Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 1 of 21

Social Ecology Research Group

A rticulating A ustralian Senses of Place John Cameron

CONTENTS: Personal stories of place Cultural perspectives on place Psychological perspectives on place Spiritual perspectives on place Perspectives on place from literature and the arts References

In his 1998 Boyer lectures, David Malouf described the "complex fate" of Australians of European origin as being 'the paradoxical condition of having our lives simultaneously in two places, two hemispheres [which] may be just the thing which is most original and most interesting in us. I mean our uniqueness might lie just here, in the tension between environment and culture rather than in what we can salvage by insisting either on the one or the other' (1998, p.33). This tension between a European cultural and intellectual heritage and the physical realities of the continent lies at the heart of our constant reinventing ourselves as a continent and as a people. It is manifesting itself particularly acutely in the debate on the possibility of Australia becoming a republic, symbolically as much as practically severing ties with Europe and charting a different course in the next century. It is one of the underlying factors in the debate over the Wik legislation and Aboriginal land rights, along with an equally profound tension between European and Aboriginal heritages. In another manifestation, it is complicating the process of closer economic and political ties with Asia as the physical closeness of the continents belies the cultural distances between them.

A number of Australian writers who have grappled recently with the working-out of these tensions, notably George Seddon (1997), have arrived at the emerging sense of place in Australia as a central theme. Sense of place tends to be used as a broad umbrella term that has great intuitive appeal. Consider the following statement from a leading American environmental educator: 'It occurred to me that sense of place was literally the roots of ecological identity - ideas such as bioregionalism, sustainability, material simplicity, community, citizenship, decentralisation, environmental psychology and others were integrated in this one expression. All of my students and colleagues were cognitively, affectively and spiritually motivated to understand and articulate their sense of place' (Thomashow, 1996, p. 192).

Interestingly, although Seddon has been known for decades as Australia's "sense of place man", he has become cautious about the increasing popularity and uncritical use of the term: '"Sense of place" has become a popular concept, heard at every turn, unanalysed, and this is, for me, a problem' (p.105). The key question for him becomes "whose sense of place are we talking about?", the danger being that one person's or culture's interpretation of the qualities of a place can be imposed on others as if it had externally derived authority.

While recognising, and indeed embracing, the personal, contextual and cultural creation of place, the authors of this book demonstrate that sense of place, or more precisely the process of recognising and articulating our different senses of place, sheds light on some fundamental issues of personal http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 2 of 21 identity and what it is to be Australian. The book asks the question: Given the four major waves of cultural settlement in Australia (Aboriginal, British, other European, Asian), have Australians at the end of the century developed a distinctive sense of place? Coming at it from the other direction, are the particular natural qualities of the Australian continent finally making themselves felt in our national consciousness? If there are distinctive Australian senses of place, what are they and how are they constructed?

This volume is a collection of the work of two dozen scholars, poets, priests, artists and writers attempting to answer these questions from their own standpoint. It is part of a genre perhaps best described by Tom Griffiths in a recent review of Veronica Strang's book "Uncommon Ground" in the Australian's Review of Books: 'It has been rare in Australian studies to extend to non-Aboriginal groups the analysis of emotional and spiritual attachments to places of work and habitation, but this work is beginning' (November 1998, p. 13). The book goes beyond analysing non-Aboriginal attachment to place to considering the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal senses of place, and how that relationship might be fostered.

All the authors were participants in two national colloquia on sense of place and prepared earlier drafts of their papers for these events. The word "colloquium" in this context refers to a gathering of three dozen invited participants designed to bring about a deeper interaction between a group of place writers and researchers and a particular place than is possible in a conventional conference. The colloquia were not held in conference centres, but in venues conducive to deepening sense of place. The first one was held in the Upper Blue Mountains, with participants camping or staying in cabins, and meeting in large sandstone caves some distance from the campsite. The second was held at a camp 70 kilometers out of Alice Springs on the edge of the Macdonnell Ranges, and many of the meetings were held out in the surrounding desert. There was a mixture of intellectual discussions and time for participants to experience the place for themselves. There was at least one all-day walk into the surrounding country each time, which intensified the sense of the group journeying into new physical and conceptual territory together.

Participants prepared a short paper before the colloquium addressing some key questions relevant to the particular aspect of sense of place chosen for the gathering. The first colloquium was concerned with personal and professional understandings of sense of place and spirit of place, the second with the interaction between Aboriginal and Western senses of place. The papers, which were collated and distributed prior to the colloquium served the purpose of introducing the attendees and their ideas beforehand, enabling some sense of the collective experience and understanding of the issues to be gained. As one of the convenors, I have been delighted by the spirit with which the participants engaged with each other and with the country in each colloquium. Something larger than a mere sharing of ideas emerged that has touched all those who have attended.

Despite, or perhaps because of the popularity of the term "sense of place", its general nature and different usages require some description, if not definition. Sense of place is a broad subject area of interest to many disciplines, indeed Relph quotes the Academy of Science as stating that the science of geography derives its substance from humanity's sense of place (1976, p.2), but it is not a discipline in itself. It has to do with the relationship between people and the local setting for their experience and activity. An affective or feeling response to place is central to the concept, although it is perhaps better described as the interplay of emotion, knowledge and action with reference to a place (Altman and Low (1992), p. 5). There are many related terms such as place attachment, topophilia, place identity and environmental embeddedness.

An alternative way of looking at the phrase is to start with its components. my preferred description of "place" is Relph's: 'The word "place" is best applied to those fragments of human environments where meanings, activities and a specific landscape are all implicated and enfolded by each http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 3 of 21 other' (1992, p.37). To put "sense of" in front of a word is to bring attention to the individual experience, so that a sense of community means more than the concept of community, it means the way in which people experience a particular community, the felt sense of belonging. Similarly, a sense of place would refer to the way in which people experience and feel about the enfolded meanings, activities and landscapes.

The subject has been deeply investigated by phenomenologists working in the fields of geography and the built environment. Phenomenologists bring the life-world, the taken-for-granted pattern of everyday life, into conscious scholarly activity. Discarding theoretical positions or postulates, they seek to describe the experience of place itself, and in so doing, find that consciousness and the world are reciprocally related. There are many strands of phenomenological thought, but some of the most profound insights on place have come from recent interpreters of the work of Merleau-Ponty, who located language and perception in the body, and through the body, the world. For example, David Seamon (1992) has pioneered an approach to place which transcends the disciplinary divide between the built and "natural" environments, while Abram (1997) has produced a synthesis of phenomenology, ecology and indigenous knowledge.

The subject has been equally deeply explored in another way in the tradition of nature writing which has been best developed in North America, reaching back to Thoreau and forward to Annie Dillard. In my view, the doyen of the field is Barry Lopez. In his prize-winning book, "Arctic Dreams' (Lopez (1986)) and his essays, he combines acute observations of creatures and natural phenomena with detailed knowledge of field ecology and equally acute self-observation and reflection on larger human themes. It is unfortunate that a tradition of place writing of this calibre has been slow to develop in Australia.

There are many reasons why there has been a resurgence in interest in sense of place in Australia this decade, some of which are explored in the following paragraphs, but the roots lie deep in Australia's history; the remoteness and isolation of the place in the 19th Century accentuated by the length and arduousness of the journey to get here, the vastly different experiences of convicts and free settlers, the strangeness of the native flora and fauna to European eyes, the decimation of the Aboriginal people followed by very limited understanding of the depth of connection between the indigenous people and their country, the battle to establish agriculture and pastoralism in very harsh conditions, and the slow appreciation of the qualities of the country by artists and writers. These themes and others have been developed in the histories by Robert Hughes, Manning Clark and others, but there remains an interesting book to be written, tracing the development of Australian sense of place since 1788 as the interaction between indigenous and European people and the land itself. Paul Carter (1987) has provided an provocative start to this enterprise in his book "The Road to Botany Bay", although as Seddon (1997, p. 37) points out in his perceptive review, Carter did not succeed in his larger aim of pioneering a new form of history called spatial history. Carter did argue effectively, though, that the early European explorers did not objectively observe the new country, but that the explorers themselves and the land they passed through concurrently emerged as historical objects, products of the culture of the time. Furthermore, this process occurred within an Aboriginal landscape, along Aboriginal-made paths, and into Aboriginal-constructed clearings (p. 336).

