Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum (Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, 17) 9819942659, 9789819942657

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Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education  17 Series Editors: Aaron Koh · Victoria Carrington

Terry Locke

Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum

Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education Volume 17

Series Editors Aaron Koh, Faculty of Education, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong Victoria Carrington, School of Education, University of Tasmania, Launceston, TAS, Australia

We live in a time where the complex nature and implications of social, political and cultural issues for individuals and groups is increasingly clear. While this may lead some to focus on smaller and smaller units of analysis in the hope that by understanding the parts we may begin to understand the whole, this book series is premised on the strongly held view that researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in education will increasingly need to integrate knowledge gained from a range of disciplinary and theoretical sources in order to frame and address these complex issues. A transdisciplinary approach takes account the uncertainty of knowledge and the complexity of social and cultural issues relevant to education. It acknowledges that there will be unresolved tensions and that these should be seen as productive. With this in mind, the reflexive and critical nature of cultural studies and its focus on the processes and currents that construct our daily lives has made it a central point of reference for many working in the contemporary social sciences and education. This book series seeks to foreground transdisciplinary and cultural studies influenced scholarship with a view to building conversations, ideas and sustainable networks of knowledge that may prove crucial to the ongoing development and relevance of the field of educational studies. The series will place a premium on manuscripts that critically engage with key educational issues from a position that draws from cultural studies or demonstrates a transdisciplinary approach. This can take the form of reports of new empirical research, critical discussions and/or theoretical pieces. In addition, the series editors are particularly keen to accept work that takes as its focus issues that draw from the wider Asia Pacific region but that may have relevance more globally, however all proposals that reflect the diversity of contemporary educational research will be considered. Series Editors: Aaron Koh (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Victoria Carrington (University of Tasmania). Editorial Board: Angel Lin (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Angelia Poon (National Institute of Education, Singapore), Anna Hickey-Moody (RMIT, Australia), Barbara Comber (University of South Australia, Australia), Catherine Beavis (Deakin University, Australia), Cameron McCarthy (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA), Chen Kuan-Hsing (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan), C. J. W.-L. Wee (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Daniel Goh (National University of Singapore, Singapore), Jackie Marsh (University of Sheffield, UK), Jane Kenway (Monash University, Australia), Jennifer A Sandlin (Arizona State University, Tempe, USA), Jennifer Rowsell (University of Bristol, UK), Jo-Anne Dillabough, (University of Cambridge, UK), Megan Watkins (University of Western Sydney, Australia), Mary Lou Rasmussen (Australia National University, Australia), Terence Chong (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore). Book proposals for this series may be submitted to Associate Editor: Lay Peng Ang E-mail: [email protected]

Terry Locke

Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum

Terry Locke University of Waikato Hamilton, New Zealand

ISSN 2345-7708     ISSN 2345-7716 (electronic) Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education ISBN 978-981-99-4265-7    ISBN 978-981-99-4266-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4266-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To my grandchildren and the places that will be part of them

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge my parents, Russell James and Mary Ellen Locke (née Smyth), for teaching me the meaning of home and for providing me with my ancestral lines, and thereby the lessons to be learnt from my family stories of emplacement, displacement, migration and settlement. I would like to acknowledge my deceased brother, Kevin, who began his working life in Rotorua, fell in love with te reo, learnt the language and, with theodolite in hand, learnt intimately the lay of the land in the Te Arawa rohe (tribal area). I also owe much to the late Maureen Wehioterangi Jeyly, who was my first instructor in taha Māori (things Māori) when I was a teenager. Kevin and Maureen’s children and grandchildren are my Rotorua whānau. They are part of the reason I am attached to this place and its landscapes. I would like to thank the writers and scholars, non-indigenous and indigenous, who have unknowingly guided me in the writing of this book. I think of them as companions in a project, at the end of which I was not the same person as I was at the beginning. I would like to thank the University of Waikato for honouring me with the title of “Emeritus Professor” and the library privileges which go with it. I would like to thank Bill Green, who encouraged me to write this book in the first place and who was generous enough to proof-read the manuscript. I would also like to specifically thank colleagues at the University of Waikato, whose work has inspired me over the years and deepened my thinking about place: Karen Barbour and Kerry Earl Rinehart. I would like to thank Jeannettte Armstrong for permission to quote at length from her essay, “Sharing One Skin”, first published in Mander, J., & Goldsmith, E. (Eds.) (1996). The Case Against the Global Economy and a Turn Toward the Local (pp. 461–470). San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. I would like to thank Dinah Hawken for permission to quote Section 10 from “Talking to a Tree Fern” and Section 11 from “Talking to a Tree Fern at Lake Rotoiti”. Both poems appear in Hawken, D. (2001). Oh there you are tui! New and selected poems. Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press. I would like also thank Mark Winter for permission to reproduce his cartoon that appeared in NZ Stuff on February 17, 2023.

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My thanks to the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, for permission (20044P33) to reproduce Joseph Lycett (born Staffordshire, Britain 1774 died Birmingham, Britain 1828): View of Tasman’s Peak, from Macquarie Plains, Van Dieman’s Land, c.1823, London, watercolour and gouache on paper, 17.5 × 27.8 cm, 21.2 × 28.5 cm (sheet). M.J.M. Carter AO Collection through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation, 2004. I would like to thank countless people who have shared their stories about place with me over the last 18 months. Particularly, however, I’d like to thank Eduardo Días for allowing me to tell part of his story in Chapter 9. I owe a debt of gratitude to my editors Prasad Gurunadham and Lay Peng Ang at Springer Nature, in the first instance for being open to this proposal, and secondly for their support of me in the writing process. Thank you for your kindness and patience. Thank you also to Richard Andrews for his acute observations of the MS of this book and his insightful suggestions for revisions. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Linda Mildred (Millie), who, in 1979, on the first of many of my visits to Waikouaiti and Karitane in East Otago, began sharing her sense of place with me as we explored the landscape of her childhood; Matainaka (the lagoon), Waikouaiti (the river), Matanaka and Huriawa (the headlands) and Kirimoko, Hikararoa and Pāhāta (the hills). During her time as a music specialist at Henderson Valley Primary between 2003 and 2012, she implemented a ground-breaking, place-conscious, music education programme which I found inspiring. It planted the seed for my own emotional and intellectual exploration of sense of place in the years since. I also owe a debt of gratitude to her as my first reader and in all senses of the word my most acute critic.

Contents

1

Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Looking Back to Look Forward��������������������������������������������������������    3 1.2 Another Book on Sense of Place?����������������������������������������������������    9 1.3 Coming to Know������������������������������������������������������������������������������   12 1.3.1 Knowledge Mediated by Discourse��������������������������������������   13 1.3.2 Perceptual Intuition��������������������������������������������������������������   14 1.4 What Lies Ahead������������������������������������������������������������������������������   16 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   19

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 Theorising Sense of Place������������������������������������������������������������������������   21 2.1 Place and Space��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   21 2.2 Sense of Place ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   24 2.2.1 De-legitimating Place������������������������������������������������������������   25 2.2.2 Understanding Sense of Place����������������������������������������������   27 2.3 Spirit of Place������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   33 2.4 Placelessness ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   35 2.4.1 Investment with Meaning and Value������������������������������������   36 2.4.2 The Material Physicality of Place ����������������������������������������   38 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   39

3

 Sense of Place and Identity����������������������������������������������������������������������   43 3.1 Identity as the Sense of Who I Am ��������������������������������������������������   43 3.2 Approaching Identity������������������������������������������������������������������������   44 3.3 Synecdoche ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   44 3.4 Synecdoche as Verb��������������������������������������������������������������������������   45 3.5 Becoming Places������������������������������������������������������������������������������   46 3.5.1 Places in Themselves������������������������������������������������������������   48 3.5.2 Endowing Significance ��������������������������������������������������������   50 3.5.3 Impediments to Self-Identification with Place����������������������   51

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3.6 Dispossession������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   55 3.6.1 Not-So-Merry England ��������������������������������������������������������   56 3.6.2 Scotland��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   60 3.6.3 More on Discursive Power����������������������������������������������������   63 3.7 Sense of Place and Wellness ������������������������������������������������������������   65 3.8 Re-membering Sense of Place����������������������������������������������������������   67 3.8.1 The Clearances Revisited������������������������������������������������������   68 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   70 4

 Indigeneity and Sense of Place����������������������������������������������������������������   73 4.1 The Piktukowaq of Nova Scotia��������������������������������������������������������   73 4.2 Indigeneity����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   75 4.3 Australia��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   82 4.3.1 The Mithaka People as Synecdoche ������������������������������������   83 4.4 Canada����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   86 4.5 The United States������������������������������������������������������������������������������   88 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   90

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Decolonising Place������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 5.1 The Colonisation Project������������������������������������������������������������������   94 5.1.1 Another Synecdoche: Bandon, Cork������������������������������������   96 5.2 Sovereign Power ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   96 5.3 Discourse������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  100 5.3.1 The Wild��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  102 5.3.2 A Brief Digression on the Word “Nature”����������������������������  103 5.3.3 The Great Chain of Being ����������������������������������������������������  104 5.4 Decolonisation����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  105 5.4.1 Breaking the Chain ��������������������������������������������������������������  106 5.4.2 Unsettled Narratives and the Potential for Hybrid Identity����������������������������������������������������������������  108 5.4.3 A Personal Digression����������������������������������������������������������  112 5.4.4 Decolonising Naming ����������������������������������������������������������  113 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  115

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 Locating Sense of Place in Literary Studies������������������������������������������  117 6.1 Figurative Language ������������������������������������������������������������������������  118 6.2 The Place of Rocks ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  120 6.2.1 Personification����������������������������������������������������������������������  120 6.3 Resetting Setting ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  122 6.3.1 Epic ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  122 6.3.2 Theatre����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  123 6.3.3 Prose Fiction ������������������������������������������������������������������������  125 6.3.4 Bakhtin: A Digression on the Chronotope����������������������������  127 6.4 Travellers’ Tales��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  130 6.5 Poetry������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  131 6.5.1 Ecopoetry������������������������������������������������������������������������������  135 6.6 Ecocriticism��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  137 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  139

