Exploring the personal in place

Kate Gamble

Places bear the records of hybrid culture, hybrid histories that must be woven into a new mainstream. They are our ‘background’ in every sense (Lippard 1997, p.8).

‘A surveyor turned up today, to mark out where the soil will be taken from’ – this was how I learned that the new owners of the property were planning to open a soil pit on the riverflats.  When my father sold his property to the neighbours four years ago, this was my main concern.  As they had been excavating and selling topsoil from their own riverflats for some years, expanding to other land in the area as the resource was depleted, it seemed inevitable that the same would happen here, their stated intention to farm the land notwithstanding.  After a week or so of sadness, I decided to speak to the local council, Departments of Primary Industries, and Sustainability and Environment and various sundry contacts, to find out what was happening and how; and also to see how I might act to minimise the impact on a place that is of strong personal emotional attachment, but also, I believe, of considerable environmental and cultural value.

It became apparent quite early in this process that there was no official sanction incurred by the inherent unsustainability of such a practice: soil ‘extraction’ was simply seen as a valid land use, subject to a range of planning regulations.  Similarly, there was scant attention paid to environmental values – of vegetation or of the waterway – despite the increasing prevalence of dialogues of holistic management of river systems, over the rhetoric of individual property rights.  A parallel conversation focused on the cultural importance of a site which held many and varied traces of Indigenous habitation.  A scarred tree and an artefact scatter had been recorded on the registry of Aboriginal Affairs Victoria (AAV) in the mid 1970s, however my father had also found numerous stone tools, and located a hearth, and I sought to ensure these were also recorded.  Obviously any decisions made about the appropriateness of such an enterprise, and how it should be allowed to proceed, needed to consider all available information, so it was vital that the public record be as complete as possible.  This has proven to be a far from straightforward exercise.

This process – of trying to make plain the value of a particular place which not only has strong emotional value to me, but which I believe to be of broader regional and cultural value – has led me to this meditation on place and belonging.  How we personally and culturally construct space and place, how we locate our own place, and how we negotiate those claims and uses that compete with our literal or psychic possession of that place: these are all aspects I have sought to make visible through a place where regional and national concerns are made manifest, albeit in a relatively local way.  It is my view that a part of the cultural value of an individual place lies in its manifestation of broader cultural concerns.  These concerns might be universal; however they are likely to be more apparent, more urgent or more persuasive in particular places (Carter 2005).  I also follow Lucy Lippard (1997, p. 7), for whom:

Most often place applies to our own ‘local’ – entwined with personal memory, known or unknown histories, marks made in the land that provoke and evoke.  Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life.  It is temporal and spatial, personal and political.  A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth.  It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there.

What has been striking in this journey is the play between what I term the ‘official’ discourses of place, and those of the ‘personal’.  By ‘official’, I mean those of governance, administration, and ownership, and also local historical narratives of exploration, and settlement.  By ‘personal’ I mean the intimacy, knowledge and memories of the everyday experiences of living and working in a place.  Here I include not only those of myself and my family, but also of the (mostly unknown) others whose place this has also been.  ‘All places exist somewhere between the inside and the outside views of them’ (Lippard 1997, p. 33), so an understanding of place must consider both.  While these two sets of narratives overlap, it is easy to contrast them, view them in opposition, and do so as to privilege the grounded local knowledge of place that constitutes the latter and is almost entirely absent in the former.  There is an apparent lack of respect for, and valuing, of the personal, fine-grained knowledge of place within governmental and administrative bureaucracies, ignoring or perhaps acknowledging that ‘[l]ocal places remain stubbornly hidden from the systems of control and ownership’ (Lippard 1997, p.77).  These bureaucracies claim land as space, rather than as place; consequently, they are perpetually dislocated from the people who reside in the latter.

