Abstract
This article encounters two Tasmanian novels, Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994) and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm (2004). The novels each contain two soundscapes: one detailing the hidden histories of violence and genocide at the frontier meeting of Aboriginal people and colonialists in the 1820s, and a second, set in a contemporary timeframe, that echoes these past traumas within the lives of characters facing extinction of their own. Deploying a close listening approach in the analysis of these soundscapes, the essay charts the space of the island in the novels, arguing that the resonance between the soundscapes past and present constitutes a transhistorical continuum of sound that links the colonial to the present. While there are both similarities and differences between the soundscapes in Flanagan and Bird, in the novels the sonic continuum reconstructs colonial history and remaps the space of the island. The discussion is positioned in relation to discourses of sound in Australian gothic literature, haunting, and theories of space.
Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994) and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm (2004) are two novels that embed genealogical narratives within revisionist historical fictions, exploring the intersecting concerns of colonial history, contemporary trauma, and the island space of Tasmania. The novels trace origins, of family, place, and culture, extending the spatiotemporality of the present back into a colonial past where violent contact with Aboriginal people is uncovered. While working to position beginnings, Death of a River Guide and Cape Grimm also figure extinction, in the past and in the present, as a core theme. Examining two prominent soundscapes in each novel, this essay identifies the way both works literally sound silenced history, making audible the space of the suppressed and forgotten: sound stands in as a complex somatic materiality, enabling meaning where language fails or falls silent. A close listening approach to these key moments in the texts will unlock the rich thematic and conceptual content woven into the four soundscapes. Moreover, I will argue that sound creates a transhistorical continuum, linking the space and time of the past to the present. The resonance of the soundscapes is emphasized by the arresting and peculiar operation of sound at these crucial points of narrative and revelation, particularly in comparison to the main body of each novel. This structural concentration of sound casts the soundscapes as resonant cores that unravel the labour of the novels and amplify the spatial and conceptual links spanning the works. These links are figured explicitly in both River Guide and Cape Grimm in terms of the violent resonance of the colonial encounter with Indigenous Australian culture, events that are resounded through traumatic echoes heard in the present. Reorchestrating literary historian Georg Lukacs’s thesis on the historical novel, that it involves “not the retelling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events” (Lukacs, 1962: 42), I am proposing that this poetic awakening is, through my listening to the soundscapes at the foundations of both River Guide and Cape Grimm, a poetic awakening through sound.
Throughout this essay I will be referring to the concept of a soundscape, defined by sonic ecologist Barry Truax as an “environment of sound […] with emphasis on the way it is perceived and understood by the individual, or by society” (1978: 126). River Guide and Cape Grimm each have a different approach to how the soundscape is “perceived or understood”. I argue that the focalization of the soundscape, the “listening perspective” of the character through which the reader experiences the soundscape, reflects both similarities and differences between Flanagan and Bird’s novels in terms of character, narrative, and their particular imagining of Tasmania. These resonances and dissonances between the soundscapes in River Guide and Cape Grimm relate to the spatiotemporal complexity of the narratives being told by Flanagan and Bird: the value of a close listening approach to the novels lies in its ability to engage with these entanglements of space and time resonating within the novels and projected by their soundscapes. As such, my listening to these soundscapes will constitute a remapping of a colonial space, a making audible of what are, in both novels, hidden histories. The sonic nature of the connection between past and present in River Guide and Cape Grimm opens up a common ground, spanning the colonial and postcolonial. This formation pushes against the historical and aesthetic dynamic, apparent in the tradition of Australian gothic literature that positions Indigenous Australian history, and the sound of that history, as “other”. Taking into account the proximity of River Guide and Cape Grimm to both the traditions of the Australian Gothic and the associated concept of haunting, I will listen to how sound is woven into the Tasmanian island spatiality of the novels, paying particular attention to the ability of the island to house the productive tensions — local/global, interior/exterior, roots/routes — that are sounded in both novels.