Contents

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 The Problematics of Representing Sense of Place��������������������������������  141 7.1 Homo Symbolicum ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  141 7.2 Constructing Landscapes in Paint����������������������������������������������������  143 7.2.1 An Etymological Digression������������������������������������������������  145 7.2.2 Landscape in Van Diemen’s Land����������������������������������������  146 7.2.3 The Visual as Deepening Connection to Place ��������������������  151 7.2.4 Decolonising Landscape ������������������������������������������������������  154 7.3 Embodying Place in Dance��������������������������������������������������������������  155 7.4 Enhancing Sense of Place Through Music ��������������������������������������  159 7.4.1 Musical Expression as Generating/Communicating a Sense of Place��������������������������������������������������������������������  160 7.4.2 Connecting with the Natural World Through Music������������  163 7.5 Can Nature Represent Herself?��������������������������������������������������������  164 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  167

8

 Locating Sense of Place in the School Curriculum ������������������������������  169 8.1 Some Reflections on Curriculum������������������������������������������������������  170 8.1.1 The Knowledge Society: A Diversion����������������������������������  174 8.1.2 Critical Pedagogy������������������������������������������������������������������  177 8.2 A Place-Conscious Curriculum��������������������������������������������������������  179 8.2.1 The Perceptual Dimension����������������������������������������������������  180 8.2.2 The Sociological Dimension������������������������������������������������  181 8.2.3 The Ideological Dimension��������������������������������������������������  182 8.2.4 The Political Dimension ������������������������������������������������������  183 8.2.5 The Ecological Dimension����������������������������������������������������  184 8.3 Place-Conscious Pedagogy: Some Examples ����������������������������������  185 8.3.1 Murphy’s Bush����������������������������������������������������������������������  185 8.3.2 Henderson Valley������������������������������������������������������������������  187 8.3.3 Reshaping L1 Subject English����������������������������������������������  189 8.3.4 Outdoor Education����������������������������������������������������������������  191 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  193

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 The Geopolitics of Place: Framing Avenues for Activism��������������������  195 9.1 Radicals and Activists ����������������������������������������������������������������������  198 9.2 The Anthropocene: Narratives and Pathways ����������������������������������  199 9.3 The Geopolitics of Place������������������������������������������������������������������  203 9.4 Landing ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  207 9.5 Land Use ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  208 9.6 Rediscovering a Sense of Place and Why It Matters������������������������  211 9.6.1 And so to Choice and Ontology��������������������������������������������  215 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  217

Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  219

Chapter 1

Introduction

I am composing this book in a place I share with my wife, Millie, and our dog, Roxy, in the Ngongotahā Valley, a few miles north of Rotorua. We have called our place “Falcons Return”. There is no apostrophe, since “return” is a verb. The apostrophe would also be inappropriate because falcons, while certainly understanding territoriality, have no cognisance of ownership. Over the course of this book, it will become clear that ownership is a problem concept. So is the word “property”. In this opening paragraph, I was hesitant about describing “Falcons Return” as our property, though we do have a legal title to its three acres. The language I am using is the English of Aotearoa/New Zealand, which is generally understood in the anglophone world as long you can manage our unique accent. However, if you are a non-Kiwi, you will be unlikely to recognise the word kārearea, which is the Māori word for the New Zealand falcon – one of this country’s endangered species.1 Māori, the language of the indigenous people of Aotearoa, is also an endangered species, despite its being an official language (along with English and NZ sign). The macron in Māori language signifies a lengthened vowel. Vowels in Māori are comparable to the vowels in Spanish. Try sounding out the word kā re a re a. Make it somewhat guttural, and you may agree with me that it connects you sonically to a falcon more effectively that the word “falcon” does. If I look out to the right of the desk my laptop is sitting on, I can see a sloping lawn heading towards our northern boundary along which there are random plantings of native hebes and flaxes (harakeke in Māori), exotic camellias and a grape vine. Dominating the lower lawn is a massive sycamore tree, which provides shade in summer and mulch in winter. In the north-eastern corner, there is the lower pond, edged with flax, reeds, maples and karaka trees. For much of the year, it is mostly overlaid with a mantle of waterlilies. Rather than take you to other spots in Falcons Return, let me share with you a poem that celebrates one of the pond’s inhabitants.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_falcon

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 T. Locke, Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4266-4_1

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1 Introduction

The poem also captures one of my motives for writing this book – the hope that we might yet manage to save planet Earth from the destructive impact of climate change. Song of the Frogs No group of animals has a higher rate of endangerment than amphibians. Scientists estimate that a third or more of all the roughly 6300 known species of amphibians are at risk of extinction.   Wake & Vredenburg, 2008. In summer, the long-anticipated song starts as the light fades, and as the dawn breaks, and your ear starts in seasonal relief to the craaaaaaaaawk, craaawk, crok, crok, crok. The green and golden bell frogs2 are back, if they ever left, primed to go after a winter sleep, snugly planted on the pond’s bed. It’s time to take the young ones by the hand, to gird ourselves in garments of quiet as we gently tread the perimeter path. We stand and look for them long and long knowing their perturbability. For now, the chorus seems to hold its breath… and then the fellow starts to sound us out, pulling us to a spot behind a reedy clump where he hunkers down on his flat pad. Our presence is nothing to him and everything. The white expanse of belly and throat vibrates like the skin of kettle-drum. His song is a seer: this wetland canary, the world’s golden fool.

Poems will feature from time to time in this book as crystallisations of sensory and emotionally nuanced knowledge. So far in this introduction, I have already foreshadowed some of the themes of this book: sense of place, the susceptibility of language to both entrap and liberate, indigeneity as a reference point and resource, the threat of a climate catastrophe and the importance of giving voice to our co-inhabitants of planet Earth. In the remainder of this introduction, I will share a memoir reflecting on my own sense of place as something developed over time in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand. I will then spell out my rationale for writing this book, offering a brief summary of its overall argument. I then outline the epistemological stance I have adopted in writing this book, focusing on such concepts as aesthetic cognition, positionality and cultural critique. I will conclude with an overview of the structure of the book by briefly summarising Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.

 Originally from Australia, the species is threatened there and globally vulnerable.

2

1.1  Looking Back to Look Forward

3

1.1 Looking Back to Look Forward Although this section of the introduction is memoir, it is not essentially about me. My concern is not autobiographical. Rather, I am interested in the significance of particular events, perceptions and issues of relevance to this book that have been thematic in my own life but also likely to figure in the lives and minds of people of my generation with comparable experiences growing up in Aotearoa/New Zealand. For the most part, I am constructing myself as somewhat typical (and not particularly remarkable). I was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1946 on the first anniversary of the American bombing of Hiroshima, which was touted as ending a war that was, in fact, already in its death throes. At the time, Auckland was a small city of around 260,000 people, with the New Zealand Official Yearbook of 1946 noting that the numbers of Māori were “too small to exercise any significant effect”.3 The city’s population is now around 1,650,000, with an ethnic breakdown (according to one source4) of: New Zealand European, 59.3%; Pacific Islander, 14.6%; Asian, 23.1%; and Māori, 10.7%. As often occurs with census-based reporting, these categories are contradictory and misleading. However, they do signal a demographic trend, reflecting socially transformational, internal and external migration. When I was born, around 80% of Māori lived in rural areas. As a child, I can recall the phrase rural drift being applied to Māori. However, as Paul Meredith (2015) points out, for most Māori who began migrating to cities like Auckland in the 1960s, it was a deliberate act “in search of…work, money and pleasure” (page 1, para 5). It was also an official policy, based on the belief that “the economic future of most Māori lay in the larger towns and cities” (page 1, para 6). As was customary at this time, policy was something done to Māori. Unsurprisingly, during my formal schooling and even at university, I did not encounter Māori. Forty years after I was born, 80% of Māori were living in cities. The 1960s and early 1970s also witnessed what one radical Pasifika website ironically referred to (parodying a racist phrase) as the brown epidemic, when the Labour government of the time encouraged Pacific Islanders to migrate to New Zealand as a solution to this country’s labour shortages and to fill low-paying jobs (Polynesian Panthers Party, n.d.).5 The jobs did not last, but in the main this new population remained in numbers, leading to Auckland becoming the most populous Polynesian city in the world. A number of inner-city and outer suburbs did indeed “brown”, including Kingsland, where Millie and I bought a run-down villa in 1979 and, over a period of 37 years, brought up our blended family of six children.

 Statistics New Zealand (1946). Chap. 6. Section 3: Population, Recent movements in towns and counties, para 1. 4  https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/auckland-population 5  I invite readers to check out the Polynesian Panthers website (https://polynesianpanthersparty. weebly.com/polynesian-migration-to-new-zealand.html) for a Pasifika perspective on this migration. 3

4

1 Introduction

Despite anti-Chinese sentiment, significant numbers of Chinese arrived in New Zealand in the 1860s, originally to work in the Otago goldfields. However, it was not until the 1970s, when the New Zealand government softened its restrictive policies (a kind of “White New Zealand” policy) in order to appeal to migrants from such Asian countries as China, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Viet Nam and the Philippines, that there was a surge of immigrants from this region. As the census figures above show, Auckland has had its cultural character changed markedly by the fact that almost one in four of its inhabitants now identify as “Asian” in some way. As a 10-year-old growing up in Auckland, my imagination was stirred by a Eurocentric discourse of oriental mystique and references to Chinese opium dens and slum dwellers in Greys Avenue in Central Auckland.6 I knew no Chinese people personally. So far, I have had something to say about the demographic make-up of my city of birth as it was when I was a child and how it has changed to the multicultural and cosmopolitan city of today. My circle of friends was “New Zealand European”. Some were recent immigrants from European countries and North America. I had never heard of Aotearoa and had not yet encountered the word Pākehā. “Colony” was a word for a kind of country that I learnt about through collecting stamps. “Colonise” was a fuzzy word in the margins of my limited vocabulary. The family I grew up in was made up of: my father, Russell James (Jim); my mother, Mary Ellen; my big sister, Bernice (11.5 years older than me); and my big brother, Kevin Russell (10 years older than me). For my teenage years, I was effectively an only child. My father was a maintenance engineer in a brewery, and my mother was a housewife. Both my parents grew up in poverty and had left school at the age of 12. I will address more fully the concept of discourse later in this introduction, but for now I would like to bring in Gee (1996): Primary Discourses are those to which people are apprenticed early in life during their primary socialisation as members of particular families within their sociocultural settings. Primary Discourses constitute our first social identity, and something of a base within which we acquire or resist later Discourses. They form our initial taken-for-granted understandings of who we are and who people ‘like us’ are, as well as what sorts of things we (‘people like us’) do, value, and believe when we are not ‘in public’ (p. 137).

