iDIDJ Australia Didgeridoo Cultural Hub

The rush to record: transmitting the sound of Aboriginal culture.(Essay)

Article from:Journal of Australian Studies
Article date:January 1, 2007
Author: Thomas, Martin

Auditory experience has, in recent years, become something of a preoccupation for cultural historians. Quite apart from the need to address the imbalances of a visually fixated culture, the idea of the 'soundscape' resonates with a number of topical themes, among them the growing interest in the human sensorium and the now well-established concern for ecology and the environment. As Paul Carter pointed out in the early 1990s, sound is also germane to the study of cross-cultural encounter, with all its ambiguities of translation, mistranslation and pidginisation. (1) Although it is not always acknowledged, this type of analysis owes much to R Murray Schafer, the guru of sound studies, whose book The Tuning of the World has been basic reading for audiophiles since its publication in 1977. (2)

In the past decade or so, acoustically oriented history-writing has become a sub-genre of the discipline. The classic Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside (1994) by Alain Corbin, Listening in Paris by James H Johnson, and The Sounds of Slavery (2005) by Shane White and Graham White are just a few of many titles that could be named. More recently, Diane Collins's writing on acoustic interpretation of Australia's discovery and colonisation pre-empts a forthcoming book. (3) History, then, is being listened to as well as looked at. A reader has been published on the subject. (4) And yet, for all this interest, much of the literature has a peculiar trait, evident in the studies mentioned. Our acoustically minded historians are strongly drawn to epochs and subjects that precede sound recording. So their evocations of aural experience are constructed from sources that are entirely silent. As a consequence, the sonic 'revolution' has been quieter than might have been expected. Media history remains bracketed as its own specialisation, rather than something that all of us do, and too many historians still lazily mine oral histories (or preferably transcripts of them) for content alone--ignoring the ambience of the tape, the theatrics of the interview and the particularities of the medium, all of which affect the evidential value. This attitude suggests a lack of interest in, or hostility to, questions of media and technology, just as it reflects the logocentrism that is common not only to historiography, but to western scholarship in general. The bias towards written knowledge is itself hardly peripheral to discussions of sound. As Walter J Ong pointed out many years ago now, writing was the first technology to disrupt the temporal uniqueness of speech. Writing, as Ong puts it, involves 'the reduction of the dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist'. (5)

This essay has come about from periods of research in media archives where sounds from the past are truly audible. I became interested in these sorts of records because interviewing, field recording and sound production (for radio) have always been part of my research practice. While this experience has inculcated a certain suspicion of those 'quiescent' spaces, the business of researching Aboriginal and contact histories has convinced me of the simple injustice of prioritising written sources and outcomes above all others. Not surprisingly, written documentation is of limited value in communities where few people read. Low literacy, however, does not mean that Aboriginal communities are uninterested in their history. Quite the reverse. As I discovered in northern Australia during recent study, which involved the repatriation of historic films, photographs and sound recordings to communities in Arnhem Land, the types of archival record discussed in this paper are valued and often cherished. (6) Opening access to media archives, copies of which can be stored on computers at local knowledge centres, is one of the ways in which researchers can contribute to their discipline while offering something meaningful to contemporary communities.

Working against the tradition of seeking sound in silent sources, my purpose here is to audition and analyse a series of broadcasts and recordings that began to circulate in the mid-twentieth century. They all involve performances by Aboriginal people. These neglected artefacts reveal much about how Australia went about the business of national reinvention after World War II, and how new attitudes, fused with new technologies, allowed new possibilities for speaking and listening. The significance of the combined impact of recording and broadcasting upon ideas of nationality is evident if we think about the sound of a single musical instrument, the didgeridoo. Like the returning boomerang, it represents one of those rare but important instances where an example of Aboriginal technology has attained centrality in the iconography of 'Australianness'. And that is not the only commonality between them. Both are regionally specific technologies that have become emblematic of a pan-Aboriginal culture.

The didgeridoo has been adopted by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in places remote from its localities of origin. Until the middle of last century it was found only in the northern parts of the Northern Territory and Western Australia (from Arnhem Land in the east to the Kimberley in the west). (7) The etymology of the word, sometimes assumed to be Aboriginal in origin, gives insight to the didgeridoo's relationship with the broader culture. No term resembling it can be found in the areas of its original distribution, and for many years non-Aboriginal people referred to it as a 'drone pipe'. Although an Irish-Australian scholar recently claimed that the word is of Gaelic origin (8), the orthodox view that non-Indigenous auditors coined it for its onomatopoeic qualities is more convincing. This was the argument of the musicologist Alice M Moyle who pointed out that in 1925 when the anthropologist and explorer Herbert Basedow used the words 'tidjarudu, tidjarudu, tidjaruda' he was communicating the sound of the instrument. This is among the earliest published uses of the word. (9) Clearly, the perception that the name sounded Aboriginal added value to the instrument as it became popularised within and beyond Australia.

That a regionally specific aerophone could become a national sound involved a complex history of cultural processing. Some of that history, including the unique contribution of Rolf Harris and the instrument's fetishisation by the New Age movement, is discussed in a 1997 anthology of writings by Karl Neuenfeldt. (10) My interest is in the early stage of that process which depended upon a network of alliances between ethnographers and the electronic media. A 1948 letter from A P Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, to Richard Boyer, chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (now Corporation) (ABC), opens the door to a story of co-institutional collaboration, typically overlooked in histories of anthropology. Elkin's letter is indicative of the state of flux of postwar radio, when new technological horizons suggested possibilities for discovering and documenting the somewhat older frontier of Aboriginal culture:


Dear Mr Boyer

An interesting broadcast a few nights ago showed that you have
equipment for moving round cattle stations, for example in the Gulf
of Carpentaria region, and making recordings on the spot. The idea
of thus bringing the marginal region to the hearing of city and
other folk, is a good one ...

