This audio walk experience was created for an arts festival in Apollo Bay in regional Victoria on Gadubanud Country, Australia: a small coastal town with a rich history of both indigenous inhabitation and care for country and through industries of fishing, forestry and tourism. It was part of culmination of a creative research residency undertaken by Amy Tsilemanis in the unique area exploring layers of the past, present and future through maps and audio. In partnership with the Apollo Bay Museum, local artists, arts organisations, and traditional owner Richard Collopy, it explores themes of place and connection and brings together traditional oral history with creative audio storytelling and walking practices.
More about the Heart Maps project and event photos here: https://amytsilemanis.com.au/portfolio/heart-maps

The form of the walk experience was “a two hour moving feast of creative oral history” weaving together voices of locals discussing their memories and favourite places, original music and poetry, and led by the voices of project creators and collaborators Amy Tsilemanis and Richard Collopy in an imagined radio show format called Heart Maps radio.
It involved a sound walk that people did on individual devices walking a map of the town hearing stories of Indigenous culture and knowledge as well as those of local families, and community places of importance.
Participants were given postcards and invited to record their memories, hopes or imagined letters and post these into specially created Heart Maps letter boxes along the walk.
There was then a short bus ride that transported participants to a walk accompanied by live music, to a scene on the beach referencing stories of the sea and encounters they has been hearing about in the audio, then across the road to the Apollo Bay museum, having been given a gum leaf from traditional owners to put in the fire as part of a smoking ceremony and entry to the museum.

The piece explores communication technologies with the museum being the site of the cable station and the undersea cabling feat that connected Tasmania to mainland Australia in the 1930s with telegraph, telephone and radio for the first time. A soundscape in the museum closed the experience with woven sounds of the cable history with oral histories and leading into a final live song with Richard Collopy in Gadubanud language with people joining in. It invited people to think and feel as they moved through the places of Apollo Bay and consider the complex layers of settler and indigenous history and how we might move forward together into the future.
Listen to the soundscape here https://soundcloud.com/amy-tsilemanis/heartbeat-soundscape-for-heart-maps-audio-adventure

There was also an associated free trail of audio stories to listen to on site that can also be accessed online called The Heart Maps Story Trail https://soundcloud.com/amy-tsilemanis/tracks