I’m not altogether happy with this way of framing; it doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge that the discourses family members subscribe to pre-exist these acts of subscription and are already circulating in the wider society. But it will do for now. Because my family didn’t sit down and share with one another the beliefs we were committed to, this paragraph is my own act of interpretation, with modalities shifting between probable and maybe. Hard work was a given virtue. So was excellence in the sense of making things well and to last. (“If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly”, was a saying of my father’s.) I think my parents were proud of their working-class origins, but perhaps prouder of having “dragged themselves

 The references were about stereotyping and mythology rather than fact. (See Gatley, 2008).

6

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5

up by their shoelaces”. (They were married in 1929 – the year of the great share-­ market crash.) Talking oneself up (“skiting”7) was frowned upon. My parents loved cards and rugby. My father played rugby for Auckland. As a child I would crawl into their double bed and listen to short-wave broadcasts of test matches between the All Blacks (New Zealand’s national rugby team) and their South African Springbok arch-rivals. My parents, though lacking confidence socially, believed in hospitality and the obligation to care for elderly relatives. My invalided grandmother regularly spent time with our family, as my mother and her female siblings took six-monthly turns to host and look after her. Above all, in all senses of the phrase, was God, who sent Jesus to redeem us, who in turn established the one, true Catholic Church through St Peter, the first pope. I was taught by Josephite nuns at Good Shepherd Convent, attended St Peter’s College (Christian Brothers), was an altar boy over many years and made my parents proud (I think) by entering Holy Name Seminary in 1965 to train for the priesthood. Here is another poem (Locke, 2019, p. 11), which interprets an event which disturbed the peace of my family when I was a child, when my Uncle Tom (Dad’s brother) disappeared, to be later found washed ashore on the Manukau Harbour west of Auckland: Fissures of Memory The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. — Seamus Heaney I recall my father’s chair, empty and cold where he would kneel as we intoned the rosary praying together, as the saying went, to stay together. He’s out searching for Uncle Tom with my older brother, ten years my senior. Eleven-year-old boys have no place in such expeditions. The creases deepen and settle in my mother’s brow, releasing her from all her mundane chores. There is no comfort to be had from fire nor fare. Confined to my room I turn to Biggles and his everlasting battle with the Hun. Something erodes in the reality of fiction. I know I am waiting for something beyond my grasp. I pick it up in the whispers that prevail, the pebbles dropped into a deep pond when I crash into a conference I’m too young to join. Later, my father will be called upon

 The word is Australian slang, but I suspect my father got it from his Irish mother, together with the word “blatherskite”. 7

6

1 Introduction to pronounce on the identity of a corpse recovered from the Manukau, recognisable, just, despite the work of fish and flood. From my place in the kitchen wings I glimpse his returning face, the stony mask his blind faith will be left to deal with.

Another event that disturbed the family occurred when I was 11 years old. In our own version of “guess who’s coming to dinner”, my brother Kevin brought Kathleen Maureen Te Wehioterangi Corbett home to meet my parents and share with them the news that they were to marry. As a cadet surveyor, my brother had moved to Rotorua, where he lived in a working men’s camp that happened to be across the road from the Corbett homestead. Their wedding took place at St Michael’s Catholic Church in Ōhinemutu in Rotorua in 1959. My parents were people of their time. I would not choose to call them “racists”, just as I would not call them religious “bigots” had my brother brought home a person of the Baptist faith. (They would have had difficulty with this.) In this respect I am guided by an ethical stance I adopted early in my career as an educationalist when I was working with the concept of classical professionalism. In an address I gave to a conference of English teachers in 2003, I spoke of “the quality of one’s encounters with the other and attention to those factors that militate against one’s capacity to respond adequately” (Locke, 2004b, p. 117). In doing so, I was attempting to explain altruism, one of the three hallmarks of the classic professional (the other two are expertise and autonomy). At the time I was drawing on views of both Nel Noddings (e.g. 1986) and Emmanuel Levinas. I was taken by a phrase from Derrida’s (1999) tribute to Levinas which referred to the latter’s notion of uprightness as “original fidelity to an indissoluble alliance” (p.  3), in part because of Noddings’ own use of the word “fidelity” in her writings on the teacher’s duty of care towards her pupils. Before returning to my parents and the impact of my new sister-in-law’s introduction into my life, I want to develop in two ways the position I was advocating back in 2004. Firstly, this book endorses a proposition that seems blindingly obvious as I write it down: we have a duty of care for the planet. Secondly, what might the phrase “indissoluble alliance” mean when applied to the ethical principles which should prevail in our relationships with others. I take it to suggest that whether the other is a person, creature or the natural environment itself, the relationship involves both unity and distinction. (I will be returning to this in Chap. 4 where I explore indigenous ontology.) Our ethical calling is to be implicated in relationships of reciprocal care – an alliance where we are both parts and parts of a whole. To adjust the Biblical phrase, we are keepers of one another. As I understand the idea of othering, we “other” a person, a creature or the environment by acting in ways that would disregard or dissolve this alliance. One way of doing this is by a process of reduction, where for whatever reason we strip away the complexity of the other in question through such practices as stereotyping, a form of essentialising where we convince ourselves that a person, say, can be

1.1  Looking Back to Look Forward

7

reduced to a set of qualities and properties which we impose to suit an agenda that is, by definition, unethical, regardless of its intent. The same occurs when, for reasons that suit our agenda, we describe a landscape as a wasteland (and therefore ripe for, say, mineral extraction). So, I refuse to think of my parents as racists. They were good, amazing people, and I’m proud of them. Like most descendants of European settlers of their generation, however, they were exposed to racist discourses of various stamps. Their only contact with Māori, as far as I know, was through visiting the village of Whakarewarewa8 while visiting Rotorua. I suspect they would have seen Māori as good-natured, happy-go-lucky, exotic, physically adept (i.e. good at rugby), inclined to lack get-up-and-go, cunning, beer-drinking and enjoying one another’s company. A principal source of this discourse would have been suburban newspaper columns written under the pseudonym “Hori” which depicted Māori in this way. The writer was, in fact, a New Zealander of Scottish descent, W.  Norman McCallum, who wrote three collections of stories (illustrated with racist Māori caricatures), the first of which, The Half-Gallon Jar, sold 68,000 copies (Wikipedia, 2022). As Chap. 3 will make clear, there is a strong and complex relationship between identity and sense of place. So far in this memoir, I have avoided using the term Pākehā. However, my developing understanding of this word will be a major thread in the journey I will be asking readers to accompany me on in this book. On one level, it fits my pedigree, since my ancestors have been in Aotearoa for three to four generations and came as settlers from the British Isles. The process of naming is also a theme in this book. We identify place, people, creatures and things by names. Aotearoa was named “New Zealand” by the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman in 1642 after a Dutch province. (When I was a child, Tasman was typically described as the person who “discovered” New Zealand.) In the earlier part of the nineteenth century, this country’s indigenous inhabitants were termed “New Zealanders”. Later in the century, Māori became the generic term for these people, and New Zealanders became the term for everyone living here (including Māori). Māori were using the word Pākehā for people like me from the beginning of European settlement. However, comfort with and then attachment to the word has been relatively recent for New Zealanders with settler ancestry. Maureen Te Wehioterangi was my initial guide in this aspect of my identity formation. So, I am writing this book as a Pākehā. The name roots me in this place, not just because it is a Māori language term, but because it was bestowed on me by descendants of the original inhabitants of these islands. It is, as I see it, foundational to my entitlement to say that I belong here (more of this in Chap. 5). When I was 16, Maureen invited me to attend a tangi (funeral, but also the Māori word for “weep”) for one of the guides of Whakarewarewa. In 1960, such an opportunity was rare for non-Māori. My experience of being welcomed and forgiven for mistakes and receiving patient explanations was my first introduction to what I  Check out https://whakarewarewa.com/. As a child, visiting the village with my parents, I was told off by the famous Guide Rangi because I did not know that a bush she pointed to was called “bracken fern”. It took me decades to forgive her. 8

8

1 Introduction

would now call te ao Māori (a Māori world view).9 As a Pākehā there is a sense in which it is not my place to provide an overview of te ao Māori, which is why I’m inviting you to click on footnote 9. However, at this juncture I would make two points that have a bearing on the themes of this book. Firstly, because of the demographic shifts discussed earlier, encounters with Māori are now part of everyday life in Aotearoa. More and more New Zealanders are developing knowledge of Māori tikanga (ways of doing things), learning Māori language (te reo) and grappling with what it means to identify as Pākehā. This change, as I will argue elsewhere in this book, is leading to a greater understanding of how Māori view place and is also changing the Pākehā sense of place or at least making another meaning for “sense of place” available. My second point relates to philosophy and spirituality. When missionaries of various Christian faiths began establishing missions in Aotearoa, their aim was the conversion of a heathen people to their particular religious persuasion. Typically, a major theme in any treatment on colonisation (see Chap. 5) concerns the missionary project of imposing (sometimes violently) its own set of religious beliefs and practices on indigenous populations. Not enough emphasis, perhaps, has been put on a kind of ironic reverse colonisation, where the mind and heart of the missionary are susceptible to being colonised by indigenous habits of mind. Here is the Anglican Samuel Marsden, writing about his colleague Thomas Kendall in August 182310: By prying into the obscene customs and notions of the natives with a vitiated curiosity, his own mind has become so polluted that it would be very difficult for him to purify his ideas so far as to render what he writes acceptable to the public eye and to make himself at the same time understood.

