Richard Hunter, Frans Hoogland, Jaqueline Wright from ABC Open, and I have been working on a project which I’d love to share with you all, it’s about Feeling Country. Many thanks to Jacqui for all the hours of pulling it together and to Gabrielle Norden and Sara Retallick for contributing beautiful sounds from Country. Enjoy!
Category Archives: Sound
Spirit of Place: Topophilia
Poetica, Radio National, ABC Radio
Saturday 31 May 2014 3:05PM
Topophilia: from the Greek topos “place” and -philia, “love of”
When we meet someone new we commonly ask “Where are you from?” It’s a recognition of the affective bond between people and place, which has been a subject of contemplation as far back as Aristotle, but has gained more attention in recent decades with the emergence of the discipline of psycho-geography. It’s also long been a subject of poetry, and there are many poets whom we identify closely with a particular place – either that where they were born and raised, such as Dorothy Hewett in the West Australian wheatbelt, or the place to which they came later in life, like Margaret Scott, who left her native Bristol for Tasmania at the age of twenty-five. In this program a range of Australian poets describe their relationship with the place that has shaped them.
Filed under Sound
Superb Lyrebird
Lyrebird by Edwards, Sydenham, 1769?-1819.
1802. 1 drawing : pen, watercolour ; 41 x 32.2 cm. (s.m.). Source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an6939212
Stooping over, I walk under tree-ferns with bison-like beards which arch over pathways. Their beards are rough and filamentary, but tight and trimmed. Fronds umbrella up and out, framing the grey sky like lacy curtains. Way above me, the canopies of Mountain Ash engage in deep conversation with the wind. Scars on these trees show where limbs have been lost. I feel meek and vulnerable walking under these giants on such a windy day. It is not just the trees that I have come to be with on this day; another has called me (back) into the cool temperate rainforest.
The singers are hidden amongst the long, fallen ribbons of bark, they are somewhere down in the gullies beckoning me forth. I cross over deep muddy puddles, past flowing creeks and decomposing fallen trees. Everything in the forest is saturated with water and deep iridescent green. Pulled deeper in as the sun hangs low in the winter sky, I know there is not long before I must retreat to places of light and warmth. Up a rise and the earth dries out. The track twists to somewhere unknown and I sense to halt. A dark grey rock nearby summons me. I sit atop this cool, smooth form and close my eyes. A singer repeats his calls across the track from me and another somewhere behind. Like a creator of all other beings, from its song emerges the Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo, Eastern Whipbird, Laughing Kookaburra, Eastern Rosella and its own songs. From oneness comes many. This bird holds songs and dances, it is an invoker and a weaver of creation.
When I stand from the rock, something has deepened. It is time to descend from this hill and retrace my steps below the swaying canopy. But an invitation to encounter holds me a few moments longer… a male lyrebird jumps onto a tree branch, his brilliant tail festooned below him. Hypnotized by sound, he repeats again and again the songs of the other forest beings and I wish for a feather. Why do I want for this material form? Is the song not enough to make me feel this reality? Turning to walk back I am stopped by something small, fluffy and grey on the track. So unimaginably wispy, it is almost not there. I delicately pick up this grey flank feather and hold it between two fingers. The wind quickly finds it and I watch it dance and swirl before me. Each feathery filament animated and stating its aliveness.
Source: Pizzey and Knight, The Field Guide to the Birds of Australia, 9th Ed, Harper Collins Australia, 2012
Filed under Birds, Dogs & Trees, Moving Images, Sound, Walking
Enduring myths
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Oedipus and Sphinx. 1808. Oil on canvas. Louvre, Paris, France.
A friend sent me a link to a podcast titled Climate change and the psyche from ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind program. British climate scientist Mike Hulme and anthropologist Jonathan Marshall speak about the enduring myths and symbols that give us meaning and set templates for living. They talk about the way in which mythic frameworks underlie scientific viewpoints and are foundational to our beliefs about the world and in particular, the changing climate. One pertinent question which they pose is, how do we animate material realities? Rather than seeing the world around us and the changing climate as mechanistic, what are the stories we have created to make meaning of these changing realities?
I took a screen grab of a comment that was made by ‘Wendy’ in response to listening to the interview [see below].
I like that Wendy identifies discourse and narrative as fertile ground for debate, after all, these stories are a reflection of the truths that we live by and use to construct our reality. The statement that I like most in Wendy’s post is:
‘… we need to be prepared to engage in relationships in different ways…’
We need to engage in new ways of being… in my view this was the central thread that wove through the statements being made by Hulme and Marshall. Our society’s approach to a changing climate is inextricably tied to the way in which we conceptualize and perform our relationships with other species, the biosphere, lithosphere and atmosphere.
Filed under Sound
Loops
Post sound-trip to Litchfield with Al, I kept on envisioning sound and how it travels through people and place and where it originates from. I saw loops rising up from the earth, moving up and through people and looping back into the earth. Was this image influenced by what I had read from Maratja (as cited in Christie 2010a) about land, sound and people? He says, ‘It’s the land which holds the sound, and then after that, we Yolŋu people. What we are talking about, is how that sound emerges’ (p. 67).
I though, if there is a cycling, or looping of sound from the land, through people and back again, maybe it would look like this…
Last time I was living on country north of Broome, people were reluctant to talk about the Song Cycle which runs along the coast from One Arm Point to Bidyadanga. I could understand why, increased attention on the Song Cycle from the proposed LNG development at Walmadany had stimulated much conversation and inquiry about it. Countrymen and women were worried that all this talk might somehow dilute the power of this entity… I stopped asking questions.