I have been in Arnhem Land a couple of times during the past
eighteen months on my particular field work. I have been much
impressed with the necessity for recording in permanent form the
ceremonies with singing, didjeridoo playing, stick tapping and
feet stamping. Of course, at the same time, films could be made
of the ceremonies. The recording, however, is very important
because of the remarkable use of accent and rhythm by the
Aborigines [sic] in the parts to which I refer ...

It has occurred to me at various times that the A.B.C. could
co-operate with myself and the University in this matter,
especially if you have--as obviously you have--an expert
recording outfit on wheels. You would be able to get some real
records which would not be obtainable apart from such an
expedition as I would plan ... (11)
This letter was the genesis of a field trip to the northern pastoral station of Mainoru in 1949, a collaboration involving Elkin, the ABC broadcaster John Thompson and other personnel, both academic and technical. The mixture of outcomes reflected the marriage of convenience between university and national broadcaster. There was a radio documentary, a set of recordings on vinyl, and a substantial monograph titled Arnhem Land Music, co-written by Elkin and the musicologist Trevor Jones. (12) Importantly, this event did not occur in isolation. Just a few months after Elkin penned his letter, Colin Simpson, another ABC programmaker, travelled from Sydney to western Arnhem Land where he teamed up with Charles P Mountford, the photographer, filmmaker and self-trained ethnologist, who was then leading the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. Apparently unaware that W Baldwin Spencer had made phonographic recordings of the instrument at the same locality in 1912 (13), Simpson later stated that his recordings were the first ever made of the didgeridoo. (14) Although an erroneous claim, that he could make it is an indication of the scarcity of such recordings. Soon, however, the music of corroboree would hit the airwaves and grace the soundtrack of many a film. The rush to record had begun.

K S Inglis describes the new documentary radio as 'a sort of peacetime counterpart of what war correspondents had been doing with mobile recording equipment'. (15) In the sense that recordings of long duration and fairly high fidelity were now obtainable in situ, these attempts to capture and transmit the sound of Aboriginal Australia really were a new beginning. Yet they were also a continuation of an older technological adventure, as a contemporary radio event indicates. The same year that Elkin teamed up with the ABC in the Far North, another anthropologist took to the airwaves with Aboriginal music, in the Extreme South. The venue was the studio of ABC Hobart and the broadcast was preserved on an acetate disc, a tape of which I auditioned in the ABC Archives in Sydney. (16) Norman B Tindale, entomologist-turned-anthropologist from the South Australian Museum, was guest of honour. (In later years he would win renown for mapping the boundaries of Aboriginal Australia.) In Hobart in 1949 he was interviewed by Bob Langer, an ABC announcer. Combining the roles of visiting boffin and guest DJ, a nervous and bumbling Tindale transmitted to the world some phonographic recordings of the faintly audible Fanny Cochrane Smith.

The recordings broadcast by Tindale were duplicates of wax cylinder records, the earliest of which were commissioned by the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1899. They are considered the oldest extant recordings of an Aboriginal voice. Smith sang again for the phonograph a few years later, in 1903, this time at the house of Horace Watson, an amateur anthropologist and resident of the Hobart suburb of Sandy Bay. (17) Both sets of recordings are played in Tindale's presentation. Like any artefact, the tape I auditioned in Sydney poses a range of interpretive challenges, exacerbated in this case by the fact that the recording of the broadcast has decayed in the past half century. The clunky exchange between Tindale and Langer, supposedly ad lib, but obviously scripted, has a buzzy patina of interference that adds a further element of distortion to the low-fidelity cylinders, already heavily degraded in 1949. We hear the wavering voice of Fanny Cochrane Smith through a thicket of whoosh and crackle, faint yet sonorous. Renowned as a singer in her day--she publicly performed traditional Aboriginal music in a farm building south of Hobart--a sense of her forceful presence is still discernible. This gives a quality of bathos to the Anglo-Australian patter of Tindale and Langer, as they hammishly enact the radiophonic equivalent of opening Tutankhamen's tomb. Yet in a funny way these quaint theatrics accentuate the rich temporal layering that gives the proceedings so much meaning. The postwar radio auditors, listening to the primitive recording through a bakelite wireless or cabinet-size receiver, were transported to a forgotten moment in their story, the story of modernity, which does of course involve an encounter with antiquity--or so the singer's voice was presented, and presumably heard.