Clearly, from Marsden’s point of view, Kendall has gone over to the dark side. Almost 200 years later, as traditional churchgoing declines in Aotearoa, in another irony, Māori spirituality and its attendant concepts have become a kind of religious lingua franca for public occasions such as the openings and closings of parliament and conferences of various kinds. However, as I will be arguing in Chap. 5, these concepts have been gradually assimilated by many Pākehā as they manage the spiritual yearnings attending a sense of the diminishing relevance of traditional Christian faiths (an aspect of their primary discourse). When my mother died in 1987, though she had a Catholic service for her funeral, the preceding ritual of having her coffin at home was influenced by Māori kawa (protocols) around managing death and grief. Māori have always seen themselves as one with the natural world. Hence, the notion that one might offend a person but not nature is inconceivable. It took my

 I invite readers to check out https://ourlandandwater.nz/about-us/te-ao-maori/#:~:text=The%20 M%C4%81ori%20world%20view%20(te,living%20and%20non%2Dliving%20things 10  I found this quotation while researching Marsden in the Hocken Library in Dunedin for my book Maketu (the full quotation can be found in Locke, 2003, p. 37). 9

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own Catholic church of origin over 2000 years to decide that it was possible to commit a sin against nature.11

1.2 Another Book on Sense of Place? If I hadn’t dedicated this book to my grandchildren, I would have dedicated it to David Attenborough who, over many years, and through a variety of media, has with increasing urgency drawn our attention to the life forms on this planet that we are putting at risk through human-induced climate change and environmental destruction (Attenborough, 2020). This book has also been prompted by a sense of urgency and a desire to play a small role in ensuring that my grandchildren’s future is rosier than currently predicted. Sense of place may not at first sight be an obvious starting point for such an undertaking. However, my hope is that the multifaceted treatment of sense of place in this book will draw attention to ways in which a focus on sense of place can assist the project to save and perhaps restore a goodly portion of planet earth’s life forms (including our own). I am not writing this book out of a settled body of disciplinary knowledge, though I draw regularly on the work of disciplinary specialists. My doctoral study (now a distant memory) was related to the fields of literary criticism and American Studies, both contested spaces. In mid-life, as a high-school teacher of English, I also found myself engaged in debates about a “subject” that was also a hotly contested space and characterised by what Bernstein (2000) described as the historically situated recontextualisation of various primary discourses (e.g. applied linguistics, literary criticism) in its manifestation in different national curriculum policy documents (see Locke, 2010a). I spent the last 20 years of my academic life as an educationalist. Drawing on Bernstein again, scholars such as Johan Muller (2009) note that “…independent disciplines may converge to form a new field, or ‘region’, of knowledge, comprised of a cluster of disciplines now come together to focus on a supervening purpose” (p. 213). Education is a “region” in this sense. This book, then, is cross-disciplinary (for more on these matters, see Chap. 8). The one constant I found in my life, as I wended my way across a range of academic fields and professional vocations, was a commitment to writing (as art, craft and pleasure) including poetry. All things are grist to the poet’s mill, and poetry is at once the most disciplined and unruly of verbal forms. In this sense, I am writing to discover the content of this book with a poet’s habit of mind. I believe there is in all of us the potential – and need – to attach to one or more places. There, I’ve said it. In my own case, my initial attachment was to Auckland, but it was Auckland as represented by specific locations which I have memorialised in the form of concrete particulars. These included the city waterfront, the craters of  See Encyclical Letter Laudato Si′ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for our Common Home. Retrieved from https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html 11

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1 Introduction

Mt. Eden and other extinct volcanoes and the beaches and forested slopes they foregrounded to the west where the Waitakere Ranges offered a counterpoint to the urban agglomeration on the isthmus. As I wrote in a poem entitled “The City that Was”: The jewel in my imagination, though,     was the Viaduct Lighter Basin with its clang of fishing boats the ravening shrieks of gulls     and the hum and creak of its drawbridge swinging upwards. But it was the overpowering reek     that set my nose twitching even now as I lament the demise of its untidy clamour     and its supercession by the order of superyachts.

There was also the hard materiality of the walls my father somehow built out of granite rocks with his bare hands to terrace our back yard – rocks gifted to him from an eruption somewhere back in geological time. The lower terrace was an orchard and the upper more expansive one the site of the family’s vege12 garden. I would now claim that my interest in cities as both spaces and places grew out of taken-for-granted sense of place. As a doctoral student (1970–1976), I completed a study with the title The Antagonistic City: A Design for Urban Imagery in Seven American Poets. The poets began with Whitman and ended up with William Carlos Williams. The design in question was a mythical pattern of withdrawal and return – a kind of heroic journey, where a protagonist withdraws from the city and undergoes a kind of transformational experience in an encounter with the wilderness before undertaking a return journey to the city. Looking back on this now, I was caught up in an attempt to make sense of both city and wilderness as grand, cultural metaphors operating symbolically in the writings of the poets whose work I immersed myself in. Regardless of the credibility of the thesis itself, the project ensured that I engaged with sense of place in the American context, though I did not formally use the concept in my theoretical framework. After five decades, however, William Carlos Williams still looms large as a “place-based” poet, and I will return to him in Chap. 6. At the same time I was beavering away on my doctoral dam, I was reading widely and unsystematically such writers as Lewis Mumford (The Culture of Cities; The City in History) and Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities). Their ideas fuelled a commitment to an aesthetic of urban design as the basis for making cities more liveable. Coincidentally, in 1974, championed by its visionary mayor, Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, Auckland City Council published a Central Area Plan, aimed at fostering “the identity and character of Auckland through urban 12

 Kiwi slang for vegetable, pronounced “vedgie”.

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planning” (Mitchelson, n.d., para 6). The plan was an example of a place-making genre, aimed at “the conscious creation of places for diverse social ends”, where place-­making is “one critical element that drives the decision-making process” (Liu & Freestone, 2016, p.  7). I spent hours preparing a submission on this plan, the vision of which was never for the most part realised. Even before Millie and I moved from Auckland to the Ngongotahā Valley, a range of factors were contributing towards the development of the personal sense of place I now have. Chief of these was my growing sense of identifying as a Pākehā New Zealander and openness to the influence of Māori spirituality and practice. Increasingly in formal settings, non-Māori are invited and sometimes expected to introduce themselves by means of a pepeha.13 Here is my introduction of myself to you as my reader through my pepeha: Ko Terry ahau Ko Ngongotahā te maunga Ko Kaituna te Awa Ko Millie te wahine Ko Pākehā te iwi

I am Terry Ngongotahā is the mountain (that speaks to me) The Kaituna is the river (that speaks to me) My wife is Millie Pākehā is my tribe

I have avoided saying “Ngongotahā is my mountain”, since it could be construed as a gesture of ownership. Such a reading would be inconsistent with a Māori world view (see Chap. 4). There are other features I could have included in my pepeha. I could have adjusted the order. Over the years, I have referred to other mountains and rivers. When introducing myself in the context of an IFTE (International Federation for the Teaching of English) Conference in 2020, I chose the Ohinemuri as my river and Karangahake as my mountain – places in the Karangahake Gorge where my father spent his boyhood. This place is represented in Fig. 1.1, which represents the confluence of the Ohinemuri and Waitawheta rivers. It was made for me by ceramic artist Con Kiernan. However, central to the spirit of the pepeha is that the place names signify a significant connection and attachment. The place is part of me, and I am part of this place. Below is a set of propositions that constitute the argument of this book. It’s my answer to the question: Why another book on sense of place? • The earth is our home. There is no Option B. • Having or developing a sense of place involves a kind of interpenetration. The concrete details and histories of places that are special to us are implicated in our identities. • The concept of sense of place can be adapted in a large range of curriculum areas and can operate as a central theme for cross-disciplinary teaching and learning. • Indigenous peoples have much to teach us about honouring the natural world as kaitiaki or caretakers. • We can root our own sense of place in more than one place. 13

 See https://pepeha.nz/

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1 Introduction

Fig. 1.1 Karangahake mosaic

• This rootedness is integral to our identity and can be powerfully expressed via artistic media. • The more rooted we feel in places that matter to us, the less likely we are to violate those places in self-destructive acts and the more likely we are to care for them. • The more of us who do this, the more chance we have of saving the planet for our children and grandchildren.

1.3 Coming to Know There is a twofold theory of knowledge (epistemology) underpinning this book. The first I refer to as knowledge mediated by discourse and the second as knowledge arising from perceptual intuition. I view the latter as generated by a direct engagement with experience through acts of perception/attention. The latter commitment puts me in the camp of those who subscribe to a belief that there is such a thing as knowledge founded in an awareness that is pre-linguistic, i.e. prior to its becoming subject to representation via one or more human coding systems. I agree with Relph’s (2016) contention that: “Rationalism has lost its privileged position as a way of understanding reality” (p. 26).

1.3  Coming to Know

13

1.3.1 Knowledge Mediated by Discourse Drawing on critical theory, this book views knowledge as in part socially constructed and historically situated. From this perspective, specific ways of viewing the world characterise particular groups of people in particular times and particular places. Central to this theory of socially constructed knowledge is the concept of discourse. Here is Gee’s (1996) formulation of the concept: Discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes. A Discourse is a sort of identity kit which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular social role that others will recognise. (p. 127)

Norman Fairclough, one of the founders of critical discourse analysis (CDA), drawing on Michel Foucault, defined a discourse as “a practice not just of representing the world, but of signifying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning” (1992, p. 64). In my own book on CDA (Locke, 2004a), I used the diagram below to represent the relationship between self and discourse: Our subscription to certain discourses often operates at the subconscious level. By way of illustration, I have on a number of occasions explained to students that my determination not to cry at my father’s funeral was a product of my having been conscripted since childhood to a discourse of masculinity in terms of which “big boys didn’t cry”. (I was 19 when my father died). In Fig. 1.2, I have used the word “inscription” as a metaphor for the way a discourse can be inscribed on the self – “written” into the self as part of its subjective composition. One can also freely choose to “subscribe” to a particular discourse. In the previous section, I shared something about the personal journey that led to my subscribing to a particular discourse (way of thinking about or storying) in relation to sense of place (Fig. 1.2). The academic disciplines can be thought of as discourse communities. A disciplinary field, such as geography, for example, is constituted by a dynamic cluster of sub-disciplines supported by researchers who generate knowledge within the framework of a specific scholarly discourse. This knowledge is never absolute. As Relph (2016) puts it, “scientific truth is not determined by objective methods alone but at

Fig. 1.2  Self and discourse

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1 Introduction

any given time is an expression of a consensus of scientific views” (p. 26) or, as I would put it, by the breadth of its subscription base. Foucault’s singular gift to those who would want to bring about social change as a way of improving some aspect of the human condition and the condition of our environment (including its life forms) is his understanding of power. Power is not just something exercised by a sovereign agent (e.g. Putin, as instigating an invasion of Ukraine) but also operates discursively. Putting it another way, discourses have power effects determined by the size of their subscription base. Putin’s mandate for invading Ukraine was not determined by the truth value of his claims but by the number of his citizens persuaded by a discourse that constructs Russia as a victim of NATO’s territorial and cultural ambitions. It is an uncomfortable truth that certain discourses legitimate tyrants. It is an inconvenient truth (to pick up on Al Gore’s phrase) that the lack of political will to avert the climate crisis is also the product of patterns of discursive subscription. For much of this book, CDA will underpin my analysis of sense of place as it functions as a presence (or an absence) in particular contexts. In this respect, I am positioning myself on the margin, writing back to hegemonic discourses that I believe to be destructive of the well-being of society and the environment. A final point about discourse. Some may be tempted to respond fatalistically to critical discourse theory, as if we are all dupes and pawns of powerful discourses that in effect colonise our thinking and determine our behaviours. I don’t dispute the power of various discourses to colonise people’s thinking. However, my view of the human person is that there is room for human agency. I distinguish between self and subjectivity. I view that aspect of the self that subscribes to or is conscripted by various discourses (not always consistent with one another) as a composite of subjectivities. I retain the word “self” for some kind of core self (akin to Damasio’s autobiographical self)14 that exercises agency by navigating, monitoring, adjusting and modifying our discursive make-up via acts of critical self-reflexivity (Locke, 2004a). It is the basis for a decision to think and act differently, as a result of deconstructive acts of analysis that enable us to identify the various discourses that we have in some way allowed ourselves to subscribe to.

