History, Memory and Displacement: A Postcolonial Study of The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Abstract

Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) is a significant Australian novel that explores migration, displacement, memory, trauma, and the difficult construction of identity in a post-war multicultural society. Set in Tasmania, the novel centres on Bojan Buloh and his daughter, Sonja, Slovenian migrants whose lives are profoundly shaped by the violence of European history and the experience of resettlement in Australia. The novel moves between different periods of Sonja’s life, revealing how individual memory is inseparable from historical trauma. Through its fragmented narrative structure, silences, flashbacks, and representations of landscape, Flanagan demonstrates that migration does not necessarily end displacement. Instead, geographical movement may reproduce psychological, cultural, and emotional forms of exile.

A postcolonial reading of the novel reveals the tensions between homeland and host country, European history and Australian identity, belonging and alienation, and personal memory and collective history. The Buloh family’s experience also complicates conventional understandings of Australian multiculturalism by demonstrating that migrants carry histories that cannot easily be assimilated into the dominant national narrative. This article argues that Flanagan uses the experiences of Bojan, Maria, and Sonja to examine how historical violence survives through memory and the body, and how confronting the past becomes necessary for the recovery of identity and belonging