AustLit

'This special issue of the journal Coolabah comprises contributed papers that examine the relationships between place, placescape and landscape - Australian places and imaginings. Australian perspectives of place and cultural production unavoidably confront issues of identity simultaneously from antipodean and elsewhere vantage points.' (Source: Introduction)

'This article seeks to provide an overview and analysis of the 2011 Australian film, Red Dog as a popular cultural product from Western Australia. Set in a working class mining community in the 1970s, I argue that it provides a new outback legend in the form of Red Dog. This article stems from a review of Red Dog as Film of the Year written for the forthcoming Directory of World Cinema: Australian and New Zealand Second Edition from Intellect Books.' (Author's abstract)

'The following essay explores the relationship between contrasting cultures and cultural spaces within a rural Australian, Victorian, context, with reference to the narrated cultural landscape in Joan Lindsay's novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) and in the film based on the novel, by Peter Weir (1975). In the analysis of the five first scenes of the film, the focus will be on the notion of scenic- and human- beauty that is at once arresting and foreboding, and the various contrasting and parallel spaces that characterise the structure of book and film. The article will draw from a number of additional secondary sources, including various cultural readings which offer alternative methodological approaches to the works analysed, and recorded 1970s interviews with the author and the filmmaker.' (Author's abstract)

'In early 2012, I was invited by Pilbara Writers group in Karratha to make a poetry map for the Pilbara region when they saw the Poetry 4 U website (http://poetry4U.org ) where poems are pinned to geographic locations. I visited the Pilbara June 17 - 23, 2012 to commence the poetry mapping project with members of the Pilbara Writers group. By walking with video when writers took me to their favourite places I was able to document visceral intersubjective experiences of these places, of being there together, so that I could empathically share the writers' sense of landscape. This paper discusses what happens when a hodological approach is taken to explore connections and flows between poetic expressions, places and landscapes.' (Author's abstract)

'In 1984, J. Douglas Porteous challenged the geography world to silence. True geographical appreciation cannot be expressed in prose; the logical conclusion is for geographers to be silent. Given that they cannot be silent, Porteous advocated nontraditional writing, such as poetry. In 1994, Paul Cloke illustrated the power of reflective narrative for a geographer grappling to understand the world. In 1998, I started writing geographic poetry. In 2012, I draw these strands together in this reflective essay, drawing on a poetic journey over a decade old now. Can I reflect a sense of place or place-making that transcends traditional geographical expression? Did Porteous truly open a geographic window otherwise closed to me? I conclude the poetry does create geographical sense and sensibility, but more as constructed possibilities than as objective realities. The poetry provides glimpses into the experiences of geographical displacement encountered by many New Australians, and thus may best be considered as metageographical expressions.' (Author's abstract)

'Since 2007, I have been travelling regularly to the Thai /Burma border to run creative writing workshops with Burmese women refugees. The stories that eventuate from the workshops are published and distributed internationally. I have never been inside Burma so my knowledge of the country has come to me via other peoples' stories. Recent changes that have taken place in Burma give glimpses of hope for a democratic future and yet I remain on the edges of this country I feel I know intimately.

In his memoir From the Land of Green Ghosts (2004) Pascal Khoo Thwe writes about the layers of distinctly different cultures that make up the country of Burma. After attending university in Mandalay Pascal was forced to flee after the arrest of his activist girlfriend. He joined the guerilla forces on the border and then through a chance encounter with academic, John Casey, finally made his way across the border into Thailand then on to England. This extraordinary story is more common than many people realize. When one considers the more than half a million refugees who have fled across the Burmese borders into neighboring Thailand over the last decade it is easy to see the tremendous ramifications that the political situation has had on the people of Burma.

This paper is a meditation on the Burma of my imagination and the many permutations of country, culture and landscape that I have come to know through the people of Burma and their relationship to the lands of their birth. As a facilitator of other people's stories I reflect on the ways in which the personal stories of lives lived inside Burma and on the borders of the country as refugees have helped me understand the situation there. The paper also explores the way narrative and advocacy, storytelling and capacity building have played a part in the democratic changes that are now taking place after more than sixty years of civil war inside Burma.' (Author's abstract)