1.3.2 Perceptual Intuition In 2009 I gave my inaugural professorial address on the topic of “Minding the aesthetic: The place of the literary and other arts in education” (see Locke, 2010b). In the course of my talk, I drew attention to the marginalisation of what I called aesthetic cognition in the New Zealand education system. I argued that there were three phases of aesthetic knowledge production: the awareness of pattern; the

 See Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. London, UK: Vintage. 14

1.3  Coming to Know

15

embodiment of pattern in form; and an evaluative response to this formal embodiment. Each of these phases was associated with a kind of educational imperative: 1 . The need to cultivate an aesthetic disposition in students 2. The development of skills and disciplinary knowledge 3. The fostering of argumentation and analytical reason (as opposed to specious rationality). Here is a paragraph I wrote at the time, which describes the three phases of aesthetic cognition in more detail: The first relates to perception or intuition, an awareness of relationship between events or qualities. The second relates to the emergence or embodiment of this awareness into something durable (a painting, poem or equation) or something enacted (a chant or dance) that exhibits qualities such as balance, shapeliness, harmony and elegance that go beyond (but include) the utilitarian. The third is about response to this formal embodiment. The maker herself or himself can take pleasure from creative acts. But going beyond the individual or group maker, these forms, calling forth from the audience a particular kind of attention, have the potential to produce states that we attempt to describe in words such as “rapture”, “transport”, “enjoyment”, “delight”, “validation” and even “Eureka!” These acts of attention, engaged in collectively…are powerfully cohesive. (2010b, pp. 4–5)

Perceptual intuition is the first of these phases. Drawing on the writings of Root-­ Bernstein (1996, 2003) and others, I argued that both science and arts disciplines are characterised by aesthetic cognition. Root-Bernstein (1996), for example, argued that scientific insight comes from what he called synscientia – knowing in a synthetic way – “being able to conceive of objects or ideas interchangeably or concurrently in visual, verbal, mathematical, kinesthetic, or musical ways” (p. 66). It is in the evaluative process that occurs in the latter stages of knowledge production and reflection where, I argue, critical theory and critical discourse analysis has its place, i.e. CDA concerns itself with the already known, propounded and propagated. I also drew on Darwinian theory, especially Brian Boyd’s book On the Origin of Stories (2009), where he argued compellingly that nature evolved art to create creativity (p. 119), noting that “we can view art as a kind of cognitive play, the set of activities designed to engage human attention through their appeal to our preference for inferentially rich and therefore patterned information” (p. 85). The poem below was prompted by a passage from Loren Eiseley in Joseph Carroll’s book Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), which the latter describes as a “meditation on the integration of knowledge and beauty in human cognition” (p. 83). I was struck by its suggestion that our aesthetic urgings to go beyond the utilitarian are instinctual in our species and that aesthetic considerations are at work in the ways we validate something as authentic and/or “truthful” (See Farmelo, 2002). The Achievement of a Hand Axe Picture this man:    his uncalloused hand hefting the yellow, worked flint     of a remote age

16

1 Introduction pausing in the clasp     & unclasping of the stone the tendering of his finger    at its edges pausing in the apperception     of the ghostly legacy of a long-vanished mind     defying time and tongue — this impracticable relic     of a brutish, dangerous world embellished beyond utility     with a virtuoso’s elegance transmitting     the structure of a mind wistful, inarticulate gripped by a shadowy aesthetic lingering       over his adept handiwork. (Locke, 2014, p. 11)

A similar theme is contained in the lines below from Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s poem, “The Power of Taste”. Herbert had less reason than most to believe in ease of commitment to truth and action: So in fact aesthetics can be an aid in life one shouldn’t neglect the study of beauty Before we assent we must examine closely architectural forms rhythms of drum and fife official colors the homely rituals of burial (2014, p. 409)

1.4 What Lies Ahead Chapter 2, “Theorising sense of place”, begins with an overview of both place and space in order to clarify the distinction between these two central concepts which are sometimes confused. It will then move to a discussion of sense of place and its pertinence in a range of disciplines, each of which offers its own take on the concept in relation to its own disciplinary focus. In doing so, it will discuss the relationship between sense of place and “spirit of place”. This discussion can be seen as foreshadowing later chapters in the book, which address the recontextualisation (Bernstein, 2000) of these disciplines as subjects, curriculums and programmes in educational contexts. Finally, this chapter will address and critique the notion of “placelessness” or “a placeless world”. Chapter 3, “Sense of place and identity”, explores the relationship between sense of place and identity. It develops the idea that our individual sense of place as an aspect of our identity is a reciprocal relationship: places impress themselves upon us, and we in turn endow places with significance. Places speak to us in certain

1.4  What Lies Ahead

17

ways; we are disposed to speak back to them in accordance with our patterns of response and conviction. The focus will then shift to the historical phenomenon of dispossession (with specific reference to the United Kingdom and Ireland), where individuals and communities were forcibly removed/alienated from places to which they had been historically attached and often traumatised as a result. Dispossession, it will be argued, is a key element in a weakened sense of place or a kind of rootlessness where sense of place connotes deep loss and/or nostalgia. The chapter also makes a case for the relationship between sense of place and wellness and asks how a sense of place might be reclaimed. Anticipating Chap. 6, it links the process of reclaiming, asserting or expressing a sense of place to the process of representation, that is, giving form and substance to one’s sense of place via what Gunther Kress (2010) would call “representational resources”. Chapter 4, “Indigeneity and sense of place”, begins by addressing the problematic concept of indigeneity, noting that an official definition of indigenous is yet to adopted by any UN agency owing to the diversity of indigenous peoples (United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, n.d.). The thesis of this chapter is that there are commonalities in respect of sense of place that can be found among a range of indigenous peoples, based on a particular relationship between the society or culture and the land it occupies (or once occupied). This relationship will be explored with reference to a number of indigenous peoples, drawing in the main on indigenous sources. The nature of this relationship is viewed as something others (e.g. descendants of colonisers, inheritors of European intellectual traditions) can learn from, especially as we address the current climate crisis. Chapter 5, “Decolonising place”, begins with an overview of the “colonisation project”, viewing it as a special case of dispossession, characterised not just by an unjustifiable appropriation of territory but also by ideological warfare and cultural erasure. In this regard, it will explore the concept of the “wild”, as given meaning by both colonisers and colonised and utilised in struggles to establish a hegemonic discourse based on the ideology of improvement as a way of justifying a proprietorial relationship with the land. This chapter views decolonisation as a means of calling to account the colonising project, not just in relationship to processes of redress and reparation but also in relationship to discourse, ideology and identity. The decolonisation project has been advanced in huge measure by contemporary assertions of indigenous identity, as indicated in Chap. 4. It is also facilitated by processes of discursive deconstruction guided by indigenous wisdom. I conclude the chapter by suggesting that decolonising processes offer a space for the descendants of colonisers to develop hybrid identities which embrace indigenous ways of being, thinking and doing. Chapter 6, “Locating sense of place in literary studies”, adventures on a traverse of literary criticism (or more generally literary studies) in search of concepts, orientations and discourses in relation to which sense of place might have some relevance. It begins with a focus on figures of speech and the implications of viewing these not as neutral and universal, but rather as culturally constructed and thereby contestable, especially in relation to their function in writing that engages with the natural environment. It then moves to a consideration of the concept of setting. The

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argument here is that in literary studies, setting has become significant by virtue of its comparative absence, or by its marginalisation, or by its subordination to plot and character, or by a lack of attention to its theorisation. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope is drawn on in addressing this absence, and arguing for ways of bringing setting back to centre-stage, thereby enabling a theorisation of its relationship to sense of place. The theme of Chap. 5 is returned to in exploring examples of the prose fiction genre of travellers’ tales, showing how they can be used to highlight contrasts in values attributed to place in texts where indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives are opposed. The discussion of poetry concerns itself with pastoral as a genre, with a particular focus on the work of John Clare. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ecocriticism as a form of literary criticism that, at least for some of its practitioners, is congruent with the argument of this book and relevant to anyone concerned with the climate crisis. Chapter 7 is entitled “The problematics of representing sense of place”. As indicated earlier, this book adopts a critically discursive framework. In terms of such a framework, “representation refers to the language used in a text or talk to assign meaning to groups and their social practices, to events, and to social and ecological conditions and objects” (Wenden, 2005, p. 90). This chapter begins by arguing how acts of representation are always socially situated, discursively shaped and ideologically tinged and seek to position a reader/viewer to sign up to their outlook. These acts draw on a range of representational resources and are frequently multimodal. In subsequent sections, this chapter begins by discussing sense of place as encapsulated in visual art, especially in relation to the various agendas operating in the representation of place, and how these relate to the sorts of dispositions or modes of attachment discussed in Chap. 3. It then shifts to a discussion of sense of place in relation to dance, which focuses specifically on site-based dance and the role it might place in deepening one’s sense of place and support a decolonising agenda. Finally, I focus on music and sonic art more generally, discussing ways in which music can enhance sense of place. I conclude by drawing attention to some contemporary music-making practices, which espouse environmental discourses and “emplace” composition in ways which enhance a relationship to nature based on partnership ideals. Chapter 8, “Locating sense of place in the school curriculum”, begins with general reflections on curriculum, particularly in relation to the so-called knowledge society and critical pedagogy. It then reviews some of the literature both theorising and advocating for a place-responsive curriculum in the context of compulsory schooling, drawing on the work of scholars in both the United States and Australia. On the basis of this review, the chapter identifies a set of principles and practices that might underpin a place-responsive curriculum design and pedagogy that is consistent with Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of the book. This includes a vision of place-­ responsive education with a strong focus on Geography as its core, which embraces a decolonising agenda and addresses the climate crisis. The chapter concludes with some examples of ways in which sense of place might be integrated into the design of specific programmes: (1) a cross-disciplinary English/Science unit, (2) Music education, (3) L1 subject English and (4) Outdoor education.