Disparate, and yet concurrent, as the ground covered by both sets of knowledge might be, place seems always to be found somewhere else: alongside, peripheral and remarkably difficult to fix.  Place, argues Entrikin (in Bell 1997, p. 815), ‘is best viewed from points in between’ – in between the rock of objective generalization and the soft place of subjective particularism.  It is as if place avoids capture by direct focus, visible only obliquely.  The personal and everyday exists encased by the official and yet somehow resists confinement within its parameters.  Aerial photographs, maps and the histories of local towns and councils have all contributed to my understanding of my place, some revealing information new to me, others by the absences therein; and each, in some way, by re-forming the familiar in an unfamiliar manner.  Similarly, bounded and definitively located as a place is, it is simultaneously entirely unstable and shifting, caught in the tension between the official and the personal, between the clearly defined and the uncertain, so that it changes not only between discourse and persons, but within each individual’s experience.  A shift in knowledge changes perceptions just as a new occurrence generates its own memory; so a place alters perceptibly across time.

Lippard (1997, p. 4) begins her introduction to Lure of the Local: ‘Place for me is the locus of desire.  Places have influenced my life as much as, perhaps more than, people’.  I am not convinced that place is my ‘locus of desire’, but this place I write of has surely influenced my life in a truly fundamental way.  The play between the official and personal aspects of place is also that between the public and private, between cultural norms and individual beliefs, between the general and the particular; and so locating place involves negotiating each and all of these in a personally meaningful manner.  More accurately for me, it seems that place is not only in-between, but at the point of tension between each of these dimensions, where understandings, beliefs and cultural narratives collide, jostle and are made manifest.

Significantly, however, it is the possibilities this particular place has produced, the way the information and traces it holds have allowed me to people this place across time, that are most compelling for me both in forming my personal attachment, and my awareness of its greater cultural significance.  And this remains a more eloquent expression of the basis of my formation of place than either memory or habitation, while still being contingent upon both.

Locating place

The place I refer to is a named area of land which has changed significantly during my lifetime, in size and shape and also, curiously, location.  It is the farm I grew up on, about 35 kilometres north of Melbourne, purchased by my father and his brother in the early 1950s.  Named by them, ‘Cooinda’ was approximately 1800 acres divided at that time from a much larger property which spread to the north.  In 1980, my father subdivided the property, continuing to farm some 535 acres of land.  While the name still appears at the gate, the property was allocated a street number some years ago.  Oddly, this first number was sequentially lower than that of each adjoining property – from north to south, the three properties were numbered 450, 365 and 395 respectively.  While the councils responsible acknowledged the anomaly, they refused to alter it – something which I did by simply declaring it to be ‘425 Old Sydney Road’, and changing the postal address.  This rather anarchic action was necessitated by the local post office’s refusal to deliver mail, as to them our address ‘didn’t exist’!  Even more peculiar, my declaration seems to now be accepted as fact.

Both the larger and smaller versions of the property were divided by Deep Creek, with the eastern portion at different times existing within Plenty, Broadmeadows, Kilmore and now Mitchell municipalities; and the western, in Springfield, Romsey and Macedon Ranges.  Across these spatial ‘shifts’, it has consistently remained at the periphery of each governmental entity, a condition which seems to resemble in both quality and outcome, that of peripheral vision for the respective levels of government.  The full address shifts from Mickleham (postal) to Beveridge (municipal and therefore electoral), resulting in an official dispute as to the physical location of the property – and associated difficulties in exercising voting rights in local, state and federal government elections.

 Figure 2 shows the property on the ground, as it appeared from the air in 1968.  The paler boundary marks the extent of the property from the late 1940s to 1980, while the darker colour shows the property after the 1980 subdivison.  Since the most recent sale, this area has been subdivided further into four.  Old Sydney Road marks the boundary to the east.  Deep Creek clearly meanders across the image, as it does the landscape, demarcating landform.  Steep hilly mudstone country lies to the east of the creek, easing down to the plain which is traversed by the Hume Highway. The volcanic plateau to the west is the larval flow from Mt William, some distance further north-west of the property.  The house, farm buildings and surrounding plantations can be seen close to the road, though now there are more buildings, and the trees around the house are both more numerous and mature.  Farm tracks can also be traced in places; again the routes have been altered as have some fence lines.