One more recent dimension of the resurgence of interest in sense of place has been the growing importance of Aboriginal sense of place in modern Australia. There has been an explosion of Aboriginal creative activity in the past few decades that is of international significance. Since the introduction of Western painting materials to some Central Desert people in the early 1970s, Aboriginal art of great quality and distinctiveness has moved into galleries, museums and the art market. The work of Emily Kngwarreye and Rover Thomas has achieved a degree of international attention and acclaim that is matched by few if any white Australian contemporary painters. Aboriginal bands such as Yothu Yindi and Gondwana have national audiences and are taking world http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 4 of 21 tours. Performances from Aboriginal dance troupes and drama groups are enthusiastically received. Sally Morgan's "My Place" was a best seller. This explosion is all the more remarkable for the general conditions of poverty, institutional neglect and often racism which have prevailed for most of these people.

Because of the inseparable link between person and country that many Aboriginal people speak of, much of this creative expression is perforce an expression of Aboriginal sense of place, though I suspect this phrase has little currency amongst Aboriginal people. Notions such as totem, songlines and the Dreaming which are essential elements of Aboriginal culture necessarily establish such a depth of connection that statements such as "We are the land" are not uncommon. So there is no equivalent to "place literature" in the Western tradition, it is all about place. Virtually all of Emily's paintings are entitled "My Country".

In some quarters of the Australian community at least, this expression of person/place/culture has been enthusiastically received. In fact the strength of the reception has created its own problems. "White man got no dreaming" was an early phrase uttered by Muta, a Murinbata man, and used as the title of Stanner's influential book (1979) which has come back to haunt both sides of the discussion. On the one hand Aboriginal people have complained of the ultimate exploitation of spiritually barren white fellers appropriating Aboriginal spirituality as their own. On the other, it has led to calls for Australians of European extraction to examine the depths of their own cultural traditions, such as the Celtic, in order to rediscover their own indigeneity (see Tacey, 1995). Whatever the merits of the various cases, it is now true that any discussion of sense of place in Australia must take Aboriginal sense of place as a vital factor, something which was not recognised to be true thirty years ago.

A second dimension has been less spectacular and arguably less recognised - the awareness that the Australian continent, like all distinct land masses, imposes a way of thinking and acting on its human inhabitants by virtue of its particular combination of climate, landscape and ecology. It is perhaps best illustrated by Tim Flannery's book, "The Future Eaters" (1994), which popularised the views of a growing number of ecologists that the country could no longer afford to ignore the ecological limits to human activity on this fragile and dry continent.

Of course, the distinctiveness of Australia's landscape, flora and fauna has been evident, often painfully evident, right from the start of the colonies. What has been less evident is the cost of using European agricultural methods and mindsets to "develop" the interior. Massive irrigation schemes have diverted water onto sediments which, unlike those in England, contain salt so that our largest river is being turned into a saline drain. Cattle and sheep have been grazed in large numbers on semi-arid soils which, unlike those in England, have a very thin easily erodable topsoil much of which has been washed and blown away to leave a bare, infertile remnant. Flannery contends that the only alternative to even greater degrading of the capacity of our land and water to support life is to understand the nature of the continent on which we live, and end the maladaptation of our culture to the biological realities of our continent. Noting that 'the critical values that a truly adapted Australian culture must enshrine are dictated by the impoverished nature of Australian ecosystems' (p. 400), he calls for strong limits on human population, recognition of the cost of consuming our non-renewable resources ("eating the future"), much more flexible attitudes towards what can be sustainably produced on the land, and far greater contact with, and working knowledge of, our ecosystems.

The contribution of the ecological perspective to an understanding of modern Australian sense of place is the sharp edge of the recognition that place is not the mere passive recipient of whatever humans decide they wish to do upon the face of it. The land is an active participant in a very physical sense. For example, "woody weeds", native bushes, are turning vast tracts of inland Australia into so-called "green deserts" in response to the ill-treatment of a century of over-grazing, curtailment of fire and destruction of native grasslands. Sense of place is not simply the affective response to a http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 5 of 21 particular place that people might have, it includes a growing sense of what the place demands of us in our attitudes and actions.

This viewpoint has echoes at a deeper level. Carl Jung commented: 'Certain Australian Aborigines assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor-spirits who reincarnate themselves in the new-born. There is a great psychological truth in this. The foreign land assimilates its conqueror' (1927, p.49). Psychic material inherent in the land and its indigenous inhabitants can rise up into the unconscious, the dreams and symbols and myths of the conquering people and ultimately take them over, make them in the shape of the new psychic patterns. Perhaps this process is starting to take place in Australia now. Paralleling the physical asserting of the land against the assaults of the European invaders, do we have a growing psychic assertion? If so, the first place to look would be those who are arguably most closely attuned to the national psyche - the poets and novelists.

Our leading commentators on Australian literature have devoted considerable attention to the contemporary literary response to the land. David Tacey is explicit about the emergence of a deeper response:

'When I came back to Australia in 1984 I began searching our literature for examples of imaginal vision, for expressions of a dynamic relatedness to the land that could provide a new basis for creative and transformative living. I was heartened to discover that there was indeed a great deal of literary evidence to suggest that a new spiritual pact or bond with landscape was developing here' (p. 160-161).

Tacey's evidence starts with Patrick White and the deep, disturbing experience of the land in such books as Voss and The Tree of Man. He then argues that the fiction of writers such as Randolph Stow, David Malouf and Rodney Hall could be the forerunner of a "new imaginal vision" renewing a landscape-based spirituality for non-Aboriginal Australians that is not derivative of, or exploitative of, Aboriginal spirituality. Noting that 'poetry itself is the major cultural carrier of the mythopoetic mode of perception in secular times', he describes how post-war poets such as Judith Wright and Les Murray have overcome the supposed separation between the poet as subject and the landscape as object.

David Malouf writes about overcoming the separation in a different way. He describes the work of the writer as taking the sensate world into their consciousness and giving the world a "second life", a world that we inhabit imaginatively as well as in fact. He points to Kenneth Slessor's poem "South Country" as a breakthrough in which the landscape finally gets inside the psyche, so it's both an internal and external landscape: 'The poem in fact makes no distinction between the two and part of its beauty and pleasure is that it allows us to enter this state, too, in which all tension between inner and outer, environment and being, is miraculously resolved' (1998, p.42).

Veronica Brady, giving the subject a broader historical sweep, notes that the "land" has always been a central trope in our literature, standing primarily for alienation in the last century, for belonging in this one. With more recent writers starting with Patrick White, she notes the concern for land as "other", the shadow side of the modern self which has been disowned and suppressed: 'The traditional notion of Australia as the "place of new beginning" becomes, rather, an ending, a breakdown of the classical episteme of Western culture which is based on knowledge as an order of representation of the mastery of nature.' Confronting the land as "other" is seen to be the only way to break through 'the false confidence and self-enclosure of consumer society' (1994, p.128).

These are very large topics which are taken up in more depth in some of the later chapters in this book, but it does seem that at least a certain proportion of Australia's leading novelists and poets are searching for a deeper expression of the interconnection between white and black Australians and the land we inhabit. My reading of Brady, Malouf and Tacey is that they differ on how advanced this http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 6 of 21 process is within the literary community and on how much effect it is having on wider society, but they are emphatic about the importance of the process as one of the few ways in our culture to break out of modern alienation within society and from nature.