The Royal Society of Tasmania cylinders are known as the earliest recordings of an Aboriginal performer. Torres Strait Islanders were recorded a year earlier, in 1898, as is documented in the report of AC Haddon's Cambridge Anthropological Expedition: '[by] the aid of a phonograph records of many songs were secured, and of these twenty have been subjected to detailed examination'. (18) It would be surprising, however, if recordings of Aboriginal Australians or Torres Strait Islanders had not been made earlier. Edison's phonograph was patented in 1878 and when production of the miraculous 'talking machine' cranked up in the 1880s, it spread from industrial centres to some of the more difficult-to-get-to places on the planet. Phonography, like its sister-technology, photography, was regularly used to document so-called primitive people. Powered by a wind-up mechanism, and thus not reliant on electricity, it could be used almost anywhere. For the most part, anthropological phonography has been neglected by scholars, although Erika Brady, a former sound archivist, has written an interesting account of the North American experience. (19) The use of the phonograph in anthropological research and folklore study was very much in accord with Victorian anxieties about the supplanting of old ways by a rapacious modernity. The phonograph's usefulness in the 'preservation of languages' was among the ten 'benefits to mankind' listed by Edison in 1878 when spruiking this, the most beloved of his inventions. (20) But the phonographic record was seriously wanting in terms of longevity. Unlike early photographic messages, which were inscribed on media that have proven long-lived--metal, glass and paper--the phonograph recorded onto brittle and unstable wax. So the extant media archive is massively skewed in favour of the visual. Appearances survive while sounds for the most part have perished, as might befit the most ephemeral of phenomena.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Only cylinders that were quickly archived in a stable environment had hope of survival, and even then their future was not assured. The Smith recordings owe their existence to the Tasmanian Museum where they were immediately stored. Another, somewhat larger collection of recordings from the Federation period, made by Baldwin Spencer in Central Australia, also survives. They were deposited with the (then) National Museum of Victoria, of which Spencer was honorary director. (21) In his Hobart broadcast, Tindale makes much of the fragility of the cylinders and the extent to which their content has slipped towards oblivion. When Langer asks him about the meaning of the songs, he explains how their translation 'was entrusted to a wax cylinder which we discovered to be in a thousand pieces in its little box. Unless somewhere somebody has a written manuscript, we are never to know what the songs are about'. Although bereft of logic, it is a revealing comment. Phonographic recordings had a duration of approximately two minutes. So with six cylinders surviving (22), a complete translation could never fit onto a single record. Yet the image of the shattered cipher--a broken Rosetta Stone--is deeply emblematic. The greater meaning of the recordings, the point of their dissemination on radio, was that they documented a race of people officially extinct. As Tindale explained to his listeners:


The Tasmanians were a very primitive people and they died before
science could obtain adequate records of their modes of thought,
speech and behaviour. Because of this even a small relic such as
these songs is of undoubted interest ...
In this manner, Tindale positioned the superseded technology as a signifier of racial termination and cultural exhaustion. This approach, which stripped the songs of their semantic value, can be compared to the later transcription and exegesis of Alice Moyle, which managed to say quite a lot about the singer and her intent, despite the decayed state of the cylinders. (23)

Tindale's interpretation was concordant not only with attitudes to race, but with attitudes to recording. All mimetic technologies, those nineteenth-century inventions that purport to reproduce 'the real', are haunted by intimations of loss and disappearance. A complex matrix--cultural and emotional--modulates their impact, as Roland Barthes argued so persuasively in his meditation on photography, Camera Lucida (1980). The sensations he articulates when responding to photographs are centred around the irrecoverability of a past moment, seemingly captured by the camera. The analogy between photography and phonography can only go so far, but the theme of disappearance is almost palpable in the recordings of Fanny Cochrane Smith. This is due to the sound itself (including the patina of distortion), and to Tindale's commentary, reiterating what his listeners already knew. Not only are we listening to a woman singing, a woman who is dead; these songs in a lost language go beyond individual lament. They mark a racial terminus (to adapt the language of both her time and the 1940s).

The cultural processing of racial demise, especially that of the Tasmanians, was hardly unique to the 1940s. In the fin de siecle mood of the late 1800s, provincial newspapers around the country rattled on sententiously about the deaths of 'Old Billy' or 'Queen Fanny', always the 'last' of their tribe. Tasmania, of course, had the dubious celebrity of being the only part of Australia in which full extinction had supposedly occurred. To prove it, they had the skeleton of Truganini, the woman born on Bruny Island who became famous in her own lifetime as the 'last fullblood' Tasmanian. In contravention of her last wishes, the remains of Truganini, who died in 1876, were seized from the grave. The body-snatchers were never identified, but the corpse quickly fell into the hands of the Royal Society of Tasmania--the very organisation that later commissioned the Smith recordings. Truganini's remains were initially kept hidden in a vault, but in 1904 the skeleton was articulated and exhibited at the Tasmanian Museum (where the cylinder records of Smith were also stored). This grisly trophy, and the monstrous history of which it is part--the near elimination of an entire indigenous people after just three-quarters of a century of subjugation--might have been seen as a cautionary tale, a call for a new approach, especially after Federation in 1901. But for the first half of the twentieth century, still influenced by evolutionist ideas that Aboriginals could never withstand the competition of living in tandem with a modern and more vigorous race, the Tasmanian example merely bolstered the view that what happened there would happen elsewhere. Diet and medical services were in many cases so appalling that it is a miracle that the dire prediction did not become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Conditions were bad enough to provoke the ire of Colin Simpson when he went on his recording trip to the north of Australia. The prospect of racial death, he later wrote, 'has not moved us much; we should have been much more concerned at hearing that the cattle industry was dying'. (24) Simpson's criticism, voiced in his book Adam in Ochre (1951), was both a sign and an agent of an attitudinal change that brought greater empathy between white Australia and the people it had supplanted. Adam in Ochre, which eventually sold 50,000 copies, helped sway public opinion, and is itself evidence of how media technologies opened new possibilities for depicting Aboriginal heritage or otherwise engaging with it. As we will hear, Simpson's writings and recordings provide a counterpoint of sorts to the Tindale broadcast, which sits fairly snugly within established constructions of racial demise. Yet that said, there is not a total disparity between the two. If we tune in to Smith, and turn down the volume on Tindale's exegesis, it becomes rather difficult to situate the recordings within a straightforward narrative of colonial plunder and exhibition. To try to plant them there will only perpetuate the colonial legacy by denying the agency of the singer who preserved her voice in this way.

