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White Noise
One of the first things you find out about Bogong is about the Bogong moth. Indigenous Australian populations used to migrate annually to the area to feast on the springtime abundance of the moth. Sadly due to many reasons relating to white colonisation there are almost no traces of the original inhabitants of the area. In the Bogong historical society there is a corner dedicated to the Aboriginal history of the area and one of the staff does attempt an oral history in the talks they give… I recorded one of these with my phone because as much as I knew she meant well, some of the things she said were pretty offensive. For example” “(Aboriginals) they had no resistance to alcoholism” and that they used to go into the mountains to feast on the moth looking “all scraggly” and come back “fat and healthy, their skin all shiny”...
The recording I have of her is pretty rough but I cut it up and layered it over itself to form a whirlpool of her voice. I purposely made it so that you couldn’t exactly make out who was saying it as I didn’t want to identify her, but you can make out certain lines here and there… I used this recording over some video footage of Bogong moths I shot.
It’s hard not to see the significance of our initial searching for any trace of Aboriginal culture being drowned out by the white noise of the valley…
I think the material we have gathered over our time here has to reflect on the lack of aboriginal presence here. The voice recording from the historical society is a start but we will definitely try harder to acknowledge what has happened and who came here before white people.