References

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In the concluding chapter – Chap. 9, “The geo-politics of place: Framing avenues for activism” – the preceding chapters are reflected on as conversation starters related to the concept of place in all its manifold meanings at personal, cultural, ideological and political levels. It commences with some reflections on both radicalism and activism, before proceeding to a discussion of what is being increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene. It then moves to a focus on place as it relates to geopolitical discourse, drawing on the work of Dodds (2019) and others. Drawing on geopolitical theory, but with a major focus on place as a geographical entity, the chapter explores a range of contemporary global issues with a view to identifying avenues for activism  – strategies for positive change. These include soil erosion, land use, pollution and the displacement of human populations. The chapter concludes with some reflections on how sense of place can be nurtured, reinforced or rediscovered, with a particular focus on human choice and ontology – how we might choose to be in relation to places and our co-inhabitants.

References Attenborough, D. (2020). A life on our planet: My witness statement and a vision for the future. Witness Books. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique (revised ed.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Boyd, B. (2009). On the origin of stories. Harvard University Press. Carroll, J. (1995). Evolution and literary theory. University of Missouri Press. Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. Vintage. Derrida, J. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (P.-A.  Brault & M.  Naas, trans.). Stanford University Press. Dodds, K. (2019). Geopolitics: A very short introduction (3rd ed.). (Oxford, 2019; Online edn, Oxford Academic, 25 July 2019), https://doi-­org.ezproxy.waikato.ac.nz/10.1093/actr ade/9780198830764.001.0001. Accessed 2 Mar 2023. Fairclough, L. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press. Farmelo, G. (2002 January, 26). It must be beautiful: Great equations of modern science by Graham Farmelo. The Guardian. Retrieved March 2, 2022 from https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2002/jan/26/extract Gatley, J. (2008). Shabby and shambling: Decadent housing in greys avenue. AHA: Architectual History Aotearoa, 5, 45–54. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourse. Taylor and Francis. Herbert, Z. (2014). The collected poems (A. Valles, Ed. & Trans.). Harper Collins. Kress, G. (2010). A grammar for meaning-making. In T. Locke (Ed.), Beyond the grammar wars: A resource for teachers and students on developing language knowledge in the English/literacy classroom (pp. 233–253). Routledge. Liu, E., & Freestone, R. (2016). Revisiting place and placelessness. In R.  Freestone & E.  Liu (Eds.), Place and placelessness revisited (pp. 20–34). Routledge. Locke, T. (2003). Maketu. HeadworX. Locke, T. (2004a). Critical discourse analysis. Continuum. Locke, T. (2004b). Reshaping classical professionalism in the aftermath of neo-liberal reform. Literacy Learning: The Middle Years, 12(1)/English in Australia, 139, 113–121.

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Locke, T. (2010a). Discovering a metalanguage for all seasons: Bringing literary language in from the cold. In T. Locke (Ed.), Beyond the grammar wars: A resource for teachers and students on developing language knowledge in the English/literacy classroom (pp. 170–184). Routledge. Locke, T. (2010b). Minding the aesthetic: The place of the literary in education and research. Waikato Journal of Education, 15(3), 3–16. Locke, T. (2014). Ranging around the zero. Steele Roberts Aotearoa Ltd.. Locke, T. (2019). Tending the landscape of the heart. Steele Roberts. Meredith, P. (2015). Urban Māori – Urbanisation. In Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/urban-­maori/page-­1. Accessed 23 Feb 2022. Mitchelson, N. (n.d.). Part one: Stopping the rot: The Central Area Plan, Sir Dove Myer Robinson, and searching for the purpose of Central Auckland in the 1970s. Auckland History Initiative. Retrieved March 1, 2022 from https://ahi.auckland.ac.nz/2020/01/28/stopping-­the-­rot-­the-­ central-­area-­plan-­sir-­dove-­myer-­robinson-­and-­searching-­for-­the-­purpose-­of-­central-­auckland-­ in-­the-­1970s/ Muller, J. (2009). Forms of knowledge and curriculum coherence. Journal of Education and Work, 22(3), 205–226. Noddings, N. (1986). Fidelity in teaching, teacher education, and research for teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 56(4), 496–510. Polynesian Panthers Party. (n.d.). Polynesian migration to New Zealand. Retrieved February 23, 21022 from https://polynesianpanthersparty.weebly.com/polynesian-­migration-­to-­new-­ zealand.html Relph, E. (2016). The paradox of place and the evolution of placelessness. In R.  Freestone & E. Liu (Eds.), Place and placelessness revisited (pp. 1–19). Routledge. Root-Bernstein, R. (1996). The sciences and the arts share a common creative aesthetic. In A. Tauber (Ed.), The elusive synthesis: Aesthetics and science (pp. 49–82). Kluwer. Root-Bernstein, R. (2003). The art of innovation: Polymaths and universality of the creative process. In L. Shavinina (Ed.), The international handbook on innovation (pp. 267–278). Elsevier. Statistics New Zealand. (1946). The New Zealand official year-book, 1946. Retrieved from https://www3.stats.govt.nz/New_Zealand_Official_Yearbooks/1946/NZOYB_1946. html#idchapter_1_5086 United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. (n.d.). Indigenous peoples, Indigenous voices (Factsheet). Retrieved March 14, 2023 from https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/ documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf Wake, D.  B., & Vredenburg, V.  T. (2008 August 12). Are we in the midst of the sixth mass extinction? A view from the world of amphibians. PNAS, 105 (Supplement 1). https://doi. org/10.1073/pnas.0801921105 Wenden, A. (2005). The politics of representation: A critical discourse analysis of an Aljazeera special report. International Journal of Peace Studies, 10(2), 89–112. Wikipedia. (2022). Hori (slur). Retrieved February 24, 2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Hori_(slur)

Chapter 2

Theorising Sense of Place

Unsurprisingly, the concept of sense of place as an object of academic discourse has its roots in geography. However, as sociologist Gieryn (2000) points out, in recent years it has found a place in architecture, town planning, environmental psychology, the social sciences, philosophy and history (p. 467). My first concern in this chapter is to address the difference between place and space. I then discuss at some length aspects of the concept of sense of place and its pertinence in a range of disciplines. On the way, I will be discussing sense of place in relation to spirit of place. Finally, I will address the notion of placelessness or a placeless world by revisiting the scholarly debate between John Agnew (author of Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society [1987]) and Fred Shelley and Audrey Clarke (Human and Cultural Geography: A Global Perspective [1994]) and the work of Edward Relph (1976, 2016). The debate is important because it asks the question: Is a focus on sense of place still relevant when we have all, supposedly, become increasingly mobile global citizens of a shrinking and homogenising planet?

2.1 Place and Space Urban studies scholar Wyly (2011) points out that the 1970s debates among geographers were in part concerned with attempts to differentiate place and space. By way of example, he quotes geographer James Duncan’s contention that: “Place was seen as more subjectively defined, existential and particular, while space was thought to be a universal, more abstract phenomenon, subject to scientific law”. With reference to the 1970s, he notes that an influential discourse that emerged at the time “was concerned with meaning and contrasted the experienced richness of the idea of place with the detached sterility of the concept of space” (Duncan, 2000, p. 582, cited by Wyly, 2011, p. 13). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 T. Locke, Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4266-4_2

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Let me digress here and bring in Gaston Bachelard’s classic text, The Poetics of Space (1958). I can safely assert that Bachelard would have taken umbrage at the phrase “detached sterility of the concept of space”. I first encountered Bachelard in the 1970s, when I was trying to make sense of the meaning of cities and wildernesses in the context of American poetry. Re-reading his book recently helped me realise that, as a fledgling academic, I was tending to view these large-scale geographical entities as spaces rather than places; this freed me to attach my own symbolic meanings to them. Thought of as spaces, they also lend themselves to the designs of urban planners  – they were locations of potential. Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (writing three years after Bachelard), described cities as “an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design” (1961, p. 6). (Re-reading her introduction I was reminded of the incandescence of her anger at the failures.) The Poetics of Space is about the emotional potential and phenomenological meaning of real and imagined spaces. To some extent the work is the opposite of a meditation upon place, since Bachelard teases out generalised meanings of categories of spaces rather than specific meanings (for individuals and groups) of particular places. As Richard Kearney (1958) points out in his introduction to the Penguin edition, the word “poetics” in the title is a signal that this book is about making meaning, noting that “for Bachelard this is a two-way process: we are made by material images that we remake in our turn” (p. xix). As Bachelard (1958) himself writes: “One must be receptive…to the image at the moment it appears….The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche” (p. 1) which “comes before thought” (p. 4) [italics in the original].1 Bachelard’s first chapter is entitled “The House. From Cellar to Garret. The Significance of the Hut”. “Through poems”, he writes, “perhaps more than through recollections, we touch the ultimate poetic depth of the space of the house” (p. 28). So what is the chief benefit of the house? “I should say: the house allows one to dream in peace”. Attached to this claim is an explicit valorisation of daydreaming: “The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths” (p. 28). This poem was prompted by Bachelard’s writing: Making Huts In the family sitting room, a dreamer of refuges dreams of a hut, of a nest, or of nooks and corners in which he would like to hide away, like an animal in its hole. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (p. 50). I see the small child    too much exposed to the yawn of sky     and scorch of sun

 I would argue that there is a resonance here with the concept of perceptual intuition in the last chapter. Later in the introduction, Bachelard asserts that “Forces are manifested in poems that do not pass through the circuits of knowledge” (1958, p. 6). 1

2.1  Place and Space

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digging his way to solace     between the comfort of rocks in a deep hole he will later     roof with iron and tarp. Summoned home he finds     in the vastness of the lounge an unendurable pressure    to display himself. A shuffling of furniture,     a rug as makeshift cover, Shrinks space to a place     for the body to dream.

