It is a winter night on Wadjemup. I am walking through the back blocks of Thompson Bay, alongside the vintage bungalows and weatherboard staff accommodations that make up the forgotten side of the island’s main settlement. Here there is no view of the ocean, nor do the houses look out upon each other to create that sense of holiday community afforded by the more expensive and modernised cottages by the coast. it is a shadowy, hushed anomaly on an island of open spaces and skies.

This atmosphere is due in no small part to the gloomy canopy of casuarinas that sits overhead. This tree, also known as the she-oak or beach oak, soundtracks nocturnal wandering with an austere, deeply forlorn whistling. It is one of Wadjemup’s most defining sounds and, consequently, an indelible part of my life’s acoustic palette, coming to mind regularly in moments of extreme aloneness or introspection. It is the sound of emptiness, evoking the wind’s movement across an empty land better than plains or low-lying shrubs ever could. Something about it sounds expansive and effortless, a great sweeping that disregards built environment to simply wash through on a level plane.

And it is always, in some way, haunting.

My experience of the casuarina’s song is not unique. This sound, generated by the whistling of wind between leaves that look more like twigs or ‘needles’, has been the subject of interpretation for tens of thousands of years. Most of these interpretations identify something haunting about the sound, whether that be in terms of pure psychological affect or its being actually haunted by uncanny, non-physical presences or voices.

Barbara Holloway’s The Tree and Its Voices: What the Casuarina Says provides a compelling overview of the ways in which the casuarina’s song holds an important place in both colonial and First Nations imaginations. To colonial ears, this lonely crying is equated with a kind of discomfiting ‘natural’ voice; the trees themselves communicating something of their own accord that is alien to the human listener. Yet in the knowledges of certain First Nations peoples, the casuarina is a vessel by which “wise people” communicate with others equally fluent in the language (8). That is to say, the tree does not speak of its own accord but is instead a mouthpiece for those who possess the knowledge needed to use it.

I should note here that Holloway’s study draws from the knowledges of the Ngiyampaa people of New South Wales, and the Ngarrindjeri of South Australia. There is no suggestion that these beliefs are common to other First Nations peoples; only that “across Australia the casuarina-including its sounds and other characteristics-appears significant in Aboriginal traditional beliefs, stories and explanations of belonging” (7). Similarly, I do not intend to imply any sort of homogeneity by relating these ways of thinking to trees on entirely different country.

I do so instead because my own acoustic experience of Wadjemup’s casuarinas is completely transformed when, as Holloway writes, “the tree is heard to say what people make it say” (7). Especially when I consider that the casuarina’s song is loudest and most keenly felt not in the back blocks of Thompson Bay, but in an adjacent place I rarely visit out of both fear and reverence.

Behind all of the barbecuing families and exorbitantly priced holiday rentals is Australia’s largest (known) death in custody site. A burial ground containing the unmarked graves of up to 373 Aboriginal men and boys, dating back to the island’s historic use as an Aboriginal prison between 1838 and 1931, as recorded by the Rottnest Island Authority.

In a time not long before mine, this unmarked graveyard was repurposed as as “Tentland”: a budget campground whose tragic earth was seasoned with the urine and vomit of drunken uni students. Authorities eventually made some effort to right this by putting up passive wooden fencing and apologetic signage that, while doing little to appropriately honour the site, at least transformed it into a no man’s land where the casuarinas could weep day and night with no competing sound.

The place is terrifyingly sad. Upsetting in a visceral way that seemed obvious even as a child with no real knowledge of its history. The distant murmur of tipsy parents and bike bells was swallowed up by the roaring cries of the casuarinas in this field of mourning, the night breeze running off those needles like so many tears. You didn’t go there.

