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Soundings
The French corvette l'Astrolabe sails into Westernport, the scientists on board intent on drawing, recording, classifying. A century later Anna and Jasper Black, pioneering believers in the notion of progress, come to test their belief that the land can be made to serve their purposes. Now landscape photographer Jack Cameron, lost, drifting, struggles with their past to find a purpose his own life lacks. This bold and impressive novel interweaves narrative strands from past and present to create a world that is familiar yet disturbingly strange. Landscape becomes an obsession, photographs throw up unsettling images distilled from the past, reality and imagination begin to shift...
216 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
About the author
Liam Davison
20 books4 followersLiam Patrick Davison was an award-winning Australian novelist. He was born in Melbourne, where until 2007, he taught creative writing at the Chisholm Institute of Technology in Frankston.
Educated at St Bede's College, Melbourne and Melbourne Teacher's College. Davison was awarded the National Book Council's Banjo Award for Fiction in 1993 and has been shortlisted for several literary prizes such as The Age Book of the Year Award and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. His work is characterised by its sharp and perceptive insights into Australian history and landscape.
He was married with two children, Sam and Milly, and lived on the Mornington Peninsula. (Wikipedia)
Liam Davison and his wife Frankie were aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 when it was shot down over disputed territory in Ukraine, and all lives were lost.
Educated at St Bede's College, Melbourne and Melbourne Teacher's College. Davison was awarded the National Book Council's Banjo Award for Fiction in 1993 and has been shortlisted for several literary prizes such as The Age Book of the Year Award and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. His work is characterised by its sharp and perceptive insights into Australian history and landscape.
He was married with two children, Sam and Milly, and lived on the Mornington Peninsula. (Wikipedia)
Liam Davison and his wife Frankie were aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 when it was shot down over disputed territory in Ukraine, and all lives were lost.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 3, 2014
When I set out to read Liam Davison’s novels as a tribute, I had no idea how rewarding it was going to be. I had never heard of Davison; I was motivated by sentiment and a determination that his work would not sink into obscurity because of his untimely death. But Soundings, Davison’s second novel, has turned out to be a riveting book to read. It’s an extraordinary book, one that sucks the reader in as surely as the mud of the mangroves of the story trap the characters into murky waters below.
The novel is written in three timeframes woven together, and – infused with an intimate knowledge of the landscape – it draws on the history of the Westernport region. It begins in the early 19th century with a sealer called Kerrison observing his woman clubbing seals on the rocks. Nameless, she is an Aboriginal woman, abducted from her home and her people to be Kerrison’s slave. Kerrison witnesses a French ship arrive in the bay and take observations. Their act of measuring and naming everything makes his familiar world suddenly feel different. William Hovell arrived a week after the departure of the French, disconcerting Kerrison still further when he takes an interest in the woman.
As the ships sailed out of the bay, Kerrison knew that any chance of respite for him had gone and that he was left to face what had been building inside him since the French had come. He watched his wife dragging herself across the rocks, her black skin shining with grease as she edged her way closer to a family of seals. And he thought of the sketches the French had made of her and the questions Hovell had asked, wondering what it was they had seen that he couldn’t see for himself. He remembered how quickly she had aged, how she’d lost the suppleness she had had as a girl and how he’d been left to share his bed with a woman he could never know. And he hated himself for it. Not because of what he’d done, but because he continued to live with her and because it had taken others to show him that there was more to her than he could ever have imagined before. (p. 81-2)
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/08/03/so...
The novel is written in three timeframes woven together, and – infused with an intimate knowledge of the landscape – it draws on the history of the Westernport region. It begins in the early 19th century with a sealer called Kerrison observing his woman clubbing seals on the rocks. Nameless, she is an Aboriginal woman, abducted from her home and her people to be Kerrison’s slave. Kerrison witnesses a French ship arrive in the bay and take observations. Their act of measuring and naming everything makes his familiar world suddenly feel different. William Hovell arrived a week after the departure of the French, disconcerting Kerrison still further when he takes an interest in the woman.
As the ships sailed out of the bay, Kerrison knew that any chance of respite for him had gone and that he was left to face what had been building inside him since the French had come. He watched his wife dragging herself across the rocks, her black skin shining with grease as she edged her way closer to a family of seals. And he thought of the sketches the French had made of her and the questions Hovell had asked, wondering what it was they had seen that he couldn’t see for himself. He remembered how quickly she had aged, how she’d lost the suppleness she had had as a girl and how he’d been left to share his bed with a woman he could never know. And he hated himself for it. Not because of what he’d done, but because he continued to live with her and because it had taken others to show him that there was more to her than he could ever have imagined before. (p. 81-2)
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/08/03/so...
March 5, 2019
Just beautiful; the story and logic and impact is built by pieces. Gregory Day summed it up better than I can: "By the book’s end an uncanny human inquiry has taken place, full of mystery and pathos and depicting the true scale of the tiny vertical human within the wide horizontalilty of landscape."
August 21, 2020
Liam Davison is not a prolific author. Born in 1957, he published his first short story in 1981, and his first novel, Velodrome, in 1988. He has now published a total of four novels and some 25 short stories. Now he regularly reviews Australian fiction for the "Weekend Australian" and was a judge for the 2005 Australian/Vogel award. So his output has been limited. On the basis of his first two novels this is a pity. He produces interesting work and I, for one, would like to see more of it.
Soundings is set in Westernport Bay in Victoria, a swampy area prone to fierce downpours and flooding. The novels looks at the way the land and water has been treated by man since white settlement, examining the force exerted by the elements on the poeple who live there.
