Desert “Dreamtime” in Sound (60 min)

As you travel from Australia’s Eastern seaboard, the temperate forests and lush undergrowth slowly shifts to rolling grassland and eventually to a hard scrabble semi-arid region that marks the beginning of Australia’s great deserts. The biggest town in the area, Broken Hill, sits within a small range of mountains--hills really--that the English settlers called the Barrier Ranges because they marked this final shift from a land of the living to a land of apparent emptiness and death. To the East of these ranges, the third longest river in Australia, the Darling, finds its first shape and meanders aimlessly though the increasingly fertile landscape as it finds its feet and strength on the way to the ocean. To the West, however, the "barrier" is crossed and you could travel nearly 3,000 miles as the crow flies finding yourself only in desert before you hit the Indian Ocean. This soundscape is recorded near a hill called Mount Darling. In keeping with the minimalism of the place, you will hear very little and what you do hear won't change much. The sound mainly consists dry brown grasses moaning hollowly in the empty wind and the incessant chatter and hum of insects buzzing just above the rocky outcroppings and endless sand. The occasional miniature flying creature comes into earshot but that is about it. With fewer than 3% of Australia’s already small population calling these deserts home, you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that it is blank and empty and inhospitable. But the indigenous peoples of Australia have called these sun-drenched places in Australia’s red center home for many tens of thousands of years. And generation after generation lived a vibrant and sophisticated life over those fifty or sixty thousand years, learning to live closely with the land below, learn from the sky above and harmonize with the subtle dream world that permeated everything. Listen carefully and hear the land as they heard it. Nothing much has changed (in the sounds at least) for a long, long time. If you can let go of thought and judgement even for a few moments and give in to the sound you will begin to get a sense of the thin veil that separates the human mind from the Dreaming. This is what a place sounds like where the people have no word for time.

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