During my journalling one day I felt compelled to draw this image of an entity weaving through the land, up above the surface and diving down into the earth…
Sound, looping, vibration, snaking, rising, diving, resonating…
Al asked if I would record myself singing. The song that emerged was… ‘Weaving, timelessly snaking through place’. I wanted to use his electronic instrument to improvise with this sample to create a piece of music that would loop in the same way that the images above do. We managed to find a way to do this and the improvised piece that emerged was this…
Christie, M 2010a, ‘The task of the translator’, International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts Australia, no. 2, pp. 67-74.
Qin and sheoaks. Timelessness and place
Last weekend my friend Al and I were dancing with timelessness and place. He had come to Darwin to record sounds from here and to improvise with these sounds to create electronic music. Al wanted to let the places we spent time in wash over him, find a home in him so that the music he created would hold an essence of him being in this place.
We found ourselves on the beach at East Point listening to the lapping of the small waves, against the background hum of ships leaving the harbor. A beach stone curlew was calling out as we approached the cliffs, keeping an eye on its young which was intent on exploring the waterline, regardless of our presence. The rocks that surfaced through the sand and water and trailed up into cliffs in this place look like they’d been painted in swirling patters. Pink, yellow, white and orange colors danced on rock-face. They left us staring at these impossible designs, a constant tug at our attention. In the face of the low cliff was a cave, it looked and felt like a women’s place. Why hadn’t I been here before? Two long rocks lay submerged in the water. They looked like crocs and slowly reveled themselves as rock as the tide pulled out further and further. Was there an underlying trepidation in the recordings Al made here, something that said, this place is beautiful but beware of what lurks in the water?
Later that afternoon, standing on the bridge over Rapid Creek, we listened to the gentle sound of the wind playing with the needles of the sheaoks. It reminded Al of the qin, an ancient Chinese stringed instrument. A musician he knew had once held his qin to the wind to let the wind play it. Wind, trees, birds, people’s voices and splashing, bike riders on the bridge, tide rushing over rocks, planes overhead… this place was saturated in sound.
On our way to Litchfield the following day, Al told me about an experience he’d had in creating a piece of music over an extended period of time. He said that he felt as though he could perceive the piece as a whole and experienced a sense of timelessness with his music. Music existing in timelessness… I tried to comprehend how this could be. Usually when I think of music one of the guiding elements is time. Al seemed to be beautifully preoccupied with this idea of timelessness in his music making. What my mind kept coming back to was place. Where the music was being made? The places in which the sounds were being recorded was what mattered most to me. For the rest of the day our conversations wove together our thoughts and feelings on timelessness and place. I kept thinking about stories shared by Richard on the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail from Bugarregarra (the Dreaming) and then his words, ‘Bugarregarra is everything, it’s a way of life.’ Would he use the words timelessness and place to describe Bugarregarra?
Late last Saturday night after we returned home from our roamings I used one of my Al’s electronic instruments to create an improvisation in sound using a recording of qin and piano. The result was Beautiful ash and ruins. To me this improvisation sounds industrial, devoid of beauty, anxious, grey and confused. At one point I feel like I am being cranked up to the pinnacle of a roller-coaster ride, but the roller coaster never releases and goes down. I’m curious about what attracted me to making such an anxious sound. How far up did I think I could go? Despite these uncomfortable sounds, the essence of the music is beautifully melodic qin and percussive piano. The process of improvising on Al’s electronic instrument was completely new to me. For some reason I abandoned the aim of creating something that sounded beautiful and wanted to explore all the shades within the sound, especially the darker ones.
My sense of place is saturated in sounds, smells, visual and something else, a feeling that is hard to describe. I used to assume that the sounds, smells and visuals made the other feeling, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. Just like there is a texture to the sound of the qin, or wind through sheoak needles, there feels to me to be an essence in each place, a texture that is tricky to put into words… but can it be translated and articulated through sound? Is the piece I improvised an articulation of place, one that is confronting – beautiful but full of turmoil? Did the industrial hum of the ships leaving the harbor want to escape into the music?
Filed under Sound
Lurujarri Dreaming – AWAY!
ABC Radio National, Saturday 2nd March, 6PM
Four years in the making, the animated Lurujarri Dreaming documents the Western Australian song-cycle from Broome up through the Dampier Peninsula.
This particular song-cycle is part of the annual nine day Lurujarri Heritage Trail which was established in 1987 by Goolarabooloo elder Paddy Roe.
Though since 2008 plans for a land based liquefied natural gas development have loomed over the Kimberley coast, in particular James Price Point (Walmadan), located approximately fifty kilometres north of Broome – this area making up part of the Lurujarri Heritage Trail.
Filed under Moving Images, Sound
Due process… what’s in a name?
I have not the heart to write for long about the incredibly flawed EPA process and the collusion that exists at all levels with the W.A. State Government re: proposed development at Walmadany/James Price Point. The concept of one-person boards/committees still intrigues me. To anyone reading this, please listen to the ABC Kimberley Radio interviews with W.A. Environment Minister Bill Marmion, Paleontologist Dr Steve Salsbury and Ecologist Louise Beams via the link below:
Filed under Sound, The Campaign
Being with Country 