The Ocean Sounds Like a Motorway – by Melissa Fagan
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITING
1
How does the ocean sound? Like the hollowed-out whoosh of a shell cupped to your ear. A distant rustle. A constant murmur. A heavy thud, a thunderous clap, the creep of the encroaching tide. When heard from above—standing on the top of a rocky cliff—the sound of the ocean carries upwards, reaching towards your ears. Beneath the surface, it’s a deep, low warble. A ghostly, inhuman echo. A whale song. On a sunny afternoon it’s a dolphin’s giggle: joyful, playful, silly. On a cold winter’s day, it’s a kittiwake’s cry: a pre-emptive nostalgia, a mourning.
2
For two and a half years, I lived in an apartment at the top of a hill, overlooking the sea. From the balcony I could see the full stretch of the Gold Coast and beyond, all the way to the sandy hills of Mingerribah/North Stradbroke Island. From there, the coast appears as a series of bays, white-sand beaches that cup the sea, broken only by a series of headlands—Tugun, Currumbin, Jellurgal, Nobby’s Head. In the hazy distance, Surfers Paradise, a stretch of towers that pierce the sky and dominate the hinterland beyond. Fortresses of glass, they gleam and glitter in the morning sunlight, mirrorlike. In the afternoon they glow, golden. On overcast days they pale to a shade of muted blue, on the cusp of invisibility. Sometimes, when the air is misty and the sea and sky become one, they appear to float, untethered, hovering above the horizon. In Helen Garner’s short story ‘Postcards from Surfers’, narrator Nora is driving north from Coolangatta Airport with her parents when a cityscape appears suddenly in the distance: ‘Miles ahead of us, blurred in the milky air, I see a dream city: its cream, its silver, its turquoise towers thrust in a cluster from a distant spit.’
“A dream city. I thought of this phrase every time I looked up and saw Surfers glimmering like a mirage in the distance. If only it were a mirage, or a dream.”
A dream city. I thought of this phrase every time I looked up and saw Surfers glimmering like a mirage in the distance. If only it were a mirage, or a dream. The skyscrapers there were built on sand, on coastal dunes more than 10,000 years in the making, in an ecosystem that is not supposed to be still, an ecosystem that relies on the constant movement of sediment for stability. The beaches of the Gold Coast, and in particular Surfers Paradise, the dream city, where hundreds of high-rises now emerge from what was once a narrow sand spit bounded by water on both sides, are prone to erosion, especially during cyclone season. The Q1, 323 metres high and one of the tallest residential buildings in the world, was at the time of its construction praised as an engineering feat. Its foundations extend to over 40 metres; four of those are solid rock. Within four years of completion, paint had started to peel off the façade. Two years later, an owners group sued the developer, alleging that the building’s protective coating was faulty, leaving it prone to rust in the salt air.
The steel deadlocks on the doors of my rented apartment were sealed fast with rust, unusable. I requested they be replaced when I moved in, but was told that fire safety regulations prevented it. In the time I lived there, so much rusted, withered or wore away. The chain of my rarely ridden bicycle, stored in the open parking area underneath; the hooks and latches that kept the windows from flying open in the northerly winds; the original wooden window frames and every herb I attempted to grow except, for some reason, continental parsley. Even there, in that four-storey building that was more than fifty years old, nothing lasted.
When I moved there, I thought I would be there for half a year—eight months at most. I wanted to stay forever; or at least, I wanted to indulge in the feeling that I might stay forever; I wanted permanence, without actually committing to it. I thought of my years of travel, all the times I had arrived in a place and been struck by that same feeling, an impossible yearning to live there, to be someone else, to live another life. I reasoned that if I thought of myself as a traveller, rather than a potential inhabitant, eight months would seem like a long time. I ended up living there four times as long as I expected to and part of me wanted to stay. But the apartment was sold, and the new owners wanted to move in, make it their own.
For two-and-a-half years, the ocean was my soundtrack. In the old building where I lived, there was no air-conditioning, and I wouldn’t have used it if there was. There was no need for it. Most of the year I left the window wide open at night, was lulled to sleep by the sea. I didn’t mind the salt, the air that was never quite dry – but I don’t miss its corrosive quality. I do miss the sound of the ocean. As I fell asleep each night, and in the morning when I woke, I heard the sea. I became attuned to her rhythms. I came to know when it was high tide, or getting close; the register shifted, becoming louder, especially when the surf was big, or the sand settled in such a way so as to expose the rocks at the base of Kirra Point.