The wider cultural impact of the retelling and uncovering of the foundations of Australian history being performed in River Guide and Cape Grimm resonates closely with the often heated confrontations of the “history wars” that dominated Australian history and literature fields, and to some extent the popular media and political debate, in the 1990s and 2000s. The publication dates of River Guide and Cape Grimm position the novels at either end of the wide-ranging debate exemplified by the opposing views of historians Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle, who published work explicitly addressing the colonial history encountered by Flanagan and Bird. Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002, 2009) questions the factual veracity of the scholarship of historians like Reynolds, whose publications, including The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (1981), examined Aboriginal resistance to colonialism and the massacres covered up by colonial authorities. In their movement towards the reconstruction or “resounding” of history, River Guide and Cape Grimm, whose Tasmanian settings place them in the geographic centre of the “history wars” debate, sit alongside other critically acclaimed novels published in the period, such as Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) or Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005).
In River Guide and Cape Grimm sound works to create a link between the historical violence of the past and the contemporary manifestations of that history in the present of each novel, in a sense neutralizing the historical distance between the past and the present and instead enabling a reshaping of the present via the resonance of sonic history. Two theories of sound offer support to my discussion of sound and space: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of “the refrain” (1987), which they use to discuss the organization of sound into territory, and Paul Carter’s concept of “the sound in-between” (1992), which describes the space of the frontier and the meeting of European colonizer and Indigenous Australian through sound. While these two conceptions of sound account for the spatial side of the work performed by the transhistorical continuum, discussions of haunting from sociologist Avery Gordon and Jacques Derrida form a bridge between time and space and how they operate in the continuum of sound. The insights of sound-related scholarship on the Australian Gothic form another important part of my theoretical constellation in this essay.
The anti-linear temporality of the haunted Gothic landscape in both novels performs a circular conceptual movement that takes me back to the specific geography in River Guide and Cape Grimm: the space of the island. The spatiotemporal resonance heard in the connection between soundscapes is as much a product of the island as it is a reinscription or reorchestration of the complexity of that geoimaginary: the island produces the continuum and the continuum produces the island. Tasmania, and the “spectre” of the island’s former guise, Van Diemen’s Land, positions the novels within a web of interlocking spatial and thematic discourses that characterize the island as a space capable of grounding and sounding a multitude of turbulent histories and contradicting ideas. Examining what he calls the “master metaphor” of the island, John Gillis suggests: The island is capable of representing a multitude of things […] fragmentation and vulnerability but also wholeness and safety […] loss but also recovery […]. Islands are where we quarantine the pestilential and exile the subversive, but they are also where we welcome the immigrant and asylum seeker. They can represent both separation and continuity, isolation and connection. (2004: 3)
I want to draw attention to ideas that are particularly relevant to River Guide and Cape Grimm within Gillis’s summary, specifically the opposition between symbolic quarantine and exile of subversive elements, otherwise known as convictism, versus the “welcome” of immigrants and asylum from “old Europe” (River Guide), South America, and the British Isles (Cape Grimm). Extending this discussion, Godfrey Baldacchino calls the many binary dynamics of the island — fragment/whole, paradise/hell, isolation/connection — “nervous dualities” (2005: 248). These tensions are played out in myriad ways in both novels. Most profoundly for my discussion of soundscapes and the transhistorical continuum is the dual action whereby the uncovering of silenced or forgotten history that disturbs the foundations of the present also directly engages with the spatial binaries of the island. Baldacchino argues the island “confronts us as a juxtaposition and confluence of […] local and global realities, of interior and exterior references of meaning, of having roots at home while also deploying routes away from home. An island is a world, yet an island engages the world” (2005: 248; emphasis in original). The attributes described by Baldacchino designate the island in terms of both spatial and temporal movement, key aspects of the novels that are voiced as issues of immigration, travel, and narrative movement across time. Emphasizing the temporal axis of Baldacchino’s list of binaries, Gillis suggests that the “island has been the West’s favourite location for visions of both the past and future. It is also there that we most readily imagine origins and extinctions” (2004: 3). The convergence of such origins and extinctions are encapsulated on the island of Tasmania/Van Diemen’s Land in River Guide and Cape Grimm. Forming a transhistorical continuum between past/present or origin/extinction, sound emphasizes the always-connected nature of Baldacchino’s “nervous dualities” while also amplifying the forgotten or silenced parts of a colonial history founded on power dynamics of European/Indigenous, winner/loser, official/outsider, and recorded/suppressed.