The three factors I have mentioned so far - Aboriginal, ecological and literary, have all been quite directly about an aspect of Australian sense of place. There are also some more general features of modern Australia that have a major bearing on the rediscovery of sense of place. Although the percentage of the population in rural areas has declined steadily this century, it has accelerated in post-war years and seems to have crossed some kind of threshold in national attention. Beyond the physical decline in the number of farmers and the number of rural banks, there is the general perception that Australia no longer "rides on the sheep's back", which would have had wide currency in 1950. Australia has been one of the most urban countries in the world, in terms of having a high proportion of the population living in cities, but now it seems that national attention is catching up with reality. Notwithstanding the attention currently being paid to questions of native title on pastoral leases, the fact remains that this is a nation of city-dwellers increasingly caught up with urban and international issue at the expense of the dwindling number of people in "the bush".

Increasing urbanisation has had a number of effects on modern sense of place. As more people have settled into our cities, there has been increased attention given to urban planning, suburban growth and the quality of life in urban places. At the same time, as Tuan (1974) has noted, the view of non-urban places changes as a nation becomes more urbanised. Wilderness comes to stand at the opposite pole from the city, not the countryside, and especially not the working landscapes of paddocks and farms. It is a state of mind as much as a state of nature in Tuan's point of view (p.112), the repository of qualities which the modern industrial state is destroying. The working countryside then occupies a middle space, neither city nor wilderness. Despite, or perhaps because of, their closer proximity to national parks and wilderness areas, rural people who have a daily working relationship with the landscape, and are less concerned with, or even opposed to wilderness preservation.

Many Australians who are now city dwellers did not come from rural Australia, but from overseas. Australia's massive post-war immigration program has had profound effects in all areas of Australian life, including sense of place. Four Australians in ten were either born overseas or their parents were. As Martin Krygier comments:

'We now have over hundred ethnic groups and eighty languages here. The peaceful way in which all these "aliens" have become citizens should be at the forefront of any account of immigration in Australia. This was a real social experiment which could have gone awfully wrong (1998, p.68).

In discussing this phenomenon, Krygier steers a middle course between zealous multiculturalists who maintain that Australia was a cultural wasteland prior to immigration, and anti-ethnics who extol the virtues of the "old Australian' Anglo traditions at the expense of the New Australians. He also appropriately balances the pride which all Australians should feel at the success of the "social experiment" of immigration with the shame over our treatment of the Aboriginal people.

What can we say about sense of place among immigrant Australians, given the relative success of multiculturalism here? It is obviously a complex matter, depending upon the circumstances of emigration and the ease of adjustment to the new country (recognising that physical adjustments are more easily made than emotional ones). Peter Read describes how an "army of sociologists" have grappled with the sense of belonging to a new country that immigrants have:

'Mechanistic models, which detected stages like "naturalisation", "absorption", "assimilation" and "acculturation" were replaced by more sophisticated theories which allowed for individual difference, changing attitudes throughout the whole of life, and the stability of a national or regional culture from http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 7 of 21 decade to decade and generation to generation. Immigration theorists now allow that the process of belonging in a new land is much more complex than previously imagined' (1996, p.27-28).

Migrants bring their homelands with them in memory, and Read describes how some people try to recreate them physically, others keep the memories alive through stories and rituals, others are wary of the emotional trap of becoming attached to the one place, while others envy local peoples' sense of place and seek to establish Australian roots, but 'find that the emotional soil of new countries is shallower than their homeland's' (p. 31). The overall effect is surely to complexify the question of Australian sense of place in the 1990s. As Aboriginal and White non-immigrant Australians are struggling with the Wik decision and the Stolen Generation, both of which are intimately tied up with differing notions of place affiliation, immigrant Australians are going through a process of coming to terms with the new land in terms of their homeland experience. In most cases, this is unlikely to lead to a straightforward place affiliation or a simple response to the interaction between Aboriginal and Western senses of place, particularly when most migrants are living in the cities.

Meanwhile, the country as a whole has been propelled into a new era of globalisation. Australia's place in the world is far more in the everyday consciousness of individual citizens than previous generations. Information on Australia's position in the global economy with regards to exchange rates, imports, exports and balance of payments is made available in daily news broadcasts. Farmers and miners monitor the daily fluctuations in the prices for their products that are set in overseas commodity markets. We are increasingly aware of global environmental issues such as the Greenhouse Effect, biodiversity loss and the destruction of rainforests. The arrival of the Internet has meant that many Australians can be in contact with individuals, chat groups, libraries and companies all round the world for the cost of a local call.

The impact of globalisation on Australian sense of place is felt in many ways. To many place writers, it is one of the forces that is threatening to destroy the distinctive character of local places. Globalisation, through agencies such as the World Trade Organisation and the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment, represents the triumph of multinational corporate power over the sovereignty of national governments. Governments have less capacity to influence the terms of foreign trade and investment in their country or to set high environmental standards for particular projects. Neither Australian developers nor their foreign counterparts have shown great sensitivity to sense of place in suburban or tourist developments in the past. Some writers raise the spectre of unrestrained market forces homogenising distinctive Australian shopping, living and eating places into endlessly repeating variations of giant shopping malls, Ramada Inns and Macdonalds. Starting from his definition of place as the intertwining of specific landscapes, social activities, meanings and rituals, Relph is concerned by the "disassembly" of place by the global spread of "the instant environment machine", the interactive network of corporations, technologies and standardised planning and design methods:

'The result is that the communal activities which were once a defining feature of place have become geographically fragmented, and communities are now defined as much by common interest as by common location - as in "the business community", for example. The meanings and symbols of many places have either been destroyed or commodified. Distinctive landscapes have been demolished, or if exceptionally distinctive, copied everywhere else.....In such domineering or vacuous environments, it is hard to develop a sense of place, for there is nothing in them to promote affection or a sense of belonging' (1992, p.41).

There is an interesting dynamic between homogenising and differentiating aspects of globalisation. The optimist might say that the growing recognition of Australia as the only Western country that is also "mega-diverse" (the eight or nine countries that contain most of the world's biodiversity) would accord it a particular status in the eyes of the world and the world's corporations. Evidence for this http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 8 of 21 position would include the growth of ecotourism in Australia and the general marketing of its unique fauna and landscapes. The pessimist might say that for every genuine ecotourist facility there are five ersatz ones and ten tourist developments that have no regard for the qualities of the place in which they have been built. They might point out that Australia continues to opt for destroying wetlands to produce generic marinas and canal developments, and continues to produce low quality bulk commodities like woodchips which destroy forests as places in Relph's sense of the word.

There is a similar divergence of opinion about the Internet and sense of place. On the one hand, the Internet can be viewed as the ultimate postmodern enemy of place affiliation. In describing sense of place, I mentioned the importance in the literature of an embodied, sensory response to place. Cyberspace is a disembodied space that is no place at all, the only sensory connection to which is a deprived one - the sight of the computer screen and the touch of the keyboard. One the other hand, it is a point of connection to the world that is transforming lives. People who are not physically or financially able to travel can now communicate with people in any country of the world, and interact with them at a number of different electronic levels. Combined with satellite television, world music and similar developments, the world and its cultures are now a real presence in the daily lives of many people, arguably giving them a much expanded sense of place in the world.

Is this at the expense of local sense of place? One of the foremost proponents of sense of place, Yi- Fu Tuan, who uses the term topophilia, notes that sense of place tends to ring false when claimed for too large an area. He then adds: 'If both empire and state are too large for the exercise of genuine topophilia, it is paradoxical to reflect that the earth itself may eventually command such attachment: this possibility exists because the earth is clearly a natural unit and it has a common history. Shakespeare's words "this blessed plot", "this precious stone set in a silver sea" are not inappropriately applied to the planet itself. Possibly, in some ideal future, our loyalty will be given only to the home region of intimate memories and, at the other end of the scale, to the whole earth' (1974, p. 101-102).

