Acoustic Palimpsests

My proposition in this chapter is that Australian letters and “scenes of reading” (Dixon and Rooney 2013) are not just those produced in English and that, moreover, like many englishes within global English, Australian English is haunted by the accents of other languages.1 Derridean deconstruction privileged the authority of “presence,” whereas writing was designated as a type of second- order, mediated communication where stable meaning receded ever further. As cited in the previous chapter, Derrida's later work (Monolingualism and the Prosthesis of Origins) accentuated the fact that the enunciative split precluded the claim to own language, to fully control its meaning (“the hegemony of the homogeneous”). However, while emphasizing the instability of language and meaning, Derrida, an Algerian Jew, confessed to his intolerance of accents in relation to his own French monolingualism. So in the realm of voice, orality and presence there was another order of authority. He points out that such accents are not generally detectable in writing. In her recent perceptive book Not Like a Native Speaker, Rey Chow (2014) takes up Derrida's claims to demonstrate that if one looks at language in relation to colonialism, an argument could be made that the colonized, in their linguistic subjugation, understood far more consciously than the colonizers that the hegemony of the homogeneous does not exist. So this chapter will examine the oral dimensions of multilingualism in Australia but, perversely, situate these elements textually. To what extent does this hum or “presence” of other languages (Indigenous as well as others) fundamentally destabilize the authority that English appears to enjoy within a national culture that strenuously perpetuates its colonial monolingualism? To what extent do these other languages merely create accents that reinstate a yearning for homogeneous origins in the dominant groups?

The topic may also have been inflected, or performatively engaged, by the skepticism that people express in Canada when I tell them that I am Australian and they tell me (occasionally somewhat indignantly) they had not heard the accent in my voice— as though I'd been hiding something.