We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 116
AUTUMN 2009
REVIEWS
NON-FICTION - C.A. CRANSTON
Frank Vanclay, Matthew Higgins and Adam Blackshaw (Eds) – Making sense of place, eploring concepts and expressions of place through different senses and lenses, National Museum of Australia, 2008
Let me save you the trouble of reading this review and suggest outright that you buy the collection, read the last three chapters (by an anthropologist, a geographer, and a philosopher), then settle back, revert to chronology, and explore the intricacies of Making Sense of Place. The thirty-one chapters in this collection are concerned with current narratives of ‘settling into place’, as opposed to ‘settlement’ and the ownership which that term implies. As ‘place’ the Great South Land inspired precolonial
narratives of inversion and perversion; in the eighteenth century (as Australia) it produced an extreme example of the unreliable narrator, James Cook, with his rendition of place and its (un)inhabitants. The last couple of centuries have perpetuated the myth-making and contributed more unsettling narratives of place. These essays, however, are free from the narrative prejudices of the past, yet ripe with considered tensions – autochthonous stories, seeking to articulate individual attachments to place. In many cases they articulate ‘multiple attachments to different home-places’ (Trigger 308), ever conscious of ‘the poisonous place temptations of parochialism and exclusion’ (Relph 322). There’s the place/displacement narrative, as in Ursula de Jong’s account of being an Australian-born child of non-English-speaking migrants and the complexity
notches up in David Trigger’s account of being a Jewish-Australian ‘exiled’ from his mental, ancestral homeland.
It would not do, however, to equate ‘place’ with ‘Australia’ or with ‘home’. Some of the most intriguing chapters in this splendid, richly illustrated book are those that discuss homeless places marked by transition. Jennifer Clark’s ‘Your Spot’ tries to make sense of the meanings attributed to roadside markers in the South Island of New Zealand; for the road-dead ‘the roadside becomes a gateway between life and death’ (167). The markers achieve rebellion status in their ‘assumption of public space for private means’ (171). Likewise, the public space of the parking lot comes under scrutiny as police vehicles vie with cruising vehicles in ‘Stop, Revive, Survive’. Here, Barbara
Holloway asks if a car can be a place, noting the car-place as a home for the homeless, as a speed machine, as a sex machine, as a way to put the baby to sleep, and as a death-trap for said baby on hot days; it is both ‘place and a means of experiencing place’ (162). The theme of transition continues in Laura McAtackney’s chapter on the Long Kesh/Maze prison in Northern Ireland. Once ‘home’ to paramilitary prisoners and currently
being reinterpreted as a historic site, the Maze was a place to ‘maintain a group identity through community activity’ such as building escape tunnels (194) and exercising non-cooperation (IRA member Bobby Sands’s hunger strike, and death after sixty-six days, in 1981).These are disturbing yet refreshing perspectives (the ‘lenses’ referred to in the book’s title), not least for those mobile populations whose ‘home’ is never fixed and who, passing through spaces populated by nativist narratives, find themselves anxious and alienated. ‘Place’, begins Frank Vanclay, ‘is generally conceived as being “space” imbued with meaning’ (‘Place Matters’, 3). As such, chapters investigate place
making that is phenomenological and conceptual. And while natural and cultural icons such as Uluru or the Sydney Opera House (designed by a Dane who had never set foot in Australia) contribute to a general sense of place, the meaning attributed by an individual to a particular place is a result of the ‘coming together of the biophysical, social and spiritual worlds’. Simply put, place is ‘space that is special to someone’ (3). Again, this collection challenges and expands our notions of place and space. For place need not refer to a stable, built locality, and space doesn’t necessarily refer to the external world. There’s embodied space occupied by the senses, the catalysts through which the world is made known, and from which meaning-making proceeds.This very personal space, and the way in which it can be invaded and misunderstood (a theme throughout the collection), is articulated in ‘Places of Silence’. Mike Gulliver discusses meanings attributed to acoustic space by the born-deaf and the previously hearing-abled. With hearing loss the latter group ‘still consider the hearing world to be their home, [but] they find themselves forcibly separated from it and from any significant involvement in its affairs’ (89). Born-deaf people, however, ‘are people of the eye’; their sense of place is ‘lived out in the visually interactive world of sign language’ (91). This directly challenges hearingabled perspectives that imagine deafness spatially, as loss, silence, and emptiness.
There are places imaginatively shaped to accommodate escape. Celmara Pocock’s ‘Reaching for the Reef’ also discusses the importance of the senses in meaning-making and finds today’s touristic encounter touchdeprived. Reef experiences are more readily accessible than in the past but the visitor’s sense of place, of doing it tough in a tropical dangerland, is cocooned by air-conditioned quarters, glass-bottomed boats, insect repellent and, importantly, conservation laws that protect the local marine inhabitants from falling victim to the human wish to souvenir a sense of place.