Figure 2: Property located on an aerial image.  [Source: E. Gamble]

...in history, by name, and by ownership

The historical narrative for this area is brief as it appears in the published local histories of the region, and vague as concerns ‘Cooinda’.  In his work on the journals of explorers, Paul Carter (1987, p. 77) notes that ‘[t]he landscape emerges as an object of interest in so far as it exhibits a narrative interest’.  This landscape seems to have been as peripheral in this sense as it has been to the local councils, lying on the furthest edges of the narratives of history, settlement and development as these are represented in available local histories.

The explorer William Hovell recorded this journal entry for 14 December 1824:

myself and Mr Hume ascended a high but single hill [Mt Bland, Beveridge], in front from which we saw a very gratifying sight.  This was a very extensive plain extending from west to south-east for several miles with patches of forest…  Mr Hume named this plain Bland’s Plain in compliment to my friend Dr Bland of Sydney (Payne 1975, p.4).

Quite close, just to their right as they looked across the plain, the land rose slightly then folded into steep hills, descending quickly to what was soon known as Saltwater River and later as Deep Creek.  This waterway, while often difficult to access, was recognised as important to the viability of grazing in the area.  In his history of Broadmeadows, Andrew Lemon (1982, p. 12) writes:

The Government Surveyor, Richard Hoddle, arriving in Port Phillip in 1836, was soon tracing the district’s streams towards their sources in the back country, but squatters had marked out territory before him.  These streams were of importance.  Small but apparently reliable in dry times, the headwaters of the Merri, the Darebin, the Moonee Ponds, the Deep Creek and the rest were a necessary resource for the successful settlement of the lands to Melbourne’s north.

And in a history of the former Whittlesea shire, it is noted:

Another recorder of the area in 1836 was George Russell who relates that:

‘On the following day we rode over a wooded country, well grassed, about the district of Kilmore, at the time quite unoccupied by anyone.  In the evening we got to a station occupied by a Mr George Brodie on the Deep Creek where we remained for the night.  On the third day we rode over an open tract of country to the eastward of Mr Brodie’s place, it was at that time called Mercer’s Vale…’ (Payne 1975, p.4).

Mercer’s Vale was the name of the main run in the area as it was first claimed, and which may have included ‘Cooinda’.  The landscape remains picturesque despite extensive clearing of woodlands, though it must have once appeared more so, as according to Bailliere’s Victorian Gazetteer and Road Guide of the mid-1860s: ‘To the north there were still plenty of trees. Mickleham, or Deepdene as it was sometimes called, was described as thickly timbered’ (Lemon 1982, p.44).

For land with a valuable resource given the concerns of the time (water), and considering also its proximity not only to Melbourne but also the only road to Sydney, the narrative interest in this landscape is surprisingly spare.  Perhaps this indicates the durability of Hovell’s early defining of place which may have persisted in imagination if not in usage.  This paucity is even more pronounced when reflecting on the later discovery and mining of gold – precisely the sort of industry usually celebrated in these histories, but which remains unremarked upon in those most relevant here.

Known as ‘Cooinda’ or, more usually, ‘Ted Gamble’s place’ until 2002, this property was owned by E. & J. Gamble, and before that, for a brief time, by the partnership of W. & E. Gamble.  Before that it belonged to Flinty – a Collins Street solicitor who included this in his property of some 15,000 acres of land, and whose full name is lost to local memory.

In the local histories, variation and likenesses in names of the original landholdings make for confusion in distinguishing this particular parcel of land.  Certainly (and obviously) it was a part of a larger whole: after settlement, perhaps Mercer’s Vale, a run named in 1836 for George Mercer, which gave its name to a settlement, re-named Beveridge in 1853 (Tucker 1988, p. 26).  Perhaps it was the first landholding in the area for W. T. J. Clarke, who ‘took over a run named Bank Vale in the Mickleham district, a little to the north of the Brodie run’ soon after 1841 (Lemon 1982, p.22).  Or was it later: ‘From 1867, the years of W. J. T. Clarke’s occupation… of the area west and north of Kalkallo… With the dispersal of the Clarke Estate in 1911, the area reverted to smaller holdings of from two hundred to two thousand acres’ (Payne 1975, p.106)?  Then again, perhaps it was part of the:

Konagadarrar-Western Port run No. 194 of fourteen-thousand, seven-hundred-and-twenty acres, with a capacity for seven-thousand sheep. [which] lay to the west of Brock’s ‘Darraweit Guim’ run and ‘Steele’s Horse Station’.  The run was watered by Deep Creek…‘Konagadarrar’ run was another of the runs acquired by W. J. T. Clarke in the Special Survey of 1851 (Reid 1992, p.18).

