Mapping the Landscape with Sound: Tracking the Soundscape from Australian Colonial Gothic Literature to Australian Cinema and Australian Transcultural Cinema

Abstract

This article explores how and why the Australian landscape was sonically mapped by Australian colonial Gothic writers and how these sonic descriptors came to be audibly translated into films of New Australian Cinema and, later, redeployed in Australian transcultural cinema. Australian colonial Gothic literature proved important for writers to describe and situate themselves within a foreign and uncanny landscape. The writers relied upon the sonic semantics of the Gothic genre to aurally envelop their characters within a spectral web—a world of exultant cries, piercing screams, rasping breaths, all permeating from the Australian landscape. New Australian Cinema drew on both the key sounds found in Australian Gothic fiction and the centrality of the sonic in this literary genre to tell similar stories of an uncanny Australia. By utilising three sonic conceptual tools—the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact, and the sonic spectre—and providing a close listening of Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1989) I examine how key sonic tropes from New Australian Cinema were enlisted by Australian transcultural cinema, but are silenced, manipulated, and repositioned to take on new meaning and tell very different stories of colonisation, settlement, and nation.