘Como Olvidar’. The image slows and this slowing of time and the fluidity of image create molten heat in a battle between Mexican Mariachi love ballad and Australian Indigenous rock song. The suspension of time and the expansion of sound through the surrounds embalm the audience in a liquid bath of sonic melodramatic overflow. Thornton discusses this scene: I love that idea that Delilah is listening to something and she has no idea what this woman is singing about but she’s feeling it and I really like that idea, that Ana Gabriel is her concept of love. … That’s Delilah’s concept of what she thinks love should be, the big strings, very Disney, all very American/Mexican, whereas all she’s got is this mad little ‘run-a-muck’ who’s Samson with the crazy hair and the little rabbit body. And what she wants is Ana Gabriel, but all she’s got is this little crazy thing on the veranda.

[And Samson is] going Warlpiri Warlpiri woman! His version of love, you know, and he’s doing this crazy dance…his is this kind of Neanderthal kind of version of ‘me Tarzan, you Jane’…and she’s got this kind of Barbie doll version, ‘me Barbie, you Ken’. Both their sounds sort of fight at the beginning and obviously her sound wins in a sense, andAna Gabriel takes over and then what we do is to go from 24 frames to 48 frames, so his whole body slows down and gets all sort of fluid and sexy, and she watches…and it is all done with the sound. The really interesting thing about that scene is that when we were in the mix, we had both of those sounds so we had to choose the point where Ana Gabriel won…and Robert Sullivan, who was the mixer, and Liam and I spent so much time on that because just by moving either piece of music, just by moving it a second or frame this side or a second or frame that side of the point could give very different emotions. So it was incredibly hard to get it right, and it got to a point with this section of music where we were not looking at time code anymore, but we were just trying to feel it, manually mix with the fader because we just couldn’t do it by numbers. It had to be something that just emotionally came, the fader had to be emotionally controlled, not time code, second or frame controlled (Thornton 2009a).

Chion suggests that ‘the song is what often creates a link between individual characters’ destinies and the human collectivity to which they belong’ (2009, p.428). In this sense, both Delilah and the audience are immersed in a communion of heightened emotional

152 melodrama as Delilah connects her fantasy of a ‘Disney’ kind of love with the ‘rabbity’ image of the young Samson. Ana López in, ‘The Melodramatic in Latin America: Films, Telenovelas, and the Currency of a Popular Form’, asserts that: as a spectacle, the melodrama fosters immediacy, recognition and identification; it leads the spectator to hang on every gesture and expression of an actor or actress, to adopt his or her aspirations and to suffer from the gap between these aspirations and their realization in the ordinary world (1991, p.597).

I argue that for the audience of Samson and Delilah, the melodramatic mechanisms working away in this scene raise all sorts of questions from within the gap created from what López calls ‘aspirations and their realization’. The types of questions born from this gap address issues concerned with the implications of a new love. In this case, one carrying a mixture of everyday romantic hopes and dreams interwoven with an assortment of obstacles born out of the types of love and suffering created under socio- political atrocities implemented during a prolonged colonial regime. By integrating Mexican melodrama and its post-revolution everyday struggles with a love story set in an Indigenous community, Thornton draws on the diversity that embodies (trans) nationalism and at the same time raises the question about cultural representation in a shifting cultural, political and geographical space.

Listening to the spectre

On the day nana Mitjili passes away, initially there is no reason to suspect that this morning is going to be any different. Birds and insects have already started their daily rituals alongside the veranda band who are still working over that same riff; however, at some point something about the sound changes and disrupts. Thornton explains: …we played with the band, especially when nana died we used the bottom end, the base, the kick drum, ‘doomp, doomp, doomp’ and we dropped it at the point where Delilah realises that her nana is dead. It’s very subtle, it’s in the subs… (Thornton 2009a).

Delilah’s first job of every day is to administer nana Mitjili’s medication. However, on this day, Delilah is unable to wake her. As grief settles over Delilah, she quietly starts singing, ‘Little baby Jesus, sleeping in the hay…’. This Christian hymn references the Western education of little Jedda in the filmJedda (Chauvel 1954) and points to the influence of Christian missionaries on Indigenous Australia. Thornton discusses with ABC 1 Sunday Arts host Fenella Kernebone the ease with which the transference of Christianity into Indigenous communities happened: In Aboriginal communities there is a lot of Christianity, and you know, Jesus works perfectly in the Dreaming. If you believe in a Rainbow Serpent you can believe in God and Jesus, it all works and fits perfectly. You don’t have these faith issues when you believe in the Dreaming, so these sort

153 of biblical things we all kind of grew up with because of the missions in Central Australia, having crosses everywhere and seeing signs works perfectly (Kernebone 2009).

Mission life and Christianity travelled in an easy and fluid motion through Indigenous Australian communities, supporting the colonial decisions being mapped out for the first Australians. In ‘Love and Social Marginality in Samson and Delilah’, Therese Davis discusses how the ‘intertwining of Christian and Aboriginal spirituality’ has created a ‘complex hybrid worldview’ (2009) that in Samson and Delilah is made both visibly and audibly clear. As sonic artefact, the Christian hymn Delilah sings connects the fierce campaign missionaries fought throughout Australia to civilise and save the souls of the Indigenous peoples with the 21st century reality of empty symbolism and broken families.

Delilah moves through the ritual of cutting off her hair in grief and reverence to her nana’s death. What happens next is both disconcerting and disorientating. The sound stays in sync but the hymn starts to free fall, now detached from Delilah, her bodiless voice continues to sing across a cut and sutured image. At times Thornton uses the ability of cinema to disrupt time-space relations, as he explains in this scene: When the nana dies and Delilah starts singing the hymn, ‘Little baby Jesus’ – it backs up who she is, her nana would have taught her that song. We played with the sync, she’s singing it with her lips and then the song keeps playing and we go to the images later, and she is not singing when she is cutting her hair but the song is still being sung. The scene stays in sync with the audio but the picture goes out of sync. It’s funny, everyone talks about the sound going out of sync, but no one ever says the picture is out of sync; the sound’s right, it’s in the right place, the picture is in the wrong place… (Thornton 2009a)

This scene is haunting – Christian hymn, Indigenous ritual, audibly out of time, out of place with each other. When nana dies a ghosting effect occurs at the point where linear Western time is loosened, giving way to sacred time. Delilah’s voice, strained, breathless, floats loose, cut from the restraints of the physical body, creating a sense of disconnection, disassociation. A Christian hymn hangs in the air, creating visual distortion – something is wrong with this picture. Graeme Davison, in The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time, points out that ‘Australia was a child not only of the scientific and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century, but of the religious and moral revolution known as the Evangelical Revival’ (1993, p.13). As he argues, ‘the clock was the epitome of the eighteenth-century rationalists’ view of the world – balanced, orderly, self-regulating’ (1993, p.9-10). The missionaries waged a moral campaign to save and civilise under ‘the godly discipline of punctuality’ as understood by the rule of Western time (1993, p.14). In this scene, the clock stops, a Christian hymn cuts through time, creating a contested, haunted, timeless space where

154 past and present combine in what Deleuze terms a ‘being memory, a world memory’ (1989, p.98). For the audio-viewer, history and memory are open to question; another shock, a dream, an audible contested site open to interpretation.

