Between the birth of cinema and the post WWII era, expedition (or ‘travel’) films made in the Australian colonies were shot silent and are missing an important dimension and voice. Many of these films reflect a colonial gaze, laying claim to place through their visual construction, and exhibited to a spectatorship with a particular understanding of Britain’s place in the world and ideas of a burgeoning white Australian nation. Consciously or not, these films become part of collective memory and represent enduring coloniser narratives of place. Sound informs our sense of place and identity; the silence of these films is therefore deafening, but presents an opportunity.

Taking the 1926 “travel film” The Wonderland of North West Australia as an example, Rob examines what we do not hear as a way to explore sound’s role in the creation of place and identities through aural ways of being and knowing, to debate sound-led practice as a means to reconceptualise previously encoded images, and explore field recordings as malleable documents of time and place. In 2019 Rob retraced the steps of the original expedition and captured sounds and images that resulted in two creative pieces, one audiovisual, the other sound-only.

These pieces explore the acoustic re-enactment of environments, objects, and unheard spaces, as a way to expand our understanding of auditory experience, the conceptual use of sound and images to explore the multi-layered present and non-linear notions of time, the potential for creative work to help present new perspectives, voices, and alternative histories that challenge embedded colonizer narratives of place, and a reflexive and reflective mode that situates the field recordist. Through this work Rob argues that sound is a vital and often overlooked part of human experience in time, and that engaging with sound creatively offers the potential to provide new ways of thinking.

Rob Hardcastle is Senior Lecturer and Discipline Lead for Film Production at the University of Canberra. As a filmmaker, Rob has many credits in cinema and broadcast. His recent work has been as a sound designer and re-recording mixer on television documentary films. Previously, Rob was an audio producer, recording and mixing in diverse environments, from jungles and forests to recording studios and concert halls around the world. Rob has published and presented on how advanced conceptual thinking can help address issues around sustainability and exclusivity in industrial film-making, the propagation of misinformation and disinformation in television documentary films, the role of sound in the creation of place and identity, and the film archive as a contested space. Rob’s practice-based research devises new methodologies to help provide new perspectives, often by exploring silenced or missing voices. As an educator, Rob has taught at BA (Hons) and MA level, exploring the connection between theory and practice, considering film within a broad socio-cultural and historical context, and encouraging a pragmatic challenging of embedded and problematic cultures in industrial filmmaking practice.