Each of these is a possibility; the only clarifying comment from my father is that it was ‘originally’ Clarke’s land.

Figure 3a [Left]: Map of first subdivision of land in the area.  [Source: Payne 1974, p. 6]

Figure 3b [Right]: Sketch map of the runs as selected by early squatters.  [Source: Reid 1992, p. 10]

Paul Carter’s (1987, p. 151) assertion might clarify this historical and locational dilemma:

If the process of making a place for oneself was as much a process of bringing symbolic boundaries into being through language as it was a question of wielding the axe, then the absence of written accounts is explicable.  It was not only a dwelling place which had to be built, but a language of place as well.

Perhaps the absence of this property and its immediate area from local histories results not only from its position on the periphery of relevant administrative entities, but also from the lack of development of a language of this place.  For while there are many small settlements and named places across this landscape, this property lies within a sizeable area of silence, as if unmarked by language.

 Figure 4: Map of named places in the area, with 'Cooinda' marked in red.  (Click on the image for a larger version.)  [Source: Mapshare, Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, created online 6 Sept 2005.  See http://nremap-sc.nre.vic.gov.au/MapShare.v2/]

It is not surprising that the language closest to this place aligns neatly with the few available historical details.  Of those settlements proximate to ‘Cooinda’, Clarkefield, Bolinda, Monegeeta and Chintin to the west and north-west all mark the land selections of early settlers (Reid 1992).  Beveridge, as noted earlier, was the former Mercer’s Vale, initially named for the first white settler, then quickly renamed when the Beveridge family opened a popular hotel in the township (Tucker 1988, p. 26).  Mickleham is named for a village in Surrey, England, though how it came to be named is not recorded (Blake 1977, p. 173).  Darraweit Guim, Wallan, Kalkallo, and three of the four names already mentioned (Bolinda, Monegeeta and Chintin) are all recorded as derived from local Aboriginal languages.  According to Blake, Chintin is from the word for ‘sun’; Bolinda, from the word for ‘old man’; Kalkallo from that for ‘tomahawk’ or ‘wood’; and Monegeeta, the word for ‘back’.  Wallan is said to relate to landform, meaning ‘round, flooded area’, while Darraweit Guim is thought to locate the site in the context of Mt Macedon and this section of Deep Creek (Blake 1977).  Clark and Heydon add to this that Kalkallo comes from the Woiwurrung word ‘galk-galk’ meaning stick; Monegeeta from ‘mooneejettee’; and list Wallan and Darraweit Guim as they appear here without meanings included (Clark & Heydon 2002).  It goes without saying that the names by which the Indigenous owners knew their country largely remain unrecognised and unacknowledged.

As Lippard (1997, p. 47) has noted: 

Euro-American names tend to be less about what is there than what it looks like or who was there. They are used as grassroots affirmations, as bids for posterity, and as proof of ownership, a means of control from the top…  The ability to name or rename oneself and one’s place is an aspect of ownership.

Few of these place names and indeed few, if any, of these acts of locating actually tell us anything about the places they refer to, or of the experience of individual place.  Each tells of an instance of marking and thereby making place, in order to differentiate it from everywhere else; and each was the act of a person engaged in settlement.  Even where Aboriginal language names have been recorded, these were interpretations by and actions of the settlers or surveyors with the power to do so.  However these fail to evoke anything of place even as they seek to define it.  As Carter (1987, p. 165) writes, ‘[a]gainst this background, white invasion was a form of spatial writing that erased the earlier meaning.  Settlement then became a question of giving back to a desolated, because depopulated, land a lost significance’.  The names, and the historical records seek to do this, to provide significance as the cement with which to bind memory and habitation, in order to create belonging, and certainly I look to them to do just that.  Knowledge of place is after all collective, not only personal.  However, none of these evocations are convincing – perhaps because they lack the intimacy of detail required to people the landscape, so that their significance pales even as they still do structure our landscape.

