Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-tn8tq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-07T14:21:37.297Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Coda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2019

Edited by
Get access

Summary

Imagined Sound maps a diversity of spaces, historical timeframes, conceptual approaches and creative reimaginings. From the centre of the continent to the coastal fringe, from the ‘island continent’ to tiny landmasses far out in the Pacific, from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, the range of spaces and times that emerged from the works of literature and music assembled in this book cohered around two pivotal geoimaginaries: the continent, and the island and archipelago. The multiplicity of responses to these two spatial configurations, and the related-but-distinct nature of listening to novels, songs, jazz suites, poems, video clips, and song lyrics, echoes the potential for these forms to be reimagined by writers and composers, to be transformed by personal artistic aims and historical contexts. Soundscapes of terror, refrains of transcendence, verses and choruses sung to raise political awareness or remind us of the unburied past, sampled voices from the past bourn on oceanic tides, screams echoing across haunted landscapes, the visceral abjection of the colonial island, the chains of a global archipelago. The situations and environments resounding through the last seven chapters are a unique kind of catalogue of Australian space and time. Listening to ‘imagined sound’ enables us to hear this diversity of sonic situation.

The continent, the island, the archipelago: each has its own harmony of imagined sounds. The soundscapes and refrains of the continent – the replaced desert centre walk walked by the mytho-Modernists Webb and Lumsdaine, the iconic images of Uluru, sorry suits and lyrical refrains of recognition sung by Midnight Oil, or the subtle bush soundscapes of Miller's postcolonial novels – sound out the ‘geo-becoming’ that has taken hold of Australian artistic production since World War II. In these works, the continent – sometimes the ‘island continent’ – is both insular and vast, a series of landscapes teaming with sounds sometimes haunting, sometimes refreshing. Building and rebuilding what the continental landmass is in our ears and minds, Webb and Lumsdaine made discoveries – sites of isolation, paranoia and transcendence. Later, around the turn into the post-Mabo era, Midnight Oil and Miller revisited these continental myth-scapes, but progressed further by working to recognize Indigenous Australia.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Coda
  • Edited by Joseph Cummins
  • Book: The 'Imagined Sound' of Australian Literature and Music
  • Online publication: 18 September 2019
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Coda
  • Edited by Joseph Cummins
  • Book: The 'Imagined Sound' of Australian Literature and Music
  • Online publication: 18 September 2019
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Coda
  • Edited by Joseph Cummins
  • Book: The 'Imagined Sound' of Australian Literature and Music
  • Online publication: 18 September 2019
Available formats
×