Eerie Sounds, Then and Now: Listening in to Mid-Century Non-Indigenous Central Australian Soundscapes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mid-century non-Indigenous visitors to Central Australia such as the naturalist Hedley Finlayson (author of The Red Centre, 1935) and the journalist-cum-conservationist Arthur Groom (author of I Saw a Strange Land, 1950) wrote popular works that overturned prejudices about a “dead heart” and encouraged subsequent visitors and tourists. Yet they were often unsettled by eerie sounds. This article uses Mark Fisher’s notion of eeriness, as well as literature on the uncanny, to theorise the ambiguous sonic eerie. In particular, I show how, in the Australian settler-colonial context, the sonic eerie can prompt an unhomeliness that presences Indigenous dispossession or environmental degradation. In this way, it can undermine feelings of wonder and emplacement that other senses, including eyesight, might impart. But sonic eeriness need not always develop in that way, and it is often transient in its effects, even though it can result in echoes. While Finlayson and Groom overcame their unsettlement, part of the power that eeriness possesses is in the way in which those who read about it can also be affected by it. In these after-effects, we can still hear Indigenous claims to land being made, and the ghostly echoes of climate change.