Leaving Smith for the moment, let us turn to Simpson and his sound recordist, Raymond Giles, who met up with the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land (AASEAL) in October 1948. AASEAL, a seven-month 'friendly mission' between Australia and its wartime ally, was then nearing conclusion. Mountford and his team of anthropologists and scientists were camped at their third and final base, the mission settlement of Oenpelli (now known as Gunbalanya) in west Arnhem Land. Simpson and Giles made many hours of recordings that included interviews with expedition scientists, and documentation of songs and ceremonies performed by Aboriginal locals. They used the same type of machine that had captured Elkin's attention, the Pyrox Wire Recorder. By this time, Colin Simpson (1908-83) was mid-way through the two and a half years he served as a writer and producer of radio documentaries for the ABC. Previously, he had worked in advertising and then as a newspaper journalist, in which capacity he exposed the celebrated literary hoax, the Ern Malley affair. As Inglis points out in his history of the ABC, Simpson's time with the national broadcaster gave him a large swath of raw material that he later used to reinvent himself as a highly successful travel writer. (25)

The title alone might explain why Adam in Ochre is little read in a supposedly post-feminist, postcolonial era. Curiously, Simpson claimed in an interview with the oral historian Hazel de Berg that the title was chosen for its phonetic rather than its semantic value.


I wanted a title of three words with a universal image in it, with
one word that was quite relevant to the Aborigines [sic], charact-
eristic or indicative of something of them, and I wanted the K sound
in the title. K has more impact than any other consonant in the
language. I perhaps had come across this in advertising but I knew
that Kodak was a psychologically, scientifically coined trade name.
You forget a lot of brand names but you would not forget Kodak
because of this K, it nailed it into your memory ... and one night
I said to myself 'Adam in Ochre' ... (26)
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Simpson had a strong social conscience, and even his more conventional travel writings probed sensitivities to do with race and prejudice. His 1956 book, The Country Upstairs, presented Japan as a tourist destination--a fairly controversial position just eleven years after the war. For Australia in 1951, Adam in Ochre did indeed nail itself onto the public agenda. Analysing recent population data, Simpson advanced the then groundbreaking argument that the 'dying race' theory was a fallacy, and that the Aboriginal population was actually increasing. He advanced a timely critique of the pastoral economy: 'With one hand, as it were, the pastoral industry offers the aboriginal economic and cultural opportunity; with the other it encompasses his life and holds him in economic and cultural subjection to the industry's needs'. (27) Based on what he had learned in the Northern Territory, he gave concrete examples of how Aboriginal people had supported the war effort. He poured scorn on scientific opinion that said Aboriginals were mentally inferior to Caucasians, and he rubbished the refusal to include 'full-blooded Aborigines' in the population figures: 'they must, surely be regarded as Australian to the same extent as the descendants of the people who invaded the country in 1788'. (28) His criticism of Commonwealth policy on Aboriginal matters was the impetus for a feisty exchange with Paul Hasluck, Minister for Territories in the Menzies government. (29) As was the case for many intellectuals of the period, Simpson's activities and associations were of sufficient concern to the government to warrant surveillance by the newly created Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. (30)

In terms of its form, Adam in Ochre is unusual for a mass market book. It would probably enjoy a hallowed position in the annals of ficto-criticism had it appeared in the 1990s, rather than four decades earlier. After seventy pages of observational writing, it segues into a fifty-page novella titled 'Kakadu Naked', and then returns to non-fiction. Simpson justified this device on the grounds that the Kakadu (Gagudju) Tribe, reported by Spencer to be the original inhabitants of Oenpelli, had been eliminated by killing and disease. So he was forced to imagine himself into their last years, and in this way tell a story of murder and moral hypocrisy to do with sexual contact on the part of settlers. The experimentalism of Simpson's approach was influenced by the experience of working in a medium that was itself being reinvented. Previously, broadcasting had been a studio-based affair, heavily scripted. It was common practice for an actor to assume the role of prime minister, say, in reading a speech. Mimicking antecedent models of theatre and concert hall, dinner-jacketed announcers, musicians and actors performed music and drama, often to live audiences. The men who read the news, forecast the weather and made other announcements (women's voices were considered insufficiently resonant by male authorities (31)), were frequently British or had anglicised accents, conforming to the southern-English example of the BBC. This could hardly be more different to the soundscape of documentary radio which was part of a push to encourage Australians to experience their land and heritage more authentically. The novelty of this type of radio, even to the people who made it, is evident in Simpson's language and use of quotation marks. For example, he writes in Adam in Ochre: 'I was then on contract with the A.B.C. as a writer of documentary programmes called "features" ...' (32)

Simpson had a lot to say about the Pyrox Wire Recorder, an Australian-made device that blossomed briefly after World War II until the introduction of magnetic tape. (33) It is enough of a presence in the text to warrant an explanatory glossary entry at the back of the book:


The sound is recorded on to a magnesium steel wire not much thicker
than a hair. The wire runs from a small reel, which holds enough
for an hour's recording, on to a bigger reel. On the way it passes
through a magnetic recording head. This produces a pattern in (not
on) the wire by changing the structure of its molecules. This
sound-created pattern is reproducible as sound. It is also erasable
... To play back what you have recorded you reverse the switch and
the wire runs back at a speed of ten feet a second. At this speed
any voice sounds like Donald Duck's ... This recorder cost about
A200 [pounds sterling]. Its type has now been superseded by a
plastic-tape model of higher fidelity, costing less. (34)
The effect of the portable recorder on scripting and production style has been studied by Tony MacGregor, a present-day producer at the ABC. He discusses the formation in 1947 of the ABC program titled Australian Walkabout, to which Simpson contributed numerous broadcasts including the documentary Expedition to Arnhem Land (1948). The novelty of this type of radio is apparent in the first advertisements, run in The ABC Weekly. Listeners were promised the opportunity to 'Meet Old Pioneers ... Hear Actual Voices of Australian Personalities ... Hear Exciting Incidents from Australia's Past and Present'. (35) The rage for representing the wildness, the character, and the rusticity of Australia, which drew partly from earlier traditions of cityites exploring the bush, paid particular attention to the sparsely inhabited central and northern parts of the continent, the areas deemed most 'authentically' Aboriginal. Now made accessible by domestic aviation, they seemed ripe for 'discovery' and '[n]ational image making', as Roslyn Poignant argues. (36) Such interest was by no means confined to broadcasters. Writers, photographers, filmmakers, painters and others were drawn to these expansive vistas; they 'went walkabout', as the name of the show suggested. As MacGregor points out, the term 'walkabout' is highly redolent in this context. It applied originally (and sometimes pejoratively) to the supposedly compulsive nomadism of 'the blackfellow', although it came to articulate a distinctively Australian mode of engaging with the country. By the 1950s the word 'walkabout' was everywhere: the name of a promotional travel magazine, a children's book by Axel Poignant, a book for adults by Charles and Elsa Chauvel, an ethnographic film by Mountford. (37)

This changing radio culture must be kept in mind when considering an event like Tindale's on-air audit of a phono-archive. Here was a new, technologically mediated spatiality that injected a different, and I would say a more emotionally charged, sense of affect into the ongoing project of representing Australia. Part of this shift involved a greater degree of first-person narrative in the reporting. In a way that he had seldom done in his newspaper career, Simpson put himself into his programs, not only because this was acceptable in the new and generically unformulated practice of radio documentary-making, but in order to situate the recordings. Scripted commentary during this transitional period frequently emphasised that 'we are out in the field with recorder and microphone'--that people were listening to the sound of 'real' Australia and not a confection cooked up by actors and a sound effects man in a city studio.

The result of this was a sense of immediacy. The heady rush of discovering the country and communicating one's findings could be euphoric. Producers in a range of media tried to relay the sensation of the experience. Simpson did so in the program Arnhem Land Expedition, when he took his microphone into the crocodile-infested Oenpelli Lagoon to capture for his radio audience the orchestral grandiosity of the dawn chorus. A heady description of making this recording forms a memorable chapter of Adam in Ochre. (38) AASEAL cameraman Peter Bassett-Smith conveyed a similar sense of intoxication when, at the end of the Arnhem Land expedition, Mountford asked him to submit a written report on the work accomplished. It is a text that greatly expands the genre of report-writing:


Have you ever tried to weave a small tapestry with fibres from each
fleece of Australia's 120 million sheep? No, well try taking motion
pictures in Arnhem Land ... There is certainly no lack of material
but to present a fair picture of life on this greatest of
Australia's Aboriginal reserves involves transport problems that
have to be experienced to be believed; however it's good fun to take
shots from the air so we may as well start there.

While droning along, in the half light of dawn, drowsy with the
sleeplessness of an early morning start, and huddled in the
'blister' of a R.A.A.F. Catalina, consciousness is rudely thrust
upon one with word from the pilot that we are soon to cross the
sheer 500 foot sandstone escarpment that is the threshold of our
destination. With cameras, bristling turret lenses, filters and
light meter at the ready, we prepare to go into action. As the
silver sky shines up at us from below, reflected in the broad
flooded plains of the three Alligator rivers that twist like
agonized pythons, the sun throws off the mantle of night and we
have an unforgetable [sic] glimpse. Here is the natural wall of
the crowned rocky cliffs and huge rectangular blocks of stone,
level strata-ed and solid that, from time immemorial, has guarded
the western bounds of this little known country, Arnhem Land. A
floating, drifting panorama that has gone in an instant. Gone?
Well perhaps others may share this vision in the cool dark comfort
of an arm chair. (39)
Differences between media are brought to the forefront by the imagistic density of Bassett-Smith's prose. While the aerial panorama expressed the quintessence of the cameraman's experience, sound recording offered a more grounded and intimate relationship with its material. In Adam in Ochre, Simpson included a rhapsodic homily to the wire recorder. Evoking the retinue of interpersonal contacts facilitated by the machine, he describes the wild array of individuals who have handled it:


Sometimes I like to look back on the cavalcade of people I have
seen carrying A. B. C. recording gear. I see the recorder-box and
the label-gaudy Globite cases of mikes and vibrators and wires and
spare-parts being passed from an Indian taxi-driver in Singapore to
a Dusun or a Murat carrier in North Borneo who puts some of it in a
round bark basket called a boongen and hoists it on his back. Then
it is far from the jungle and Australian copper miners are helping
us lug the gear through the deep tunnels of Mount Lyell in Western
Tasmania. ATorres Strait Islands native is picking it off a lugger
out of Thursday Island and rowing it towards the palmy shore of
Badu ... ATonkinese waiter earns another tip getting it into a jeep
in Vila, New Hebrides. It's in Borneo again, in a prau, going down
a jungle river chattered over by monkeys. A Canberra technician sets
it up before the Prime Minister. (40)
Mere physical contact with the recorder creates a sympathetic magic, and the passage becomes a metaphor for the connectivity of radio.