And what of the name ‘Cooinda’?  Carter (1987, pp. 136-7) states:

it may well be that the relative failure of Whites in Australia to incorporate Aboriginal concepts into their language is one reason why English here continues to float, as it were, off the ground and why, despite its ability to name isolated objects, its poetic power to evoke the living space remains patchy.

This naming is between settler and Indigenous cultures, its provenance lost and its use now widespread, all over Australia.  The word ‘floats’ in the manner Carter describes, generating no connection with or understanding of place, except as it attaches to my family’s tenure there.  And this name is yet another assertion of possession and control.

Of mines and creek

Ghosts of the living and dead alike, of both individual and collective spirits, of both other selves and our own selves, haunt the places of our lives. Places are, in a word, personed – even when there is no one there (Bell 1997, p. 813).

Michael Bell (1997, p. 813) writes that ‘we constitute a place in large measure by the ghosts we sense inhabit and possess it.  The meaning of a place, its genius loci, depends upon the geniuses we locate there’.  He includes here memory, the ghosts of our past, including ourselves at other times, and also how we see our future grounded in place; along with those of others we know to have inhabited place, and others again who we sense without knowing their connection.  According to Bell (1997, p. 820), ‘[h]owever we locate them temporally, the ghosts of place are always presences and as such appear to us as spirits of temporal transcendence, of connection between past and future’.  Through this connection and acknowledgement of these ‘spirits’ of place, we invest a social meaning in space, ‘and thereby make it a place’ (Bell 1997, p. 820).

This resonates for me; it describes my making of place.  Inhabiting ‘Cooinda’ over time has inscribed attachment simply through moving across the land and seeing changes, repeatedly, through seasonal cycles and across time.  As Lippard (1997, p. 34) notes, ‘[e]ven if one’s history there is short, a place can still be felt as an extension of the body, especially the walking body, passing through and becoming part of the landscape’.  Walking has generated my relatedness to place in a way that could not be otherwise replicated.  However it is not only the act of walking, but what is made apparent through doing so – and by this I mean the traces of other habitation on the land.  It has been walking, and moving across the land, along regular tracks, sometimes in meandering on ground that I had perhaps never before trodden, that the remnant traces of others who had been there before became visible.

This is obvious in the area around the gold mines.  These are a series of vertical shafts, 1.5 metres by 2 metres, cut through rock, which run across hills and valleys in a logic not visible from the surface.  Apart from the mines themselves, and the associated mullock heaps and tailings, there was the ruin of a stone house, empty windows and walls tumbling, built from the blocks cut from the mines.  A single house, alongside a mine shaft and a towering pile of gravel, overlooking a dam and with a couple of wattles for shade – without any factual knowledge of the mines and their workings, this became a place because for me it was peopled.  People lived and worked here, made money or went broke, and perhaps died here too.  The intensity of their labour was apparent, testified to by the sheer volume of discarded rubble.  The leg of an iron bed, uncovered in a particularly dry year, when there was little grass cover, spoke not of the time of its manufacture to temporally locate the industry, but rather of the person who slept in it.  This is a place which connects the past to my present through evidence of habitation and labour, and in which the transitory nature of that which we often consider permanent – our houses – is made apparent.  Interestingly, I think of this place in the present tense: my father levelled the house and removed the stones perhaps thirty years ago; the wattles died; the gravel was used to fill a mine where the sides had become unstable and unsafe. This place has not existed as I have described it above for a long time; however it remains for me, with its ghosts.

     
Figures 5a and 5b: The mineshafts as they still exist, beside which the ruins of the house were evident.

Another place within the whole, one which I know as clearly distinct, is the area of the creek most readily accessed by the track from the house, which makes its way downhill over a couple of kilometres to the only accessible crossing place.  This ease and consequent frequency of access is certainly why this stretch became ‘the creek’ (in contrast to the rest of the waterway which flows through the property); familiarity is in part responsible.  This was the area we most often visited, walking on summer evenings to swim or paddle.  It was where tadpoles could always be collected among the rockpools, and it was the place we came to measure the height of the floodwaters.

 Figure 6: The riverflat which forms the southern end of 'the creek' seen from the hill to the east.