This analysis of the sounding of aspects of Australia’s history of dispossession in River Guide and Cape Grimm makes a contribution to postcolonial recuperations of colonial history, as well as the wider critical understanding of both novels. The focus on sound demonstrates a different approach to the work than those already undertaken on River Guide, with previous criticism investigating the environmental and historical aspects of Flanagan’s novel (Delrez, 2007; Polack, 2006; White, 2012); the article also helps to expand the slim collection of work relating to feminism and the gothic in Bird’s novel (Britten, 2010; Salas, 2005; Walker, 2004). While novels such as Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2002) — another critically acknowledged work that engages with ideas of history and rewriting — cover similar territory to River Guide and Cape Grimm, I have chosen these novels because of their explicit foregrounding of sound.
Death of a River Guide, Flanagan’s first novel, tells the story of Aljaz Cosini and the history of his family in Tasmania and Slovenia. Aljaz is prompted to tell the multiple strands of this story by the situation he finds himself in: due to an accident that occurs while he is employed in the position of head river guide, leading a group of “punters” or river adventure tourists down the Franklin River, he is trapped underwater by the flooding river. Aljaz proclaims: “I have been granted visions — grand, great, wild sweeping visions. My mind rattles with them as they are born to me” (1994: 10). 1 These visions are of his birth, the migration of his mother and father from the “old world” of Europe to Tasmania, and the mythical, hidden, and violent events that populate his ancestry at the foundations of colonial contact. The colonial scene in River Guide features a soundscape where an Indigenous woman, Black Pearl, is raped by a sealer. In the contemporary soundscape, occurring before the colonial scene in the narrative order, Aljaz hears the past resonate within the present as a rock band plays in a Hobart pub. Although River Guide has by far the most sonic material of Flanagan’s five novels, sound does have a small role in his second novel The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997), with the sublime sounds of the rugged Tasmanian landscape harmonizing with the experience of Flanagan’s migrant worker Bojan. The retelling of history, specifically Tasmanian history in relation to its recent ecological, migrant, and convict narratives, is an ongoing concern for Flanagan.
Cape Grimm is the third in a series of novels examining what Bird describes as “charismatic people” (Bird, quoted in Salas, 2006: 126). 2 Cape Grimm oscillates between three intersecting phases of the Mean family genealogy: the arrival-via-shipwreck of Magnus and Minerva in the 1850s; the birth and life of Caleb Mean; and the relationship of Paul Van Loon and Virginia Mean. Paul and Virginia echo French novelist Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s influential Paul and Virginia (1788/1898) not only in name but in terms of character and theme: island isolation and innocent incest link Saint-Pierre’s novel, set on the French colonial island of Mauritius, with Bird’s contemporary/colonial setting on the island of Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania. The theme of innocence is transformed from sexual awakening in Paul and Virginia into historical knowledge through sound in Cape Grimm (Henderson, 2000, 2002). Virginia, the survivor of a contemporary mass murder in the isolated north-west Tasmanian town of Skye, has a dream that sounds a violent part of the hidden early history of European and Indigenous Australian contact in the 1830s. The soundscape depicting the Skye genocide replays this impulse to extinction in a contemporary timeframe. Positioned within Bird’s body of work, the themes of genealogy, convict history, and the space of the island of Tasmania, particularly its isolated north-western corner, are reoccurring threads, although sound does not feature significantly in any of her other novels.