The project of representing Arnhem Land in the 1940s opens similar questions to those raised by the recording of Fanny Cochrane Smith. The desire of one culture to make a likeness of another, the process of mimesis that Michael Taussig investigates in his essays on intercultural exchange, is premised on a power relationship that nearly always favours the westerner over the 'primitive', the modern over the ancient. Indeed this very formulation emphasises the power relationship implicit to this dialectic. As Bruno Latour has written:


The adjective 'modern' designates a new regime, an acceleration, a
rupture, a revolution in time. When the word 'modern',
'modernization', or 'modernity' appears, we are defining, by
contrast, an archaic and stable past. Furthermore, the word is
always being thrown into the middle of a fight, in a quarrel where
there are winners and losers, Ancients and Moderns. 'Modern' is
thus doubly asymmetrical: it designates a break in the regular
passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are
victors and vanquished. (41)
Charles Mountford's going to Arnhem Land with a group of American and Australian scientists was an expression of this paradigm. The trans-Pacific collaboration involved the Smithsonian Institution, the National Geographic Society and the Australian Government. (42) This large-scale affair was expressive of modernity not only in its scientific ambitions but in its encapsulation of the postwar zeitgeist: the new geo-political reality. The northern Aboriginal communities had themselves been tremendously affected by the wartime experience that made the American-Australian expedition both possible and desirable. They were, after all, the first line of defence against Japanese incursion, and Arnhem Land was flooded with soldiers and military installations during the Pacific War. But this did not dissuade Mountford from trading on the supposed primitiveness of the people who lived there. In applying for the National Geographic Society funds that seeded the expedition, he proposed documenting the rich painting traditions of the area, 'knowing that the simple art of these people would be the first aspect of their culture to disappear ...' (43) He named his 1949 National Geographic Magazine article about the expedition 'Exploring Stone Age Arnhem Land'. (44) As well as studying the Arnhem Landers scientifically, weighing them, examining their diet, surveying their dental hygiene, collecting their blood, breast milk, urine and faeces, the expedition made likenesses of them. Mountford and Howell Walker, the National Geographic representative, took photos. Bassett-Smith shot moving pictures. Frank Setzler, archaeologist from the Smithsonian, took casts of their faces. And, like Colin Simpson, they travelled with a Pyrox Wire Recorder which they used mainly on Groote Eylandt, their first port of call.

With some justification, the gathering of recordings can be associated with a broader history of cultural appropriation by colonial powers. Westerners have been making likenesses of the people they colonise since Columbus took mirrors to the Americas. So much has been written about the depiction of indigenous populations by agents of empire that it is easy to forget that this image-making is a two-way process. As Taussig puts it, the 'artefact that portrays something' gives one 'power over that which is portrayed'--a reality reflected, for example, in the long tradition of Arnhem Land rock art. (45) Generations of visitors and invaders, ranging from Macassan trepangers to soldiers in planes, are depicted in paintings.

As much as sound recording is entrenched in this history of intercultural image-making, it has attributes that are exceptional. When working in this time-based medium, the ethnographic subject can direct the conversation, control the message (semantically and aesthetically) to a degree that is impossible, say, with a camera. If we treat the recorded sound image as nothing more than anthropological booty, we perpetuate the colonial trajectory by negating the input of the person who spoke or sang for the recorder. What of their desire to perform, to educate, to preserve or simply to transmit their message? Since the two mimetic devices--the camera and the phonograph--are never far from each other, there is visual as well as acoustic evidence of Fanny Cochrane Smith's recording sessions. To some extent we can tap the mood. We can see her in 1899, self-composed and immaculately dressed in the book-lined headquarters of the Royal Society of Tasmania. The horn of the phonograph that received her voice occupies the centre of the frame. Around the room are six serious looking gentleman, members of the society. Seated on the floor is the one person looking directly at the camera. He is her nephew, Gussie, who sat with her while she sang. He looks about six years old.

I think I detect the inkling of a smile on Smith's face in the photograph of the 1899 recording session, taken by Royal Society member and prominent Hobart photographer J WBeattie. In a photograph documenting the 1903 recording (taken by the firm Howard & Rollings), she has something closer to a chuckle. She is pictured with sound recordist Horace Watson, standing in his garden. He attends to the machine and she poses in a long black dress, head tilted towards the opening of the horn. That day she sang a hymn and several 'corroboree songs' in language. One of these, a homily to spring, she also sang in 1899, providing a translation in English. She made a recorded statement in 1903 that indicates that she too subscribed to the idea of racial demise. 'I am the last of the race, a Tasmanian. I am, I am the daughter of Tangnarootoora, of the East Coast Tribe. I am just seventy years of age.' (46) Watson added his own commentary to the cylinder, referring to the photograph. 'This record was made for me by Fanny Smith in 1903. We had a real excellent time here. You will see the photograph taken in the very action of singing.' (47)

There is certainly no hint that the recordings were made under coercion. A person can be forced to do many things, but it is difficult to make them sing. Watson's comment underscores all the images, visual and acoustic: 'we had a real excellent time here'. I suspect that Marawana, a key interviewee for Colin Simpson and a brilliant player of the didjeridoo, also had fun with the recorder. He is seen smiling broadly in a photograph by Howell Walker, seated in a circle round the Pyrox with Simpson, Giles and some other Oenpelli men. In west Arnhem Land they recorded an initiation ceremony and several hours of public or corroboree songs. Raymond Giles, now in his nineties, is the one participant in this session who still survives. I interviewed him in 2006 and he recalled the enthusiasm with which the singers performed for the machine.