It is an open question whether this constitutes an "ideal future" or not. Most of the authors cited in the Introduction so far have either explicitly stated or would consider that an Australian sense of place, grounded in an understanding of this country's biological and human history, is a valuable thing to foster. It is true, though, that too much attention can be paid to the concept of the nation at the expense of what is happening in one's back yard or local community, or at the expense of global ecological realities. Perhaps it is possible to envisage an ideal bioregional future suffused with global consciousness and unsullied by nationalism, while acknowledging that our history of neglect of environment and Aboriginal peoples and the displacing effect of the current globalising forces impels us to consider the nature of Australia as a place more deeply. The chapters that are to follow take up these issues in divergent and engaging ways.

The contributions to the book have been organised according to five main perspectives on place - personal, cultural, psychological, spiritual and from literature and the arts. Any broad characterisation such as this has its limitations, of course. The categories overlap greatly, so that it is a difficult judgment to say whether a text is written from a cultural or literary perspective. Much place writing is done at several different levels concurrently, so that the author may be speaking from a personal, cultural and spiritual standpoint in the same paragraph. Nonetheless, it has proved to be helpful to identify the dominant viewpoint on place the author has taken, and to compare the positions of people who have written from a similar outlook, while recognising the contingency and limited nature of the categories.

1. PERSONAL STORIES OF PLACE befits the condition of many non-Aboriginal Australians, most of the stories in this section are not http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 9 of 21 about an encounter with a single place, but the process of finding an Australian sense of place which may include connection with a number of personally important places, here and overseas, along the way. Bobbi Allen's path to understanding her Australian-ness has included an exploration of her Scottish ancestry as the daughter of a Tasmanian farmer who was also the chief of Clan Nicolson. Her discovery of her own indigenous history amongst the Celtic inhabitants of Skye has led her to draw parallels between the way the Celts were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands during the Highland clearances and the 'great ritual of dispossession' of Aboriginal people in this country. She also draws out similarities between Celtic and Aboriginal expressions of unity with the land, which enable her to avoid the dangers of either being imperialistic about Anglo-Celtic heritage or ashamed of it. This "third way" of neither denigrating Aboriginal culture and spirituality nor grasping after it from a sense of inadequacy has been articulated by several modern Australian commentators, including David Tacey (1995).

For Bobbi Allen, then, the way into a deeper Australian sense of place is both back and forward. The way back is through deepening into our own ancestral indigeneity through literal ancestral research, general understanding of cultural background and imaginatively filling in the details. The way forward is into a different form of relationship with Aboriginal Australians, after the tears have been shed on both sides. Significantly, Bobbi only felt clear to pursue this course after she had been back to Skye recently and walked on the headland there, feeling the bones of her ancestors, acknowledging her connection and yet feeling that Australia was home.

Encounter with place can be an unsettling and transformative experience, even in one's own backyard, as I describe in "Dwelling in place: dwelling on Earth". Moving into a large European garden on the edge of the Blue Mountains National Park caused attitudinal changes (re-examining my conservationist prejudices about introduced species and reconsidering my views on the purpose and value of gardens) and physical changes in my musculature and way of moving. Shifting my prime activity in the national park from bushwalking to bush regeneration has altered my visual focus from a moving view of generalised "bush" at some distance from the walking track to the square metre of rock, grasses and invading weeds immediately in front of me. While looking for a more mutual, unpredictable and local relationship with place, I have begun carving some stones out of an old wall and have entered into playful and experimental process of accident and discovery.

A key function of the person-place relationship which emerges from my experience has been the way in which deepening into place can bring one back to the present moment. Working full-time in the environment movement in Sydney, I had spent an increasing amount of my time living in a world of future-oriented abstractions such as sustainability rather than dwelling in the present with my senses open to the beings and forms of my local place. We live in an era which is dominated by globalisation and universal ideas such as economic rationalism which do not give value to the particular, to the local place or culture. It remains vital to consider how to live on the planet sustainably, but it must be done in a way that includes the power of deepening into our home places. The latter process has been unsettling and humbling as well as fulfilling for me, and sits rather uncomfortably, I suspect, with the projects of rationalists and global environmental reformers alike.

As a result of her experiences here and abroad, Judy Pinn points out some potential traps to do with sense of place. After a profound liminal experience in Hawaii, she became caught in the "one true place" syndrome - the belief that one particular place will always hold special meaning for a person to the detriment of other places the person might find themselves in. Powerful memories of place can serve as inspiration and reminders of what is possible, but can also be an obstruction to being in place in the moment if grasped too firmly or tied too closely to any one place. She also warns of the danger of becoming too fixed about sense of place. As Relph discusses, the opposite of being-in- place is not nomadism, but placelessness. Some nomads are in place wherever they go, whereas long-term residents of the one suburb, for example, can feel very out of place. Pinn describes how leading a nomadic existence in a modern Western society which places a premium on stability and http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 10 of 21 geographic identification was quite a marginalising experience for her.

The organising theme of her chapter is "the space-in-between", a literal and metaphorical borderlands between the territories of two groups, or where apparently contradictory stories of place or community come into contact. In accordance with her interest in uncovering stories which have been suppressed by a dominant way of being in the world, she describes her research in uncovering local knowledges of place by farmers and women which have been undervalued compared with the decontextualised scientific knowledge of extension agents. Similarly, she is concerned with the way imaginative understandings of place can be marginalised by literal understandings of place - the flora and fauna, rivers and landforms, echoing David Malouf's plea that we "possess the world that we inhabit imaginatively as well as in fact". After a life in the borderlands, she is a strong voice for not taking sense of place too literally or in a reified way, that it is a site of contestation and difference like any other. How to hold multiple and sometimes conflicting stories of the same place, literal and imaginative stories that may be at odds with the main cultural narrative, that is a real question.

In his chapter John Seed relates some of the early encounters with the rainforest which led him to become an internationally known rainforest campaigner and exponent of deep ecology, and the co- founder with Joanna Macy of the Council of All Beings workshops. He describes how as a "back-to- the-land hippy" living in an intentional community in Northern NSW in the early 1970s and diligently pursuing Buddhist meditation practice, he had little knowledge of the local forests until he joined the Terania Creek blockade, drawn by curiosity or neighbourliness. The rainforest he entered that day provoked a deep appreciation of the importance and antiquity of the forests and surprisingly strong feelings of kinship with them. Along with the feelings came a deep knowing, a realisation that in a larger sense, he was part of the rainforest defending himself.

The immediate recognition and feeling of intimate connection and identification slowly found expression in John's activism to protect the rainforests and then in his embracing a new movement and philosophy. Deep ecology brought together his involvement with Buddhism, his knowing of the rainforest and his involvement in environmentalism. Interestingly, having been deeply connected with a particular place in the Northern New South Wales rainforest, John felt that he was almost pushed away by that forest to pursue international rainforest campaigns. In talks during the colloquium, John described how he felt the waning of the strength of affiliation to the one place which had sustained him through all the campaigning as if that forest was withdrawing from him and pushing him out into the world. He had to learn to identify with all rainforests, and not just the one. Beyond telling us of the significance of place in the development of a conservationist, the story documents the movement of affiliation from the particular place to all such places, which is an important issue in sense of place. One of the potential drawbacks of place affiliation as a means of social change is that it can lead to parochialism, concern only for one's own backyard. The factors that lead to an expansion of affiliation with all backyards, so as to speak, are of great significance. In John Seed's case, the coming-together of intimate place experience, activism and an all-embracing philosophy seems to have been the key factor in his development.

A much-needed perspective on urban sense of place is provided by Brendon Stewart. While Australia is one of the most urbanised nations, most place-based literature in this country continues to be concerned with wild places or rural places. Brendon describes the joys of growing up in Gladesville, of finding buried treasures in the cemetery, wondering over the appearance of the word "Eternity" chalked in copperplate on the pavement, playing in the mud and bamboo at the shore of the mental asylum. As an adult, he has marvelled at the appearance of the Auburn Mosque and the sight of moustachioed Turkish men strolling peacefully down streets of cottages originally built for returned Gallipoli soldiers.

