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‘Imagined Sound’ is a unique cartography of the artistic, historical and political forces that have informed the post-World War II representation of Australian landscapes. It is the first book to formulate the unique methodology of ‘imagined sound’, a new way to read and listen to literature and music that moves beyond the dominance of the visual, the colonial mode of knowing, controlling and imagining Australian space. Emphasising sound and listening, this approach draws out and re-examines the key narratives that shape and are shaped by Australian landscapes and histories, stories of first contact, frontier violence, the explorer journey, the convict experience, non-Indigenous belonging, Pacific identity and contemporary Indigenous Dreaming. ‘Imagined Sound’ offers a compelling analysis of how these narratives are reharmonised in key works of literature and music.
‘These essays take us closer to a recognition of the role of sound in the formation of national identity, a far more complex dynamic than simplistic celebrations of, for example, “national” musics. They reveal the contradictions and fissures in the bland generalisations that have generally underpinned representations of Australian identity.’
—Bruce Johnson, Professor, University of Technology Sydney, Australia; University of Turku, Finland; and University of Glasgow, UK
Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction – Imagined Sound; Part One: Listening to the Continent; 1. Reimagining ‘the centre’: Francis Webb’s ‘Eyre All Alone’ and David Lumsdaine’s Aria for Edward John Eyre; 2. Midnight Oil: Sounding Australian Rock around the Bicentenary; 3. Sound and Silence: Listening and Relation in the Novels of Alex Miller; Part Two: Listening to Islands and Archipelagos; 4. An Archipelago of Convicts and Outsiders: The Songs of The Drones and Gareth Liddiard; 5. 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; 6. A Sonic Passage Between Islands: Mutiny Music by Baecastuff; Part Three: Listening to the Continental Archipelago; 7. Noisy Songlines in the Top End; Coda; Notes; Works Cited; Index.