Australian Literature and Music, 1945 to Present
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The Space and Time of Imagined Sound: Australian Literature and Music, 1945 to Present Joseph Cummins A thesis in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences 2015 Acknowledgements Since I started as an undergraduate, Elizabeth McMahon and John Napier have inspired and guided my intellectual pathway. I’ll always remember John playing Bartok and Ravel, and Liz lecturing on Whitman and Tsiolkas. Without their encouragement, knowledge, discussion, editing skills and advice this project would not have taken place. Thank you both. Ashley Barnwell. Thank you for all your encouragement, inspiration, support, and love. You are my partner in crime, always willing to discuss, deconstruct, and argue. Thanks for your help in the last six months of this project, for pushing my writing, and for reading through the final copy. Alister Spence, Phil Slater and Helen Groth have been great and generous mentors to me during my time at UNSW. Thank you for your encouragement and advice. A particular thank you to Al and Phil, from whom I learnt so much. Thanks to my family, my music family, ASAL, AAL, IASPM, CMSA, Maroubra, Sydney Roosters, and International Grammar School. For sparking my love of the literary and historical, and for her encouragement, example of open mindedness and discussion, and genuine interest in my work, this thesis is dedicated to Nan Colleen. Abstract This thesis examines the space and time of imagined sound in Australian post-World War Two literature and music. Using what I term a critical close listening methodology, I will discuss a range of novels, poems, songs, song suites, film clips and art music compositions that, through a return to various times in the past, offer a remapping of Australian space. Literary and musical representations of the post-European settlement era – narratives as diverse as the desert explorer imagined by both Francis Webb in his poetic sequence ‘Eyre All Alone’ (1961) and David Lumsdaine in his electro-acoustic composition Aria for Edward John Eyre (1972), the convict and outsiders songs of The Drones and Gareth Liddiard (2006 and 2010), the soundings of mythic island foundations in Baecastuff’s Mutiny Music (2006 - present) and the destruction and rebirth of the continental top-end in Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (2006) – resonate within key moments of the post-war era, such as the search for the centre, the shift towards recognition of Indigenous custodianship in the post-Mabo period, and the move beyond the boundaries of the nation. Drawing together literary and musical works in seven chapters, I consider representations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous experiences of a range of Australian geoimaginaries – the continent, the archipelago, and the island. I argue that the close listening method, with its focus on sound, generates a unique cartography of the artistic, historical, and political harmonics of the works assembled, while also creating a productive dialogue between the distinct mediums of the works. These statements of postcolonial spatiotemporal difference deepen our understanding of the complexity of fundamental national spaces and times, mapping the development of pivotal geoimaginaries that accompanied the historical terrain of the post-war period. Table of Contents Introduction ____________________________________________________1 The Space and Time of Imagined Sound: Australian Literature and Music, 1945 to Present First Suite: The Continental Interior Chapter One ___________________________________________________19 Replacing the Centre: Francis Webb’s ‘Eyre All Alone’ and David Lumsdaine’s Aria for Edward John Eyre Chapter Two ___________________________________________________ 56 Sounding Australian Rock Around the Bicentenary: Midnight Oil Chapter Three __________________________________________________ 81 Silence and Sound: The Soundscapes of Alex Miller Second Suite: The Island and Archipelago Chapter Four ___________________________________________________ 104 An Archipelago of Convicts and Outsiders: The Songs of The Drones and Gareth Liddiard Chapter Five ____________________________________________________ 123 Echoes Between Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania: The Space of the Island in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm Chapter Six _____________________________________________________ 143 A Sonic Passage Between Islands: Baecastuff’s Mutiny Music Chapter Seven __________________________________________________ 172 Noisy Songlines: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria Conclusion _____________________________________________________ 199 Listening to Australian Post-War Literature and Music Introduction The Space and Time of Imagined Sound: Australian Literature and Music, 1945 to Present This thesis examines the space and time of imagined sound in Australian post-World War Two literature and music. Using what I term a critical close listening methodology, I will discuss a range of novels, poems, songs, song suites, film clips and art music compositions that, through a return to various times in the past, offer a remapping of Australian space. I discuss literary and musical representations of the post-European settlement era, encountering narratives as diverse as the desert explorer’s journey through the desert imagined by both Francis Webb in his poetic sequence ‘Eyre All Alone’ (1961) and David Lumsdaine in his electro-acoustic composition Aria for Edward John Eyre (1972), the convict and outsider stories of The Drones and Gareth Liddiard (2006 and 2010), the soundings of mythic island foundations in Baecastuff’s Mutiny Music (2006 - present), and the destruction and rebirth of the continental top- end in Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (2006). These works resonate within key moments of the post-war era, such as the search for the centre, the shift towards recognition of Indigenous custodianship in the post-Mabo period, and the move beyond the boundaries of the nation. Drawing together literary and musical works in seven chapters, I consider representations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous experiences of a range of Australian geoimaginaries – the continent, the archipelago, and the island.1 I argue that my critical close listening method, with its focus on sound, generates a unique cartography of the artistic, historical, and political harmonics of the works assembled, while also creating a productive dialogue between the distinct mediums of the works. Such an approach is an experiment in method: close listening is a critical machine for engaging with literary and musical texts. The statements of postcolonial spatiotemporal difference produced by this method deepen our understanding of the complexity of fundamental national spaces and times and map the development of pivotal geoimaginaries that accompanied the historical terrain of the post-war period. 1 ‘Geoimaginary’ is the term I use to describe the bundle of both real and imaginary ideas relating to a geographic space such as the centre, the bush, the coast, the island and the archipelago. 1 The critical close listening method highlights three interrelated lines of inquiry – into sound, space and time – which underpin my work. While these lines are intimately connected in each chapter, here I will attempt to unravel them to elucidate my methodology and the critical and comparative work I will perform, and to track the evolution of these filaments of discussion across the span of the thesis. My focus on sound and listening emerges from the pairing of literature and music, two mediums and critical fields – each of which contain a number of distinct genres – that feature as many conceptual similarities as they do material, methodological and generic differences. The methodology I have formulated to approach a range of works and genres is inspired, in equal parts, by the close reading of texts common to literary studies and the score analysis familiar to musicology. I argue that refocusing these scholarly approaches via listening and sound bridges the chasm between the two mediums and fields, allowing for a fluid discussion across different mediums and genres that remains alert to the unique ways each work of music or literature represents distinct Australian times and spaces. My approach of critical close listening emerged from the habit of reading novels with close attention to any description of sound, and transformed to encompass listening to and reading works of literature and music side by side, with an ear attuned to how authors and composers working in the period between mid-century and the present represent Australian landscapes and histories. The method aims to bring to bear the critical attention inherent to close reading and direct it onto my constellation of concerns with sound, space and time in the post-war period. At the foundations of my comparative discussion is imagined sound, a concept that describes the spatiotemporal relations created by the sound evoked in literature and music. It is imagined sound because it is created by descriptive language, not through physical vibration. Thus imagined sound is an extension of the range of heard sound, particularly in relation to the sound of music. The first question is, how does imagined sound create and interact with space and time? The idea emerges from a throwaway phrase made by Benedict Anderson in his key study of nationalism, Imagined Communities (1983). Discussing the role of song in the formation of the nation and the ‘unisonance’