AustLit

'This article encounters two Tasmanian novels, Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994) and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm (2004). The novels each contain two soundscapes: one detailing the hidden histories of violence and genocide at the frontier meeting of Aboriginal people and colonialists in the 1820s, and a second, set in a contemporary timeframe, that echoes these past traumas within the lives of characters facing extinction of their own. Deploying a close listening approach in the analysis of these soundscapes, the essay charts the space of the island in the novels, arguing that the resonance between the soundscapes past and present constitutes a transhistorical continuum of sound that links the colonial to the present. While there are both similarities and differences between the soundscapes in Flanagan and Bird, in the novels the sonic continuum reconstructs colonial history and remaps the space of the island. The discussion is positioned in relation to discourses of sound in Australian gothic literature, haunting, and theories of space.' (Publication summary)