Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-c654p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-30T14:29:01.982Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Noisy Songlines in the Top End

from Part Three - Listening to the Continental Archipelago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2019

Edited by
Get access

Summary

Mapping the transformation of the colonial continental landmass into a recycled, postcolonial archipelago, Alexis Wright's acclaimed novel Carpentaria (2006) refigures the Top End of Australia as a space defined by circular weather patterns, charted by sonorous songlines and shrouded in both colonial and Indigenous noise. This chapter will examine how the constellation of landscapes and events depicted in Carpentaria create a novelistic songline, a contemporary reimagining of the novel. Recording the creative movements of ancestral figures, songlines have been commonly performed through a combination of singing and dancing (Stubington 2007). Although this original form has transformed significantly in Carpentaria, I argue that Wright's novel performs this songline function.

But not only is Carpentaria a novelistic songline, it is a noisy novelistic songline. Noise, the transgressive power of which is often associated with meaninglessness, distraction and excess, makes sense of the precise character of the sonically saturated fabric of Wright's work. Theorists of noise also describe how it is able to reform a structure or system. I extend these insights to see how the revisionist mythopoeics of Wright's novel couple the oftenungainly vibrations of noise to the heroic, geographic, animistic and synoptic characteristics of the songline, creating a map of political resistance, spiritual vitality and continental regeneration. Listening to the noise that inhabits several pivotal soundscapes of the novel – extra-resonant sites along its songline – complicates Carpentaria's place inside the borders and official histories of the nation. I divide these soundscapes into ‘neocolonial’ – the soundscapes of Desperance and the Gurfurrit mine – and ‘Indigenous’ – the storm and the island of rubbish. Like a kind of Deleuzian noise machine, in Carpentaria the sonic waste of the colonial is transformed into a refreshed location on the noisy Indigenous songline.

Reading Carpentaria with an ear for imagined sound is reliant on the web of ecological, historical, sociological and cosmological resonances shared by both the novel and the singing tradition. By providing a larger historical and narrative context to the mapping of specific places and times, this reading and listening approach gives an almost sacred or ceremonial function to the text. In other words, through imagined sound we hear Carpentaria as a contemporary iteration of Indigenous Dreaming. Deborah Bird Rose discusses this complex and multifaceted concept, referring to ‘Dreamings’ as ‘the great creative beings who came out of the Earth and travelled across the land and sea’.

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.

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.

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.

Available formats
×