Sounds of place

A site specific audio artwork commissioned by Wollongong City Council.

This project considers the cemetery as a site of intersecting stories: of people who are buried there, their relatives, the history of the town and how it developed, and also the plants and animals at the site.

Ten Audiomoths were used to create wide area field recordings at the cemetery and combined with spoken word interviews which resulted in a multi-channel audio installation using 8-10 loudspeakers. People can move and explore inside the cemetery sound field which has been translated down to room size. Birds, frogs, cars, planes, the wind in the trees… and from the loudspeakers will emerge voices talking about memories and human connections.

I am finding out some amazing information working with the Helensburgh Historical Society. For example, a woman buried at the cemetery, Emelie Harper Makin was the daughter of a French-Canadian citizen and ‘Patriote’ Joseph Marceau, who was transported to Australia in 1837 for insurrection and rebellion against the British Crown.

At first glance you might not imagine the bush or the animal life playing a major part but I am learning that the cemetery at one time had more sections than it does at present such as a paupers’ section. The space we see today has altered dramatically over time due to human intervention and the effects of periods of fire and rain. Fire has also resulted in a feeling of empty space, as many burials had only simple wooden crosses which have been burnt away. In fact the cemetery is mostly occupied; unmarked graves are everywhere, and in some cases the exact location of burials has been lost altogether.

The Audiomoth recordings and the locations in which they were made can be accessed through this Google map layer. These sounds are free to download and use under the license below. These are uncompressed high quality files so keep that in mind if you are accessing them using mobile data.

The project’s audio files available through the Google map are licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International