Samson and Delilah does not bombard the audience with information. Rather, it releases a series of shocks administered by the play between sound and image. The carefully constructed sound and image tracks are specifically designed to instigate emotional jolts, to create unease and to form questions. Throughout this film, a type of audible haunting operates, playing out in the slippages between the image and soundtrack, the crevices that form at the point where sound meets silence and in the very decision to make the local both authentic and audible. As Faye Ginsburg asserts in ‘Screen Memories and Entangled Technologies: Resignifying Indigenous Lives’, Indigenous filmmakers such as Warwick Thornton are using the media to challenge and renegotiate an Indigenous ‘presence in the national imaginary’ (2003, p.87). In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon observes that: Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production (1997, p.7).

It is apparent in much of Thornton’s work that he understands the power of sound, and the significance of the spectre. InSamson and Delilah, the local is audibly interwoven with the national and the global and reinforces how Indigenous communities have not vanished but are telling their stories, negotiating their own screen representation and ‘making their own knowledge’ within a transnational world.

Conclusion

In this chapter, by providing several close listenings from Samson and Delilah and using the interview material recorded with director Warwick Thornton, sound designer Liam Egan and sound recordist David Tranter, I have been able to highlight the key arguments in my thesis, outlined below. What this chapter incorporates is a solid core of research that supports my findings that there has been an emergence of a body of work, which I define as an Australian transcultural cinema, that is largely driven by the soundtrack. In this chapter I have substantiated that in an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains it is primarily through the soundtrack using the sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic spectre – and by creating breaks in linear time – that society’s hauntings are audibly heard and can be examined.

155 In chapter one, by providing close listenings, I examined how Australian transcultural cinema is not only sounding back to the New Australian Cinema, but re- sounding how the nation is imagined and heard through cinema today. By investigating how my conceptual tools – the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact and the sonic spectre – operate in Samson and Delilah, I highlighted their role and position within the transcultural cinema. Further, by explaining how silence is used in Samson and Delilah, I reinforced my argument that silence as well as sound needs to be listened to in an examination of the past and the present.

In my second chapter I investigated how in Australian transcultural cinema the soundtrack can be listened to as a sound event. I explained that by listening to the soundtrack as an event it is possible to examine the role of the soundtrack in films from the New Australian Cinema as well as those from an Australian transcultural cinema. In this, my concluding chapter, I have shown how, by listening to Samson and Delilah as a series of sound events, it is possible to hear how this film sounds back to early cinematic representations of Australia as a nation.

In chapter three I examined how government policy changes in the early 1970s saw a growing acknowledgement of rights and recognition for Indigenous Australians and Australia’s expanding migrant population. These changes had an impact on the film and media industries; slowly, not only images but the trained ‘English broadcast’ voice and broad Aussie drawl dominating Australian film and television started to become inflected with a more pluralistic voice.

As discussed in chapters four and five, in the early 1970s an Australian sound industry was created to support the New Australian Cinema. At this time there were very few recorded Australian sound effects and atmospheres. It was over the next ten to twenty years that sound practitioners started to record and collect Australian sounds, many of which were used over and over again, from one film or television series to the next. It became common for editors to share atmospheres and effects. During this time particular sounds and particular sound placement started to take on certain meanings. It was in the 1970s and 1980s that sounds started to be used consistently as markers or signifiers, what I have identified as the sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic spectre.

Samson and Delilah uses these same sound-sharing practices, which are part of the culture of the Australian film sound industry. For example, the generator that rumbles in the background in Thornton’s film is a sound fromPlains Empty (2005), a

156 short film by Indigenous filmmaker Beck Cole. Warlpiri voices are layered carefully over the image, building up an impression of community life. These voices came from Papunya, a community with Warlpiri speakers, and they were recordings that sound designer Liam Egan already had in his collection from an earlier film ofThornton’s. The announcer introducing the music on Samson’s radio is DJ Kenny broadcasting from a small community radio station located in Warwick Thornton’s 2005 short film,Green Bush again, from Egan’s sound library. The industrial practice of sharing and reusing sounds still has a practical application in the films of Australian transcultural cinema. However, extra thought and care is put into the creditable use and placement of sound.

In chapter six, drawing from Marks’s assertion that intercultural cinema can be considered a genre and Naficy’s argument for a transnational genre, I expanded my argument for an Australian transcultural cinema by conceptualising it as a genre. Using Altman’s argument for a semantic and syntactic approach to genre, I explained how Australian transcultural cinema uses the sonic semantic elements belonging to the road movie, the melodrama and the Gothic to sound back to Australian films of the 1970s and 1980s. This concluding chapter has examined the use of the Gothic mode, the melodrama and road movie genres in Samson and Delilah, looking at how they operate and help to define it as an Australian transcultural film.

In chapter seven I outlined how in an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains it is often through the use of acousmatic sounds and the presence of the acousmêtre that the past is able to be sonically brought into the present for a re- examination of historical events. In Samson and Delilah, it is predominantly through the juxtaposition of sound and image and the breaks in linear time that a haunting is released. In her book Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that ‘the temporality of haunting – the return of the dead, the recurrence of events – refuses the linear progression of modern time consciousness, flouting the limits of mortality and historical time’ (2009, p.149). In Samson and Delilah, predominantly through the soundtrack, disturbances are created between the sound and image tracks that cause breaks in linear time, resulting in a shock and a release of the spectre. The spectres in this film bring to the fore questions around time, history, colonisation, erasure, memory, trauma, diaspora and representation.

As I have examined and explained, in Australian transcultural cinema new sonic structures are being created from global cultural flows that ignore fixed borders, whether chronological, topological, societal, cultural, technological or stylistic. In Samson

157 and Delilah, the contemporary setting and storyline, the mode of production, the hybridisation of style and form, and the ability of the soundtrack to create a soundscape that hums and resonates with an amplitude of different sounds, places this small Central Australian Indigenous community in the global expanse of the 21st century. What is created through the soundtrack is a heterogeneous soundscape that challenges the way Indigenous Australia and the landscape have been portrayed in the national cinema.

In an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains, and this includes Samson and Delilah, it is predominantly through the use of the sonic semantic signals and the syntax belonging to the Gothic mode, foregrounded by the melodrama and infused with the road genre, that history is readdressed and those who have been silenced are given voice. Gordon states that ‘to be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects’ (1997, p.190). Marks asserts that in intercultural cinema there is often an encoding of ‘the sense memories that do not find their way into verbal discourse’ (1994, p.259). I argue that in the transcultural cinema of ghostly remains it is the soundtrack that provides the ‘memory traces’ through the deployment of the sonic artefact, the sonic fetish and the sonic spectre. These films draw from memory, diaspora and trauma in their exploration, questioning and challenging of representations of Australian society, history and settlement.

Finally, my thesis provides an original body of work that closely examines what I argue is an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains. I have explained how this cinema is heavily influenced and draws from its position withinAustralian national cinema. Australian transcultural films rely heavily on the history and role that the soundtrack plays in Australian cinema. This is important because it is predominantly though the soundtrack that an Australian transcultural cinema of ghostly remains challenges concepts of home, nation and belonging. Further, it is by ruptures and fissures in the soundtrack that the space becomes available for an audible reckoning, a haunting, to take place, where history, memory, diaspora and trauma are given voice.

158 Appendix

Interviewee biographies

Annie Breslin

Breslin’s impressive career covers nearly thirty years. Her love of storytelling, her passion for sound and attention to detail, as well as her clarity, has brought her praise and recognition. She has won and been nominated for a number of awards, including winning the 2008 AFI25 award for best achievement in sound, for Unfinished Sky (Duncan 2007). Other sound design credits include: The Well (Lang 1997), High Tide (Armstrong 1987) and Mad Max 2 (Miller 1981). Breslin held the position of Head of Sound at AFTRS (Australian Film Television and Radio School) for six years, leaving behind an impressive legacy that included a strong theoretical and creative approach to sound design as well as state-of-the-art sound technology. Qualified in Adult Education, she continues to teach, while her interest in history, society and audiovisual media is combined in her role as Manager at the Australian National Archives. In 2001 she was awarded a Centenary Medal for services to the Australian community and the Australian film industry.