Brendon is an advocate for the inextricability of culture and landscape, and is concerned that we not be caught up in a simplistic lamentation of what we have lost in nature. For him, "the point is how to http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 11 of 21 reveal the richness of our landscape traditions, the antiquity and complexity of the links that bind us culturally into nature". This is equally true, although in different ways, for the city and the country, and it leads us into the central concerns of the authors in the second part of the book.

2. CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLACE

Writers in this section are primarily interested in the way in which our culture affects the way we understand and interact with place. In a materialist society, there is a tendency to view place as an objective fact or a collection of objective facts such as trees, roads and rivers. Those that take a cultural perspective point out that the types of place attachment we form are not universal phenomena, they are culturally determined. A foremost concern in discussing Australian sense of place is the way in which Aboriginal and Western cultures differ in their conception of the person- place relationship. Potential difficulties in verbal communication and physical interaction arise from this difference, which is poorly understood and articulated.

Cath Laudine provides an overview of Aboriginal ideas about place, highlighting in the first part of her paper how some Aboriginal people, at least, consider that culture comes from the land itself. She quotes Aboriginal people as saying essentially that the land is animated by a spiritual consciousness that shapes and changes people, and can recognise them individually. It is the source of the Dreaming songs. The Law comes from the country, it applies to Blacks and Whites equally, it is ignored at the peril of all people. This view immediately raises questions of cultural relativity. To the modern western scholar, the person-place relationship is a matter of the culture of that person, whereas to the Aboriginal people quoted by Laudine, it goes beyond culture.

Aboriginal people have a much more deeply custodial view of the relationship between a people and their land than most modern Westerners, including conservationists, according to Laudine. She cites the example of Kaiadilt people viewing a previously occupied Bentinck Island with sadness because there was nobody to look after the place anymore. She contrasts this view with the modern wilderness ethic in which a land without human occupation is to be celebrated. Traditional Aboriginal people view "singing up the country" as the responsibility of the human inhabitants of a land to maintain the song lines, and perform the songs and ceremonies at increase sites in order to ensure the flourishing of the totemic species. While the consequences are generally in accordance with what Western conservationists would want to occur, they are founded in "sensibilities beyond the ken" of most Westerners, and provide us with a challenge for mutual understanding and action that should not be underestimated.

Veronica Arbon and Hinton Lowe take up the challenge of mutual understanding as educators. They are not primarily concerned with Aboriginal and Whites' physical interaction with the landscape so much as with Aboriginal and White people in communication with each other through education at Batchelor College. They are interested in the use of landscape as a metaphor 'illuminate understanding of the space in which indigenous and other Australian knowledges account and engage with one another'. The landscape metaphor allows discussion of different learning journeys and pathways, the possibilities of meeting places and companions and guides for the journey, as well as allegiances. The authors argue it is a much preferable metaphor than the dominant language of education as a conduit from teacher to student.

In exploring the metaphorical use of landscape, Arbon and Lowe take us deeply into the cultural creation of landscape. They use the example of painting to show that it is never a matter of merely representing on the canvas what is "out there", but of constructing concepts and expectations of the land that serve political and ideological interests. The painting movement at Papunya in the 1970's created a new space between traditional Aboriginal understandings of landscape and the institutions of the Western art world in which deeper communication about country and belonging could occur http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 12 of 21 then was previously possible in art circles. The authors argue that an analogous process is needed for the development of an educational curriculum and an constructive native title debate that recognises reciprocal inter-connection. With echoes of Judy Pinn's concern for the "spaces in between", they introduce the Yolngu word "ganma", the place where river and sea mingle yet keep their identity in constant interflow. The question is how to create fluid spaces in which different knowledges are respected and new intercultural creations are encouraged to arise out of contestation. Landscape may be of more than metaphorical significance, it may point the way to the value of physical country in creating these spaces.

Peter Cock gives us his practical experience of the pain and humour of the spaces between the cultures in his account of a cultural exchange program in Central Australia. Anyone who has been through such a first encounter will recognise the mixture of defeated expectations, awkwardness in a new setting and judgements about people's actions. He raises the difficult question "What do we have in our White Australian culture that is worth sharing?" His answer is a mixture of revitalising our usually Anglo-Celtic cultural heritage, as has been discussed by Bobbi Allan and others in the first section, and deepening our connection with this country.

He provides an important reminder of the risks, frailty and the likelihood of hurt that can come from naive intercultural engagement. He also raises some prickly issues in uncritical multiculturalism that few are willing to deal with, such as White perceptions of ecologically unsound practices on Aboriginal settlements (and vice versa?). Beyond the difficulties is the possibility for establishing common ground - if White Australians can rekindle their participation with nature in local places and communities, they can share and celebrate their experiences of different country with Aboriginal people in a way that recognises the common threats to that primary bond. That's a very big "if", however. To be able to hold their own in a genuine intercultural conversation about country, most White people would need to be grounded for an extended period of working and living with country that they just do not have.

Peter Bishop is concerned with another type of challenge that the White Australian encounter with the Aboriginal Dreaming is creating - the need to revalue the imaginal realm. Taking one interpretation of the Dreaming as the foundation of the mythic imagination, he sees by contrast a collapse of any foundation in the west, the loss of meaning and the end of history. Out of the collapse of the real and the literal, though, can come the rebirth of our mythic imagination which has been stifled by misplaced literalness, concreteness and individualism. And one of the prime beneficiaries can be a restored, re- imagined relationship with place.

Restoring the imaginal does not mean re-inventing ourselves from scratch. Rather it means freeing ourselves of literal and generalised dismissals of our society's place relationships. Bishop identifies a series of paralysing beliefs about our culture, such as the sterility of suburbia, the lack of experience of the sacred, the idealisation of everything Aboriginal. Re-imagining the world involves listening imaginatively to what we are doing, to allowing everything in our lives, including shopping malls, to have inner-ness. The implication is that only when we have reconciled ourselves to the imaginal depths in our own culture will we be able to approach reconciliation with the Aboriginal peoples in a respectful and constructive way.

Kate Rigby is also concerned with the nature of European Australian responses to the Dreaming, and the danger of cultural appropriation. At the same time, she points out the limitation of applying the cultural approaches of writers such as Simon Schama in which the value of landscapes threatened by developers is in part their richness to the culture, "whether through prior habitation and use, or through mythical or aesthetic representation". Schama is writing primarily of Northern Hemisphere landscapes which have centuries or even millennia of European cultural inscription. In Australia, many of the strongest conservation battles are over forest and "wilderness" with which there is http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 13 of 21 minimal cultural connection; indeed that is the point.

The way forward, according to Rigby, is into an embodied ecological aesthetics. Drawing on the work of German phenomenologists, she proposes a middle path for realising "spirit of place" for European Australians: neither locating spirit in the land itself or a neo-animistic way; nor locating it in culture or in language itself in a post-structuralist way; but in the "coupling of physical manifestation and sensuous perception", a dynamic relationship between the body and its sense, the place, and the memories and enculturation of the person, without being dependent upon any one of those aspects. This proposal sits in interesting juxtaposition with the previous two chapters, adding a further dimension to Peter Cock's participation with local nature, while incorporating some the fluidity, integration and release from the literal that Peter Bishop is seeking.

The chapters in this section so far have concentrated on the interactions between Aboriginal sense of place and the attitudes of European Australians who have settled here. Brendon Stewart reminds us that there is a parallel process of cultures coming to terms with sense of place in Australia - the experience of recent immigrants making their home here. All non-Aboriginal Australians were immigrants once, and we can see the echo of Stewart's understanding of the role of memory in constructing an immigrant's new story in Australia in Bobbi Allan's need to reach backwards in time to create something new as a fifth generation Australian.