The histories revealed by sound in River Guide and Cape Grimm relate to the early colonial period, when Tasmania was called Van Diemen’s Land. The change of the name Van Diemen’s Land to Tasmania, which took place on 1 January 1856, exemplifies Jim Davidson’s statement: “Tasmania is the only state which systematically set about erasing its first half-century: under a new name, it was determined to be born again” (1989: 307). This erasure is manifest in River Guide with the Cosini family shame over the “convict stain” and in Cape Grimm with the mythical arrival of Magnus, Minerva, and the baby La Nina on the deserted Puddingstone Island, just off the coast of north-western Tasmania. The theme of extinction applies to both Indigenous and European individuals and communities. The “difficult liminal states, transgression of boundaries, and spatial oppressions” (Ng, 2007: 149) of the Australian gothic tradition has long contended with the ghosts of a colonial past that Tasmania, and the rest of Australia, has attempted to forget. Davidson argues that the gothic is “a way of looking at Tasmania at least as old as Marcus Clarke” (1989: 310): Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) is often cited as one of the finest gothic works of literature produced by an Australian (Gelder and Weaver, 2007; Ng, 2007; Turcotte, 1998).
While Clarke’s Natural Life is a seminal work of Australian gothic literature, more pertinent to the present discussion of sound is his “Preface to the Poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon” (1913), a short piece that underscores the importance of sound to the gothic. Hearing the foundations of the Australian gothic in the experience of the “weird melancholy” of the bush, Clarke describes an Australian landscape filled by the “myriad tongues of the wilderness”, where “flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls” and “mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter” (1913: 115). Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver’s suggestion that “the colonial Australian Gothic especially relishes the aural effects of the bush” (2007: 4) accentuates the ongoing influence of the sounds emanating from Clarke’s lonely “primeval forest” (1913: 115). Despite its value in terms of sound, Clarke’s description of the Australian gothic landscape silences the colonial violence that Gelder and Weaver see as the defining feature of the gothic in its Australian context: “The colonial Australian Gothic is intimately tied to the violence of settler life” (2007: 9). Gelder goes on to state that the “dispossession and killing of Aboriginal people” and the “foundational systems of punishment and incarceration […] continues to shadow Australian cultural production and helps to keep the Australian Gothic very much alive” (2007: 122). A nexus of historical and fictionalized instances of this colonial violence are central narrative events in River Guide and Cape Grimm, branding both novels Australian gothic historical fiction.
Attuned to the temporal and spatial tensions at play in River Guide and Cape Grimm, Avery Gordon’s concept of haunting binds my examination of sound with the formation of a transhistorical continuum, in terms of both thematics and structure. Gordon argues: “Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in linear time, alters the way we normally separate and sequence the past, the present and the future” (2011: 2). The non-linearity of the haunting is seen in the looping, interrelated content of both soundscapes: songs and screams echo between the past and the present, an interrelation also seen in the narrative structures of both novels. In the context of Cape Grimm and River Guide, the spectral — what Jacques Derrida characterizes as “the experience of the non-present, of the non-living present in the living present, of that which lives on” (1994: 254) — is manifest in both visual and auditory forms. This multi-sensory haunting takes into account the visual qualities of the landscapes that encase the spectral past, as well as the complexities of the novel as an imaginative medium, which I do not have space to discuss here. My focus on sound takes up Gordon’s characterization of haunting: “not about invisibility or unknowability per se, [haunting] refers us to what’s living and breathing in the place hidden from view: people, places, histories, knowledge, memories, ways of life, ideas” (2011: 3). In the soundscapes of River Guide and Cape Grimm the previously obscured or silenced histories are sounded and make an impact upon the present. While reconfiguring linear temporality and remapping historical space, the sonic hauntings of these novels also broadcast a challenge to visual dominance (Foucault, 1979; Jay, 1993; Mulvey, 1975), particularly with regards to the colonial formation and control of the landscape via the eyes of the explorer, cartographer, soldier, and jailer (Arnold, 2006; Columpar, 2002; Pratt, 1992).
In a close reading analysis I will now encounter these four soundscapes and the circular echoing back and forth of spatial and temporal resonances between the past and the present that they sound: first, the two soundscapes of colonial trauma, and second, their paired contemporaries. While this approach to the soundscapes reverses the order in which they occur in the narratives of both novels, placing analysis of the colonial soundscape first enables critical reflection in terms of causality from past to present. This method will also emphasize those elements of the past that reverberate in the soundscapes of the present, isolating the structural, thematic, and textural similarities between the colonial and the contemporary.