Andrew Plain

Andrew Plain is recognised both nationally and internationally for his innovative sound design. Co-director of Huzzah Sound, Plain was known for his unwavering support of the local film industry and his ability to articulate succinctly on the role of sound in film. He had a passion for film and an ability to work across both sound and picture editing, but it was his love of sound and music that defined his career. Plain was exceptionally generous in his mentorship and was sought after at universities to give master classes and guest lectures. His film soundtracks are cohesive pieces of work, each created from a wonderful balance of theoretical, technical, sensory and creative aspects of filmmaking and sound design. Plain co-wrote a number of academic publications on film sound with Dr Helen Macallan. In 2001 he was awarded the Centenary Medal in the New Year’s Honours List for services to Australian society and film production. Plain left an impressive legacy of work, and this is acknowledged in the nominations and awards that he received. A selection of films for which he received awards include:

25 Australian Film Institute

159 The Sapphires (Blair 2012), Killer Elite (McKendry 2011), Oranges and Sunshine (Loach 2010), Tomorrow When the War Began (Beattie 2010), Unfinished Sky (Duncan 2007), La Spagnola (Jacobs 2001) and Oscar and Lucinda (Armstrong 1997).

Beck Cole (Warramungu and Luritja) Alice Springs based Indigenous writer and documentary director Beck Cole is well practised in film and media. Cole has received awards and recognition for many of her works, which include the documentaries First Australians (2008) and Wirrija: Small Boy (2004) and the short filmsPlains Empty (2005) and Flat (2002). Cole started her career as a cadet journalist at Imparja Television. She later completed a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Sociology at Charles Sturt University. Cole’s interest moved into documentary filmmaking while she was working at the ABC Indigenous Branch under the guidance of the late artist and filmmaker Michael Riley. Completing a Masters in Documentary Directing at AFTRS in 2001 gave Cole the time to experiment with both technologies and ideas. Though she considers herself foremost a documentary filmmaker, finding documentary making more challenging than drama, Cole’s two short films,Flat and Plains Empty, and her feature, Here I Am (2011), show a filmmaker with a remarkable affinity for both filmmaking and storytelling.

Craig Carter

The delicate use of light and shade, sound-silence and, when given the chance, the integration of sound design elements with music, all signal the work of Melbourne based sound designer Craig Carter. He has many accolades to his name, including the 2002 AFI award for best achievement in sound for Rabbit-proof Fence (Noyce 2002). Other credits include: The Home Song Stories (Ayres 2007), Head On (Kokkinos 1998) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller 1985).

David Tranter (Alyawaree) Sound recordist David Tranter started his career in the 1980s as a sound trainee at CAAMA. He has worked on hundreds of productions at CAAMA and many award- winning documentaries, television series and films. Tranter has built up his knowledge and particular style through years of practical experience. He was the sound recordist on Samson and Delilah (Thornton 2009), which won the 2010 AFI award and the

160 Australian Screen Sound award for best sound. Other sound credits include The Darkside (Thornton 2013a) and Blood Lines (Nash 2007). Tranter is also a documentary writer and director and credits for these roles include Karlu Karlu: Devil’s Marbles (2009) and Crookhat and the Kulanada (2010).

Erica Glynn (Kaytej) Writer, director and Head of Indigenous Programs at Screen Australia, Erica Glynn started her career at CAAMA. She gained experience making documentaries for the communities surrounding Alice Springs before completing the three-year BA directing course at AFTRS. Glynn has made a number of documentaries, including Walk with Words (2000) and Ngangkari (2002). Her own frustration in trying to tell her stories, which include the 1998 award-winning filmMy Bed Your Bed (Glynn 1998), has inspired her to support new Indigenous filmmakers in telling their stories. InDreaming in Motion (Gallash 2007a), she had this to say about her work: ‘I love working with filmmakers, watching them define and refine their stories and skills.They’re brave and they’re inspiring, and they are making an impact. What could be better?’ (2007, p.36).

James Currie

James Currie has had an extraordinary career in sound, one that spans the advent of the New Australian Cinema in the early 1970s to the present day. Tertiary educated, Currie has applied both musicianship and independent thought to an impressive list of films; he is often credited as sound recordist, sound designer and sound mixer on the one film. He regularly collaborates with the same filmmakers, such as Rolf de Heer and Paul Cox. Currie has been nominated, and has won, an impressive number of local and international awards, including winning the AFI award for best sound track in 2006 for Ten Canoes (de Heer 2006). Film credits include Oranges and Sunshine (Loach 2010), The Tracker (de Heer 2002), Bad Boy Bubby (de Heer 1993) and We of the Never Never (Auzins 1982).

Jane Paterson

Starting her career in film sound postproduction in New Zealand, Paterson worked on a number of award-winning feature films as a Foley artist before moving toAustralia in 1993. A graduate of AFTRS, she continued to work on films as a sound editor. Her passion for sound and love of story contributed to her working on sound teams that

161 continually gained significant recognition for their sound design. Films include:Passion (Duncan 1999), Children of the Revolution (Duncan 1996), Bootmen (Perry 2000) and Oscar and Lucinda (Armstrong 1997). Qualified in Adult Education, Paterson has taught at AFTRS. She is also qualified in audiovisual archiving and is currently completing a Masters in Information Studies. She has most recently worked in film preservation at the Australian National Archives.

Liam Egan

Sound editor and supervisor Liam Egan has over thirty years experience working in the film and television industry. Co-founder of Counterpoint Sound and later working freelance in the Australian film and television industry, Egan’s sound design shows an innate understanding of the role of sound in film and his editing and design style has enhanced and benefited many films and resulted in both recognition and awards. He headed the sound team that won the 2010 AFI award for best achievement in sound for Samson and Delilah (Thornton 2009). Other credits include: The Hunter (Nettheim 2011), Walking on Water (Ayres 2002) and Idiot Box (Caesar 1996).

Peter Fenton

Peter Fenton is known as a rugby coach, poet, published author, journalist and public speaker. However, the Australian film industry cherishes him for his illustrious career as ‘doyen’, or veteran sound mixer. Bowing out in 1997 with Bruce Bereford’s Paradise Road (Beresford 1997), Fenton mixed approximately 150 feature films in his career as sound mixer. Other credits include The Russia House (Schepisi 1990), Evil Angels (Schepisi 1988), Gallipoli (Weir 1981), Newsfront (Noyce 1978) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975). In 1998 the Australian Screen Sound Guild presented him with a Lifetime Achievement award in recognition of his contribution to the Australian film industry. Fenton is an invaluable resource because he is one of just a few sound people who experienced the beginning of the New Australian Cinema and worked through the numerous changes in the Australian film industry, including policy and technology.

Peter Smith

Peter Smith has an easygoing personality that is well suited to the diplomatic manoeuvres necessary for a successful sound mix. Based in Adelaide, demand dictates that he travel to other cities to work with sound editors, directors and producers. Smith has a reputation as an astute and talented mixer and his credit list is impressive. In

162 2013 he won an AACTA26 award for best sound for The Sapphires (Blair 2012). Credits include: Happy Feet Two (Miller 2011), Lucky Miles (Rowland 2007), In a Savage Land (Bennett 1999) and Robbery Under Arms (Hannam 1985).

