Palimpsest 4,
2001
VACANCY - ONE TREE HOTEL
An abandoned derelict property
stands back off the Cobb Highway surrounded by a barbed wire
fence. Searing hot winds from South Australia push through
its hollow inner spaces where sunken floorboards have given
way to weeds and the dry smell of earth underneath. Some
old loosened timbers sway and bang against sturdier upright
supports as unfixed corrugated iron clatters wildly in counterpoint.
The rise and fall of wind rush catches on eaves and fills
hallways as though trying to pump life into a building that
wants only to recover itself as dust. Birds inhabit these spaces
now flying between rooms with no doors and windows with no
glass, a fantastic cage on a plain without trees.
Standing listening to this odd syncopation between nature
and a place of human habitation, faint voices even whole words
can be heard rising from the percussive heat. But their sense
is elusive as the pull of the present moment blunts any recognition
of meaning. Then they assume other guises and return in gusts
of bright chirping and rattling tin to mimic shaken harnesses
and the tread of boots on hardened ground.
It feels as though the slackened fabric
and weakened structure of this place has released to awareness
a sonic spectre of all those who have passed through it.
An old broken down hotel surrenders to the wind on a vast
silent plain to become a solitary resonant chamber and for
one hour it leaves its trace as impressions on a ribbon of
audio tape that I have set in motion."
Martin Sims,
February 2001 |