I found too that they were very happy to be recorded and the young
stronger boys [who helped carry the equipment] were delighted to
hear themselves recorded and played back ... Once you made friends
with the young helpers they were very keen to be recorded, but
almost exclusively they didn't know their own voice and others
would say 'that's you, that's you', and they were tickled pink. (48)
Simpson relates that the purpose of the recordings was explained to Marawana and this affected how he monitored his work. 'He had seen and heard a radio at Oenpelli mission' and re-did a recording if he detected a mistake. 'The white people of Australia were not going to hear him blow a wrong note on the didjeridoo, which the white people would never have heard on the air before.' (49)

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

For amidst the power relationships that unfold around the mimetic process, there is room for a sympathetic magic. This I detect in the account of Bessie Mountford, wife of the expedition leader and honorary secretary. Her diary entries from Groote Eylandt in 1948 describe recording sessions with a man the expedition knew as 'India', although recent inquiries have established that his real name was Hindoo Namunduwulmul Mirniyowan (50):


23 June. I had helped Monty [Mountford] with the Pyrox recorder
trying to register the singing of some of the ceremonial songs. The
singer was an artist, his voice and manner matching his beautifully
sensitive face. He is called India, and is said to have acquired the
name because his caste of feature suggests Hindoo mixture in his
ancestors. True or otherwise, he is good to look at, walks with the
grace of a born dancer, and is altogether most attractive. Howell
[Walker] is using him as a camera model. Again the men folk
disappeared with the native performers, and again I sat alone
waiting for the moment when the actors should appear between two
sand ridges, moving towards the totem poles to complete their
ceremony. The light was clearer than on the previous day, there
seemed to be cameras and cameramen everywhere. They were all so
intent on photography I wondered if they saw the performance.

25 June. After a latish tea I helped Monty record yet a few more
songs. Some of his artists were nervous, everything was new and
strange, but India, giving his last song again performed with
the skill, poise and beauty of a seasoned public singer.
Tired with the day's many and varied activities we went to bed as
soon as the recording was finished, crawling into the darkness of
the two man sleeping tent as seasoned campers ... (51)
Quietly, reflectively, Bessie Mountford observed and listened, exhibiting the attentiveness required of any true encounter. These qualities are necessary when listening to Fanny Cochrane Smith, despite her near inaudibility. The surviving shred of a voice asserts her presence and belies the myth of racial extinction to which she herself subscribed.

There is of course a strange anomaly in the Smith story, which was not lost on contemporary observers. By the time Fanny preserved these 'last fragments' of Tasmanian language in 1899, Truganini, the official 'last Tasmanian', had been dead for more than twenty years. Whether Smith was of full- or part-Aboriginal blood was hotly disputed in her day. She was born on Flinders Island in 1833 or 1834 to an Aboriginal woman named Tangnarootoora. The identity of her father is less clear, since her mother had children with both a white sealer and an Aboriginal man known as Eugene. (52) Whether he was the man she refers to in an 1899 cylinder as '[m]y father Noona' is unclear. (53) Certainly, she never accepted the descriptor 'half caste'. Displaying a steeliness in her identity politics, she took pride in her knowledge of plants and traditional handicrafts, as she did in her knowledge of song. She was married to a sawyer and former convict named William Smith, and together they had a family of eleven children. Her claim to be the 'last Tasmanian' after Truganini's death convinced a parliamentary committee in 1882, and this brought her economic benefits in the form of an annuity and a grant of land. (54) That a new last Tasmanian had been recognised six years after the death and thwarted burial of Truganini was infuriating for some colonists, but the decision stood. Despite her claim to be the last of her people, there is much about her that stands for continuity above termination. I see it in the figure of her nephew Gussie, looking at the camera in the 1899 photo. The coming generation meets us in the eye.

The racial 'purity' or otherwise of Fanny Cochrane Smith is irrelevant when you hear her voice. Its long endurance makes a point about culture, since it demonstrates that language, song and tradition have a fluidity and yet a resilience that belie the fantasy that genealogy is only a matter of blood. On this note, it is worth mentioning that in 1947, just two years before Norman Tindale took to the air on ABC Hobart, Truganini's skeleton was removed from public display after a series of objections. She would wait almost another thirty years until her bones were removed from the museum, cremated, and her ashes spread in D'Entrecasteaux Channel near Bruny Island. Truganini's remains disappeared from view around the time that Fanny Cochrane Smith entered the airwaves. These days the recordings of Smith have supplanted their skeletal predecessor at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery where she sings daily in a permanent installation.

Notes

(1) Paul Carter, The Sound In-Between: Voice, Space, Performance, New South Wales Press & New Endeavour Press, Kensington, NSW, 1992; and Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language, Faber & Faber, London, 1992.

(2) R Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1977.

(3) Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998 [1994]; James H Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995; Shane White & Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech, Beacon Press, Boston, 2005; and Diane Collins, 'Acoustic journeys: exploration and the search for an aural history of Australia', Australian Historical Studies, vol 37, no 128, 2006.

(4) Mark M Smith (ed.), Hearing History: A Reader, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 2004.

(5) Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Routledge, London, 2000 [1982], p 82.

(6) See Martin Thomas, '"If we don't see this film again, we won't be able to remember": Taking documentary records to Arnhem Land', Refereed Proceedings of UNAUSTRALIA, The Cultural Studies Association of Australasia's Annual Conference, 6, 7 & 8 December 2006, accessed 20 February 2006, .

