Please see the online version of this article to play a sound file while reading this piece.
As a Tangata Tiriti-Pākehā sound artist now living on Wurundjeri Country, this writing — much like my practice — deviates, trespasses and wanders off. Growing up as a sixth generation beneficial-coloniser from a farming family in lower Te Wahi Pounamu (Kai Tahu Land, Aotearoa), there was time and space to wander. However, any connection to Land was ultimately rejective: confused by imperialised notions of ‘improvement’ through control, boundarisation (the process of defining and enforcing limits on Land), commodification, toxification and exploitation. Such perspectives shaped and sickened the people, some whose lives ended too soon from chemical exposure and economic pressures beyond their control — Land remained reshaped and sick, constantly caught up in some colonial agenda.
Leaving the ‘rural areas’, I moved to the city and began playing in bands, becoming embedded in a diverse community of noise musicians. Noise drew me to a love of acoustic feedback as resonance, which prioritised improvisational action and expression through doing the ‘wrong’ thing. Through improvisation I found a commonality between the experimental-noise community of Ōtepoti (Dunedin) and the wandering of my agro-pastoralist upbringing. Carrying this with me, I then moved to Naarm, unceded Wurundjeri Country, in 2012, where I have lived and made work within the sound art community here since.
Between these lived experiences, I can understand and share that improvisational practices hold value in their necessity for self-reflexivity and trust, which undermine imperialised notions of control through commitment. Many hypocrisies lurk unquestioned in the methodologies and language used by many ‘site-responsive’ sound artists. Often, we are all implicit in a mess of ‘helicoptering’ in; we fly in, fly out. Time-pressured, under-budgeted, ecolo-guised, cryptic-non-selves — self-appointed discoverers and heroes, leaning on distractive, nonspecific, safe-haven new materialisms and post-human canons which only perpetuate the backdropping of living Land through a self-elevating narrative. As sound artists on unceded Lands, listening is an act of positioning and of perspective. Perspectives can be flexible depending on one’s commitment to self-reflection — not ‘deep’ anything, just sensorial commitment, specific, open and direct. Less jargon and exhausted language.
Language informs reality. Words convey ideas. They should not be used to form subtly violent phrases of coercion. If we actually ‘acknowledge’ Country, how do we prioritise living Land? How do we listen and present how we listen? How do we live and present how we live? Our words and actions show commitment; they perpetuate an overlapping and shared existence; they generate resonance. Otherwise, we limit ourselves by prioritising imperialised frameworks or ‘schools of thought’, and respect boundaries we shouldn’t. Within the subtler layers of fear and disconnect, we self-police, as well as police each other through imperialised restrictions, policy, efficiencies and professionalisms.
If we continue with imperialised perspectives of Place (through manipulations of space and time as trajectory), where the way things are expected to unfold (as expectations), or anticipated outcomes (as agenda) constantly inhibit our senses and selves — we perpetuate rejective, unthoughtful and closed practices. Therefore, improvisational acts with Places avoid that familiar safe haven for positionalities based on control or a preconceived outcome or agenda. Accepting incidental tangents presents opportunities through embodiment to learn more about our relationships with living Land and reveal existing structural and self-imposed restrictions influenced by such personal boundaries based on expectations and trajectories. Ultimately, it's about commitment: resonance accumulating between present moment, Land and false notions of a separate, observing self. We have all felt this resonance, regardless of differences in lived experiences and constructed realities.
If I were to try to describe what I mean by ‘improvisation’, it’s like understanding, for a fraction of a second, that I have, think or know something, then instantaneously, perpetually letting it go — like falling and catching myself, over and over — acting as transducer, converting energy from one form into another — not blocking the way through definitive thought or process — letting it pass through in a continuous flow of immanence, where holding too tightly would only disrupt and disconnect. Improvisation is simultaneously temporal, spatial and embodied. It oscillates, in immediate, pre-thought, intuitive resonance and in energetic accumulations of time, space, thought, flesh, earth, air and electricity. Tuning in to the subliminal, perhaps a wavering, harmonic drone on the edge of hearing, which grounds us to Land through attentive and consistent presence — something beyond hearing. A sound which subtly vibrates the structure, expanding through its molecules, re-contextualising, reflecting and self-amplifying its own signal. Who is it that hears? Through avoiding holding, having, owning or controlling, one is open to resonant possibility, to align through trust and commitment. Everything structural, institutional and imperialised within and of our actions and ourselves is designed to restrict these forms of immediately connective experience across senses.
In 2023 I was commissioned as a sound artist to ‘respond’ to Melbourne Water’s Western Treatment Plant — where our shit, piss, discarded DNA and chemicals — metropolitan essence (‘waste-water’) from Batman’s expanded colony, or Melbourne City — ends up. On first coming here I was struck by the dominance of the colonial narrative attached to the zero-population ghost town of Cocoroc, where the first workers who established the plant lived. The narrative has since improved, with Wadawurrung reality being more visible in this Place.
On seeing a map of this area, the name ‘Old Boundary Road’ stood out to me. A boundary defines an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ while regulating movement of access in either direction — in or out. The imperialised boundarisation of Land, the encapsulation and channelling of Water. While the history of this particular ‘Boundary Road’ is not confirmed, it reminded me of the function of boundary roads in many Australian cities. Most information I could find on this comes from Magandjin (Brisbane), where boundary roads are signifiers of colonial control of Land. These roads are ‘characterised by the subjugation of First Nations People to the implanted government, police forces, schools and churches’.[1] Colonial laws established boundary lines for ‘better’ alignment of streets and police forces. They also facilitated more controlled curfews for First Nations people, a measure presented as ‘for their own safety’, while exiling them to beyond the boundary as justification for ‘removing and preventing nuisances and obstructions’.[2] If we question our lingering settler-colonial perspectives of Place and the nature of such a facility occupying Wadawurrung Lands, it is the concept of the boundary, and the actions around those invisible lines drawn on Country, that is most relevant.[3] Australia began as a police state, and the police state lingers on in us in subtler ways.
