Unmuting the Past

: Sound-led Creative Practice and the Colonial Legacy of the Silent Expeditionary Film

Abstract

Between the birth of cinema and the declining years of the British Empire after World War Two, expedition (or 'travel') films produced in the Australian colonies were shot silent, and are consequently missing an important dimension and voice. Many of these films reflect a colonial gaze, laying claim to place through their visual construction, with subsequent exhibition being to a spectatorship with a particular understanding of Britain's place in the world as well as ideas of a burgeoning white Australian nation. Whether consciously politicised or not, these films become part of collective memory and represent enduring colonizer narratives of place. Sound informs our sense of place and identity, the silence of these films is therefore deafening, but presents an opportunity. Taking the 1926 "travel film" The Wonderland of North West Australia as the basis for the research and creative practice, I examine what we do not hear as a way to explore sounds role in the creation of place and identities through aural ways of being and knowing, debate the potential for sound-led creative practice as a means to reconceptualise and re-contextualise previously encoded images, and explore field recordings as an important but malleable document of time and place. In 2019 I embarked on a fieldtrip to the Kimberley region of North Western Australia to retrace some of the steps of the original expedition. I captured sounds and images that resulted in two creative pieces, one audiovisual, the other sound-only. Both involved the editing, manipulation, and layering of field recordings and, in the case of the audiovisual work, the incorporation of material from the 1926 film. Numerous ideas are explored in these pieces, including the acoustic exploration and re-enactment of environments, objects, and unheard spaces, as a way to expand our understanding of auditory experiences, the conceptual use of sound and images to explore the multi-layered present and non-linear notions of time, the potential for creative work to help present new perspectives, voices, and alternative histories that challenge embedded colonizer narratives of place, and a reflexive and reflective mode that situates the field recordist. Through this work I argue that sound is a vital and often overlooked part of human experience in time, and that engaging and working with sound creatively offers the potential to provide new ways of thinking.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Australian National University