Songlines and storylines...

I had the opportunity to return to Launceston this past week, to attend the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture – Australia & New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ) conference called “Sounding the Earth: Music, Language and Acoustic Ecology.” Organized by UTas Research Associate CA. Cranston, who lives in Launceston – along with several other helping hands from ASLEC! - the conference brought together approximately 50 scholars from Tasmania, the mainland, England, and the US and Canada, from disciplines ranging from English Literature and Anthropology to Cultural Studies and Geography. There was also a performance component featuring musicians, dancers and writers (including PEI’s own Deirdre Kessler!). The conference revolved around the role of sound: bird song, Aboriginal song, city soundscapes, country soundscapes, “making waves in the ocean of air” (which is where my talk on island culture and identity was situated), stories, poetry, animal sounds, and absence of animal sound (e.g., animals - like the extinct thylacine or Tasmanian tiger).

The opening of the conference was so amazing that I had to share… For me, it was pretty much the highlight of the conference (although there were some other amazing presentations!). As Kate Booth (a recent UTas Geography PhD graduate and another student of Pete’s) said, after the keynote address on Thursday morning, “I can just go home now.”

The conference began Thursday morning, Oct. 21, with “Welcome to Country” by Dyan Summers, a Tasmanian Aboriginal, and her husband Ronnie Summers, an elder from Cape Barren Island, located off the northeast coast of Tasmania. I was curious about the usage of the word “Country” without a qualifier; it wasn’t “Welcome to the Country,” or “Welcome to our Country,” but “Welcome to Country.” But what it seems to mean – and I may have this wrong – is “Welcome to our homeland, a land that was taken from us by colonizers, a land that we are now sharing with you. We call it Country.” Over the two days, several conference presenters prefaced their talks with an acknowledgement that they are on land that once belonged to the original inhabitants, Tasmanian’s Aboriginal peoples, thanking them for the privilege of being here. It was a lovely and respectful way to begin.

Dyan invited her husband to sing a song she had written: “The Songlines of the Moonbird.” A moonbird is a muttonbird, the harvesting of which ("muttonbirding") is a cultural tradition for Aboriginal Tasmanians from Cape Barren Island. The birds are collected for their oil, which apparently has healing properties - akin to our cod liver oil in the northern hemisphere, and, I understand, just as foul-tasting. Ronnie is a descendant of the Trawl-wool-way and Palawa people, and author of Tasmanian Songman, Ronnie (a book with accompanying CD).

Following this was a presentation by Bruce Watson, a folksinger-songwriter from Melbourne. 

As part of his Powerpoint, he showed us a photograph of Fanny Cochrane Smith, “the last Tasmanian” (1834-1905), taken in 1903. Fanny is singing a song, in her native tongue, into the long brass tube of an Edison phonograph, which was being operated by Horace Watson, a relative of the people who started Keen’s Curry in Hobart in 1841. I only learned of Keen’s Curry about a week ago (though I certainly have Keen’s Mustard Powder in my kitchen cupboard at home; it turns out the mustard people eventually bought out the curry people). One of Hobart’s attractions is the unusual sign for Keen’s Curry - made of white stones on a hill overlooking Hobart. Apparently, it’s been there since 1915, and from time to time “larrikins” (the word used here for hooligans) or even political activists sneak up the hill in the middle of the night and rearrange the stones to read messages reflecting the tenor of the times, such as "HELLS CURSE" or "NO CABLE CAR."

Anyway, Fanny sang some traditional songs in her language, and the recording is now the only record of her language, a language that has since died out. Bruce played us a clip from the recording: a voice, high and haunting, with an unmistakable rhythm, and even though you don’t know what it is she’s saying, her voice stays with you - notes that have survived over a century even though the language is gone… sound waves captured not in memory but in wax… Here are some photos of the cylinders located in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, along with the photo; in the interactive display you can press a button to hear some of the recording. (I learned afterward from a security guard that I wasn’t allowed to be taking photos… oops… sorry! I beg for forgiveness…)

After his talk, Bruce invited Ronnie to join him in singing his song, “The Man and the Woman and the Edison Phonograph.” The evocative melody and lyrics are still rattling around my brain – symbolic of a time and place and a way of life that is disappeared: “The song lives on, but the singers are gone.”

Now this is where I want you to go on YouTube to listen to the song for yourself.  It starts with the photo, and a clip of Fanny singing, then moves onto the song, recorded recently at a folk festival on the mainland. When you’re done - and make sure you stay til the end! - come back and I’ll tell you the audience’s reaction…

I don’t think very many of us made the connection between Bruce Watson, the man with the guitar standing before us, and Horace Watson, the man with the phonograph, so the last lines of the song hit us like the proverbial tidal wave: “The man had a son and that man had a son and that man had a son and that son is me.” (I remember gasping just before he got to the end, knowing full well what was coming…) And then Ronnie sang these lines: “And that woman had a son, and that son had a daughter, and that daughter had a son, and he had a son, and that son was me.” At first I thought he was just echoing Bruce, but when he got to the word “daughter” I knew he had to be Fanny’s descendant... And then the tears started. And I looked beside me and Kate was crying, and I looked around me and others were weeping, too… tissues coming out of pockets… the applause… Bruce and Ronnie both so moved…