Phil Judd

Phil Judd, mixer and owner of Philmsound, a sound postproduction facility in Sydney, has spent nearly fifty years working in the Australian film industry. Phil Judd, mixer and owner of Philmsound, a sound postproduction facility in Sydney, has spent nearly fifty years working in the Australian film industry. The Australian film industry has benefited from Phil’s vast experience and dedication to sound excellence. During this time Phil has accrued a wealth of accolades to his name, including winning the highly esteemed USA Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel award in 1992 for Black Robe (Beresford 1991). Other film credits include:Satellite Boy (McKenzie 2012), The Tender Hook (Ogilvie 2008), Dead Calm (Noyce 1989), Long Weekend (Eggleston 1978) and The Last Wave (Weir 1977). In 2001 he was awarded a Centenary Medal for services to the Australian community and the Australian film industry.

Philip Brophy

Brophy writes, lectures, directs, produces, sound designs, composes and performs across arts, music and film. His publications range across all his interests and include The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (2008c), 1OO Modern Soundtracks (2008b) and 100 Anime (2008a), as well as three books edited from the Cinesonic International Conferences in Film Scores & Sound Design held in Melbourne (1999, 2000, 2001). Brophy instigated the Cinesonic Conferences, which drew key figures from academia as well as composers and sound designers. His fascination with horror, sex and exploitation are well documented and explored, including in two of his films; Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat (1998) and Body Melt (Brophy 1993). He has curated a large number of exhibitions including the anime retrospective, Focus on Tezuka (2006), for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). He has had numerous commissions, producing audiovisual mixed-media works that include The Body Malleable (2004), commissioned by the Digital Media Fund and exhibited at ACMI, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Museum of Art in Osaka (Japan),

26 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts. Previously known as the AFI Awards, the Australian Film Institute created an ‘Australian Academy’ and launched the AACTA Awards as its highest accolade to screen and sound excellence.

163 Cultuursite Mechelen in Belgium, and housed on permanent display in the Museum of New and Old Art in Hobart, Tasmania.

Rolf de Heer

Rolf de Heer has a long history as a filmmaker. His films generate a lot of interest and debate from within the industry as well as from academia. Often writing, producing and directing his own films, De Heer works across a broad spectrum of film styles. Examples of his work include Incident at Raven’s Gate (1998), Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Ten Canoes (Heer 2006). Each film is deftly created with depth, intelligence and love, and with respect for storyline and character. The soundtracks of de Heer’s films are notable for the way they facilitate the storytelling process as well as for their skilful crafting.

Romaine Moreton (Goernpil and Bundulung) Dr Romaine Moreton divides her time between audiovisual research, film and documentary making, and writing and performing poetry. Her work carries a wonderful sense of light, shade, sound and rhythm. In 2014 she was appointed a research fellow/ filmmaker-in-residence in the school of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University. Moreton has recently completed a trans-media exhibition called One Billion Beats (2013), in collaboration with Campbelltown Arts Centre. Drawing from the audiovisual archives at the National Film and Sound Archive and AIATSIS27, she utilised the recordings of Indigenous peoples to engage an audience and create a discussion that focuses on the contemporary use of ethnographic material and Indigenous cultural heritage preservation. Moreton is also a curator for Australian Screen, the National Film and Sound Archive audiovisual heritage site. She has published over a hundred works of poetry, prose and short story. Her anthologies include Poems from a Homeland (2012b) and Post Me to the Prime Minister (2004). Moreton wrote the screenplays for Redreaming the Dark (Glynn 1997) and Cherish (Jones 1997), both of which were invited to screen in 1998 at the Cannes Film Festival in the fringe program. She wrote and directed the award-winning filmThe Farm (2009) and her second film,The Oysterman (2012a), will be released in 2014.

27 Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

164 Sue Brooks

After completing a diploma in still photography, filmmaker Sue Brooks studied cinematography at AFTRS before moving into directing. When interviewed, Brooks discussed how she saw herself as a ‘bower bird’ (2009) in relation to the influence of other filmmakers, noting that when she watches films she is ‘always watching the effect of how sound affects both script and the film’. Brooks uses a deft touch when bringing slices of Australian life to the screen. With thirty years experience in the film and television industry, she has accumulated accolades and recognition for much of her work, including Road to Nhill (1997) and Japanese Story (Brooks 2003), which won the 2003 AFI award for best film. Her most recent film isSubdivision (2009b).

Sally Riley (Wiradjuri)

Sally Riley worked as theatre director and writer-in-residence at CAAMA TV before taking up a position as trainee producer at Film Australia. She wrote and directed the award-winning Fly Peewee Fly (1998) in 1998 as part of the AFC’s (now Screen Australia) Indigenous Branch’s first drama initiative,From Sand to Celluloid. She has written, produced and directed both documentary and drama. Riley was Head of Screen Australia’s Indigenous Programs for nine years and during this time her talent, ability and generosity were focused on supporting and encouraging other Indigenous filmmakers. Her initiatives, including the short film programs, have helped create a legacy of talented filmmakers with an impressive body of film work that covers documentary, short films and feature films. Currently Head of ABC TV’s Indigenous Department, Riley has been responsible for expanding Indigenous content on prime- time television as well as the ongoing production of the weekly Message Stick program. Riley was awarded the Australian Public Service Medal in 2008 for her contribution and services to Indigenous Australians in the film and television industries.

Tony Vaccher

Tony Vaccher, co-director of sound facility Audioloc, started his career at AFTRS. He has become a talented and esteemed sound mixer and editor. Audioloc has attained many accolades and their film and television credits includeBright Star (Campion 2009), The Sum of Us (Dowling 1994) and the television series All Saints (Seven Network 1998-2009). Vaccher recently completed Top of The Lake (Campion and Davis 2013), which was awarded the 2014 AACTA for best sound in a mini-series.

165 Warwick Thornton (Kaytej) Warwick Thornton is an award-winning cinematographer, director and multi-media artist. His credits as cinematographer include The Sapphires (Blair 2012) and Here I Am (Cole 2011). He shoots and directs his own films, including the award-winningSamson and Delilah (2009b) and the recent documentary The Darkside (2013a). Thornton advertised for people to come forward with their personal encounters with ghosts. Actors recount some of these ghost stories in the documentary, which had its premier at Corroboree Sydney 2013. The Darkside is a cross-platform work; a documentary, it also incorporates a mobile App and a website that allows participants to document their own experiences with ghosts. Thornton’s interdisciplinary works include his prints and 3D video that form Stranded (2011); Mother Courage (2012), a film installation commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image; and a print installation that forms part of the exhibition Debil Debil (2013b), curated by Professor Marcia Langton. Awards include: 2013 AACTA for best cinematography for The Sapphires, and AFI best direction and best cinematography for Samson and Delilah.

Wayne Pashley

Director of Big Bang Sound Design, Wayne Pashley has received both praise and accolades for his contribution to the Australian film industry. Listening to his film soundtracks, it is easy to hear the clarity and complexity for which he is known at play in the overall film experience. In 2014 he won the Australian Film Institute ACCTA award for best sound in a feature, for The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann 2013). Other credits include: Australia (Luhrmann 2008), Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two ((Miller 2006, 2011) and Kiss or Kill (Bennett 1997).

