'Imagined Sound' of Australian Literature and Music

Joseph Cummins is a scholar based in Melbourne, Australia. He has published widely on Australian post-war literature and music, with a focus on sound and landscape. His recent research also explores literature and family history.

• Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction – Imagined Sound; Part One: Listening to the Continent; 1. Reimagining ‘the centre’: Francis Webb’s ‘Eyre All Alone’ and David Lumsdaine’s Aria for Edward John Eyre; 2. Midnight Oil: Sounding Australian Rock around the Bicentenary; 3. Sound and Silence: Listening and Relation in the Novels of Alex Miller; Part Two: Listening to Islands and Archipelagos; 4. An Archipelago of Convicts and Outsiders: The Songs of The Drones and Gareth Liddiard; 5. Echoes between Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania: The Space of the Island in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm; 6. A Sonic Passage Between Islands: Mutiny Music by Baecastuff; Part Three: Listening to the Continental Archipelago; 7. Noisy Songlines in the Top End; Coda; Notes; Works Cited; Index.

‘These essays take us closer to a recognition of the role of sound in the formation of national identity, a far more complex dynamic than simplistic celebrations of, for example, “national” musics. They reveal the contradictions and fissures in the bland generalisations that have generally underpinned representations of Australian identity.’—Bruce Johnson, Professor, University of Technology Sydney, Australia; University of Turku, Finland; and University of Glasgow, UK