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COPYRIGHT 2007 Australia Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology
Auditory experience has, in recent years, become something of a preoccupation for cultural historians. Quite apart from the need to address the imbalances of a visually fixated culture, the idea of the 'soundscape' resonates with a number of topical themes, among them the growing interest in the human sensorium and the now well-established concern for ecology and the environment. As Paul Carter pointed out in the early 1990s, sound is also germane to the study of cross-cultural encounter, with all its ambiguities of translation, mistranslation and pidginisation. (1) Although it is not always acknowledged, this type of analysis owes much to R Murray Schafer, the guru of sound studies, whose book The Tuning of the World has been basic reading for audiophiles since its publication in 1977. (2)
In the past decade or so, acoustically oriented history-writing has become a sub-genre of the discipline. The classic Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside (1994) by Alain Corbin, Listening in Paris by James H Johnson, and The Sounds of Slavery (2005) by Shane White and Graham White are just a few of many titles that could be named. More recently, Diane Collins's writing on acoustic interpretation of Australia's discovery and colonisation pre-empts a forthcoming book. (3) History, then, is being listened to as well as looked at. A reader has been published on the subject. (4) And yet, for all this interest, much of the literature has a peculiar trait, evident in the studies mentioned. Our acoustically minded historians are strongly drawn to epochs and subjects that precede sound recording. So their evocations of aural experience are constructed from sources that are entirely silent. As a consequence, the sonic 'revolution' has been quieter than might have been expected. Media history remains bracketed as its own specialisation, rather than something that all of us do, and too many historians still lazily mine oral histories (or preferably transcripts of them) for content alone--ignoring the ambience of the tape, the theatrics of the interview and the particularities of the medium, all of which affect the evidential value. This attitude suggests a lack of interest in, or hostility to, questions of media and technology, just as it reflects the logocentrism that is common not only to historiography, but to western scholarship in general. The bias towards written knowledge is itself hardly peripheral to discussions of sound. As Walter J Ong pointed out many years ago now, writing was the first technology to disrupt the temporal uniqueness of speech. Writing, as Ong puts it, involves 'the reduction of the dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist'. (5)
This essay has come about from periods of research in media archives where sounds from the past are truly audible. I became interested in these sorts of records because interviewing, field recording and sound production (for radio) have always been part of my research practice. While this experience has inculcated a certain suspicion of those 'quiescent' spaces, the business of researching Aboriginal and contact histories has convinced me of the simple injustice of prioritising written sources and outcomes above all others. Not surprisingly, written documentation is of limited value in communities where few people read. Low literacy, however, does not mean that Aboriginal communities are uninterested in their history. Quite the reverse. As I discovered in northern Australia during recent study, which involved the repatriation of historic films, photographs and sound recordings to communities in Arnhem Land, the types of archival record discussed in this paper are valued and often cherished. (6) Opening access to media archives, copies of which can be stored on computers at local knowledge centres, is one of the ways in which researchers can contribute to their discipline while offering something meaningful to contemporary communities.
Working against the tradition of seeking sound in silent sources, my purpose here is to audition and analyse a series of broadcasts and recordings that began to circulate in the mid-twentieth century. They all involve performances by Aboriginal people. These neglected artefacts reveal much about how Australia went about the business of national reinvention after World War II, and how new attitudes, fused with new technologies, allowed new possibilities for speaking and listening. The significance of the combined impact of recording and broadcasting upon ideas of nationality is evident if we think about the sound of a single musical instrument, the didgeridoo. Like the returning boomerang, it represents one of those rare but important instances where an example of Aboriginal technology has attained centrality in the iconography of 'Australianness'. And that is not the only commonality between them. Both are regionally specific technologies that have become emblematic of a pan-Aboriginal culture.
The didgeridoo has been adopted by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in places remote from its localities of origin. Until the middle of last century it was found only in the northern parts of the Northern Territory and Western Australia (from Arnhem Land in the east to the Kimberley in the west). (7) The etymology of the word, sometimes assumed to be Aboriginal in origin, gives insight to the didgeridoo's relationship with the broader culture. No term resembling it can be found in the areas of its original distribution, and for many years non-Aboriginal people referred to it as a 'drone pipe'. Although an Irish-Australian scholar recently claimed that the word is of Gaelic origin (8), the orthodox view that non-Indigenous auditors coined it for its onomatopoeic qualities is more convincing. This was the argument of the musicologist Alice M Moyle who pointed out that in 1925 when the anthropologist and explorer Herbert Basedow used the words 'tidjarudu, tidjarudu, tidjaruda' he was communicating the sound of the instrument. This is among the earliest published uses of the word. (9) Clearly, the perception that the name sounded Aboriginal added value to the instrument as it became popularised within and beyond Australia.
That a regionally specific aerophone could become a national sound involved a complex history of cultural processing. Some of that history, including the unique contribution of Rolf Harris and the instrument's fetishisation by the New Age movement, is discussed in a 1997 anthology of writings by Karl Neuenfeldt. (10) My interest is in the early stage of that process which depended upon a network of alliances between ethnographers and the electronic media. A 1948 letter from A P Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, to Richard Boyer, chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (now Corporation) (ABC), opens the door to a story of co-institutional collaboration, typically overlooked in histories of anthropology. Elkin's letter is indicative of the state of flux of postwar radio, when new technological horizons suggested possibilities for discovering and documenting the somewhat older frontier of Aboriginal culture:
Dear Mr Boyer An interesting broadcast a few nights ago showed that you have equipment for moving round cattle stations, for example in the Gulf of Carpentaria region, and making recordings on the spot. The idea of thus bringing the marginal region to the hearing of city and other folk, is a good one ... I have been in Arnhem Land a couple of times during the past eighteen months on my particular field work. I have been much impressed with the necessity for recording in permanent form the ceremonies with singing, didjeridoo playing, stick tapping and feet stamping. Of course, at the same time, films could be made of the ceremonies. The recording, however, is very important because of the remarkable use of accent and rhythm by the Aborigines [sic] in the parts to which I refer ... It has occurred to me at various times that the A.B.C. could co-operate with myself and the University in this matter, especially if you have--as obviously you have--an expert...
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