166 Sources

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Altman, R. 1980, ‘Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism’, in Yale French Studies: Cinema/Sound, no. 60, pp. 67–79. Altman, R. 1999, Film/Genre, British Film Institute, London. Appadurai, A. 1990, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 1–24. Balázs, B. 1985, ‘Theory of the Film: Sound’, in Elisabeth Weis & John Belton (eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice, Columbia University, New York, pp. 116–25. Bergson, H. 1911, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul & W. Scott Palmer, Macmillian, London. Bhabha, H. K. 1994, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London. Bhabha, H. K. 1997, ‘The World and the Home’, in Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat & Anne McClintock (eds), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 445–55. Bordwell, D. & Thompson K. 2013, Film Art: An Introduction, 10th edn, McGraw-Hill, New York. Bostock, L. 2007, ‘Indigenous Screen Culture: A Personal Experience’, in Keith Gallasch (ed.), Dreaming in Motion, Australian Film Commission, Australia, pp. 7–12. Brophy, P. (ed.) 1999, Cinesonic: The World of Sound in Film, Australian Film Television and Radio School, Australia. Brophy, P. (ed.) 2000, Cinesonic: Cinema and the Sound of Music, Australian Film Television and Radio School, Australia. Brophy, P. (ed.) 2001, Cinesonic: Experiencing the Soundtrack, Australian Film Television and Radio School, Australia. Brophy, P. 2008a, 100 Anime, British Film Institute, England. Brophy, P. 2008b, 100 Modern Sound Tracks, British Film Institute, England. Brophy, P. 2008c, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Currency Press, Sydney. Brophy, P. 2008d, ‘Where Sound Is: Locating the Absent Aural in Film Theory’, in James Donald & Michael Renov (eds), The Sage Handbook of Film Studies,

167 Sage, Los Angeles, pp. 424–35. Buscombe, E. 2006, ‘Injuns!’ Native Americans in the Movies, Reaktion Books, Great Britain. Byrne, D. 2007, Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia, AltaMira Press, New York. Carter, P. 2004, ‘Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing and Auditory Space’, in Veit Erlmann (ed.), Hearing Cultures, Berg, Oxford, pp. 43–63. Chion, M. 1994, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, New York. Chion, M. 1999, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, New York. Chion, M. 2009, Film, a Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, New York. Collins, F. & Davis, T. 2004, Australian Cinema After Mabo, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Connor, S. 2004, ‘Sound and the Self’, in Mark Smith (ed.), Hearing History, University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA, pp. 54–56. Coombs, F. & Gemmell, S. 1999, ‘Preface’, in Piano Lessons: Approaches to ‘The Piano’, Felicity Coombs & Suzanne Gemmell (eds), John Libby & Company Ltd, Sydney, pp. viii–x. Davison, G. 1993, The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Deleuze, G. 1989, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, The Athlone Press, London. Dermody, S. & Jacka E. 1987, The Screening of Australia: Anatomy of a Film Industry, vol. 1, Currency Press, Sydney. Dermody, S. & Jacka E. 1988a, The Imaginary Industry: Australian Film in the Late ‘80s, AFTRS Publications, Australia. Dermody, S. & Jacka E. 1988b, The Screening of Australia: Anatomy of a National Cinema, vol. 2, Currency Press, Sydney. Derrida, J. 2006, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, New York. Doane, M. A. 1985, ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’, in Elisabeth Weis & John Belton (eds), Film Sound: Theory and Practice, Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 162–76. Feld, S. 2000, ‘Sound Worlds’, in Patricia Kruth & Henry Stobart (eds), Sound, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 173–200. Gaines, J. 1990, ‘White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory’, in Patricia Erens (ed.), Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, Indiana

168 University Press, Bloomington. Gall, A. & Probyn-Rapsey, F. 2006, ‘Ivan Sen and the Art of the Road’, Screen, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 425–39. Gallash, K. (ed.) 2007a, Dreaming in Motion: Celebrating Australia’s Indigenous Filmmakers, Australian Film Commission, Australia. Gallasch, K. 2007b, ‘Australian Indigenous Film, a Community of Makers’, in Keith Gallasch (ed.), Dreaming in Motion: Celebrating Australia’s Indigenous Filmmakers, Australian Film Commission, Sydney, pp. 13–20. Gelder, K & Jacobs, J. 1998, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South. Gelder, K. & Weaver, R. (eds) 2007, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, Melbourne University Press, Australia. Ghandi, L. 1998, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Gibson, R. 1984, The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia, Sirius Books, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Gibson, R. 2002, Seven Versions of a Bad Land, Queensland University Press, Australia. Gibson, R. 2006, ‘Acting and Breathing’, in Lesley Stern & George Kouvaros (eds), Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, Power Publications, Sydney, pp. 37–48. Ginsburg, F. 2003, ‘Screen Memories and Entangled Technologies: Resignifying Indigenous Lives’, in Ella Shohat & Robert Stam (eds), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media, Rutgers University Press, Piscataway, NJ, pp. 77–98. Gledhill, C. 1987, ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, British Film Institute, London, pp. 5–39. Goldman, M. & Saul, J. Spring 2006, ‘Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production’, University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 2, pp. 645–55. Gordon, A. F. 2007, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 5th edn, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Grant, B. K. 2007, Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology, Wallflower, London. hooks, b. 1992, Black Looks: Race and Representation, Sound End Press, Boston. Howes, D. 1991, ‘Introduction: To Summon all the Senses’, in David Howes (ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Jolley, E. 1986, The Well, Ringwood, Australia.

169 Klein, A. A. 2011, American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures, University of Texas Press, Austin. Kristeva, J. 1980, ‘Place Names’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Columbia University Press, New York, p. 282. Kristeva, J. 1991, Strangers to Ourselves, Harvester/Wheatsheaf, New York. Langton, M. 1993, Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television…, Australian Film Commission, Australia. Laseur, C. 1993, ‘beDevil: Colonial Images, Aboriginal Memories’, Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, no. 37, pp. 1–10. Lastra, J. 2000, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity, Columbia University Press, New York. Lawrence, A. 1991, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, University of California Press, Berkeley. Lawson, H. 2007, ‘The Bush Undertaker’, in Ken Gelder & Rachael Weaver (eds), The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 139–46. LeDoux, J. 2003, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, Penguin Books, New York. Lim, B. C. 2009, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Lindsay, J. 1967, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Buccaneer Books, Inc., New York. López, A. 1991, ‘The Melodramatic in Latin America: Films, Telenovelas, and the Currency of a Popular Form’, in Marcia Landy (ed.), Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, pp. 597–606. MacAdams, S. & Bigan, E., 1993, ‘Introduction to Auditory Cognition’, in Stephen MacAdams & Emmanuel Bigand (eds), Thinking in Sound: The Cognitive Psychology of Human Audition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 1–9. McLuhan, M. 1971, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 4th edn, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Marks, L. Autumn 1994, ‘A Deleuzian Politics of Hybrid Cinema’, Screen, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 244–64. Marks, L. 2000, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Mayne, J. 1993, Cinema and Spectatorship, Routledge, London. Miller, S. May 2009, ‘Shooting from the Heart’, Deadly Vibe, no. 147, pp. 4–5.

