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'The tree known popularly and scientifically as the casuarina has been consistently noticed for the sounds made as wind passes through its unusual foliage of needles and leaf scales. The acoustic experience of the casuarina — with subspecies found throughout Australia — has been represented as 'haunted', 'grieving' and voicing the secret language of initiates. This essay traces intriguing conceptual and aesthetic representations of the 'voice' and its listeners found across both Aboriginal and white Australian cultures in traditional English verse, Aboriginal prose narrative, accounts of cultural practices, and hybrid blends of all three. The essay adopts the notion of 'listening to listening' to set out the many forms of story the tree's sounds generate their contribution to identifying places, and to suggest a specific Aboriginal song-line appears to underlie the divergent replications of tree-'voice' across southern Australia.' (Author's abstract)
Notes
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Epigraph:
On the erased hillside
your true eyes understood the wind that was our origin.
-Peter Boyle, Apocrypha
The boughs of the She-oak began to wail as the wind was passing through the wiry
leaves. Now the sounds seemed to come from the She-Oak...
-David Unaipon 'Narroonderie's Wives'
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 6 Mar 2014 13:44:24
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-131836-20120507-0833-www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/aslec-anz/article/view/2233/2732.html
The Tree and Its Voices : What the Casuarina Says
Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
Subjects:
- Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin : A World That Is, Was, And Will Be 1998 single work non-fiction oral history
- The Wail in the Native Oak 1861 single work poetry
- The Poetical Works of Henry Kendall 1966 selected work poetry
- The Voice of the Native Oak 1851 single work poetry
- Deep Well 1962 selected work poetry
- Gunderbooka : A Stone Country Story 2000 selected work non-fiction oral history
- Henry Kendall 1883 single work poetry
- Sensory Displacements : Migration and Australian Space 2010 single work criticism
- Narroondarie's Wives 1924 single work short story
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