We first encounter Kerrison, a sealer in 1826 who is exploiting a local Aboriginal woman to survive. He encounters, in turn, a French exploratory force, and then William Hovell, a major English explorer of the period. Kerrison is a strange, violent man who is the first to feel the force of the environment in which he lives.
We then cut to the main story of the novel, that of Jack Cameron in the present-day. Cameron is a landscape photographer who has taken leave of his job from the Ministry of Lands, and who rents a house on the bay from Alton Kleist, an antiquarian book-dealer who is spending an extended period overseas. Added to the mixture of characters are the original owners of the house, the Droste family, and in particular their daughter Anna. The forward pace of the novel jumps between each of these characters, interweaving their narratives and slowly building up layers of understanding in the reader.
Cameron is attempting to take a rest from the landscape photography that he has been at for too long. "For himself, there was only the land, always seen through the eye of the lens, always with the aperture set at infinity. Even when there were features to be seen - a hill or lake or group of trees falling inside the co-ordinates of his map - they were pushed to one side, often only half in the picture, always reduced to a drab flatness by the requirements of his work." He longs to take photographs of people, portraits, even pornography, but he keeps being drawn back to the swamp, the mud and the water. In Kleist's house he finds photographs of the bay and portraits of Anna from the 1890s, and he starts to take his own photographs using, of all things, the finishing line camera from a disused greyhound racing track. His fixation on taking these photographs becomes almost an obsession as he drives all over the bay finding the best combinations of light and shade, sometimes returning day after day to the one spot to record the gradual passage of time. And slowly he starts to see things in his photographs that he is certain are not visible to the naked eye. The land is replaying its own history to him. Even as the mud and sandbanks shift and change with the tide and rain, they seem to retain a record of the passage of man. Each character experiences this is their own way, and none of them are able to understand the full nature of the forces surrounding them.
It's hard not to see Davison making some telling comments here regarding the contrast between the Europeans' relationship to this landscape, and that of the indigenous inhabitants. They, at least, did not attempt to tame the place. And neither where they swallowed up by it.
This is an impressive novel, short, and beautifully paced. Its concept of landscape lingers long in the mind, clinging on like the mud of the bay.
Soundings is set in Westernport Bay in Victoria, a swampy area prone to fierce downpours and flooding. The novels looks at the way the land and water has been treated by man since white settlement, examining the force exerted by the elements on the poeple who live there.
We first encounter Kerrison, a sealer in 1826 who is exploiting a local Aboriginal woman to survive. He encounters, in turn, a French exploratory force, and then William Hovell, a major English explorer of the period. Kerrison is a strange, violent man who is the first to feel the force of the environment in which he lives.
We then cut to the main story of the novel, that of Jack Cameron in the present-day. Cameron is a landscape photographer who has taken leave of his job from the Ministry of Lands, and who rents a house on the bay from Alton Kleist, an antiquarian book-dealer who is spending an extended period overseas. Added to the mixture of characters are the original owners of the house, the Droste family, and in particular their daughter Anna. The forward pace of the novel jumps between each of these characters, interweaving their narratives and slowly building up layers of understanding in the reader.
Cameron is attempting to take a rest from the landscape photography that he has been at for too long. "For himself, there was only the land, always seen through the eye of the lens, always with the aperture set at infinity. Even when there were features to be seen - a hill or lake or group of trees falling inside the co-ordinates of his map - they were pushed to one side, often only half in the picture, always reduced to a drab flatness by the requirements of his work." He longs to take photographs of people, portraits, even pornography, but he keeps being drawn back to the swamp, the mud and the water. In Kleist's house he finds photographs of the bay and portraits of Anna from the 1890s, and he starts to take his own photographs using, of all things, the finishing line camera from a disused greyhound racing track. His fixation on taking these photographs becomes almost an obsession as he drives all over the bay finding the best combinations of light and shade, sometimes returning day after day to the one spot to record the gradual passage of time. And slowly he starts to see things in his photographs that he is certain are not visible to the naked eye. The land is replaying its own history to him. Even as the mud and sandbanks shift and change with the tide and rain, they seem to retain a record of the passage of man. Each character experiences this is their own way, and none of them are able to understand the full nature of the forces surrounding them.
It's hard not to see Davison making some telling comments here regarding the contrast between the Europeans' relationship to this landscape, and that of the indigenous inhabitants. They, at least, did not attempt to tame the place. And neither where they swallowed up by it.
This is an impressive novel, short, and beautifully paced. Its concept of landscape lingers long in the mind, clinging on like the mud of the bay.
September 24, 2021
Lovely writing. Super sensory and engaging. Great length.
Did Not Finish
September 1, 2016DNF at page 15.
It's a little early to quit, and I can already tell that it's well written and I believe an interesting story, but I have other books that I need to get to really soon, and I don't want to force myself to get through this story within a day and potentially put myself in a book slump. I only picked it up in the first place because it had been sitting on my unread pile for years, and I needed a small book that I could easily get through in a day. I may come back to this book some time in the future, but I feel that the short section that I read was enough to tell me that I personally wouldn't get the most out of this book and that it's not something I'm overly interested in.
It's a little early to quit, and I can already tell that it's well written and I believe an interesting story, but I have other books that I need to get to really soon, and I don't want to force myself to get through this story within a day and potentially put myself in a book slump. I only picked it up in the first place because it had been sitting on my unread pile for years, and I needed a small book that I could easily get through in a day. I may come back to this book some time in the future, but I feel that the short section that I read was enough to tell me that I personally wouldn't get the most out of this book and that it's not something I'm overly interested in.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews