Sound Medicine: Bringing nature to Australian Indigenous women in prison
Researchers in Australia worked with Indigenous women to bring the sounds of home inside the prison walls.
This episode originally aired September 5th, 2021.
Part of the reality of incarceration for Indigenous people is a profound loss of connection to home, community, and culture.
In Queensland, Australia in early 2019, an interdisciplinary team of researchers decided to try something experimental — bring the faraway sounds of home to a group of women behind prison walls.
The research team worked with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in the Brisbane Women's Correctional Centre (BWCC) to design and compose an immersive audio soundscape to promote well-being, relaxation and a strengthened connection to culture and country.
They called the pilot project, Listening to Country.
The project team consisted of two Aboriginal researchers, Vicki Saunders and Bianca Beetson, and two non-Aboriginal researchers, Leah Barclay and Sarah Woodland.
Woodland, a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne, has been running creative programs at BWCC since 2011.
After working on an audio drama project, Woodland received a request for a more personalized audio-focused project.
"One of the women came to me and said, 'We would like to make a relaxation CD. That's what we'd like to do for a creative project,' Woodland told producer McKenna Hadley-Burke for Tapestry.
Country, in the Indigenous Australian context, is about more than just the geography of a place.
Beetson, a Gubbi Gubbi/Kabi Kabi woman from the Sunshine Coast and Director of Indigenous Research at Griffith University, describes country as "that belonging place."
"That place that you feel connected with that place that fills your wellspring, and energizes you, and makes you feel good wherever you are. But, you know, in a traditional First Nation sense here in Australia, you know, country's really about that place where your ancestors have been born," she said.
"I think a significant part about living off-country for Listening to Country was the fact that, you know, these women were incarcerated, and couldn't actually have access to country. They couldn't get to that place that makes them feel well and reconnects them."
Indigenous people are highly overrepresented in Australia's prison population. Indigenous women were deemed the fastest growing group in Australian prisons, making up 34 per cent of all incarcerated women. The rate of imprisonment among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in Queensland more than tripled over a fourteen-year period, between 2005 and 2019.
High incarceration rates mean more women — many of them mothers — are separated from family, community, and culture.
Saunders, a Gunggari woman from south west Queensland and the Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Indigenous Health Equity Research at Central Queensland University, says environmental sounds are tied to Indigenous healing practices.
"The best medicine for most of us is to go bush. And part of that medicine is the soundscapes, the natural rhythms of a soundscape, that can really help you," she said.
"One of the women was saying that she'd been in for three years. And what she missed most was the sound of nighttime. In a prison environment, there is no sounds of nighttime that we would normally experience … it resonated for me because I was trying to imagine what would that do to me, if I couldn't hear the sounds of nighttime?"
All of the researchers stressed that the goal to give the women some reprieve from the unrelenting sounds of alarms, slamming doors, talking, and other industrial noises that make up a prison soundscape was a driving force behind the project.
"Sound itself is so intrusive, you can't actually have sonic privacy, in a sense — and especially in a prison. It's so overwhelming, the soundscapes that you're immersed in … having spent a bit of time there for the project, you're realizing how much it's affecting you while you're in that space," said Saunders.
The research team was supported by Aunty Melita Orcher and Aunty Estelle Sandow, from the Brisbane Council of Elders. Their presence during the project was essential to fostering trust within the group and creating a culturally safe environment for the participants.
In addition to already being familiar with the prison and the women, Saunders said having the Elders present also helped them "hold the space in a safe way."
"These things are, you know, they're part of deeper traumas ... because it is about a sense of place and belonging and, you know, the politics of identity for Indigenous peoples worldwide are designed to disconnect you from that," said Saunders.
The team stressed that the work of the project wasn't just about what the women wanted to hear, but how they needed to listen.
The concept of dadirri, from the Ngan'gikurunggurr and Ngen'giwumirri languages of the Aboriginal peoples of the Daly River region in northern Australia and popularized by Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, played an important role in introducing the women to the practice of 'deep listening.'
"It's not just about hearing with your ears. Yeah. It's hearing with your whole senses, your whole body. Aunty Miriam Rose talks about it in a much more profound way than I ever could. But it is about, we need to learn how to listen properly. She talks about you know, that's the gift. Aboriginal ways of listening is a gift for everyone," said Saunders.
Barclay, a sound artist and acoustic ecologist, conducted the field work of gathering the environmental recordings and creating the final hour-long immersive audio soundscape. She says the benefits of listening to natural soundscapes go beyond improvements to mental well-being.
"We've got plenty of scientific evidence now that listening in the environment or listening remotely with high quality recordings can reduce your heart rate, your blood pressure, slow your breathing, and have, you know, a positive physical impact on your body in just 10 minutes," explained Barclay.
Barred from bringing laptops into the prison, the team had the women write and draw what they wanted to hear on big pieces of paper that they then used to map out the structure of the design of the soundscape.
Field recordings were gathered from 15 different locations across southeastern Queensland and the final soundscape included sounds of ocean waves, dolphins, a campfire, kookaburras, a didgeridoo, music from local Indigenous artists, and sounds the women recorded inside the prison.
"There's obviously issues around, you know, people's voices being identified in those recordings so we did have to manipulate those in a way that we couldn't identify the sounds of specific people's voice," said Barclay.
The final day of the project, when the team presented the completed soundscape to some of the women who participated, was an emotional one for Beetson.
"We had them on yoga mats, lying on the floor and listening for 45 minutes to the sound. They forgot where they were, you know, and that was one of the things that stood out for me when the women were like, 'Oh, we forgot we were here,' " she said.
"That was the standout moment for me. In fact, I think I got very emotional."
Since the pilot project was completed in 2019, the team has been looking at bringing the Listening to Country methodology to other spaces and communities that could benefit from personalized soundscape creation. Moving forward, the team wants to emphasize the capacity for future projects to capitalize on accessibility and engagement.
"So we're building workshop models and essentially capacity building programs where we can train young Indigenous artists to actually do the field recording and produce soundscapes and become, kind of, active leaders in the project as well," explained Barclay.
"And the kind of other layer of the inclusive technology is, well, I guess, listening experiences that are responsive to individual people. So rather than, you know, someone that's wearing hearing aids, not able to listen to the soundscape, how do we actually design a soundscape specifically for someone with that particular hearing [ability]?"
The team hopes the methodology will make its way into more prisons as well as other institutional spaces and transform the way we think about sound in relation to well-being and maintaining connections to community, culture, and country.