Sounding the Landscape: Representations of Aboriginal culture in Australian audio archives, 1900-1975

People Involved

Dr Martin Thomas

Project overview

‘Sounding the Landscape’ investigates the ways in which sound recording technology has been used to document Aboriginal culture in selected parts of Australia. My methodology involves a combination of archival research and fieldwork with Aboriginal communities. Presently I am studying recordings made in northern Australia in the 1940s-50s by the anthropologist A. P. Elkin and the ABC producer Collin Simpson. I will be discussing these recordings with Indigenous owners during a field trip in July-August 2005.

Project Details

Cultural inquiry across a range of disciplines is bringing fresh attention to the many facets of the human sensorium. Works such as Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity (1993) are part of a wider pattern in which cross-cultural research has queried the centrality of vision in western cognitive systems - the assumption that ‘seeing is believing’. This development is bringing new interest in the phenomenon of sound and the distinctive formation of auditory cultures.

My project, which selectively evaluates acoustic documentation of Aboriginal culture from the period 1900-75, will involve the study and analysis of the following audio archives:

1. Sir Baldwin Spencer’s phonograph recordings. Produced in the Northern Territory at Charlotte Waters in 1901 and Katherine Creek in 1912, the fifty original wax cylinder records are held by the National Museum of Victoria.
2. Audio tapes and vinyl discs collected and/or recorded by A. P. Elkin. Seventy-seven audio tapes recorded at various locations from the period 1955-74 and four boxes of vinyl discs from the period 1948-73. This untapped collection is part of Elkin’s personal papers in the University of Sydney Archives. No access restrictions apply to this part of the collection.
3. Selected recordings and documentation in various formats from the archives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sydney.

Working from these primary sources, and others previously auditioned, I will study the way in which Australian Aboriginal culture has been recorded, archived, circulated, broadcast and - more recently - reclaimed by its traditional owners. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I will examine ethnographic and radiophonic constructions of what is now called ‘Aboriginality’. This is intended to further the understanding of race relations in Australia and in the process provide a dynamic media history that will express the nuances, the fluidity, and the sheer emotional resonance of the recorded sound image. This inquiry will examine and evoke the human encounters that produced a unique and typically overlooked history - a wealth of stories which tend to lie dormant in institutional archives.