As Joy Damousi pointed out in her previous book, Freud in the Antipodes, ‘While historians and other social theorists have focused primarily in the visual and its influence in the construction of identity, little attention has been given to the auditory in understanding the “modern” notion of the self’ (p. 2). Any scholar in the field of popular music studies would subscribe to these words and approach this book in search of well-known references.
While this collection of texts has little directly to do with popular music, they illuminate central themes in popular music studies. These texts focus on a peculiar modernity, well located geographically yet far from dominant traditions: Australia. A large number of the texts explore the creation and codification of correct forms of English speech in Australia. Two essays deal with another type of sonorous phenomenon: Diane Collins' study dedicated to the sound of gold-fields; and James Donalds', the only author who includes musical reference in his work establishing parallelisms between industrialisation and the era of jazz in Paris.
The different approaches used allow for the establishment of connections between fields. One main connection is the continuity of class conflict when examining sonorous phenomena. Diverse articles indicate how a consequence of modernity is the progressive elimination of distances, both literal and social. And unlike the eyes, the ears cannot be closed. Cities and emergent countries of modernity such as Australia are melting pots, spaces of encounter and therefore of conflict. The industrial era is no doubt an era of class struggle and so sound is presented as comer stone of class identity, of subaltern identity.
The conquest of sound is therefore part of the history of conflict between the hegemonic forces trying to define the right ways of sounding with the subordinated cultures that try to achieve their own space. We have read about these processes in the field of popular music, and here the works of Collins and Donald exemplify these processes in rural Australian and urban European environments.
In the struggle to impose a vision of a sonorous orthodoxy as part of achieving and creating an idealised image of national communities, great impact has come through ideological apparatuses such as those exemplified by various schools (see Atkinson and Kirkpatrick); mass media notably radio (Griffen-Foley); and cinema (Yecies). The study of these processes of community reaffirmation stands out especially in Deacon's chapter, ‘How an Australian invented “Good American Speech”’, which illuminates the imaginary element of identity constructions. (This reminds me of a Spanish example vis à vis the central role that Silverio Fraconetti, a singer of Italian origin, played in the codification of flamenco styles.) To this end, but on a micro-sociological level, the study by Lake emphasises the role of oral expression of Prime Minister Deakin in his relations with the British colonial government: the power of the voice and oratory are presented as central elements of a powerful masculine identity, that because of its symbolic power becomes by extension the identity of a nation that presents itself as an independent country despite a reality of colonial dependency.
Despite its misleading title, with regard to the sonorous scopes and geographic spaces analysed, the cases contained in these essays are deeply related to concerns and problems circulating in the field of popular music studies.
