Sounding out mobility in the tiny airports of south-eastern Australia
PhD thesis completed 2022
Abstract
Australian transport infrastructure statistics show that 61% of rural aerodromes ran at a loss in 2014-2015. Of all the states, the situation is worse in Victoria, where roads and real estate pose the greatest threat, and where space, both aerial and terrestrial, is at a premium. Throughout the last few decades, aerodromes in Geelong, Philip Island, Wallan, Whittlesea, Welshpool, Melton, Moorooduc, Pakenham, Moree, Labertouche, Orbost, Longwarry, Cabbage Tree, and Berwick have been closed, while others face an uncertain future. This thesis aims to demonstrate the significance of these closures and show how, by serving multiple purposes and multiple histories, tiny airports affect the bodies and imaginations of their users and the community.
In order to achieve this goal, the project ‘sounds out’ one tiny airport, to gain a better understanding what it is, and does, and give voice to what would be lost if it were to close. The airport in question is the Benalla Aerodrome. Like most tiny airports it is layered with histories, knowledges, aerial imagination, community, and opportunity. It is also an important piece of regional infrastructure. Its existence has an impact on the mobilities of airport users around the nation. And here, mobility is understood as being an entanglement of movement, meaning, and practice. In the field of mobility studies, however, tiny airports are often overlooked. A lot has been written about large airports, particularly their place and placelessness. Tiny airports, not being iconic symbols of globalisation, or a handy representation of time-space compression, are literally bypassed. Yet every airport, no matter how small, is connected, simply by virtue of it being an airport, to the wider world of aviation, to transport policies, to regional demographics. Each links to culturally defined aviation imaginings, that are both nostalgic and futuristic. This speaks to the new era of electric flying machines, which are already airborne. To examine this, both creative and traditional research methods are used in gathering the data and in communicating the results. Hence this thesis uses both written text and sound (in the form of embedded audio files) to enable a new set of acoustics to resonate. This is especially true of information pertaining to affective atmospheres, emotion, and the place of the body. The result takes the findings of this project beyond the realm of passenger and flight statistics, into a world of possibility, even joy, that for some, can only exist in the sky.