The "blue hour", according to one Italian immigrant is the only time of day or night when the light is the same in Italy and Australia. 'It is the time memories choose to come to light, deceived as it were by that momentary trick of nature. Brendon uses interviews with recent immigrants to evoke that quality of a story connected to the past, yet becoming a new story in a new place becoming a home. For twenty-three hours of the day, the light is not the same, there is a hard Australian sunlight which demands recognition and respect. These interviewees from Italy, Vietnam and Turkey are engaged in the creation of a twenty-four hour story, using memory as a strategy to connect past and future, to connect distant places with the place they, we, are remaking as Australia.

Val Brown brings together Aboriginal, European Australian and recent immigrant experience of place in her discussion of the results of workshops she has run on the topic. She starts with Lewis Mumford's contention that that every human settlement has always been based on a site for governance (palace), a site which is sacred (temple), and a site for storing resources (granary). In a series of workshops with very different Australian groups, she asked people to identify actual structures of elements of landscape that served as palace, temple and granary for them in their community. Virtually all of the 300 participants were able to nominate candidates for these three significant places and relate to them as powerful signals. Interestingly, Val found that the differences between the groups were not as great as the diversity of cultural and socio-economic background would have suggested.

It was surprising that Aboriginal people were willing to relate at all to such European cultural constructions as palace, temple and granary. Their responses were much more based in country, through particular species or spirits of the strength of the land itself, than those of non-Aboriginal Australians, and were more likely to ascribe all three functions to the same element. Buildings such as churches, banks and Parliament House were prominent amongst a group of Canberra residents, much less pronounced amongst environmental students, and weren't mentioned by Aboriginal attendees. More important than the responses themselves was the way in which participants valued the diverse constructions of place, and came to see the diversity as necessary. Val Brown draws hope from these workshops that people from different backgrounds can communicate meaningfully about sense of place in a way that affirms individual and cultural difference.

3. PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLACE

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There are many ways that the experience of place can be understood as a psychological phenomenon, or indeed that psyche and place can be considered as intertwined. These include environmental psychology, which maintains the neoclassical separation between the human psychological subject and the object in the environment; ecopsychology, which is concerned with a living, inter-subjective relationship between person and world; and applications of depth psychology, which are interested in anima mundi, in the way in which the whole world and its inhabitants are ensouled. The writers in this section cover the range of interpretations, while expressing in common the ways in which a denial of the deep connection between psyche and place has caused alienation and loss in Australian peoples and places. Re-connecting and re-animating the world has great healing potential at the personal, cultural and environmental levels.

David Russell takes up the cudgels, as Peter Bishop and others have done previously, against a literal or sense-bound understanding of the person-place relationship. Taking what is happening in a place too literally, or stopping at which is tangible to the senses, is denying the psychologically important role of the imagination to "sing reality" in the words of Gaston Bachelard. In describing a sense of place as an imaginative event, though, David is not arguing for some sort of transcendent flight from the senses. Imagining, he says, is what the body does and is as sensuous and physical an experience as any other. Imagining, or dreaming into a place can inform our lived experience of a place and become a soul-making experience using the language of myth and story.

He illustrates this process using a local place Yarramundi, at the junction of the Grose and Nepean Rivers. The topography suggests to the imagination not just a literal junction, but a meeting place of different elements. History does in fact record a significant meeting between Governor Phillip and an old Aboriginal man of high degree, Yella Mundi. The sharing of food and stories at that meeting took place with "neither suspicion nor uneasiness", and arouses great sadness in the present-day reader that the Europeans were not able to maintain the spirit of mutual benefit between the two peoples. David's description of the large river stones at Yarramundi echoing the pain of lost opportunity two centuries ago reveals an experience of soul-making. The strength of its resonance will then depend upon the history, culture, psychology and imagination of the reader. In my case, Yarramundi is a place I drive past most days, and it has been transformed by David's work into a reminder of lost opportunity made all the more poignant by the current use of the river as a sewage effluent drain by the swelling population of Western Sydney.

The question of how well stories of psyche and place can translate across cultures is taken up by Craig San Roque. A Warlpiri man asked him whether European culture had a "big story" about alcohol and drunken-ness that could be used by Aboriginal people to gain power over the destructive effect of alcohol abuse. Craig, a Jungian analyst, responded in a therapeutic way, but at the cultural and mythic level (the myth of Dionysus), not the personal. His way of telling the story at a cultural psychological level was through conversations about being drunk and destructive which found expression in a theatrical re-enactment in the open air in Aboriginal country.

In the aftermath of what was ostensibly a great success, Craig is asking hard questions about the way in which the deep myths of our psyche are bound up in culture and place. The story of Dionysus, like most Western tragedies, is one of destruction, sacrifice and rebirth. It comes from the Northern Hemisphere, which has a pronounced cycle of seasons in which living things die in winter and are reborn in the spring. In Central Australia, there is an altogether different pattern of evergreen trees and long dry periods broken by irregular rains. Similarly, Craig fears that in the Aboriginal psyche there is a different pattern; there isn't the corresponding myth of tragic death and rebirth, and therefore perhaps no way to deal at a collective psychological level with the ongoing dismemberment of land and people.

Peter Cock describes his experience of teaching ecopsychology to graduate students as a practice that has great psychological and environmental benefit. He argues that environmental action, though http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 15 of 21 it might be motivated by a variety of factors such as concern for future generations or the rights of other species, cannot be sustained without "personal eco-bonding". At the same time as being an environmental imperative, the process of deepening one's connection to nature is also of great psychological benefit. Peter characterises modern psychology as placing too much responsibility in the hands of the therapist, and suggests that nature can do some of the holding and enable hidden aspects of the psyche to find expression. He describes a process in which he asks students to relate an aspect of a chosen place that has caught their attention, which he then responds to in both a clarifying "left brain" and an associative "right brain" way. In group session, this has provided images of life patterns, or unexpressed parts of the self, or avenues for further psychological work. Peter thereby provides practical illustrations of how healing the psyche occurs in parallel with a more compassionate approach to caring for place.

Starting from the basic psychological model for the health core self surrounding a range of distressed adaptive selves, Stuart Hill considers how a psychologically authentic sense of place can be developed. He extends Josselson's framework of interpersonal relational learning (four expressions of sensory grounded experience and four based on meaning-making and cognition) to the relationship between person and place. He shows how fundamental human process such as being held and validated by someone and recognising and caring for others are paralleled by physical experiences of nature, becoming aware of the "otherness" of place and working for the care of nature. The framework can then be used by educators, parents and community workers to work more consciously towards the deepening of a sense of place as an essential human function and an element of ecological re-design. In this way, it serves as an amplification and complement to the sort of work Peter Cock is undertaking.

In developing his argument, Stuart offers a challenging perspective on the role of personal therapy in the move towards a more ecologically sustainable future. He notes that many people have adapted to childhood hurts and deprivation by living reactively to the world, constantly seeking stimulation and consumption rather than living pro-actively from a healthy core self in a way that is less demanding on the environment. He recognises that undergoing therapy to confront and heal these basic wounds is going to be ineffective without redesign of many of society's institutional structures and processes, but argues that it is nonetheless a vital first step. He is critical of post-modernists who fail to distinguish between core and adaptive constructions, while post-modern and post-structural thinkers are critical of any notion such as the core self, authenticity and essential nature. The schism between humanistic psychology and post-modern philosophy has significance for how the person-place relationship is viewed, whether there are more or less authentic ways of being in place, and whether modern place relations are maladaptive or to be celebrated for what they are.

