A Cultural History of Sound, Memory, and the Senses

279 Pages·2016·1.357 MB·English

by  Joy Damousi (editor), Paula Hamilton (editor)

A Cultural History of Sound,
Memory and the Senses
The past 20 years have witnessed a turn towards the sensuous, particu-
larly the aural, as a viable space for critical exploration in history and other
humanities disciplines. This has been informed by a heightened awareness of
the role that the senses play in shaping modern identity and understanding
of place, and increasingly, how the senses are central to the memory of past
experiences and their representation. The result has been a broadening of
our historical imagination, which has previously taken the visual for granted
and ignored the other senses. Considering how crucial the auditory aspect of
life has been, a shift from seeing to hearing past societies offers a further per-
spective for examining the complexity of historical events and experiences.
Historians in many fields have begun to listen to the past, developing new
arguments about the history and the memory of sensory experience. This
volume builds on scholarship produced over the last 20 years and explores
these dimensions by coupling the history of sound and the senses in distinc-
tive ways: through a study of the sound of violence, the sound of voice
mediated by technologies and the expression of memory through the senses.
Though sound is the most developed field in the study of the sensorium,
many argue that each of the senses should not be studied in isolation from
each other, and for this reason, the final section incorporates material which
emphasizes the sense as relational.
Joy Damousi is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne.
Paula Hamilton is adjunct Professor of History at University of Technology,
Sydney.
Routledge Studies in Cultural History
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
41 Jesuits at the Margins
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Alexandre Coello de la Rosa
42 Travelling Notions of Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe
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43 Language as a Scientific Tool
Shaping Scientific Language Across Time and National Tradition
Edited by Miles MacLeod, Rocío G. Sumillera, Jan Surman and
Ekaterina Smirnova
44 Transnational South America
Experiences, Ideas, and Identities, 1860s–1900s
Ori Preuss
45 Enlightenment and Political Fiction
The Everyday Intellectual
Cecilia Miller
46 Madness in Cold War America
Alexander Dunst
47 Minor Knowledge and Microhistory
Manuscript Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and Davíð Ólafsson
48 The Problem and Place of the Social Margins, 1350–1750
Edited by Andrew Spicer and Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw
49 Electroconvulsive Therapy in America
The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy
Jonathan Sadowsky
50 A Cultural History of Sound, Memory and the Senses
Edited by Joy Damousi and Paula Hamilton
A Cultural History of Sound,
Memory and the Senses
Edited by Joy Damousi
and Paula Hamilton
First published 2017
by Routledge
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ISBN: 978-1-138-21177-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-44532-8 (ebk)
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Introduction: Leaning In 1
JOY DAMOUSI AND PAULA HAMILTON
1 Sound Studies Today: Where Are We Going? 7
BRUCE JOHNSON
PART I
Sound and Voice 23
2 “The World Wanderings of a Voice”: Exhibiting the
Cylinder Phonograph in Australasia 25
HENRY REESE
3 “Are You Sitting Comfortably?”: The Changing Position
of Storytellers on Early Australian Radio 40
JENNIFER BOWEN
4 Lindbergh’s Voice 56
DAVID GOODMAN
5 Noisy Classrooms and the “Quiet Corner”: The Modern
School, Sound and the Senses 71
KATE DARIAN-SMITH
PART II
Sound and Violence 91
6 Throwing Down the Gauntlet: Voice, Power and Sexual
Violence in Penal New South Wales 93
PENNY RUSSELL
vi Contents
7 Startling Reports: Gunfire as Social Soundscape in Early
Colonial Australia 109
DIANE COLLINS
8 Sounds and Silence of War: Dresden and Paris during
World War II 123
JOY DAMOUSI
9 Hearing the 1965–66 Indonesian Anti-Communist
Repression: Sensory History and Its Possibilities 142
VANNESSA HEARMAN
10 “For a Few Seconds, Imagine”: An Aural Experience of Six
Days of Terror at the Stadium of Chile, 12–17 September 1973 157
PETER READ
PART III
Sensory Memories 177
11 “Big Smoke Stacks”: Competing Memories of the Sounds
and Smells of Industrial Heritage 179
LISA MURRAY
12 Intimate Strangers: Multisensorial Memories of Working
in the Home 194
PAULA HAMILTON
13 Botanical Memory: Materiality, Affect and Western Australian
Plant Life 212
JOHN CHARLES RYAN
14 “If I Ever Hear It, It Takes Me Straight Back There”:
Music, Autobiographical Memory, Space and Place 231
LAUREN ISTVANDITY
15 Seeing in Black and White: Visualizing “Shadow Sisters”
among Metaphors of Light and Dark 245
EMMA DORTINS
Contributors 261
Index 265
Figures
5.1 ‘Open Space Primary Schools,’ T he Educational
Magazine 29, no. 4 (1972), pp. 13–15. State Library
of Victoria. 82
5.2 Joe Kolker, ‘A Quiet Place: A Modern Education
Parable,’ The Educational Magazine 33, no. 6 (1976),
pp. 18–20. Curriculum Branch, Education Department
of Victoria. State Library of Victoria. 83
12.1 The beautifully polished bell used by JM’s family to call
servants. Photograph taken by Paula Hamilton,
15 January 2015. 195
13.1 The Southwest Australia Ecoregion of Western Australia,
extending from Shark Bay to Israelite Bay (shaded triangular
area) (2013). Credit: Gossipguy (Public Domain via
Wikimedia Commons). (CC BY-SA 3.0) 213
13.2 Loment (seedpods) of trefoil (D esmodium spp.),
Hawaii (2003). Photo: Forest and Kim Starr (Public
Domain via Wikimedia Commons). (CC BY 3.0) 216
13.3 Flowers and fruits of witch hazel ( Hamamelis virginiana ),
Karlsruhe, Germany (2009). Photo: H. Zell (Public
Domain via Wikimedia Commons). (CC BY-SA 3.0) 217
13.4 Close-up of kino (gum) of marri ( Corymbia calophylla ),
Kings Park and Botanic Garden, Perth, WA (2011).
Photo: John Charles Ryan. 219
13.5 Balga ( Xanthorrhoea preissii ), Yanchep National Park,
WA (2007). Photo: Ausxan, (Public Domain via
Wikimedia Commons). 222
13.6 Kevin Collins’ Table of Curiosities, Banksia Farm,
Mount Barker, WA (2009). Photo: John Charles Ryan. 225