The scene of colonial violence in River Guide is buried deep within the novel. This position emphasizes the silenced nature of that violent resonance, rather than figuring it as a point in the narrative that other events can be heard to causally follow. Each small section of River Guide is given a title, and the colonial soundscape is called “Black Pearl 1829”. It is one of the last visions Aljaz has before he drowns in the river: The woman being raped begins to sing a strange and forlorn song. Her song sounds the emptiness of the beach and the ocean, echoes the distant cry of the sea eagle, calls for the return screech of the black cockatoo. “Shut up, Black Pearl,” warns the sealer as he thrusts in and out. “Shut up.” But Black Pearl continues to sing to her brother the blue-tongued lizard, her mother the river, her father the rocks, her sister the crayfish that smells of woman […]. On and on the song goes, and after the sealer pukes and then falls asleep in a stupor, the two other women come over and lie together with Black Pearl. They lie together on the land on which they once stood with pride. As they warm each other on the beach, they join in the low song that seems to cover all the sand. The song and the sound of the waves become one and on and on it goes, and though the women are now asleep the black cockatoo and the sea eagle sing. The wind in the boobiallas passes the song on to the wind in the gums, who teaches it to the wind in the myrtles and celery top pines, who then sings it to the river and to the rocks. (315–6)
This soundscape from the early nineteenth century opens a similar space, the littoral beach — the island’s frontier with the rest of the world — to what is heard in Cape Grimm. Despite the similarities, the violence here is rendered far more graphically, and the personal significance of this event to the contemporary listener, Aljaz, is also more explicit: Aljaz here understands that Black Pearl is the matriarch of one branch of his family: “I realise I am witness to the conception of Auntie Ellie’s mother and to the genesis of all that I am” (316).
From the ocean and rocks up to a variety of birds and tree species, the song of Black Pearl sounds a multileveled space of local natural environment. Although Black Pearl is being violently assaulted her song is a sonic analogue to her surroundings — she both “sounds the emptiness” of the local space, while also eliciting responses from bird and plant-life that appear to be of totemic importance. The scene shows Black Pearl’s song directly addressing other animals and parts of the environment: the blue-tongue lizard, the river, the rocks, the crayfish. Sound here embodies family and totemic ties. In the second half of the scene Black Pearl is joined in her song by two other women. Their song “covers” the sand, “becomes one” with the sound of the waves, and, after the women sleep, is continued by the black cockatoo and the sea eagle, who then pass it onto the “wind” that moves through several species of tree, before finally arriving at the river and rocks. Initiated by Black Pearl, the movement of her song sounds something of the multilayered and interconnected nature of an Indigenous Australian worldview thrown into violent contact with sealing, a commercial aspect of colonialism. Although we as readers do not know what Black Pearl’s song sounds like, the way that it is taken up by so many elements of the surrounding ecology gives a sense that it is beyond conventional harmony/melody parameters. It is a sound that, in its consonance with the environment, shares timbres and textures with the many animal, plant, and environmental sounds Flanagan has included in the scene.
In Cape Grimm the foundational scene of colonial violence is focalized through the perspective of Virginia Mean. Virginia is one of only three survivors of the fire that destroys Skye, the insular community founded by the ancestor of Virginia’s cousin and lover, Caleb Mean. So severely traumatized by the experience as to be rendered mute, Virginia keeps a journal, where she records this dream: I am sitting in the cave that is a place to which I go, a special secret place. The black girl swims up to me, and whispers a word that sounds like “Mercy” over and over again. Even though she is far below me in the water I can hear her whispering moans and sounds and words as they climb through the air towards me, up the cliff. Ladders of whispered words ascend the split and crumbling battered flecky stoneface of the crenellated cliff […]. We look out to the horizon and we see tall ghost ships sailing alone with purpose and intent just behind a scrim of dull-grey drizzling gauze. We see small flashes of the red coats of the soldiers, we hear the sound of guns, the rough cries of the men in chains […]. Like George Augustus Robinson, I hear the shrieks of the mothers, the cries of the children, the agony of the men. And I see the people, and I see the massacres, and they move across and through the phantom landscape of my sight. (2004: 180–2)
3
This scene, and the name of the novel, are an echoing reference to the Cape Grim massacre that took place on 28 February 1828, where around 30 Pennemukeer people were murdered by shepherds.