I include it here because it illustrates the way spaces in the abstract (underground hut, lounge in a house) have significance attached to them (i.e. become symbolic) on their way to becoming particular places. This movement I think is, as I look back, what my doctoral dissertation was really all about. It is also very much what this book is about. I now return to the discipline of geography and the writings of Minnesota geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. The classic treatment of the distinction between space and place is Tuan’s (1977) book Space and place: The perspective of experience. Known by some as the father of humanist geography, Tuan had a profound impact on the way scholars thought about the relationship between people and their environment. Pertinent to the concerns of this book, he describes our species in his classic text as “tenants of the earth practically concerned with the design of a more human habitat” (p. 7). In an interview given in his 80 s, he remarked that “People think that geography is about capitals, land forms, and so on. But it is also about place — its emotional tone, social meaning, and generative potential” (Gabriel, 2013). For Tuan, “In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of place. ‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place’” (p. 6). Space can be thought of as preceding place, like a three-dimensional container waiting to be filled. “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (p. 6). Elsewhere he notes that “Places are centers of felt value where biological needs, such as those for food, water, rest, and procreation, are satisfied” (p. 4). So, there is a reciprocal relationship between space and place. A location becomes a place when it is endowed with human meaning and value. Architects talk about the spatial qualities of place; they can equally well speak of the locational (place) qualities of space. The ideas “space” and “place” require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place. (1977, p. 6)

The last sentence has relevance for human mobility, as discussed in Chap. 9 and elsewhere in this book. Tuan (1974) used the term topophilia to indicate “a love of rootedness, dwelling and habitation within a secure geographical location” (Anderson & Erskine, 2014, p. 130).

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2  Theorising Sense of Place

A generation later, another geographer Agnew (2011) offers a comparable perspective on the history of space and place. He acknowledges these both as “fundamental geographic concepts” (p.  317), with the former dating back in its contemporary sense to the seventeenth century. “Space is regarded largely as a dimension within which matter is located or a grid within which substantive items are contained” (p. 316). In the simplest sense place refers to either a location somewhere or to the occupation of that location. The first sense is of having an address and the second is about living at that address. Sometimes this distinction is pushed further to separate the physical place from the phenomenal space in which the place is located. Thus place becomes a particular or lived space. Location then refers to the fact that places must be located somewhere. Place is specific and location (or space) is general. (p. 318)

There is a polemical agenda at work in Agnew’s chapter, based around his distinguishing two definitions of place in relation to the concept of space. “The first is a geometric conception of place as a mere part of space and the second is a phenomenological understanding of a place as a distinctive coming together in space” (p. 317). One of the arguments he makes is that until recently, “the privileging of place as simply location has continued. Places themselves are seen as simply incidental (if necessary) to more profound non-spatial processes such as class struggle, perceptual capacity and orientation, capital accumulation, or commodification” (p. 321). Before considering more closely sense of place as per Agnew’s second definition and Tuan’s “centre of felt value”, it is worth noting other meanings of the word “place”. One is the meaning of the word as expressed in the sentence, “She was kind enough to save my place in the queue”. “Place” in this sense is roughly synonymous with the word “position” or “placement”. It is more abstract than the meaning of “place” I have been drawing attention to but is nonetheless powerful when used in such grand metaphors as the Great Chain of Being (see Chap. 5). Further, as Agnew (2011) notes, place is also a “rank” in a list (as “in the first place”) and a temporal ordering (as in something “took place”) (p. 316). Table 2.1 offers an overview of the space/place distinction.

2.2 Sense of Place There is widespread recognition in the academic literature that sense of place is a complex concept with a number of constituents or elements and as potentially inclusive of other concepts. Geographer Mayhew (2015), for example, points out that sense of place is “Either the intrinsic character of a place, or the meaning people give to it, but, more often, a mixture of both”. She goes on to cite the research of Shamai (1991), who notes that: “Sense of place…is an umbrella concept that includes all the other concepts – attachment to place, national identity, and regional awareness….The messages transmitted are not neutral, but rather they reflect the subjective senses of the beholder or the perceptions of ‘society’” (pp. 347, 355).

2.2  Sense of Place

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Table 2.1 Differentiating space and place Space A potential container of indeterminate size for objects of two or more dimensions Largely abstract: a “blank canvas” as metaphor indicates a potential to be filled. A gallery space is another example Poetic form can be thought of as a kind of space, awaiting completion through the infusion of content Is cognate with other abstract words, e.g. “spatial”, “spacious”

Place A specific location of indeterminate size describable in terms of natural and/or humanly created features

Largely concrete: one can picture a blank canvas sitting on an easel in an artist’s studio. It is also possible to picture a blank wall in an art gallery

A poem as realised may or may not evoke a place

You won’t find “platial” or “placious” in the dictionary. It is as if the word “place” is fixed on being a noun (however, you will find “placial” and “placiality” in the academic literature. See Hardy (2000), who derives these words from an earlier version (1998) of Edward Casey’s seminal work on The Fate of Space. Hardy, who begins his article with a lexical digression, even uses the verb “placialise”)

2.2.1 De-legitimating Place John Agnew’s chapter (2011), which I drew on above, can be viewed as a deconstruction (in CDA terms) of the conceptual history of sense of place and the discursive struggles that have contributed to its salience (or otherwise) in geography as a disciplinary field. Foucault used the term archaeology for the deconstruction of a field over time. As I explained in Locke (2004), his interest was in what made certain statements in a field possible: “the law of existence of statements, that which rendered them possible – them and none other in their place: the conditions of their singular emergence; their correlation with other previous or simultaneous events, discursive or otherwise” (Foucault, 1991, p. 59). His archaeological method set out to unearth and archive – the “set of rules which at a given period for a given society define…the limits and forms of the sayable” (1991, p. 59). He also called this “the episteme of a period” [italics all his] (1991, p.  55). (Using crisper language, American poet Wallace Stevens wrote pithily: “Each age is a pigeon-hole” (1957, p. 157).) Foucault’s approach is well illustrated in Agnew’s work, in that he makes it clear that there are limits and forms of the sayable operating in disciplinary communities as well as in society at large. Agnew argues that the second meaning of place, i.e. a phenomenological understanding of what particular places mean for people, has been devalued “down the years” (p. 318). He identifies a number of challenges to the salience of place as a concept, however defined. These include:

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• The notion of the world becoming “increasingly ‘placeless’ as space-spanning connections and flows of information, things, and people undermine the rootedness of a wide range of processes anywhere in particular. Space is conquering place” (p. 318). In this view, place becomes associated with “the world of the past and location/space with the world of the present and future. From one perspective, place is therefore nostalgic, regressive or even reactionary, and space is progressive and radical” (p. 319). • An enduring image of place as “isolated, traditional and passive”, overtaken by linear conceptions of history where, say, in the case of Europe, local places are overtaken by “national spaces” (regions and the nation state itself) (p. 318). • Another version of placelessness in the form of “an increasingly homogeneous and alienating sameness…as modernity displaces traditional folkways” (p. 319). Strip malls and chain stores replace the elemental variety that once characterised the landscape. Everywhere is increasingly alike as we all spend more of our time in non-places such as airport lounges, shopping malls and on the Internet, living lives increasingly without any sense of place whatsoever. Location/space represents the transcending of the past by overcoming the rootedness of social relations and landscape in place through mobility and the increased similarity of everyday life from place to place. (2011, p. 319)

Agnew’s own position is that “in the end it is the concrete effects of places that matter more than remaining at the abstract level of conceptualising place” (p. 318). Later in the chapter, he argues that the stronger “socially and morally inflected sense of place” (p. 322), while having a fraught presence in geography, has little contemporary appeal within the social sciences generally. He attributes this marginalisation to the power of nineteenth-century social discourse, in terms of which “place equates to a collectivist traditional community and that as modern national (and global) society has inevitably eclipsed community so has place lost its significance” (p. 322). This association of place with community will be a major theme in this book. In Foucaultian terms, Agnew is suggesting that this linear narrative has become naturalised. (In his words, it has become “second nature” (2011, p. 323)). Agnew identifies five factors contributing to the line of argument that effects the hegemony of this discourse. This is his wording for the last of these: Finally, in radical social science place has been practically devalued because as capitalism reduces places to locations when it converts use-values into exchange-values, a concomitant commodification has detached people from their self-creations in place. In this perspective, a geographical alienation of people from the world around them has been the kiss of death for place….Today, as we all bowl alone and look back nostalgically on the world we have lost, place takes on a misty glow as a concept whose shelf life has long since run out.2 (2011, p. 323)

 Agnew associates this misty nostalgia with the paintings of Thomas Kinkade. For some light relief, see Kinkade (2013) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5VpXLMSJXc 2

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2.2.2 Understanding Sense of Place Scholarly disciplines construct multiple worlds; at the same time, life goes on beyond the pale of academic discourse. In this section, I sift through the writings of selected scholars with a view to developing an understanding of sense of place which will do the job at this point in the book. In using a word like “sift”, I am suggesting that this process involves filtering the positions advocated by a range of theorists to come up with a conceptual framework that is coherent and accessible, speaks to the experiences of ordinary people and is ethically defensible. Ethically I align myself with the pragmatic tradition that has its roots in the philosophy of William James and others. Discourses have effects, i.e. they are consequential. They are, then, answerable to these effects. To the extent that we choose knowingly to sign up to a particular discourse, we need to accept responsibility for discourse-­ related consequences. Thus far, I have drawn attention to the marginalisation of the concept of place within geography specifically and the social sciences in general and the hegemonic power exerted by the concept of space and abstract constructions of place based on location. I now move to a discussion of Agnew’s (2011) second – phenomenological – meaning of place. This is the primary understanding of place this book’s argument hinges on. Sociologist Thomas Gieryn (2000), in his review essay on “A Space for Place in Sociology”, asks: “Could it be that place just does not matter anymore?” He replies immediately in the affirmative. In doing so, he contends that a place has three requirements: 1. Geographic location: “A place is a unique spot in the universe…. A place could be your favorite armchair, a room, building, neighborhood, district, village, city, county, metropolitan area, region, state, province, nation, continent, planet –– or a forest glade, the seaside, a mountain top” (p. 464). 2. Material form: “Place has physicality. Whether built or just come upon, artificial or natural, streets and doors or rocks and trees, place is stuff. It is a compilation of things or objects at some particular spot in the universe” (p. 465). 3. Investment with meaning and value: “Without naming, identification, or representation by ordinary people, a place is not a place. Places are doubly constructed: most are built or in some way physically carved out. They are also interpreted, narrated, felt, understood, and imagined…In spite of its relatively enduring and imposing materiality, the meaning or value of the same place is labile – flexible in the hands of different people or cultures, malleable over time, and inevitably contested” (p. 465). Essentially, Gieryn (2000) has split Mayhew’s “intrinsic character of a place” (2015, unpaged) into two constituents – its materiality and subjective construction or representation. I like the word “spot”, though it could be misleading  – it suggests something small scale. However, his inclusion of regions suggests that places can be compared