Freya Mathews stands in this territory between philosophy and psychology, between eco- philosophy's revitalisation of nature and eco-psychology's project of re-ensoulment of the world. She also stands in the urban world, where most Australians live, and insists that we not abandon it in our romantic yearnings for wild nature. In doing so, she draws together the threads woven through several previous chapters ö my battle with a mental hierarchy about bush and garden plants, Brendon Stewart's portrayals of making a home in the city, Peter Bishop's identification of paralysing beliefs about the sterility of urban places. Freya calls for a praxis of loving our city world, whatever it contains, however ugly or garish. By entering into a lifelong relationship with your computer, your car and your house, they not only become cherished members of your re-enchanted world, they are no longer consumer goods, no longer part of the circulating economy. Actions that are aimed at healing urban places and re-enchanting our daily lives are also an effective stance against the forces of modernisation and the process of converting the previously sacred order of matter into a set of commodities.

There are interesting differences in emphasis between the chapters of this section, between David Russell's embodied imagining, Stuart Hill's healthy ecological redesign and Freya Mathews praxis of http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 16 of 21 love, for example. These should definitely not be viewed as alternatives, and they are all grounded in peoples' lives and the places they inhabit. Differences between, say, a project of healthy ecological redesign and loving city scapes the way they are may be more apparent than actual. David Russell's desire for an "I-Thou" relationship with place is what Freya Mathews wants for our urban places, and surely this must be considered a core self activity, in Stuart Hill's terms. This common ground might be the basis for a more inclusive approach to social and environmental issues that are more commonly seen as divided. It might become more possible to be both pro-wilderness and pro-city, or pro-nature and pro-culture.

4. SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLACE

The words "spirit" and "place" most obviously come together in the phrase "spirit of place", genius loci, the indwelling spirit of a locality, as was discussed in the first part of Kate Rigby's chapter. The authors in this section, however, are talking more generally about how embracing various experiences of spirituality affects how we view and relate to place. There is an implicit tension in the subject, because spirituality generally connotes transcendence of the material plane into another realm, whereas place is about the particular, the immediate material at hand. Each of the authors negotiate this tension, and the associated difficulties of even discussing spirituality in an age of secular materialism, with reference to their own spiritual traditions.

Jenny Crawford is concerned with the ground for dialogue between ecofeminism, environmentalism and Asian spiritual traditions. She claims that spirituality offers an extended notion of subjectivity and an alternative way of knowing that offers a way out of the postmodern dilemma of being trapped within language or the text. The way out is through mindfulness, which in Eastern traditions is aimed not at the content of our discourse, but at transforming the quality of our consciousness. She then draws parallels between Buddhist mindfulness and feminist concepts of loving attention, a receptive holding of the other. Attention is understood by some feminists as a practice of knowing that precludes domination, either of other people or of Nature.

Her line of argument brings us squarely back to Freya Mathews' concept of loving attention as the praxis for environmentalism, which she quotes, but has relocated it into the context of spirituality. Jenny Crawford wants to move the discourse of feminism and environmentalism beyond "the secular ground of rational theory-making to the spiritual ground of attentive soul-making'. At this point whether it is described as eco-philosophy, eco-psychology or eco-spirituality is secondary to the fact that she is bringing into the field thousands of years of experience of spiritual discipline and specific practices of mindfulness - a potentially enormous contribution.

Susan Murphy establishes herself in one stream of the great tradition of mindfulness, Zen Buddhism, and shows how deeply relevant its practice is to being in place. Zen has come to Australia from Japan, bringing the enigmatic koan and the radical attention to the present moment in zazen to Western practitioners here, while being energised and renovated in the process. She is concerned with the crossing-over of cultural forms, not between traditional Zen and traditional Aboriginal, but into the mixing of cultures in contemporary Australia. On the land where her community holds long retreats, 'every sally wattle and blue gum, every willy wagtail and goanna' have come to shine with the presence that is revealed as the meditation enables the practitioners to get out of their own way and simply be there in place. At the same time, the land has been the site of workshops re-enacting the Eleusinian Mysteries, and imagining into the connections with the Aboriginal Dreaming. Opening into the place through spiritual discipline parallels the opening into the old stories from many cultures and the generation of new ones.

Susan then takes a delightful excursion away from remote rural retreat land to a way of being in the built environment. Acknowledging the importance of Freya Mathews' dictum that we love all our world, she shows is how this may be done. She invites us to adopt the attitude of the flaneur, the lazy http://sites.uws.edu.au/research/SERG/Articulating_jcameron.htm 6/27/2004 Articulating Australian Senses of Place - John Cameron Page 17 of 21 strolling observer of the city whose pace is not so dissimilar to the kinhin, walking meditation. She suggests we wander in back-streets and nondescript places with fresh eyes, open to the possibility of discovering knipls, little urban treasures the palm of your mind can hold'. There are delights such as the tracery of bathroom tiles on a slab half lost in weeds, the markings on a manhole cover, a varicose outbreak of plumbing high on an alley wall. Susan Murphy's invitation to "feel free to look around' the city, coming as it does after her heartfelt appreciation of the retreat land, is a striking example of the attitude of inclusiveness that several authors in this volume have called for, an attitude that springs from her Zen practice.

Father Eugene Stockton tackles the thorny topic of the immanence and transcendence of the spirit by reflecting on the relationship between the beliefs of Aboriginal people, with whom he has worked for many years as an archaeologist and priest, and Christian mysticism. He notes the Old Testament understanding of Divine Wisdom as the interplay between the transcendental God and creation in which He is immanent. He then traces it forward into the mystery of the body of Christ manifesting the infinite, and thence into the mystery of all creation. Natural features such as Uluru provide entry into a deeper reality, which is only properly approached with wonder. He establishes a point of contact with traditional Aboriginal beliefs through a sense of wonder which takes him deep into the physical reality of place, the disconcerting otherness of place. Where Aboriginal people see places as charged with Dreaming, he finds them charged with the Wisdom of God. He concludes his chapter with the Aboriginal gift of Dadirri, a deep inner listening which is evocative of the loving attention referred to by Freya Mathews and other authors in this volume.

David Tacey talks of the word "spirit' in the sense used by Aboriginal Lawman David Mowaljarlai when he described the country of Australia as "spirit place". He describes three stages in a Western culture's understanding of spirit, in which the first stage view of spirit as literal and absolute is debunked as illusion in the second stage of intellectual enlightenment and secular humanism. In the third stage, a non-literal and fluid spirituality emerges from post-enlightenment science and culture. He challenges Australian intellectuals who are caught up in the "church" of second stage cultural materialistic notions to think more openly about spirituality, and distinguish between first stage and third stage "spirit".

He illustrates how awareness of Australia as a "spirit place" has come most strongly in Australian literature and art, a phenomenon that he contends has been misunderstood by academic commentators as a form of appropriation. He makes the distinction between a shallow new age consumerist reaching for the Dreaming out of spiritual emptiness and a discovery that if we are attentive to the land, the Dreaming and the wisdom of the ages comes gradually and subtly towards us. The result, most strongly seen in some contemporary art and literature, distinguishes Australia in spiritual terms. As Tacey characterises it, the old Judeo-Christian sky god (first stage) has expired, but in Australia the earth gods have been reanimated in fluid and creative ways.

The process of engaging in new forms of earth-based spirituality is a complex and problematic one, as Sylvie Shaw has discovered in her research into neo-shamanism. She interviewed over thirty Australians who were involved in earth-based groups practicing rituals and ceremonies based loosely on shamanism. It becomes clear that many people are using neo-shamanism in a simplistic even exploitative way, as "a kind of self-help therapy dressed up in Native American costume". Like Tacey, she argues the need to distinguish between appropriation of the spirituality of indigenous cultures and genuine engagement with the land and with another culture. Hallmarks of the latter, she suggests, are an awareness of the political dimensions of eco-spirituality and a willingness to celebrate the spiritual heritage of each culture, a type of spiritual "both ways". Like Veronica Arbon and Hinton Lowe, she uses the Yolngu word ganma, the swirling together of the saltwater and freshwater, as the best image for the meeting of the cultures.