170 Mills, J. 2009, Loving & Hating Hollywood: Reframing Global and Local Cinemas, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Moine, R. 2008, Cinema Genre, trans. Alistair Fox & Hilary Radner, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. Moreton, R. 2004, Post Me to the Prime Minister, IAD Press, Australia. Moreton, R. 2012b, Poems from a Homeland, Hatje Cantz, Germany. Morris, M. June–August 1987, ‘Tooth and Claw: Tales of Survival, and Crocodile Dundee’, Art & Text, no. 25, pp. 36–68. Morris, M. 1998, ‘White Panic or Mad Max and the Sublime’, in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York, pp. 239–62. Naficy, H. 2003, ‘Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational Film Genre’, in Ella Shohat & Robert Stam (eds), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, pp. 203–26. Neale, S. 2000, Genre and Hollywood, Routledge, London. Nowra, L. 2003, Walkabout, Currency Press Pty Ltd and ScreenSound Australia, Australia. Olubas, B. Spring 2005, ‘Image, Affect and Memory: Relations of Looking in Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil!’, Southerly, vol. 65, no. 1, pp. 81–90. Ong, W. J. August 1969, ‘World as View and World as Event’, American Anthropologist, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 634–47. Ong, W. 1982, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Methuen, London. O’Rawe, D. Winter 2006, ‘The Great Secret: Silence, Cinema and Modernism’, Screen, vol. 47, no. 4. pp. 395–405. O’Regan, T. 1996, Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London. Peek, P. 2000, ‘Re-Sounding Silences’, in Patricia Kruth & Henry Stobart (eds), Sound, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 16–33. Petro, P. 1995, ‘After Shock/Between Boredom and History’, in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, pp. 265–84. Pierce, P. 1999, The Country of Lost Children, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Powell, A. & Smith, A. 2006, ‘Introduction: Gothic Pedagogies’, in Anna Powell & Andrew Smith (eds), Teaching the Gothic, Palgrave MacMillian, New York, pp. 1–9. Probyn-Rapsey, F. 2007, ‘Bitumen Films in Postcolonial Australia’, Journal of

171 Australian Studies, no. 88, pp. 97–104. Rayner, J. 2000, Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Rayner, J. 2005, ‘Terror Australis: Areas of Horror in the Australian Cinema’, in Steven Jay Schneider & Tony Williams (eds), Horror International, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI, pp. 98–113. Rodaway, P. 1994, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place, Routledge, London. Rosolato, G. 1974, ‘La Voix: Entre Corps et Langage’, Revue Francaise de Sychanalyse, vol. 37, no. 1, p. 81. Schaber, B. 1997, ‘Hitler Can’t Keep ‘em that Long: The Road, the People’, in Steven Cohan & Ina Rae Hark (eds), The Road Movie Book, Routledge, London, pp. 17–44. Schafer, M. R. 1994, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Destiny Books, Rochester, UK. Sergi, G. 2001, ‘The Sonic Playground: Hollywood Cinema and its Listeners’, in Melvyn Stokes & Richard Maltby (eds), Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, British Film Institute Publishing, UK, pp. 121–31. Silverman, K. 1988, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Sjogren, B. 2006, Into the Vortex: Female Voice and the Paradox in Film, University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Smith, M. M. 2004, Hearing History, University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA. Sontag, S. 1969, Styles of Radical Will, Farrar, Staus and Giroux, New York. Thomas, D. & Gillard, G. Autumn 2003, ‘Threads of Resemblance in New Australian Gothic Cinema’, Metro Magazine, no. 136, pp. 36–45. Tomas, D. 1996, Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, Westview Press, Oxford. Turcotte, G. Winter 2007, ‘Ghosts of the Great South Land’, The Global South, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 109–16. Turcotte, G. 2009, Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction, Peter Lang, Brussels. Turner, G. Summer 1994–1995, ‘Whatever Happened to National Identity? Film and Nation in the 1990s’, Metro Magazine, no. 100, pp. 32–35. Wilde, W. H., Hooton, J. & Andrews, B. 1995, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne/New York. Williams, L. 1997, Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, Rutgers University Press,

172 New Brunswick, NJ. Williams, L. 1998, ‘Melodrama Revised’, in Nick Brown (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 42–88. Wimmer, A. 2004, ‘Richard Flanagan’s Novel and Film The Sound of One Hand Clapping and Australia’s Multicultural Film Genre’, in Miroslawa Buchholtz (ed.), Postcolonial Subjects: Canadian and Australian Perspectives, Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, Poland. Wisker, G. 2006, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, in Anna Powell & Andrew Smith (eds), Teaching the Gothic, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 168–81.

Government publications

Australian Film Commission, 1975, ‘Appendix 1: Australian Film Commission Powers and Functions. Section 5 of the Australian Film Commission Act 1975’, in First Annual Report and Financial Statements 5th May – 30th June 1975, Australian Government Publishing Service, Australia.

Online sources

Browning, D. 2002, Ivan Sen Interview, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, viewed 17 January 2007, . Browning, D. 18 April 2009, Awaye: Indigenous Art and Culture, ABC Radio National, Interview with Warwick Thornton, viewed 12 February 2009, . Davis, T. 2009, ‘Love and Social Marginality in Samson and Delilah’, Senses of Cinema, no. 51, viewed 7 August 2009, . Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), 6 February 2008, SBSi Funding Boosted Until 2006 – Fact Sheet, Australia, viewed 5 September 2008, . Forrester, M. A. 2000, ‘Auditory Perception and Sound as Event: Theorising Sound Imagery in Psychology’, Sound Journal, viewed, 17 January 2008, . French, L. April 2000, ‘An Analysis of Nice Coloured Girls’, Senses of Cinema, viewed

173 23 August 2007, . Glennie, E. 1993, Hearing Essay, viewed 12 October 2006, . Howard, R. M. 2003, The Consequences of Writing Back: Negotiating Cultural Premises within National Media, viewed 22 August 2007, . Hurley, A. 2006, ‘Re-imagining Milirrpun v Nabalco in Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream’’, paper presented to the Passages: Law, Aesthetics, Politics Conference, Melbourne, 2006, viewed 22 August 2007, . Kernebone, F. 10 May 2009, Sunday Arts, ABC1, Interview with Warwick Thornton, viewed 12 February 2010, . Pomeranz, M. 29 April 2009, At the Movies, ABC1, Interview with Warwick Thornton, viewed 12 February 2010, . Siemienowicz, R. 24 May 2009, Samson and Delilah: Interview with Warwick Thornton and Kath Shelper, Australian Film Institute, viewed 10 June 2009, . Villella, F. April 2001, ‘Materialism and Spiritualism in The Goddess of 1967’, Senses of Cinema, viewed 5 March 2007, .

Interviews

Breslin, A. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Brooks, S. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Brophy, P. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Carter, C. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Cole, B. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Currie, J. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. de Heer, R. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Egan, L. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Fenton, P. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia.

174 Glynn, E. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia Judd, P. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Moreton, R. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Pashley, W. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Paterson, J. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Plain, A. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Riley, S. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Smith, P. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Thornton, W. 2009a, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Tranter, D. 2009, Audio interview, Anne Barnes, Australia. Vaccher, T. 2009, Audio Interview, Anne Barnes, Australia.

Films

The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, 1972, dir. Beresford, B. Longford Productions, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. Amy, 1998, dir. Tass, N. Cascade Films, distributed by Roadshow Entertainment, Australia. Australia, 2008, dir. Luhrmann, B. Dune Entertainment III & Ingenious Film Partners Bazmark Films, distributed by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, Australia. Bad Boy Bubby, 1993, dir. de Heer, R. Bubby Productions & Fandango, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. beDevil, 1993, dir. Moffatt, T. Southern Star Entertainment, distributed by Ronin Films, Australia. Beneath Clouds, 2002, dir. Sen, I. Autumn Films Pty. Ltd. distributed by Dendy Films, Australia. Black Robe, 1991, dir. Beresford, B. Alliance Communications Corporation & Samson Productions Pty. Ltd., distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Canada/Australia/ United States. Body Melt, 1993, dir. Brophy, P. Bodymelt Pty. Ltd. & Dumb Films, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. Bootmen, 2000, dir. Perry, D. Bootmen Productions, distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, Australia. Bright Star, 2009, dir. Campion, J. Pathé Renn Productions & Jan Chapman Pictures, distributed by Hopscotch Films, Australia. Careful, He Might Hear You, 1983, Schultz, C. Syme International Productions, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia.