‘The creek’ designates more than this section of Deep Creek, encompassing the two riverflats, one on either side, that fit within the ‘walls’ formed by the hills and the edge of the plateau.  The land forms a large, enclosed room here, oriented north-south, so that it catches all but the late afternoon sun in winter, and is sheltered from both the chilling south-westerly winter winds and the hot summer northerlies.  This is always a comfortable place to be, unless the creek is in flood in which case at least half of the land is inundated.  It has always held the same comfort for me that is evoked by ‘home’.

Figure 7: The riverflat which forms the northern end of 'the creek' seen from the plateau to the west, looking back to the position from which Figure 6 was taken.

It was also where a considerable part of my father’s labour was concentrated.  He cropped one riverflat, seen to the centre of the image in Figure 6, for many years. And only very recently he described the extent of the work required to render this land productive in an agricultural sense.  When he took possession of the property these flats were covered in tussocks.  One sported 37 dead river redgums, ringbarked by earlier settlers, and made like iron by regular burning, apparently by a group of fishermen who used the area (Gamble 2005).  My father as a younger man is certainly in this landscape; marking his place in the same way Carter ascribed to earlier settlers.  Peter Read (2000, p. 118) is accurate in claiming that ‘[a]ttachment is being born out of labour; the harder the labour, the greater is the implied right of attachment’; however - and importantly - it is not only the labour itself, but the time invested in place which strengthens attachment.

But there were always other people in this place too.  The gold miners had scoured the riverflat, digging and turning over the soil, leaving hillocks among the tussocks and dead trees.  As well as the marks of settlement, there were, and are, scarred trees and stone scatters, traces of the labour, time and ownership of the Wurundjeri Willam people, whose country this is.  Over the time of his ownership, my father unearthed numerous stone tools, locating a hearth as growth patterns of grass changed.  My understanding of these traces fits with Stephen Muecke’s (1984, p.129) explanation of proprietorial discourses:

It is significant that the archival discourse establishing European ownership of the Plains is underpinned by selections which are typically absent from the Aboriginal discourse which maintains its sovereignty over the land.  In Aboriginal discourse the land and its ‘owners’ are not subject to a single higher authority (the ‘crown’), land is not invested in someone’s (proper) name and ownership is not quantified over a given period (the lease) or a given area. 

‘Ownership’, in the Aboriginal sense, is circumscribed by extensive and intimate knowledge of particular places.  Individuals who function as guardians of these places do so only by virtue of the knowledges they hold about the land.  The land is not attached to their names; they, as individuals or clan-groups are instead identified with the names of the country. 

It is this equation of ownership with knowledge, and thereby time, that resonates most strongly in this place.  Local memory, as relayed to my father (and by my father to me), suggests that the traditional owners did not camp here often; they could more reliably be found further east, in the more bountiful areas around the Darebin and Yarra valleys.  However this must have been a regular camp, indicated by the sheer amount of surviving cultural material to be found.  Still, even now, a perfectly formed stone axe can be found, just left on a rock ledge.  The extent of these traces mark longevity of connection, and that equates to intimacy of knowledge.  All of this calls those people into being in a way that cannot be undermined by the vast changes of the last 180 years.

I do not seek in this paper, to argue the inherent durability and moral superiority of Aboriginal connections to place, nor are the political intricacies of reconciliation a focus of this exploration.  There is, however, something in the sheer longevity of attachment and the depth of knowledge that accompanies it, and in the intimacy of that relationship, that endures despite the absence of the people themselves.  I do not mean to suggest that I see ghosts here, in some clairvoyant vision; like Peter Read in writing of one of his places, I do not believe I intuit anything (Read 2000).  Yet that there has been a strength of attachment here, that has endured in some way, and influences my life, is undeniable.

Muecke (1984, p.67) writes of:

the diversity of … different readings of the country … rather than any one of them being absolutely right, there is a range of purposes, economic or otherwise, to which each reading offers up its services. The reading becomes the common sense of the purpose, so that a geological reading of the country stands in a quite ‘natural’ relationship to the purpose of mining. Each reading thus produces a partial knowledge of the country, and using the reading is the only way to gain access to that knowledge; the country does not offer up the fullness of its meaning to the receptive individual as some romantics and spiritualists would have us believe.

