'I turn up the volume and walk towards home': Mapping the Soundscapes of Loaded

Abstract

Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel Loaded (1995) is one of the most sonically intense Australian novels ever written. Taking place over a 24-hour period, it depicts Ari – a 19-year-old child of Greek migrants – engaging in a continuous flow of sexual encounters, drug taking, walking, dancing, and listening to music. Ari’s movements through the city of Melbourne immerse him in an almost constant series of soundscapes. Traversing between venues of excess and confrontation – the city street, the nightclub, the Greek club, and a variety of domestic spaces – Ari pushes the boundaries of his identity, his sexuality, challenging what it means to exist in Australian urban modernity. In this article I will trace Ari’s engagement with sound, sound technologies, and sound spaces. I argue that Ari maps a terrain of social and historical alienation, from the values of both his parents and friends, and of the larger society. This is not to say that Ari wholly rejects his parents and society: rather, his position is shot-through with contradictory attitudes and experiences. The fault-line of this ambivalence and tension is located around sound – mostly manifest as forms of popular music – where Ari is able to reject the mainstream, but also, at times, to connect with his family, and be part of a community. To chart Ari’s use of sound technology is, I argue, to encounter the core of Loaded’s portrayal of a second-generation Greek homosexual man grappling with the demands of contemporary Australian society.