175 The Cars that Ate Paris, 1974, dir. Weir, P. Royce Smeal Film Productions & Salt Pan, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. Cedar Boys, 2009, dir. Caradee, S. Templar Films, distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Australia. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1978, dir. Schepisi, F. The Film House, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. Cherish, 1997, dir. Jones, S. Australian Film Television and Radio School, Australia. Children of the Revolution, 1996, dir. Duncan, P. Rev Media, distributed by Roadshow Entertainment, Australia. The Combination, 2009, dir. Field, D. See Thru Films, distributed by Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Australia. Dead Calm, 1989, dir. Noyce, P. Kennedy Miller Productions, distributed by Warner Home Video, Australia. Dune, 1984, dir. Lynch, D. De Laurentiis, distributed by Universal Studios Home Entertainment, United States. Evil Angels, 1988, Schepisi, F. Warner Bros Pictures, distributed by Warner Bros Pictures, Australia. The Farm, 2009, dir. Moreton, R. Prod. John Harvey, distributed by Flickerfest Short Film Bureau, Australia. Flat, 2002, dir. Cole, B. Black Fella Films, Australia. Floating Life, 1996, dir. Law, C. Southern Star Entertainment, distributed by Hibiscus Films, Australia. Fly Peewee Fly, 1998, dir. Riley, S. Film Australia, Australia. The Fringe Dwellers, 1986, dir. Beresford, B. Fringe Dwellers Productions, distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Australia. Gallipoli, 1981, dir. Weir, P. motion picture, R & R Films, distributed by Roadshow Home Video, Australia. The Goddess of 1967, 2000, dir. Law, C. Still Life Pictures, distributed by Palace Films, Australia. The Great Gatsby, 2013, dir. Luhrmann, B. Bazmark Films & Red Wagon Entertainment, distributed by Warner Home Video, Australia. Green Bush, 2005, dir. Thornton, W. CAAMA Productions, distributed by Madman Entertainment, Australia. Happy Feet, 2006, dir. Miller, G. Kennedy Miller Productions, distributed by Warner Home Video, United States/Australia. Happy Feet Two, 2011, dir. Miller, G. Kennedy Miller Mitchell & Dr D Studios Village Roadshow Pictures, distributed by Warner Bros, Australia/United States.

176 Head On, 1998, dir. Kokkinos, A. Great Scott Productions, distributed by Palace Films, Australia. Heaven’s Burning, 1997, dir. Lahiff, C. Duo Art Productions, distributed by Becker Entertainment, Australia. Here I Am, 2011, Cole, B. Scarlett Pictures, distributed by Madman Entertainment, Australia. High Tide, 1987, dir. Armstrong, G. FGH, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. The Home Song Story, 2007, Ayres, T. Big & Little Films Pty. Ltd. & Porchlight Films, distributed by Madman Entertainment, Australia. The Hunter, 2011, dir. Nettheim, D. Porchlight Films, distributed by Madman Entertainment, Australia. Idiot Box, 1996, dir. Caesar, D. Central Park Films, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. In a Savage Land, 1999, dir. Bennett, B. Hollywood Partners, distributed by Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Australia. Incident at Raven’s Gate, 1998, dir. de Heer, R. Vertigo Productions, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. Inheritance, 1999, dir. Joseph, P. Australian Film Television and Radio School, Australia. Jack and Jill: A Postscript, 1970, dirs Adams, P. & Robinson, B. Phillip Adams & Brian Robinson, distributed by Columbia Pictures, Australia. Japanese Story, 2003, dir. Brooks, S. Gecko Films Pty. Ltd. distributed by Palace Films, Australia. Jedda, 1954, dir. Chauvel, C. Charles Chauvel Productions, distributed by National Film and Sound Archive, Australia. Killer Elite, 2011, dir. McKendry, Ambience Entertainment, distributed by Open Road Films, United Kingdom/Australia. Kiss or Kill, 1997, dir. Bennett, B. Bill Bennett Productions, distributed by Beyond Films, Australia. The Last Wave, 1977, Weir, P. Ayer Productions, Derek Power & McElroy &McElroy, distributed by Criterion Collection, Australia. Little Fish, 2005, dir. Woods, R. Porchlight Films, Mullis Capital Independent, Myriad Pictures & Dirty Films, distributed by Warner Home Video, Australia. Long Weekend, 1978, dir. Eggleston, C. Dugong Films & Victorian Film, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. Lucky Miles, 2007b, dir. Rowland, M. J. Puncture Pty. Ltd., distributed by Dendy Films,

177 Australia. Mad Dog Morgan, 1976, dir. Mora, P. Mad Dog, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. Mad Max, 1979, dir. Miller, G. Kennedy Miller Productions, distributed by Roadshow Entertainment, Australia. Mad Max 2, 1981, dir. Miller, G. Kennedy Miller Productions, distributed by Warner Bros, Australia. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, 1985, dirs. Miller, G & Ogilvie, G. Kennedy Miller Productions, distributed by Warner Home Video, Australia. Malcolm, 1986, dir. Tass, N. Cascade Films, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment Australia. Mimi, 2002, dir. Thornton, W. Blackfella Films, distributed by Madman Entertainment, Australia. The Monkey’s Mask, 2000, dir. Lang, S. Arenafilm, Canal + & Fandango, distributed by Madman Entertainment, Australia. Moving Out, 1983, dir. Pattinson, M. Pattinson Ballantyne Production, distributed by Roadshow Home Video, Australia. My Bed Your Bed, 1998, dir. Glynn, E. Chilli Films, distributed by Film Australia, Australia. Newsfront, 1978, dir. Noyce, P. Palm Beach Pictures, distributed by Roadshow Entertainment Video, Australia. Nice Coloured Girls, 1987, dir. & prod. Moffatt, T. distributed by Ronin Films, Australia. Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, 1989, dir. Moffatt, T. prod.Penny McDonald, distributed by Ronin Films, Australia. On the Beach, 1959, Kramer, S. Stanley Kramer Productions, distributed by MGM Home Entertainment, United States. Oranges and Sunshine, 2010, dir. Loach, J. Sixteen Films, distributed by Icon Film Distribution, United Kingdom/Australia. Oscar and Lucinda, 1997, dir. Armstrong, G. Dalton Films & Meridian Films distributed by Fox Video, Australia. The Overlanders, 1946, dir. Watt, H. Ealing Studios, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia/England. The Oysterman, 2012a, dir. Moreton, R. John Harvey, distributed by Flickerfest Short Film Bureau, Australia. Paradise Road, 1997, dir. Beresford, B. Samson Production, distributed by Roadshow Entertainment, Australia.