On the Land, also known as the ‘historic township’, there is a one-hundred-metre passage of spare steel sewer pipes landscaped in and big enough to walk through. With the concept of the colonial boundary in mind, my ‘response’ became to record sounds from the Land and Waters around the defined boundaries of the treatment plant and transduce them through this infrastructure. This transformed the pipes into speakers, or resonant chambers — to invert perspective by transducing the sounds of the Land back through the materiality representing the ‘centre’ of the colonial narrative. Through a self-composing, multi-channel installation, one could listen to the Land back through the infrastructure, decentring the imperial perspective to reconsider one’s positionality in listening to Land.
I came here most days for six weeks. It was hot, dry, somewhat sketchy, and I was unmonitored, unescorted. Mapless, I deviated and wandered across the Land occupied by the treatment plant — from defined boundary to defined boundary; between the freeway, Wirribi-yaluk, the warini (ocean) and Little River, all beneath Wurdi Youang (the You Yangs). Eventually I came across Old Boundary Road. At its end, a roadblock impedes access to Wiribi-yaluk (Werribee River). The words ‘Southern Cross’ were at my eye level — a eureka-esque vibe, a warning, for protection and security.
For one to transgress a boundary from interior to exterior (or the inverse) requires moving oneself and being moved, often by doing something not allowed, uncomfortable or considered ‘unsafe’ — disobedient, conflictive, selfish, problematic, unprofessional. Simultaneously, an undermining antagonism of imperial structures and a dedicated commitment to the recognition of living Land. I climbed over the nine-foot boundary fence to wander towards Wiribi-yaluk, with words such as ‘trespass’, ‘unauthorised’, ‘protection’, ‘fortress’, and ‘permit’ lingering in my unsuccessfully self-policing mind. I was, however, breaking out rather than breaking in. The question becomes, as imperialised people concerned about the devastating effects of continuing colonialism, how can the narrative shift, not only conceptually, but for real? The narrative is of our perspectives, so how can we shift whose interests we continue to serve? Is it our imperialised selves? The institutions? The funding bodies? The statutory bodies? Western law? How can shifts in perspective, in reconsidering language and actions, amplify and accumulate in resonant potential? Embodiment informs change, rearranges our matter, shifts thought — it accumulates within us experientially.
The Places we boundarise and are boundarised from tell us most about ourselves and our relationships with Land. It’s in the Places we are not supposed to go where we disrupt our own sense of control. Trespass is an interruption. To transgress, reposition, reject and act otherwise — between Land, our senses, and our selves as an embodied experience — questioning the western-imperial laws in which our colonial selves have been formed. Trespass becomes connective through its immediate, experiential rarity; its unrepeatability generates lasting memory in us — in its gut-led, pre-thought stasis, where Place passes through us. Transduction smears the boundary. It transgresses mediums, passing between materials as vibration: that harmonic drone on the edge of hearing surfaces again, this transduction informs a resonance, acoustically and emotionally, inseparable. Transduction and trespass then become one and the same. In converting and passing through, the underlying drone continues. Often the Places which require trespass are those at the edges of processes of privatisation and land-locking.
By trusting in the unknown and uncertainty of such Places — in deviating, trespassing, and wandering — a resonant relationship is formed through intention and commitment; a trust within not-knowing. In the unknown, we become more a part of the narrative, instead of Place being designed for our ‘allowed’ interpretations. Trespass then has us experiencing in ‘unintended’ ways, and such improvisational acts interrupt the controlling relationship imperialised agendas have with time.
Time waits for us beside accumulations of domestic waste, broken Kmart furniture, discarded photographs and piles of bluestone; it slinks away through a dissolving community garden, hums in wires, follows stray cats and avoids people who are in a rush. Time orients itself by rusting car bodies, ibis nesting areas, twisted peppercorn trees, clusters of fennel, artichoke, Scotch thistles, and discarded farming equipment; it weaves its way through overgrown paths overlapping with one another in the Places where no one is quite sure what ‘belongs’ where, or how it even got there.Trespass enacts a responsibility to self-reflect, something which must continually be brought up within the varying contexts of sound art, listening and self. As we linger at the boundary, with slight hesitation, a glimmer of uncertainty, or a thought of somewhere else we ought to be, the ‘safer’ option, we can choose instead to deviate, wander or trespass — stepping forward in recognition of the potential for resonance beyond the boundary.
----
----
¹ Kathleen Feain, Breaking Boundaries, RMIT Catalyst, 2013, https://rmitcatalyst.com/2013/09/29/breaking-boundaries-by-kathleen-feain.
² Daryll Bellingham, “The History of the Boundary St. Curfew,” Storytell, last updated 15 February 2023, https://www.storytell.com.au/boundary.html.
³ Liz Cameron, ‘“Healthy Country, Healthy People”: Aboriginal Embodied Knowledge Systems in Human/Nature Interrelationships Knowledge Systems in Human/Nature Interrelationship,’ The International Journal of Ecopsychology, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020.