Foremost among the sonic elements in this soundscape are the whispered pleas of the Indigenous woman named Mannaginni, who Virginia later thinks may be Truganini, an Indigenous woman made famous as the “last Tasmanian”. Mannaginni “whispers a word that sounds like ‘Mercy’”: this could be a reference to the Tasmanian landmark Quamby Buff, reportedly the site of another Indigenous massacre by colonialists. These sounds are repeated, “over and over again” appearing to fill the entire area. The sounds “climb through the air towards me, up the cliff”. It is as if the sound has an agency of its own: “Ladders of whispered words ascend the split and crumbling battered flecky stoneface of the crenellated cliff”. This first part of the soundscape is therefore dominated by the double meaning of the word “mercy”. Paul Carter has theorized this act of sonic misinterpretation at the frontier meeting of colonists and Indigenous, calling words like “mercy”, or, to use his example of “cooee”, “words in between” (1992). The sound of such words fills the material space of the frontier, and despite the fact that they are incorrectly interpreted by the colonists/Virginia, such sounds are a form of first contact communication. Virginia enters another part of the dream, where she joins with Mannaginni in perceiving the violent sounds of colonial invasion and convict occupation, “the sound of guns, the rough cries of the men in chains” (181). In mentioning the similarity of listening perspective to Robinson (“Like Robinson I hear”; 182), the scale of the events Virginia witnesses in her dream is augmented from the personal vision into a wider historical scope. Alongside Robinson, Virginia hears the screams of a whole people: “the shrieks of the mothers, the cries of the children, the agony of the men” accompany her visions of “the massacres” (182). This is a sonic tableau or compilation of suffering.
Moving forward in time, the contemporary soundscape in River Guide takes place in the last third of the novel, after the majority of the various stories of family history have been told by Aljaz, but before the soundscape of Black Pearl: When Aljaz heard the sound that then screeched forth from Shag’s guitar he knew what Shag was playing upon that guitar, knew that fat old man wanted to make those strings scream: If you leave you can never be free. It was a dreadful noise, but there was something in it that even then I recognised. Now I know it was not a new song, but a song I had unknowingly carried within me for a long time. But what was it? Once more I hear the lead singer, shouting, screaming, joining Shag’s guitar. Even back there in the bar Aljaz felt compelled to watch the singer’s hands, outstretched as if he were being electrocuted, watch the fat on his face wobble and his forehead sweat and a few thin streaks of hairs that crossed it grow wet with exertion. He screamed it out until he looked worse than some animal in agony. He was no longer singing for the crowd or for the lousy money those behind the ringing till would give the band at the end of the night. Nobody in that bar knew, but I know it now. That he was not even singing for himself. That he was singing out of himself and out of his soul and out of a memory of loss so big and so deep and so hurting that it could not be seen or described but only screamed out. (257)
For Aljaz the sound of the band conveys the emotional anguish he experienced upon his return to Tasmania after several years of running from the past. The relation of this soundscape to that genealogical extinction reverses the operation of the earlier soundscape of Black Pearl, whose rape by the sealer, while at once an experience carrying with it a profound deprivation of human dignity, is a point of origin for Aljaz and his ancestors.
