ABSTRACT
This chapter listens to gunfire as an element in the social soundscape of colonial Australia. As acoustics, the distinctive reports of colonial firearms occurred in many contexts. Colonial Australians came from a European culture into which was deeply etched a tradition of affirmative or celebratory gunfire. In contemporary Australia, the sound of gunfire is most immediately associated with war, dispossession, social dysfunction and individual violence. Cannon fire was then among the loudest human-made sounds, so the very magnitude of the sound functioned to announce the dominance of a nation, or of a particular social order, in this case the British state. The connection between the sound of random gunfire and dissolute manhood continued and extended far beyond lower George Street and the settlement of Sydney. Attention was drawn to the practice, ‘daily increasing,’ of persons not only carrying guns but shooting in the immediate neighbourhood of Sydney town.