Yet at that time, the casuarinas’ song was always the sound of a tree talking an inscrutable and impassive language that just happened to be as haunting as the history contained in that place. Despite privileging rational understandings of the natural world, colonial minds (and ears) are all too happy to chalk these things up to mere coincidence. In fact, the very notion of the tree speaking a “language” and conveying meaning is foreign to how the colonial ear is trained to interpret the sounds of flora. They are incidental, never communicative or expressive. The acoustic experience of Wadjemup’s unmarked graves, heard in this way, has only a chance relation to the awful history of the place (never mind the fact that on an especially windy night the casuarinas’ crying begins to sound more like screaming). This ignorance is especially ironic when we consider that colonial modes of listening have long identified wind itself as having a strangely communicative acoustic quality. We speak of winds that ‘howl’ or ‘roar’, and the familiar notion of ‘voices on the wind’ implies it as a vehicle for speech.

Even when it is not associated with speech, wind has always been considered something that can stir up emotional resonances. In antiquity, wind was considered a divine portent that signalled God’s wrath or affection, and in modern times we remain sensitive to its mercurial quality (Haines Eitzen 68). It has the ability to transform a place in a way that draws us in or drives us away. I think of the sea breeze that rips idyllic beaches apart in a Perth summer, or loading docks and driveways between shopping centres that become roaring wind tunnels with the slightest hint of breeze. But then there are also the gentle, warm winds of summer evenings; surely the most soothing of all weathers. Unsurprisingly, wind has an empirically verified impact on mood and quality of life (Zhang and Li 4).

I submit that this is not just a response to the immediate, physical experience of wind (its feeling on the skin, its ability to relieve or assail), but rather a subconscious response to wind’s carriage of the unknown, coming as it does from an unfamiliar place. In a study of Gerald Murnane’s Inland, Julian Murphy states that wind “serves as an occasion for the narrator to reflect on the extension of the Earth’s surface beyond his vision and knowledge” and thereby fosters “a connection to the landscape over which the wind has passed, even those parts of the landscape that [the narrator] cannot see” (7). The same could be said of our everyday experiences of wind. It confronts us with the prospect of unknown lands that destabilise what we think we know about the world. It even carries physical artefacts from those faraway place in the form of earthly matter, rubbish, and – significantly – voices.

Sometimes this connection feels warm and familiar, other times it is deeply troubling. Either way, the notion of wind being in some way a ‘vessel for meaning’ is hardly foreign to colonial listening practices.

But what of the casuarinas? After all, this is not to say that the wind itself has a voice. Nor that the casuarinas themselves are able to communicate. That would be to lapse into familiar animist tropes. Instead it points to wind’s ability to be used as a sort of messenger. However there must still be a speaker, an agent of meaning who is able to use the casuarina as an organ of speech and the wind as their breath.

It is not for me to say whether these speakers are people, beings, spirits, or something else entirely. I don’t have the knowledge to understand them. But I believe that they are indeed there, for the simple fact that I have never heard any casuarina cry like they do on Wadjemup. No matter the wind, the density of the tree, or the silence of the surrounding environment – I’m yet to hear another casuarina create a sound so haunting or anguished. An indication that this is not the sound of a particular species of tree, but the sound of particular individual trees being ventriloquised by unknown speakers.

I cannot understand it, but I can hear it in these trees alone. And I have no doubt that in so many other casuarinas, the voices also run freely. Talking, whispering, and crying out in great torrents of language that fall upon my deaf ears.

WORKS CITED

Haines-Eitzen, Kim. Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us. Princeton UP, 2022.

Murphy, Julian. “Being-in-Landscape: A Heideggerian Reading of Landscape in Gerald Murnane’s Inland.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 14, no. 3, 2014.

Holloway, Barbara. “The Tree and Its Voices: What the Casuarina Says.” Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, vol. 1, 2011.

Zhang, W., and W. Li. “How Weather Conditions Affect Well-Being: An Explanation from the Perspective of Environmental Psychology.” Frontiers in Public Health, vol. 13, 2025.

“Wadjemup Aboriginal Burial Ground Memorialisation.” Rottnest Island Authority, Government of Western Australia, www.ria.wa.gov.au/projects-and-developments/significant-projects/wadjemup-aboriginal-burial-ground-memorialisation. Accessed 20 July 2026.