It really was hard to wrench us out of the mood and move on to the next part of the conference, but CA. persevered. Good thing, too, as John Bradley, an Anthropology professor from Monash University in Melbourne, was simply amazing. His talk was entitled “Earth embedded song and human amplifiers: A case study of songline knowing.” John is the author of Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the songlines of Carpentaria. The Gulf of Carpentaria is Yanyuwa Country; and his talk was about the politics of place. These islands on the west coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria is where John has chosen to do his work on songlines - the invisible threads of connection that wait to be voiced by humans, who are the “amplifiers.” The songs and stories have agency; he says, “Each song is a keyhole into another world,” and humans are a part of that narrative, embedded in the songs.  To “sing Country” is the ultimate way to know a place. If songs are no longer sung in Country, there will be no Country left – and the land will be silenced. (I found this resonated tremendously with my work, which phenomenologist Edward Relph - one of my theory guys - calls “placelessness.”)

John ended his presentation with three videos, animations in which he was “animating Country.” He was pleased to show us what technology can do, and that not ALL technology is bad… The films are intended to help us grasp the idea of a songline: “We draw so we can begin to see inside the song, to see what kin might be – animals, plants…” And it worked. With his voice in our ears… the visuals in front of us… the characters that were created… the effect was VERY powerful: I can now understand how songlines and storylines connect us all, in everything we do. I had a visceral reaction to the rainbow serpent in the last video (snakes do that to me, so you know it must have been excellent animation!). Then someone asked a question about the power of the serpent in the Aboriginal culture – and John replied that the artists and production team had made a point of making sure that they got it right… And it was lovely to know that the rainbow serpent is the same as a rainbow in the sky.

In one of his slides, he had quoted the following:

“We are the people

Whose spirits are from the sea.

We are the people who are kin

To the island country.”

   (composed by Dinah Norman)

… so I asked a question about islands, since this is where these people live. He said that islands are all about kin and connection, that in their language there is no word for “friend,” but that “kin” is what they use since they’re ALL connected. “There is no separation between land and sea: it’s all Country.” He added, “Kinship is the strength of every human being.”

I think it was the best conference keynote speech I’ve ever heard. He sang for us in the language of the people who have adopted him as kin. He was SO passionate, SO generous-spirited, and SO in love with what he is doing… I, along with the rest of audience, was awestruck. Thank you, CA., for your vision, and your orchestration. You played us like a symphony!

**

The other highlight for me - surprisingly, given my aversion to movies featuring cannibalism and other blood and guts - was the screening of the feature film Van Diemen’s Land, which was filmed in Tasmania and Victoria’s Otway Ranges. The story is about the Alexander Pearce story, one of seven convicts who escaped from the prison in MacQuarie Harbour, on Tasmania’s west coast. Pearce ended up being the last man standing, after participating in the murder and cannibalizing of his fellow inmates in order to survive. It was gruesome – haunting – upsetting – but it was also an excellent film. (I couldn’t eat supper afterwards, so I drank instead.)

Jonathan auf der Heide, the director and co-writer (who looks like he’s 12, but is probably in his early 30s), was on hand to introduce the film and answer questions afterward. His graduation film from Victorian College of the Arts was Hell's Gates, a 21-minute short version of the film we saw; it was named Best Student Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2008. He was able to use the short film to leverage money to make the feature, though Van Diemen’s Land was made for $250,000 – and $50,000 of that went to getting the quality sound. (He says most of the money came from private sources, including friends and family.) The actors, including his co-writer, Oscar Redding (who also played Pearce), lent their talents for free – they were all Jonathan’s mates from theatre school and wanted the opportunity to be in a feature film. It took six weeks to shoot, and it’s had some good reviews. Here’s a quote from IMDb: “Van Diemen's Land is a stunning debut feature from one of Australia's newest and youngest directors. If this film is any indication of the quality of writing and directing coming out of our film schools today, it augers very well for the future of the Australian film industry as a whole.” (And here's a link to another review...)

Jonathan told us that he very much intended for the landscape to be a character unto itself. You don’t see much more than trees, rocks, mud, trees, streams, trees, rivers, more trees... At one point you see the desperation on the men’s faces as they reach the top of a mountain, only to discover more tops of more mountains… then watch the seven men trudging in a ragtag line along the crest. And you always get that “heart of darkness” feel – the Tasmanian bush as harsh and unrelenting, dark and brooding, and downright dangerous – a mirror for the desperation and blackness that is these characters’ lives…  Jonathan had told us at the outset that the film was dark – in more ways than one…

Jonathan told us that it’s been released in Britain and as a slasher/horror movie, much to his annoyance. The people who like that kind of movie are disappointed because the horror is psychological – the violence is for the most part implied (though I spent much of the movie with my hands over my eyes in anticipation of blood and gore, and my stomach was doing backflips and somersaults).

It’s an important Tasmanian story – and even though I wonder sometimes why people feel that they have to make films out of horrific incidents, I’m thinking now that it might have something to do with a land’s songlines that HAVE to be voiced, and Jonathan and his team are just the human amplifiers…