AustLit

'I am speaking from my own efforts at writing place. I hope not to be too abstract, because I want to engage with an experiential process: how my research with Aboriginal people caused me to write about place, and how writing place changed the way I write and think. Aboriginal people in many parts of Australia have taught me to consider that country is sentient. Place is one kind of embodiment of being, and the encounters of living things happen in places. Different cultures, different actions: different traces. Aboriginal cultures link time and place in a way that is neither geometric nor disembodied. There is a kind of contemporaneous time, the time of living things, that unfolds in real and located (not geometric or imagined) places. As well there is the accumulation of history/memory in place. Place become complex in its specific gravity: it is and refers to itself, and it holds and refers to relationships. Its very self, while wondrously dense, is also immensely vulnerable, because the ongoing life of the place happens through the actions and memories of ephemeral living beings.' (Introduction)