INTRODUCTION
JEFF MALPAS
SENSES OF PLACE
“There’s Tassie!’ came a cry on the deck at dawn. ‘I’m not an Australian, I’m a Taswegian’’1
I doubt that there is anywhere in the world in which one can find such a self-evident ‘sense of place’ as in Tasmania. I was not born in this island. I grew up on the North Island of New Zealand. Yet, from the moment I arrived, I had a very strong impression of the uniqueness of the place, and of the identity that attaches to it – even though that identity is neither uncontested nor unambiguous.
It seemed particularly appropriate, therefore, that in April 2006 we were able to hold the ‘Senses of Place’ Conference in Tasmania, specifically at the University of Tasmania’s School of Art in the old IXL Jam Factory in Hunter Street, Hobart.2 The essays in this issue of Island are drawn from this dynamic conference. It attracted over one hundred and sixty participants from Australia and around the world, from a wide range of disciplines. Indeed, the enormous diversity in disciplinary perspectives, in the questions addressed, and the approaches employed, is itself indicative of the enormous appeal of ideas and images of place across the social sciences, humanities and creative arts. ‘Place’ has many senses, of course, and the exploration of that diversity was explicit in the Conference’s aim of ‘exploring concepts and expressions of place through different senses and lenses’.3
The essays included here themselves provide a glimpse of that diversity. These essays address various senses of place, from a number of directions, and with respect to a range of places. Yet they all raise certain core questions concerning our relation to place, and the way in which that relation determines who and what we are. Our relation to place is not something external to us – as if we and the places we inhabit were already determined independently of one another – nor is it external to the places themselves.
Places possess their own identities, such that Tasmania and Ibiza, while they may share many points of similarity, are also self-evidently different places (and not merely in terms of their geographic location). Yet those identities only appear through an interaction, involving both ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. This interaction occurs only in and through those places.
My concept of place is one of openness – as suggested by the very etymology of the word as derived from the Greek plateia, meaning broad or open way.4 This openness allows our entanglement in place, such that we are taken up into the places in which we dwell at the same time as place is taken into our own being as its very frame and fabric. We do, of course, move between places, and so our lives may be defined in relation to many different places and locales, and yet still we are marked by those places even as we also mark them. Our lives are thus accumulations of places, as places are accumulations of human lives, and as we move between places, so we trail their traces behind us like threads from an enormously variegated, imperfectly woven cloth, a cloth that is, moreover, always being woven and rewoven.
Place provides the fabric of our lives, of our experience, but it is also the very matrix within which life and experience are formed and articulated. Place takes us in, and in so doing it also opens up into a space for experience, for remembrance, and for imagination. Experience and memory are thus always inextricably embedded in its locale and situation, while imagination draws its own sustenance from the richness of the places in which it finds itself – as so many poets, thinkers and artists have observed.
It is thus no arbitrary fancy that leads us to talk of the genius loci – the spirit of place – for it is only in place that spirit or soul, and so also creativity, comes to fruition. This is why the language of place so readily spills over into the metaphorical, and the metaphorical into the topographical – to speak of place, and of particular places, is already to talk of that in and out of which meaning arises and through which it is articulated. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to conceive of a mode of speech that would not already find its ground in the concreteness of our embodied, located existence, and some philosophers have argued that such embodied locatedness is the very basis for meaning. Moreover, since the etymology of the term takes metaphor (once again, the term comes from the Greek, metepherein) to be a form of carrying across or movement between, and since movement, as Aristotle points out, always calls upon place, so metaphor can be construed as itself a carrying between places, a movement between topoi.
If the sense of place, with all that implies, is more self-evident in a place like Tasmania, then this is undoubtedly due, in part, to the fact that Tasmania is an island. The boundedness of islands brings a very clear sense of the differentiation of the island from that which surrounds it as well as from the mainland to which it is invariably connected by that boundedness. Moreover, in Tasmania’s case, the landscape often has an intimacy and localisation – perhaps more akin to New Zealand than to the Australian continent – that makes it easy to identify and connect with. Certainly that reflects something of my own experience of this island, and partly explains why it seems so easy – especially for someone from a New Zealand background – to feel at home here. And perhaps it is also part of the reason why Tasmanians so often identify themselves first as Tasmanians rather than Australians.
Yet the sense of place that reigns in Tasmania is also due, I would suggest, to the contestation that also marks out this island. Tasmania is a beautiful island, a beautiful place, and yet its landscapes can also be dangerous and forbidding, just as its recent past is filled with darkness and sorrow. The contestation and contrast here are something that struck me quite forcibly when, on flying back to Europe after being interviewed for the Chair of Philosophy in Hobart, I read Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide on the plane – here was a very different image of Tasmania from that provided by the rather idyllic appearance of the Sandy Bay campus of the University of Tasmania. As Peter Conrad once remarked, ‘the emblems of this gardened land, so blighted by its early history, are an apple and a fanged devil’, and he refers us to Mark Twain’s description of the island as ‘a sort of bringing of heaven and hell together’.5 The sense of place that seems so evident in Tasmania (or is it, after all, still Van Diemen’s Land?) is not a sense that appears as settled and already determined. Rather it is a sense that appears in the self-evident character of the place. It is a place that demands our engagement (even if, as for Conrad, that engagement is a difficult one). In this respect, one might say that the sense of place that appears in a Tasmanian setting is precisely a sense of the question that attaches to place – what is place, and what is our relation to place? Of course, these are the same questions which are approached, in ways that go beyond just this island alone, in the essays by Sylvia Martin, David Trigger, Christina Dew and John Vella that follow.
NOTES
1 From ‘Van Dieman’s Land’, in P J Kavanagh, Finding Connections, Hutchinson, 1990, p 36.
2 The Conference was made possible through a joint partnership between the National Museum of Australia, the University of Tasmania (and especially the University’s Community, Place and Change Theme Area), the Mountain Festival, and the Place Research Network. Island would like to thank the Conference partners for allowing some of the essays presented at the Conference to be published here. Readers should note that these essays represent only a handful of the papers presented – many more of which will be published as part of a single collected volume by the National Museum of Australia which is due to appear in 2007.
3 See the Conference website at http://www.utas.edu.au/placenet/senses/.
4 See my Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
5 Peter Conrad, Down Home: Revisiting Tasmania, Chatto and Windus, 1988, p 135.
JEFF MALPAS is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania and Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics. His latest books are Place and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Heidegger's Topology (MIT Press, 2007). Much of his writing focuses on the nature and significance of place, but he also publishes on ethics, hermeneutics, philosophy of language and the history of philosophy.
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