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David Tacey has already presaged this section of the book by his contention that Australian literature and art is where there is most likely to be an expression of the deep transformative qualities of the country, the spirit-place. Writers, poets and artists, or some of them at least, are moved to dig deep: "Creative artists cannot afford to live shallowly at the surface of life; they must put down solid roots in the soil, and as soon as they do this they hit pay-dirt, their work flourishes, their creativity takes on new life and colour, and they celebrate the deep links that connect us to this place".

It has not always been a celebration, however. Veronica Brady chronicles the experiences of fear and mistrust of the land by early poets and writers, and anxiety about the Aboriginal inhabitants of it. She links this to the Enlightenment culture that the settlers brought with them which considered nature as a book to be read for its secrets and then used to exert humankind's dominion. Unfortunately, the book of Nature in Australia proved to be indecipherable to European eyes, and many nineteenth century Australians wrote of its strange plants and animals and its "weird melancholy", to use Marcus Clarke's phrase. Brady uses Helen Cixous' distinction between two ways of being in the world, or perceiving the world, to describe the developments in Australian literature. Early settlement occurred within the "economy of the proper" which features the closely related words of property, propriety and appropriation, and early literature more or less followed those themes. The contrasting mode of perception is the "economy of the gift", which has a more feminine quality, in which one forces and receives from the other without seeking control or possession.

Brady quotes from Judith Wright and David Malouf to illustrate how some modern writers have entered into the economy of the gift with the land, and have achieved a deep intimacy and communion. David Malouf writes in "An Imaginary Life": 'I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back ·.. then we shall begin to take back into ourselves the lakes, the rivers, the oceans of the earth, its plains ·.. then the spirit of things will migrate back into us. We shall be whole' (Malouf 1978: 96). Brady's point is not that the two economies can't co-exist or haven't in the past. It's that the economy of the proper has been virtually uncontrolled in this country and has had disastrous consequences, especially in our undervaluing of the Aboriginal "economy" and the destruction of the soil, water, plants, and animals of this country. She ends with a plea for us to heed the voices of the poets inviting us to journey into the land anew, to journey beyond our notions of property, ownership and control.

Peter Hay, who is a poet, essayist and academic writer, takes up the question of how the essence of place is best communicated in writing. He notes, as I have earlier in this Introduction, that the deepest theoretical understanding of place comes from the phenomenological traditional broadly interpreted to include Heidegger, Tuan, Seamon, Relph and others. He uses the example of Gaston Bachelard to illustrate the sort of writing about place that emerges from this tradition, "a sub- linguistical process of uncritical, childlike wonder" that reaches beyond, or below, language to convey the experience of place as directly as possible. He contrasts this with nature/place writing in North America especially as exemplified by Barry Lopez, which emphasises a storied relationship to place ö the writing of stories of place to each other. These are not mutually exclusive ways of writing, and indeed Barry Lopez approaches the experience of being so present in the landscape that one enters into a mystery beyond words. However, Peter Hay is most interested in the communicative value, communally and politically, of place stories.

His chapter is a multi-layered piece of writing, a catalogue essay which includes some of his own poetry, which in turn is subject to commentary. In form as well as in content, it echoes the many ways we respond to place, can hear its voices and can communicate it to each other. It also echoes the words of earlier chapters of this book, such as David Russell's desire to go beyond a sense- bound understanding to consider sense of place as an imaginative event. Peter invites us into a sensory appreciation of the she-oak with its "road-dust olive" colour, knobbled skirts and the keening breath of wind, but then moves us beyond ·.

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Victoria King takes us as deeply into the art of perception as Peter Hay journeys into the art of place writing. She traces the twentieth century Western condition of agnosis (being able to look but not see) back into art history, to the introduction of perspectival painting in the Italian Renaissance. The agnosic condition is maintained by such methods as teaching drawing by constructing images through holding the drawing implement at arm's length against the figure to be rendered. She contrasts this visual world of fixed objects with non-dualistic seeing in which there is a continuous flux of light and shadow, colour and form. The parallels with Cixous' economy of the proper and economy of the gift are clear. To turn land into property requires seeing it as an object "at arm's length" to be subdivided. Entering into deep communion with the land requires eyes that see the interconnection and mutuality.

She illustrates the effect of non-dualistic seeing on painting by correlating the work of the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock and the Aboriginal artist Emily Kngwarreye. Pollock struggled to immerse himself physically and psychically in his late "drip paintings", to let the landscape speak through him, and he alluded to the method of the North American Indian sand paintings. In contrast with Pollock's battle with the medium, his alcoholism and early demise, Emily Kngwarreye first began painting with acrylics on canvas at the age of 78 and in the last eight years of her life fluently created a world-class body of work that was a direct expression of her country. Grounded in a lifetime of body painting, Emily was able to sing the country onto the canvas in an apparently effortless way that became increasingly bold and abstracted. Emily's work illustrates at once the power of her inextricable connection to country and the rapidly evolving nature of modern Aboriginal art.

David Wright takes us into the dramatic arts and asks us to consider that just as a performance can't occur divorced from the place where it occurs, a sense of place cannot be without its elements of performance. At first, it might seem that experiencing place is the very opposite of a performance with its connotations of separation and playing a role. However, he notes recent developments in contemporary performance theory, based in environmental theatre in which traditional boundaries between performer, audience and place are being broken down. The place, like the audience, can become an active participant in the performance, a different kind of performer. It does lead to a tension, however, with some theatre being so culture-bound and place-bound that it restricts its capacity to transform and transcend the particular.

David considers that a sense of place, like a performance, is a meta-experience, concerned with the quality of consciousness of experience that is observed as well as participated in. They both have the basic structure of "gathering-performing-dispersing", they both involve a conversation between physical sensation and mental cognition. In the recent interpretation of performance, for a sense of place to emerge from a set of experiences, there needs to be a complex interplay of feeling and understanding which is then communicated. The dramatic arts thereby join poetry, painting and story-telling as ways to make sense of our relationship with place.

No simplistic summary could do justice to the many lines of argument and evocation that run through these chapters. The differences in emphasis and intellectual or cultural tradition are as interesting as the commonalities. There are, however, many pointers to a way of being in place that is based on loving attention to what is, a willingness to let go of mental and visual preconceptions and dream into a mutual relationship with country in the manner of the poet and the artist. The stories that emerge from such a way of being in place might then form the basis for a more mutually respectful dialogue with Aboriginal people about what it means to inhabit this continent in the new millennium.

REFERENCES

REFERENCES

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Abram, D. (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage Books, New York.

Altman, I. and Low, S., eds. (1992) Place Attachment. Plenum Press, New York.

Brady, V. (1994) Caught in the Draught: Essays on Contemporary Australian Culture and Society. Angus and Robertson, Sydney.

Carter, P. (1987) The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History. Faber and Faber, London 384pp

Flannery, T. (1994) The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of Australasia and its Peoples. Reed Books, Port Melbourne.

Jung, C.G. (1927) "Mind and Earth" in Collected Works, volume 10. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

Krygier, M. (1997) Between Fear and Hope: Hybrid Thoughts on Public Values. ABC Books, Sydney.

Lopez, B. (1986) Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. Picador Books, London.

Malouf, D. (1998) A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness. ABC Books, Sydney.

Read, P. (1996) Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Seamon, D. (1992) Dwelling, Seeing and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology. State University of New York Press, New York.

Seddon, G. (1997) Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Stanner, W. (1979) White Man Got No Dreaming. Essays 1938-1973. ANU Press, Canberra.

Tacey, D. (1995) Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia. HarperCollins, Melbourne.

Thomashow, M. (1995) Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist. Massachusetts Institue of Technology Press, Cambridge.

Tuan, Y. (1974) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Columbia University Press, New York.

About the author:

Dr John Cameron is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Ecology and Lifelong Learning at the University of Western Sydney. See Staff Profile - Dr John Cameron

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