178 Passion, 1999, dir. Duncan, P. Beyond Films, distributed by Motion International, Australia. Payback, 1996, dir. Thornton, W. Black Fella Films, distributed by Madman Entertainment, Australia. The Piano, 1993, dir. Campion, J. CiBy 2000 & Jan Chapman Productions, distributed by Dendy Films, Australia/New Zealand. Picnic, 1955, dir. Logan, J. Columbia Pictures Corporation, distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, United States. Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975, dir. Weir, P. Picnic Productions Pty. Ltd. & McElroy & McElroy, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. Plains Empty, 2005, dir. Cole, B. Film Depot Pty. Ltd. and Scarlett Pictures, distributed by Flickerfest Short Film Bureau, Australia. Poltergeist, 1982, dir. Hooper, T. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, distributed by Warner Home Video, United States. The Quiet Room, 1997, dir. de Heer, R. Vertigo Productions, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. Rabbit-proof Fence, 2002, dir. Noyce, P. Rumbarlara Filma and Oslen Levy, distributed by Magna Pacific Pty.Ltd, Australia. Radiance, 1998, dir. Perkins, R. Eclipse Films, distributed by Mongrel Media, Australia. Redreaming the Dark, 1997, dir. Glynn, E. Australian Film Television and Radio School, Australia. Road to Nhill, 1997, Brooks, S. Gecko Films Pty. Ltd., distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. Robbery Under Arms, 1985, dirs Crombie, D. & Hannam, K. Incorporated Television Company (ITC), distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. The Russia House, 1990, dir. Schepisi, F. Pathé Entertainment and Star Partners III Ltd., distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, United States. Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat, 1998, dir. Brophy, P. Australia. Samson and Delilah, 2009b, dir. Thornton, W. Scarlett Productions and CAAMA, distributed by Madmen Entertainment, Australia. The Sapphires, 2012, dir. Blair, W. Goalpost Pictures, distributed by Hopscotch Films, Australia. Satellite Boy, 2012, dir. McKenzie, C. Satellite Films, distributed by Hopscotch Entertainment One, Australia. Shit Skin, 2002, dir. Boseley, N. Sista Girl Productions, Australia. The Sound of One Hand Clapping, 1998, dir. Flanagan, R. Artist Services, distributed by

179 Palace Films, Australia. La Spagnola, 2001, dir. Jacobs, S. Wild Strawberries, distributed by Palace Films, Australia. Subdivision, 2009b, dir. Brooks, S. Cane Toad Productions & Freshwater Pictures, distributed by Lightning Entertainment, Australia. The Sum of Us, 1994, dirs Burton, G. & Dowling, K. Southern Star Entertainment and Great Sum Film Limited Partnership, distributed by Hopscotch Films, Australia. Sunday Too Far Away, 1975, dir. Hannam, K. South Australian Film Corporation, distributed by Hopscotch Entertainment, Australia. The Sundowners, 1960, dir. Zinnemann, F. Warner Bros. Productions, distributed by Warner Home Video, United States. Ten Canoes, 2006, dir. de Heer. R. Vertigo Productions, distributed by Madman Entertainment, Australia. The Tender Hook, 2008, dir. Ogilvie, J. Mandala Films, distributed by Dendy Films, Australia. Those Dear Departed, 1987, dir. Robinson, T. Phillip Emanuel Productions, distributed by Roadshow Entertainment, Australia. Tomorrow When the War Began, 2010, dir. Beattie, S. Ambience Entertainment, distributed by Paramount Pictures, Australia. Toomelah, 2011, dir. Sen, I. Bunya Productions, distributed by Curious, Australia. Top of the Lake, 2013, dirs Campion, J. & Davis, G. See-Saw Films & Escapade Pictures, distributed by BBC Worldwide, Australia. The Tracker, 2002, dir. de Heer, R. Vertigo Productions, distributed by Madman Entertainment, Australia. Two Fists, One Heart, 2008, dir. Seet, S. Palm Beach Pictures, distributed by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, Australia. Unfinished Sky, 2007, Duncan, P. New Holland Pictures, distributed by Palace Films, Australia. Wake in Fright, 1971, dir. Kotcheff, T. Group W, distributed by Madmen Entertainment, Australia/United States. Walkabout, 1971, dir. Roeg, N. Si Litvinoff Film Production, distributed by 20th Century Fox Films Incorporated, England. Walking On Water, 2002, dir. Ayres, T. Porchlight Films, distributed by Madman Entertainment, Australia. Warm Strangers, 1997, dir. Sen, I. Australian Film Television and Radio School, Australia.

180 We of the Never Never, 1982, dir. Auzins, I. Adam Packer Film Productions, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia. The Well, 1997, dir. Lang, S. Federighi Films, distributed by The Globe Film Group, Australia. Where the Green Ants Dream, 1984, Herzog, W. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, distributed by New Vision Films, West Germany/Australia. Wind, 2002, dir. Sen, I. Mayfan Film Productions, distributed by Ronin Films, Australia. Yolngu Boy, 2001, dir. Johnson, S. Burrundi Pictures, distributed by Palace Films, Australia.

Documentaries

The Background to Lucky Miles in, Lucky Miles, 2007a, dir. Rowland, M. J. Puncture Pty. Ltd., distributed by Dendy Films, Australia. Crookhat and the Kulunda, 2010, dir. Tranter, D. documentary, CAAMA, distributed by CAAMA, Australia. The Darkside, 2013a, dir. Thornton, W. Scarlett Pictures, distributed by Transmission, Australia. First Australians, 2008, dirs Cole, B & Perkins, R. Blackfella Films, distributed by Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), Australia. Karlu Karlu: Devil’s Marbles, 2009, dir. Tranter, D. CAAMA, distributed by CAAMA, Australia. Making Samson and Delilah, in Samson and Delilah, 2009b, dir. Cole, B. Scarlett Pictures, Madman Entertainment, Australia. Ngangkari, 2002, dir. Glynn, E. AFC Indigenous Branch, distributed by Ronin Films, Australia. Walk With Words, 2000, dir. Glynn, E. Seymour Films, distributed by Ronin Films, Australia. Wirrija: Small Boy, 2004, dir. Cole, CAAMA, distributed by Ronin Films, Australia.

Television

All Saints 1998–2009, Seven Network, Red Heart Entertainment, distributed by EMI and Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Australia. Astor Showcase, 1957–1959, Channel 7, Australia. Blood Lines, 2007, dir. Nash, J. Scarlett Pictures, distributed by Flickerfest Short Film Bureau, Australia. Home and Away, 1987– , Red Heart Entertainment, distributed by Seven

181 Network, Australia. Police Rescue, 1989–1996, Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), distributed by Warner Vision, Australia. Skippy, 1966–1969, Fauna Productions, distributed by Umbrella Entertainment, Australia.

Music

‘All I Have to Offer You (is me)’, 2009, Pride, C., on Samson & Delilah: Music from the Film (CD), Australian Broadcasting Commission, Universal Music Australia Pty Limited, Australia. ‘Como Olvidar’, 2009, Gabriel, A., on Samson & Delilah: Music from the Film (CD), Australian Broadcasting Commission, Universal Music Australia Pty Limited, Australia. ‘Skanky Reggae’, 2009, Desert Mulga Band, on Samson & Delilah: Music from the Film (CD), Australian Broadcasting Commission, Universal Music Australia Pty Limited, Australia. ‘Sunshiny Day’, 2009, Pride, C., on Samson & Delilah: Music from the Film (CD), Australian Broadcasting Commission, Universal Music Australia Pty Limited, Australia. ‘Warlpiri Woman’, 2009, Lajamanu Teenage Band, on Samson & Delilah: Music from the Film (CD), Australian Broadcasting Commission, Universal Music Australia Pty Limited, Australia.

Audiovisual exhibitions

The Body Malleable, 2004, Brophy, P. Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Australia. Focus on Tezuka, 2006, Tezuka, O. curated by Philip Brophy, Anime Retrospective, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Australia. Mother Courage, 2012, Thornton, W. Scarlett Pictures and Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Australia. Stranded, 2011, Thornton, W. Scarlett Pictures, Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection, Australia.

182 Exhibitions

Untitled still images: 1,2,3, 2013b, Thornton, W., in Debil Debil exhibition, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia.

Peformance One Billion Beats, 2013, Moreton, R., Campbelltown Arts Centre, Australia.

183