Once, while I was away, a friend of mine stayed with her partner for a weekend. She lost most of her hearing at the age of four, after a bout of meningitis. When she woke in the night and heard the waves, she thought she was dreaming.
3
If the ocean were an instrument, what would it be? Would it be wood or wind, keys or percussion? A violin? The bagpipes? A xylophone? A cymbal, or a snare? A timpani drum?
There is an instrument called an ocean drum. It looks like a double-sided tambourine, circular or hexagonal, with a wooden frame and goatskin on both sides, and filled with metal beads. It is apparently traditional to the Newari people from land-locked Nepal, used as a musical accompaniment to stories about the faraway sea. I have been unable to verify this, nor to source its Newari name, but I have listened to clips and been amazed – when you hold the drum on one side of the frame and tilt your wrist just so, the sound of the beads rolling across the animal hide does, indeed, evoke the ocean. There are therapeutic benefits, a calming effect. After watching a DIY instruction video on Youtube, I send the link to my partner with a message: we must make one.
In the seaside town of Blackpool, in Lancashire, England, there was a giant metal sea organ; at high tide, water filled the pipes and the instrument played chords based on the harmonic series in B flat. The High Tide Organ, as it was called, was built in 2002, and was one of a handful of similar musical installations around the world. It was fifteen metres tall and looked like the prow of a Viking ship. I haven’t been to Blackpool, but I have listened to the music online, which is the only way to hear it now—the organ was decommissioned in December 2021 following years of neglect. It sounds less like the sea and more like a sea creature, or a piano accordion that is slowly dying.
“It sounds less like the sea and more like a sea creature, or a piano accordion that is slowly dying.”
I watch a video narrated by the artist Peter Richards, who collaborated with sculptor George Gonzalez to create San Francisco’s The Wave Organ. The video opens with a series of black-and-white photographs, close-ups of The Wave Organ, and panoramic shots taken at ground level of a narrow causeway jutting into the bay: tarred road in the centre, piles of rocks at the water’s edge, and a long, large building—possibly Fisherman’s Wharf—in the distance. About a minute into the video, we see the profile of a man’s face, close up, standing next to The Wave Organ and looking beyond, back towards the city. More close-ups, all in black-and-white: a seabird in flight; long grass swaying in the wind; a fisherman casting his line. The sea a backdrop in almost every shot.
Richards’s voice drawls, a low tenor, calm and reflective. ‘You’re out in the middle of the bay, but you’re not really on dry land, it’s a tenuous place. So that’s what makes it interesting to me: the edge between solid ground and the water, and I think edges are where interesting things happen.’ He says he was particularly interested in tides, the way they connect us to the earth and the moon and the sun, to the weather and the seasons.
Gonzalez, his artistic collaborator, is a stonemason. The stone used in the sculpture is recycled, largely from local cemeteries and crypts. The sound of The Wave Organ is only part of the experience. ‘It is as much about being there and being comfortable,’ Richards says. ‘If I give myself five minutes, my blood pressure drops and my hearing becomes more acute. And I just become a part of the soundscape. The sounds of the wave organ are a part of it, but it’s also the ambient sounds as well. It’s like your body and your psyche relaxes, and fits in with what’s there.’ The images in the latter part of the video show visitors in situ: a woman sitting atop the sculpture, hand raised to shade her eyes; a young girl with an ear pressed to a pipe opening, wearing an expression of wonder; a young boy in a similar position looking uncertain.
My thoughts inevitably wander towards the idea of visiting. Except I cannot visit, not now, for a whole host of reasons, not least that Australia’s borders are shut. In lieu of a personal, embodied experience, I settle on a description from the Exploratorium website:
‘The installation includes 25 organ pipes made of PVC and concrete located at various elevations within the site, allowing for the rise and fall of the tides. Sound is created by the impact of waves against the pipe ends and the subsequent movement of the water in and out of the pipes. The sound heard at the site is subtle, requiring visitors to become sensitized to its music, and at the same time to the music of the environment.’
