Auditory Dispatches From Terra Australis

Sounds can be Transportive

Gentle Reader,

A conversation this week with an old Australian friend hurtled me back in time.

I asked her what she missed the most about home and she told me it was the sounds of the Australian bush at night. I knew exactly what she meant – a certain feeling of being in a truly wild place, in the midst of nature, yet with that feeling of safety which comes with being at home.

Thinking back on my own days down under, a series of images came to mind.

I remembered lying in bed at dawn in a little room across from the hospital in Port Macquarie. A sudden violent cacophony became audible from outside my window and I, still in that state of half-sleep which the Italians call dormiveglia, imagined that the noises were coming from tribe of bloodthirsty chimpanzees who were hurtling through the forest at speed, calling out violently as they came nearer and nearer. Then, the sun burst into my room, awakening me and revealing the source of the sounds which had infiltrated my dreams – it was the kookaburras in the trees outside whose calls had masqueraded as the war cries of a band of vengeful primates.

I can still see that little room, the potency of the sun, the thriving woodland outside. Yet, earlier in my Australian venture, I had come across another bird whose call stays with me still. Staring out the window one day, I saw him, the culprit behind the strange warbling sound which had accosted my ears for some weeks since – it was the Australian magpie. The sound of his call is so oddly compelling as to almost to defy description, but its range and intensity reminded me of the first polyphonic ringtones that came out on mobile phones a long time ago. Later, I found out that the Australian magpie is not related at all to the European magpie, except in name, which perhaps explains the striking difference in their birdsong.

It was not just birds who performed in the natural chorus. In Melbourne, at the height of summer when the bats performed their nightly migration across the sky, the crickets would begin their usual sunset antics. How those small creatures produce such a stridulation has always been a mystery to me, yet one little guy who rubbed his wings every night in the bushes surely made enough noise to alert every female in the neighbourhood, and I could him hear just as clearly from upstairs as if he was on my bedside table alongside my lamp and trusty kindle. Once or twice I had tried to find him, peering into the bushes outside our unit, but the sound was so resonant and general that I always found it hard to localise, and so he continued his mating calls happily without interference.

I knew that my friend, Sophia, was feeling what I had felt some years ago, a sort of homesickness which yearns for a sign or a signal from the old country, or even just a familiar voice. Back when I was living in Australia I once had to ring the Bank of Ireland to carry out certain particulars that could not be done on the computer and, as soon as I heard the middle-aged Irish woman’s voice coming from the other side of the world, I was both moved and soothed, feeling a warm gladness which was tinged with sorrow. I was caught off guard – until then I had not realised how homesick I was. Two years later, I would be home.

Sounds can be transportive. Even now, I sometimes go online and play the call of the Australian magpie or I look at videos of wombats and pademelons and I am taken again to that sunburnt country where the kangaroos gently lope and raise their ears and where the owls hoot powerfully from amongst the trees.

I had an idea. I knew that home is a place but also a state of mind, a coterie of images, sights, sounds, and feelings – I suggested to Sophia that she ought to play the sounds of the Australian bush on her phone, at night, in bed. Then, the noises she had grown up with, the chirping of the crickets, the gentle whooping of the tawny frogmouth, and the rustling of possums in the bushes, would be her lullabies once more.

She would be transported home, if only for a moment or for a night, and sometimes that is enough. 

But when I looked at her, I saw that her mind had already transported her. Closing her eyes, it was as if she stood at the verge of the bush at dusk on a humid evening – she felt her toes clutching the baked terracotta earth as the magical sounds of the bush washed over her and, in that moment, she was at home again.