We all, of course, collect souvenirs; and in the act of souveniring we encounter an ethics of place. One way in which this collection is invaluable is in its service to debate. ‘Pieces of Place’ is prefaced by a picture of four smoothly rounded rocks sitting on a suburban windowsill as if gazing wistfully at life beyond the domestic interior. These piece-of-place souvenirs (as opposed to mass-produced products) act as ‘reservoirs of
denotation’ (202). But the authors’ statement that ‘the act of physically removing a piece of place to take home is a personal act of symbolic connection and desire for remembrance’ (200) is contested elsewhere. It’s all well and good when talking about the Long Kesh/Maze prison where ‘small, mobile artefacts [are] frequently illicitly removed from the site’ (196), often reappearing in Roddy’s Social Club, a Republican ‘museum’ in Belfast. It’s more complex, however, when pieces of rock are chipped from a natural (and national) icon, at a site where the
traditional owners would rather you not even walk on the rock, let alone remove a piece of place.In which case if you’ve climbed Uluru you’ll be interested in ‘Touring the Moral Terrains of Uluru: Pathways of Pride and Shame’. Gordon Waitt and Robert Figueroa present an interesting proposition. Place, they say, has ‘moral dimensions’; each of the half a million visitors to the site must ‘morally negotiate the requests of the traditional owners.... that visitors should not climb “The Rock’’’ (289). The settler-Australian fed on European travel myths makes sense of The Rock ‘through climbing, an act remembered for the thrill of reasserting pride in a society with one dominant racial ideology at its centre’ (298). Shame, on the other hand, surfaces in those willing to forgo the climb, instead engaging with park management interpretative practices which include the Anangu
rule ‘Nganana Tatintja Wiya: We never climb’. Not climbing acts as a litmus test, revealing individual sensitivity to place, and willingness to accommodate different points of view – crucial factors in the matter of place, respect and social cohesion. Shame is the ‘moral gateway’ which, say the authors, might ‘assist the process of reconciliation’ (298).
What we need is ‘effective ways to cope with the environmental and social challenges’. So says Edward Relph, doyen of place studies, in ‘A Pragmatic Sense of Place’. Pragmatism involves a postmodern consciousness, says Relph, capable of appreciating distinctiveness and diversity. It needs to be unshackled from single approaches such as scientific objectivity (note: Relph is a geographer), instead being receptive to multiple discourses. As Brian Wattchow’s ‘River Songs: A Poetic Response to Australia’s Wounded Rivers’ indicates, multiple discourses include those
of other organisms and habitats that contribute to place (46-55). Relph published his seminal text Place and Placelessness in 1976. His book served as unwitting eulogy, situated on the crossroads of radical change in the understanding of place, before the ‘glocal’ where local and global boundaries are ‘virtual’; where space is cyber and place might be a chat
room. Thirty years on, Relph is the appropriate person to lead the charge concerning evolving concepts of place where ‘our sense of place is spread-eagled across the world’ (315). In a rephrasing of ‘think globally, act locally’ Relph notes the ‘many interconnected, large-scale challenges developing simultaneously’ (317), stressing that ‘their consequences will be as locally varied as the weather’ and will require ‘place-based strategies for their mitigation’ (317).
Jeff Malpas (‘Place and Human Being’) gets the last word. He outlines two major views on place. One, in which a sense of place sets up ‘the basis for acts of violence and exclusion, of varying degrees, against those who are seen as not of that place – as “other”’ (327). Here the problem seems not to be a connection to place but an assertion of control over place (328). These exclusionary responses are exemplified ‘in the Middle East, in Kosovo, in Nazi Germany, and even in contemporary Australia’ (331). The second perspective is that place
and humans shape each other; both have ‘character’, and ‘mutuality’ exists between place and human being. To quote the last sentence of the collection: ‘To have a sense of place is not to own, but rather to be owned by the places we inhabit; it is to “own up” to the complexity and mutuality of both place and human being’ (331).
At the global level the quiet urgency of this articulate collection lies in its implicit irony: that owning up ‘to the complexity and mutuality of both place and human being’ will manifest not as a result of social enlightenment, but of ecological imperative. It’s a pity there’s no index – but it’s a beautiful book.
CA CRANSTON Her place-based publications include The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and Their Writers (Rodopi, 2007); Along these Lines: From Trowenna to Tasmania (Cornford Press,
2000). She is on the advisory board of the Indian Journal of Ecocriticism and President of ASLE-ANZ (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment – Australia and New Zealand).
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