In his commentary on this soundscape Aljaz plainly addresses the temporal continuity produced by the sonic link between colonial past and the present: “I [knew] it was not a new song, but a song I had unknowingly carried within me for a long time” (257). This internalization of the song structure likens sound to a form of genetic inheritance. Linking this contemporary soundscape with the song of Black Pearl highlights the complex movement of temporality at play in the dual resonances of these soundscapes: Aljaz’s acknowledgement of Black Pearl’s song — “I [knew] it was not a new song” — comes before he bears witness to it in the colonial scene at the end of the novel, therefore proleptically anticipating the impact of Black Pearl’s soundscape on the sounds of the present. The capacity of the Hobart pub song to connect disparate temporalities is viewed by Aljaz as surpassing the immediate context of the performance — “he was not even singing for himself […] he was singing out of himself and out of his soul and out of a memory of loss so big and so deep and so hurting that it could not be seen or described but only screamed out” (257). This description features two different functions of polysyndeton: “out of” is used to exaggerate the ability of the song to transcend normal limits, of self and memory, also emphasizing the movement of the song beyond these limits. The repetition of the adverbial intensifier “so” simultaneously amplifies the extreme nature of the emotions and histories being mobilized within the song, gesturing towards the depth of transhistorical space the song is sounding or resonating within. The repetition of “so” also gives dramatic and rhythmic forward propulsion to Aljaz’s memory. Shag’s singing is more specifically labelled as screaming, a description that mobilizes both the common characterizations of rock music — the present — and the trauma of Tasmanian colonial history — the past. Flanagan deploys the scream to both describe and embody the emotional and historical space of the past and the present: “it could not be seen or described but only screamed out” (257). Using sound to map the unmappable, the scream is therefore the central element of this soundscape, carrying within its net of texture and volume a raft of temporal and spatial meanings and connections.
There are multiple links between the contemporary soundscape — the song of Shag — and the soundscape of the past — the song of Black Pearl. Both evoke trauma, resonating within spaces that are immediate while also expanding beyond, and both are uttered by people. The most noticeable similarity is structural: the central sounds of each soundscape take the form of song. The two songs gather together space and time, functioning in a way similar to the function of “the refrain” as described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). For Deleuze and Guattari, the refrain, which they discuss in relation to the formation of different types of territories using the examples of bird song and other animal behaviour, is a repeating melody or rhythm that captures and organizes space: it is a “prism, a crystal of space-time” (1987: 385). The two refrains in River Guide each create Black Pearl and Shag’s territories, both spatial (the island) and temporal (past and present). The filial structure headed by Black Pearl is the lynchpin of River Guide, both in terms of Aljaz’s impulse to uncover his family history and understand his life leading up to the present. Heard as a refrain, Black Pearl’s song can be cast in terms of sonic “territory”. As the sonorous foundation of the novel, Black Pearl’s song also binds the central themes of colonial violence and genealogy, grounding these themes and events within the space of the island of Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania. Shag’s refrain reharmonizes and resounds this space of hidden history while also voicing the contemporary trauma of Aljaz’s life.
While the many resonances between the two soundscapes in River Guide are evident in the return of Black Pearl’s song in Shag’s performance, the soundscapes in Cape Grimm offer less of a clear structural transmission across the transhistorical continuum. One of the asymmetries between past and present in Cape Grimm is in the listening perspective: in Virginia’s dream soundscape we hear the sounds through Virginia, whereas in the soundscape of the Skye mass murder/suicide the narrator, Paul Van Loon, relates the scene: Without looking back Caleb rode his horse through government boundaries to the top of the cliff that is Cape Grimm, the cliff near the weather station. There he watched and listened as the congregation down in his village died in the trap of flames. The cries of death carried in the cold starry air; gold and crimson and strangely malachite and indigo the flames leapt towards the heavens; sparks and flurries of flying charcoal glowed, glittered, floated, spurted into the darkness as the little town leapt up into the sky. A glimpse of hell, a sudden view of a fairy-land lit by the sizzling fat of human bodies, accompanied by the whinnies and shrieks and moans of children choking in crawling billows and wraiths of smoke, lungs and eyes filled with stinging poison. (58)
This soundscape resounds with the “cries of death”; colour features heavily — gold, crimson, malachite, indigo — and Paul does not hesitate to make his own suggestions as to the images the fire can evoke: “A glimpse of hell, a sudden view of a fairy-land”. The mention of colour is a significant point of difference to the other three soundscapes, while at the same time drawing this moment, and the novel, back into the wider tradition of the gothic novel. 4 This elevated and superhuman space, paradoxically drawn as either a hell or a fairy-land, is overlaid onto the landscape, giving the scene an imaginative register with biblical bombast and vertical depth. The way that the sound of the scene is “carried in the cold starry air” also harmonizes with the upward motion of the flames and the “little town”.