(7) See Alice M Moyle, 'The Australian didjeridu: a late musical tradition', World Archaeology, vol 12, no 3, 1981, pp 321-2.

(8) Dymphna Lonergan, 'Sounds Irish', on Lingua Franca, ABC Radio National, 3 June 2006, accessed 2 November 2006, .

(9) Moyle, op. cit., 1981, p 321.

(10) Karl Neuenfeldt (ed.), The Didjeridu: From Arnhem Land to the Internet, John Libbey & Perfect Beat Publications, Sydney, 1997. For a discussion of northeast Arnhem Landers' response to the commodification of the didgeridoo, see Aaron Corn, 'Outside the hollow log: the didjeridu, globalisation and socio-economic contestation in Arnhem Land', Rural Society, vol 13, no 3, 2003, pp 244-57.

(11) Elkin to Boyer, 3 May 1948, A P Elkin Papers, University of Sydney Archives P 130 1/5/24.

(12) A P Elkin & Trevor A Jones, Arnhem Land Music, Oceania Monographs, Sydney, 1958.

(13) Alice M Moyle, A Handlist of Field Collections of Recorded Music in Australia and the Torres Strait, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1966, p 5.

(14) Colin Simpson, Adam in Ochre: Inside Aboriginal Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1951, p 67.

(15) K S Inglis, This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932-1983, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2006 [1983], p 164.

(16) Norman Tindale interviewed by Bob Langer, 1949. ABC Radio Archives 72/10/544-2, NAT 13.

(17) Murray J Longman, 'Songs of the Tasmanian Aborigines as Recorded by Mrs Fanny Cochrane Smith', Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania, vol 94, 1960, p 79.

(18) Charles S Myers, 'Music', Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, vol IV, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1912, p 239.

(19) Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1999.

(20) Cited in Roland Gellat, The Fabulous Phonograph 1877-1977, Collier Books, New York, 1977 [1954], p 29.

(21) See Moyle, op. cit., 1966.

(22) Longman, op. cit., pp 80-1.

(23) See Alice M Moyle, 'Two native song-styles recorded in Tasmania', Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania, vol 94, 1960, pp 73-8.

(24) Simpson, op. cit., p 184.

(25) Inglis, loc. cit.

(26) Colin Simpson interviewed by Hazel de Berg, February 1960. Hazel de Berg Collection, National Library of Australia (NLA) Oral History Deb 82.

(27) Simpson, 1951, loc. cit.

(28) ibid., p 159.

(29) Papers of Colin Simpson, NLA MS5253/191.

(30) Security file at National Archives of Australia A6119, 457/reference copy.

(31) See Inglis, op. cit., p 32.

(32) Simpson, op. cit., 1951, p 6.

(33) Tape was preferable to wire because of the ease with which it could be cut and joined for the purpose of editing.

(34) Colin Simpson, op. cit., 1951, p 220. The glossary entry was omitted from later editions of the book.

(35) Cited in Tony MacGregor, 'Sympathetic Vibrations: Effecting Sound Histories', MA thesis, University of Technology, Sydney, 2000, p 61.

(36) Roslyn Poignant, 'Lost Conversations, Recovered Archives', Tenth Eric Johnston Lecture, p 2, accessed 1 October 2006, .

(37) MacGregor, op. cit., p 62.

(38) Simpson, op. cit., 1951, pp 69-73.

(39) Peter Bassett-Smith, 'Cinemaphotographer's Narrative Report', Reports of Staff, Mountford-Sheard Papers, State Library of South Australia (SLSA) PRG1218, vol 81.

(40) Simpson, op. cit., 1951, p 137.

(41) Bruno LaTour, We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993 [1991], p 10.

(42) A brief account of the expedition appears in Charles P Mountford (ed.), Records of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, vol 1, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1956-64, pp xxi-xxx. Other literature on AASEAL and its legacy includes: Anne Clarke, 'Engendered fields: the language of the 1948 American-Australian expedition to Arnhem Land', in Mary Casey, Denise Donlon, Jeannette Hope & Sharon Wellfare (eds), Redefining Archaeology: Feminist Perspectives, ANH Publications, RSPAS, Canberra, 1998; Margot Neale, 'Charles Mountford and the "bastard barks": a gift from the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land', in Lynne Seear & Julie Ewington (eds), Brought to Light: Australian Art 1850-1965, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1998; and Sally K May, 'The Last Frontier? Acquiring the American-Australian Scientific Expedition Ethnographic Collection 1948', BA Hons thesis, Flinders University, 2000.

(43) Charles P Mountford, 'Plan of Proposed Research', Correspondence 1945-1949, vol 1, Mountford-Sheard Papers, SLSA PRG1218.

(44) Charles P Mountford, 'Exploring stone age Arnhem Land', National Geographic Magazine, vol 96, no 6, 1949, pp 745-82.

(45) Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, Routledge, New York, 1993, p 13.

(46) Longman, op. cit., p 81.

(47) ibid., p 84.

(48) Raymond Giles interviewed by Martin Thomas, 27 October 2006.

(49) Colin Simpson, op. cit., 1951, p 67.

(50) Inquiries made in September 2006 at the Groote Eylandt communities of Umbakumba and Angurugu. I am indebted to Velma Leeding for facilitating these meetings.

(51) Bessie Mountford, SLSA PRG 1218/17/3/2.

(52) Longman, op. cit., p 85.

(53) ibid., p 80.

(54) ibid., p 85.