Internal Life

ABSTRACT

Performance Research Book’s book, Absolute Rhythm: Works for minor radio, collects ten of my radiophonic scripts written and broadcast in Australia mainly between 1986 and 1998. This article describes the cultural milieu in which they emerged. It argues that an upsurge of interest in a migrant writing that went ‘beyond the echo’ of Anglo-Australian writing coincided with a proliferation of historical ethnographical publications illuminating Aboriginal/white-settler linguistic transactions in early colonial Australia. It suggests that, common to both the new migrant writing and the old ethnolinguistic documentation was a ‘negative baroque’ style whose elaboration was in inverse proportion to the mutual understanding of the parties. The article illustrates the creative potential of these failed communications, and the constructions placed on them, arguing that the different economy of signification that springs up where there is no language in common articulates an alternative history of colonial relations. Embraced as the basis of a ‘migrant poetics’, it brings into focus performative features of communication that conventional textual analysis (and literary writing) repress. These features not only reside outside language in gesture and context but inside language in the power of echoic mimicry to endow ‘self-sufficient sounds’ with an ironic inflection that subverts the implicit goal of normative communication – the silencing of the other – giving the subaltern a speaking position that is radically different. A short account of a recent studio production of ‘Cooee Song’, one of the scripts printed in Absolute Rhythm, relates the cultural critique to a post-radiophonic studio praxis.

Notes

1 In 2020 none of the productions Andrew McLennan produced for the ABC across thirty years of consistent sound-art innovation is available; recordings of first productions of my works only survive because McLennan made copies.

2 The major source for these in Victoria, Australia, is Smyth (1876, vol 2: 1–221). The form of these wordlists is a standard selection of English words together with their Aboriginal language equivalents. Explaining grammatical structures, the informant (often a missionary or mission station manager), frequently provided a ‘literal’ translation of the Aboriginal expression back into English, frequently with grotesque results.

3 The script of ‘Mirror States’ was published in Carter (1992a: 93–114). The installation was never realised but a radio version of the composition was broadcast on Australian Broadcasting Corporation FM radio in October 1989.

4 To quote Derrida (1973: 32).

5 In his journals, Robinson mentions at least four Indigenous men, Eurodap, Tari-gul jar, Bo.kel.bur.nin and Pay-woo-deet who bore his name, referring to them respectively as ‘Tom Brown, alias Mr Robinson’ (Robinson 1980: 167), ‘alias Mr Robinson’ (Robinson 1988: 66), ‘Mr Robinson Larnajet’ (Robinson 1988: 99) and ‘chief, alias Mr Robinson, fine old man’ (Robinson 1988: 31).

6 This may be less Borgesian than at first appears: the native name of Nobody is given as Koi-ti (the man’s age is estimated at 39); the native name of Little Nobody is given as Kote (aged 18); the latter is presumably the former’s son, the similarity of their names a cause of confusion.

7 Dawson is also honest enough to admit, ‘It is right, however, to say that, though much trouble was taken, it was found very difficult to make the aborigines understand what was wanted’ (Dawson 1881: lxxxv).

8 ‘I set myself rules in order to be totally free,’ as Perec put it, echoing Queneau’s earlier definition of Oulipians as ‘rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape’ (Gallix 2013).

9 I pay tribute to radio maker and poet, Martin Harrison (1949–2014), who not only created the productions of ‘Memory as Desire’ and ‘What Is Your Name’ but suggested the former’s name.

10 In his technical production notes, Williams writes, ‘The sung vocals were processed through a TC Electronics Fireworx "Bad Record" algorithm and the wet-dry mix managed dynamically in ProTools. This achieved

a degree of emotional distance for most of the work, with

a more natural sound preferred where emotional engagement was to be heightened.’ (See Carter and Williams 2020)

11 ‘Cooee Song’ is based on John Moore Davis (1876: 320–22).

12 The recordings used were made by Williams at selected sites in south-west Victoria: Warrnambool Harbour, Merri Marine Park and Warrnambool Breakwater, Port Fairy Harbour (Moyne River Mouth). ‘Kelp’, an original composition of these and selected inland river field recordings, was part of ‘Hidden Histories’, exhibition, Warrnambool Art Gallery, April–May 2014.

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Paul Carter

In a number of books and public artworks, I have explored the practical expression of ‘material thinking'. Material thinking is a way of thinking particularly and locally, of attending to moments when unforeseen decisions are made and of demonstrating how the unpredictability of such decisions is a form of knowing that differentiates creative research from other forms of knowledge. In thinking materially, the process of making does not represent anything: it produces something. At the same time, the decisions taken also map a landscape of alternative paths that were not taken. These alternative paths are partly what the work is about because they surround the work, linking it, we may say, to the unpredictable complexity of the real. In principle (and in my practice), this approach applies equally to writing, drawing, sound composition or public space design. All these productions, inscriptions etched into public landscapes, radio scripts composed largely of ethnographic quotations, sound installations triangulating between sculptural installation, peri-lingual vocalisation and environmental sound can be described as ‘offcuts of infinity’. Work of this kind is vulnerable to external pressure. Aiming to show how previously unrelated materials can fit together to create new sense, it risks not fitting into any of the received genres or categories. It is likely, I now think, that this reflects a typically migrant ambivalence about attachments. Some years ago, a critic referred to me geometrically as polyhedral. The Greek word hedra refers to a thing fit to be placed and a place fitted to receive that thing. Each material situation generates its own feedback.