The pivotal sonic feature of this soundscape is the scream: “the whinnies and shrieks and moans of children choking in crawling billows and wraiths of smoke” (58). The use of polysyndeton in Paul’s description of this sound lends it an element of gothic horror, particularly in conjunction with the way he gives a ghostly form to the smoke — describing it as “wraiths”. Recounting the fire years after it took place, Paul relates how “later on some firefighters said the noises, shaped by the remoteness and the darkness, the noises were one of the most terrible parts of the whole conflagration” (59). The repetition of “noises” gives an indefinable character to the sound of the fire, accentuating the way that the noise is said to be “shaped” by a similarly immeasurable spatiality, again inflected by polysyndeton: “the remoteness and the darkness”. The ominous extension of space created by the repetition of “the” functions by layering the two spatial signifiers “remoteness” and “darkness”. The screams of Caleb’s victims become disembodied, floating and ghost-like, strongly reflecting the Gothic use of aural effects mentioned by Gelder, although here reorienting those echoes onto the space of the island.
Listening to the two soundscapes side by side, the scream is the dominant similarity resonating between River Guide and Cape Grimm, reflecting a foundational tonality of trauma within their shared transhistorical space. In terms of similarities between the two novels, both colonial soundscapes are literally buried deep within each novel, occurring after their contemporary soundscapes in the narrative, a symptom of how these histories were suppressed, hidden beneath the “blank-slate” image of the island. Despite these overarching narrative similarities, there are several differences, of structure, perspective, and location, reflecting variances between the type of characters, narrative styles, and overall objectives of Flanagan and Bird. Unlike in River Guide, where Flanagan explicitly forms his soundscapes into song refrains that gather together a set of experiences imbricated within a genealogical territory spanning a 150-year period, Bird’s soundscapes, while linking across a similar timeframe, do not create a personal structure communicating individual traumas passed down through generations. Instead this trauma resonates in terms of a whole community, sounding a space of extinction and absence in a larger sense — Cape Grimm is the harmony of destruction for a whole group of people. The intimate and specific connections heard in River Guide, such as the recurrent appearance of totemic animals evoked by Black Pearl in her song in 1829 and which also appear in several different time periods in Aljaz’s memories, are transformed in Cape Grimm into a broader historical resonance. This structural difference on the level of sound is also related to variations of listening perspective. Flanagan’s repeating refrains are heard exclusively by Aljaz, while Bird’s soundscapes are split between Virginia (colonial soundscape) and Paul (contemporary soundscape). This difference reflects the genealogical specificity of the narrative in River Guide; Bird’s narrative is concerned more with the extinction of whole groups of people and so the reach of the soundscape is wider. Finally, within these evocations of Tasmania lies a geographical difference: both soundscapes in Cape Grimm occur on the elevated littoral space of the cliffs of north-western Tasmania, reflecting Bird’s specific concern with this part of Tasmania, whereas Flanagan’s scope in River Guide encompasses the whole island, with the colonial scape located on the beach but the contemporary sounds emanating from a pub.
River Guide and Cape Grimm map histories that took place at the frontier meeting of Indigenous Australians and European colonists. Analysis of the soundscapes in each novel underscores the space of the island as a “nervous duality”, a ground able to hold soundings of both the past and the present, where muted or tacit histories can be uncovered and heard to resonate with and within contemporary events. Through the soundscape both novels are able to use these hidden histories to rearticulate the present. The spatial and temporal complexity of the island in conjunction with the sonic transhistorical continuum enables an intersection of local, national, and international movements and narratives, remapping Australian space and the position of Tasmania in the national geoimaginary. Operating as a transhistorical continuum, sound echoes across space and time, linking the present to the past, origin to extinction, Indigenous to European, colonial to postcolonial, and silenced to sounded.
Footnotes
Funding
This research was funded by the Australian Postgraduate Award.