Introduction
Leaning In
Joy Damousi and Paula Hamilton
The American lyricist Ira Gershwin had a sensitive ear for the sounds of the
modern world. In 1932 he listed in his diary: ‘Heard in a day: An elevator’s
purr, telephone’s ring, telephone’s buzz, a baby’s moans, a shout of delight,
a screech from a “flat wheel”, hoarse honks, a hoarse voice, a tinkle, a
match scratch on sandpaper, a deep resounding boom of dynamiting in the
impending subway, iron hooks on the gutter.’1
The publication of this book makes a contribution to the scholarly
conversation about the role of the senses in historical research. The past
20 years has witnessed a turn towards the sensuous, particularly the aural,
as a viable space for critical exploration in both history and other humani-
ties disciplines. This has been informed by a heightened awareness of the
role that the senses play in shaping modern identity and understanding of
place, so evocatively described by Ira Gershwin’s daily catalogue of sounds
above, and increasingly, how the senses are central to the memory of past
experiences and their representation. The result has been a broadening
of our historical imagination, which has previously taken the visual for
granted and ignored the other senses. Considering how crucial the auditory
aspect of life has been, a shift from seeing to hearing past societies offers a
further perspective for examining the complexity of historical events and
experiences.
The result can be transformative in how we understand and interpret
the past. The aim of this volume is ‘leaning in’ metaphorically to hear more
closely the senses of the past through engagement with sources generated
at the time, or by remembering at a distance from the time of their experi-
ence, which provides us with a means of access to the richness of a world
no longer inhabited. Yet this field does so much more than imaginatively
re-create the historical landscape. The senses also provide us with tools
to explore different aspects of the past hitherto unrecorded or unknown,
and to examine afresh a partly known past through a different lens. The
anthropologist Constance Classen noted that the investigation of the sen-
sory worlds of past eras should not merely describe the range of sounds and
smells that existed at a particular time, as evocative as that might be, but
should uncover the meaning that those smells and sounds had for people. 2