Listening to Alex Miller's Soundscapes.

Abstract

Australian novelist Alex Miller’s two novels, Journey to the Stone Country (2002) and Landscape of Farewell (2007), present journeys into a web of interconnected northern Queensland landscapes. Sound is a vital aspect of these landscapes. Listening to the sounds and silences of these novels opens up imaginative, post-colonial geographies, Australian landscapes that exceed the horizons of colonial vision. This paper deploys a critical listening practice that seeks to listen to how Miller’s soundscapes construct the relations that resonate between his characters, and between the characters and the sonic landscape. Listening to the central relationships of the two novels, I argue that these relationships unfold within the resonance of the sounds and silences of Miller’s landscapes. His characters are located in a soundscape that extends the dimensions of the visual landscape: through sound and listening the human/human and human/landscape relations in the novels exceed the spatiality and temporality that has traditionally, silently, produced the self/other structure of colonial mastery.