I have been to San Francisco twice. Once in 1988 with my family, and again in 1994 with friends. I was twenty-one by then. My friends and I had been travelling in a motorhome we had bought months earlier on the other side of the country. I wasn’t aware of The Wave Organ’s existence, and I’m not sure I would have thought to seek it out even if I had been. I went to Haight Ashbury of course, and North Beach, to Vesuvio’s Cafe and the City Lights Bookstore, where I bought On the Road and tried my best to imagine what it would have been like to live there decades earlier, in the era of the Beats or the Hippies. I still remember our visit to Alcatraz, how instead of wandering cluelessly, my travelling companions and I paid for a self-guided tour, and stood inside a long-empty cell listening to the simulated sounds of a New Years’ Eve Party at Fishermans Wharf. They would have echoed across the bay, taunting and teasing the inmates.
The Wave Organ isn’t far from Alcatraz, as the crow flies—less than two miles. I might have seen it from the island if I’d known what to look for.
4
The Wave Organ was inspired by a series of recordings made by American sound artist Bill Fontana at Sydney’s Kirribilli Wharf in 1976.
I find some archived recordings made for the ABC Radio show Scratching the Surface in March 1978, timed to coincide with Fontana’s exhibition ‘Sound Sculpture with Resonators’. The aptly titled Kirribilli Wharf (1976) was recorded as part of this project. It was Fontana’s first multi-channel field recording, the first time he set out to ‘apply structural thinking to the recordable listening process.’ Fontana described the 1976 recording as being seminal for his work in that ‘it was the first time that a conceptual analysis of a natural musical process resulted in a live recording that was as genuinely musical as music.’ In the essay ‘Musical Information Networks’, Fontana recalls how he drove to the harbourside wharf in the middle of the night. He placed eight microphones inside vertical cylindrical holes on the underside of the concrete pier to record the movement of the waves. The resulting installation, first exhibited at the Sydney Opera House, employed eight speakers to play what Fontana has described as a ‘real-time sound map’ of waves in the sea below the pier.
“In the opening minutes of the Kirribilli Wharf recording, the sounds intensify, the hollow lapping becoming more insistent: perhaps a ferry arriving, or the wake of a boat passing, further out in the harbour.”
In the opening minutes of the Kirribilli Wharf recording, the sounds intensify, the hollow lapping becoming more insistent: perhaps a ferry arriving, or the wake of a boat passing, further out in the harbour. An indiscernible whirr: it sounds like distant thunder, or rain, or wind, or a docked boat tugging at its mooring. The pier creaks and rocks with the to and fro of the ocean. The eight-minute recording seems to be over in an instant. I listen to it again, wondering whether I would be able to identify what it was if I didn’t already know. It sounds, in some way, like a dishwasher. But I also have the sense of being underwater. Fontana described the work as ‘an excerpt from a sound process that is perpetual’. Through my noise-cancelling headphones, the sound of the waves washing against the pier, rhythmic and regular, makes me woozy.
5
I have moved away from the ocean. I can still see it, in the distance, the container ships on the horizon and, in winter, whale-splash piercing the water’s surface every now and again. But I can’t hear it. Not in the way I once could.
The second time I visited the new house, I stood at one of the eastern windows in the late afternoon, heard the hum of the traffic crossing the bridge across the river known as the Tweed: the Pacific Motorway, connecting Sydney and Brisbane. My partner and I had fallen for the house already, knew we would buy it if we could. But standing there, hearing that sound, knowing it would never stop, knowing that the sound of the motorway was a poor substitute for the sound of the ocean, I felt a twinge of sadness.
A few weeks after we moved in, I woke in the middle of the night. The windows were open; in the otherwise silent night, I heard it. The trucks on the motorway. Except it wasn’t trucks. It was the ocean. I have heard it often since. Not always, but sometimes. Sound travels up the river corridor, as do birds, and the breezes.
In 1994, Bill Fontana created ‘Ile Sonore’ (‘Sound Island’ in English), a sound sculpture to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the D Day landing at Normandy. Amid the endless traffic at the Arc de Triomphe, a series of hidden loudspeakers played the sound of the sea: foghorns and seabirds, and waves crashing at the base of the Normandy cliffs. He wanted to create the illusion that the cars were silent. ‘The sound of the sea is natural white sound, and has the psycho-acoustic ability to mask other sounds, not by virtue of being louder, but because of the sheer harmonic complexity of the sea sound.’
The ocean sounds like a motorway. The motorway sounds like the sea. After almost a year of living here, I’m no longer sure which is which. ▼
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite.
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