This equally applies here.  My place is the product of familiarity and time, and of that of other members of my family, and it is also recognised through systems of ownership and governance.  ‘The creek’ means ‘home’ for me, and it has always seemed to be the heart of the property.  It is easy to transfer my sense of comfort and pleasure here to those others whose place this has also been.  But my peopling of this place does not come only through imagination; they are brought into being through the traces they have left, in particular through the stone tools which we have found here.  The locating and recording of artefacts might be seen as the marking of a remnant trace of the Wurundjeri Willam, a people who simply ‘went away’. [2]  Linking the artefacts with place, and creating an archaeological ‘site’, might be seen as one means of relegating that culture and those people to history, denying the living Wurundjeri culture of today (Carter 2005).  True, too, that ‘it seems easier to communicate (or identify) with people long dead who were once stewards of a particular landscape than with today’s property owner, even when the land is ‘our own’.  Their distance and unfamiliarity lend themselves to transports not encouraged by our culture’ (Lippard 1997, p.17).

The overriding sense for me in this place, and among these cultural traces has been one of connection.  As I find a connection across time with the people who have also lived here and known this place, this connection draws them into the present, reinforcing the link with the contemporary Wurundjeri community. [3]  These tools have a different use today, being more likely to be displayed in some way than wielded.  However when I pick one up, and feel the intimacy of stone, shaped to fit a hand, and fitting my hand; knowing that it was made and used in the place which I know so well, how can I not know that this was also another’s place?  ‘Through my ghosts of belonging, I place myself in relation to others and their ghosts of belonging…  Ghosts of belonging are ghosts of kinship.  We experience thereby a social tie with the physical world, animating an otherwise inanimate realm’ (Bell 1997, p. 824).

Perhaps in the end it is absolutely fitting that this place has been somehow peripheral to official discourse in so many ways.  Perhaps place (and its ghosts) is only possible where the glimpses of lived experience prevail, and disappear under the authority of the direct gaze.

 Figure 8: Rubbings of some of the stone tools found on Deep Creek.

I did not begin this with questioning my right to belong in this place (Read 2000).  I know I do belong, and if pressed to locate that belonging it would be here.  ‘The sense of place can outlast place itself’ (Lippard 1997, p. 50), and I know that is so.  That we no longer own this land does not mean that I have lost my place, even though I have lost access to it.  Nor does the threat of gross disturbance, which is occurring through the soil extraction process, diminish it (though it undoubtedly has, and will continue to in physical reality).  Those few photographs I have shadow memory, some creating the place anew.  But for me, place is most profoundly present in the stones, stones which are absolutely not mine, though I find them in my possession for a time.  And also profoundly present are the people who these stones tie to the place; some no longer exist and those who do may not know the place, but for me they are there.  ‘Shared belonging’ is not only an expression of an ideal.  It already exists in our connections to real places.  Whether or not we see it is a product of how we know our places; whether or not we acknowledge is something else again.

NOTES

1  All images were produced by the author unless otherwise noted.

2  ‘Long before the whites appeared appeared, the Kilmore district belonged to the Wurunjerri section of the Woiworung tribe’, and later, ‘[a]n explosion at Mr Allen’s mill in the 1850s frightened the few remaining aborigines out of the Kilmore area… How fast the aborigines succumbed after the white occupation of the land was a common reflection amongst settlers of the 1840s.  It remained a matter of comment in the mid-1860s’ (Tucker 1988, pp.27-8).

3  This is not to say that members of today’s Wurundjeri community still know this land and their ancestors stories of it; I do not know what knowledge persists through such complete dispossession as has occurred in Melbourne and its environs.  It does mean that through living here and developing my knowledge of place, I believe it remains their land, and that this carries rights and responsibilities, however this may be acknowledged with current systems of administration.

REFERENCES

Bell, M. M. 1997 ‘The ghosts of place’, Theory and Society, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 813-36.

Blake, L. 1977, Place Names of Victoria, Rigby Ltd, Melbourne.

Carter, P. 1987, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Carter, P. 2005, personal communication.

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