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in terms of their compass. In this regard, Casey (2009) asserts that: “The primacy of place…needs to be complemented by a more complete consideration of region: the region to which any given place belongs” (p. xxxii), defining it as “a coherent collocation of places – where the places are not necessarily the same in extent, composition, or overall character” (p. xxx). A region has a much greater compass than a single dwelling or neighbourhood. (This has implications for activism in respect of the care of place, as will be discussed in Chap. 9.)3 I like the sense in which the bald articulation of these three elements resists the idea that one is more important that the other. Gieryn himself asserts that, “…the three defining features of place  – location, material form, and meaningfulness  – should remain bundled. They cannot be ranked into greater or lesser significance for social life, nor can one be reduced down to an expression of another” (p.  466). Having said that, investment with meaning and value is the sine qua non for a location to be a place. A phenomenological understanding of sense of place – Gieryn’s third constituent – is focused on the way people engage with places and attribute significance to them. I want to eschew phrases such as “endow significance”, because I don’t want to confine the associative meaning of a place to a strictly humanistic meaning-making process. For reasons that will become clear throughout this book, I am committed to an openness to ways of being and knowing that view sense of place either as the outcome of a reciprocal transaction of some kind between self and place (one acting on the other) or as something impressed upon the self by the power of specific places (see Chap. 3). In the case of the latter, particular places are accorded agency in the production of a sense of place (albeit a person’s disposition may have a part to play in this). A well-known literary example of the latter occurs in Wordsworth’s epic poem of the romantic self, The Prelude.4 This is a passage in Book 1, sometimes referred to as the “stolen boat” episode. The speaker is a schoolboy on holiday, wandering alone at dusk as a stranger along the “shores of Patterdale”. Sighting a “small skiff”, on impulse he untethers it and begins rowing:              from the shore I pushed, and struck the oars, and struck again In cadence, and my little boat moved on Even like a man who moves with stately step Though bent on speed. (1805, ll. 384–388) And now, as suited one who proudly rowed With his best skill, I fixed a steady view Upon the top of that same craggy ridge,

 What distinguishes a region from a territory is the latter’s political boundedness; its borders are the product of human occupation and politicking. In Aotearoa, the Māori word rohe signifies the area a particular tribe or sub-tribe regards as their own on the basis of its historical occupation. 4  I’m using Wordsworth, W. (1979). The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative texts context and reception: Recent critical essays (J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams & S. Gill, eds.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. 3

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The bound of the horizon – for behind Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky. She was an elfin pinnace, lustily I dipped my oars into the silent lake. And as I rose upon the stroke my boat Went heaving through the water like a swan – When from behind that craggy steep, till then The bound of the horizon, a huge cliff, As if with voluntary power instinct, Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again, And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff Rose up between me and the stars and still With measured motion, like a living thing Strode after me. (1805, ll. 396–412)

At this point, the speaker turns the boat around abruptly and heads back to shore. However, for days afterwards, he is profoundly unsettled:        for many days my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being. In my thoughts There was a darkness – call it solitude Or blank desertion – no familiar shapes Of hourly objects, images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields, But huge and mighty forms that do not live Like living men moved slowly through my mind By day, and were the trouble of my dreams. (1805, ll. 418–416)

This passage has attracted much critical commentary.5 My point in quoting it at length is to draw attention to the way the verse addresses place, agency and effect. Initially, the focus is on the power and agency of the rower, who appears to be enjoying (if guiltily) his prowess as a rower. With the abrupt appearance of the cliff, the locus of power shifts to the landscape, which is invested with overwhelming power and presence. What the speaker is left with in the aftermath of this particular encounter with place is a kind of dark night where the soul is possessed by powerful, non-human forms that, one might say, shrink him down to his proper size. The whole episode can be read as a kind of cautionary tale, where the speaker gets his comeuppance: He’s not as big as he thinks he is; nature is not as idyllic as he fancies it to be; and violating the natural order has consequences. How we understand the way sense of place is produced or generated varies according to the disciplinary or epistemological lens brought to bear. The following cross-disciplinary definition of place from Convery, Corsane and Davis (2012) is consistent with the approach I have been taking:

 For a recent example, see Tindol, R. (2019). Rowing to sublimity: The “stolen boat” episode from The Prelude. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 45(1), 43–68. Tindol offers an account of having established the very location whence Wordsworth stole the boat and duplicating his rowing adventure. 5

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2  Theorising Sense of Place Place, as distinct from space, provides a profound centre of human existence to which people have deep emotional and psychological ties and is part of the complex processes through which individuals and groups define themselves. (p. 1)

There are two aspects of this definition. The first focuses on the nature of the attachment/affiliation/connection. (These words are not synonyms and suggest nuanced differences between these “emotional and psychological ties”.) The second, in focusing on the processes whereby “individuals and groups define themselves” in relationship to a place, is related to the formation of identity, which will be discussed in the Chap. 3. Viewed through a phenomenological lens, the focus tends to be on the individual and the way he/she consciously experiences a place (as phenomenon) and the quality of their attachment to it (Malpas, 1998; Adams, 2013). This is the discourse Canadian music educator Janet Spring (2013) writes out of below: When a person possesses a particular attachment to place, from a geographical, emotional and spiritual sense, he or she is thought to have a ‘sense of place’. This feeling or emotion is one that has been nurtured over time and one that has been influenced by day-to-day lived experiences. (p. 28)

An overtly phenomenological stance is further exemplified by the environmental psychologist Stefanovic (1998) in her study of two distinct communities, one on the Adriatic coast and the other a neighbourhood in the greater Toronto area. For her, the evolution of a sense of place occurs when “the human subjectivity is actively immersed in the environment, interpreting, intuiting, sensing, responding emotionally and intellectually, and meaningfully assigning signification in a complexity of ways” (pp.  32–33). Stefanovic draws on both Heidegger (1971) and Heidegger scholar Edward Casey (1993) to suggest that the human propensity for attaching to particular locations “may reveal something essential about human ways of being-in-­ the-world” (p. 33). In the following we find her viewing sense of place in decidedly ontological terms: To be, Heidegger has told us, is to be in-the-world. “The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 147). Edward Casey (1993) enlarges upon this theme when he writes: ‘To exist at all … is to have a place — to be implaced … To be is to be in place …”. (pp. 14–15)

As I stated in Chap. 1, this book takes the view that, in large part, what Stefanovic (1998) terms “human subjectivity” is socially constructed. Viewed through a critically oriented sociological lens, individuals are disposed to assign signification to a place by virtue of the discourses they consciously or unconsciously subscribe to. Because the sense of (a particular) place thus generated is social, there is a potential for it to be shared with others who are disposed similarly. To that extent, the sense of place will be a shared construction or representation of a place. Particular discourses will invest a place with various meanings in relation to its ecological, social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, historical or other aspects (Gieryn, 2000; Wyly, 2007). As will be discussed in detail in Chap. 7, these meanings can be made through a range of representational or semiotic resources  – words, images, sounds, movements and gestures singly and in combination (Kress, 2010).

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In Chap. 1, I recalled that as a boy one aspect of my sense of Central Auckland as a place was the mystique created by stories I heard told about Chinese opium dens in Greys Avenue. In retrospect, I realise that I was unconsciously conscripted to a discourse which associated Chinese people with slum housing, shadiness and vice. As Gatley (2008) confirms, the discourse was a popular one fed by European prejudice against Chinese people, and the neighbourhood of Greys Avenue in the early twentieth century was a different and richer place than race-based legend had me believe. Speaking specifically of the urban environment, Wyly (2011) uses the concept of filters to explain how a sense of place might develop. Individuals’ perception of the spaces they encounter in the city are deeply influenced by “filters of reality” – cultural filters that relate our experiences through the lens of shared understandings; social filters that give different views based on position, power, and social role; and psychological filters that help us to make sense of the information on the basis of our own individual needs, memories, experiences, myths, hopes, and fantasies. (p. 14)

From my perspective, while such a system of categorisation might be useful for some, it might be argued that all of these filters are in some way discursively or socioculturally produced. The last of these – the psychological – connects with a phenomenological stance on sense of place (discussed above). I would argue that this stance is in part rooted in the autobiographical self, discussed in the next chapter (and drawing on Damasio, 2000). Gieryn (2000) makes the further point that ethnic factors are at work in the way people build a sense of place. A useful definition of ethnicity is that provided by Brumfiel (2015): Ethnicity is an identity based upon a presumption of shared history and common cultural inheritance. Ethnic identity is shaped by both ethnic affiliation and ethnic attribution. Ethnic affiliation refers to individuals’ own sense of group membership and the characteristics of the group as defined by its members. Ethnic attribution concerns the characteristics of the group as defined by outsiders. (p. 374)

The distinction between affiliation and attribution is an important one for this book, though at this juncture affiliation to one or more ethnicities and the implications for cultural identity are my chief concern. Just as there are disciplinary discourses that contribute to a scholarly sense of place, so there are discourses that are culturally derived which contribute to one’s personal sense of place. These, I would argue, are the “ethnic factors” Gieryn (2000) refers to that contribute to a culturally specific sense of place. This aspect of sense of place is crucial in relation to the argument I am making in this book and my focus on indigenous sense of place (especially in Chap. 4). Fundamental, then, to a person’s sense of place is the feeling of connection to or rootedness in a particular place, which may be a natural landscape or a product of human artifice (i.e. humanly constructed and characterised by assemblages of human artefacts) or a combination of these. This feeling of connection can have a range of bases:

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• An association with enjoyable activities (e.g. camping, holidaying) • A kind of aesthetic pleasure derived from certain attributes of the place • The cultural significance of particular importance to those social groups with which one identifies • A deep but ineffable feeling of spiritual presence • A rootedness stemming from a person’s association with a particular place over time, perhaps as a member of a family or community. This list is more suggestive than exhaustive. Nor are they mutually exclusive. Gieryn (2000), for example, suggests that a person can identify with a place simply by virtue of its “pragmatic utility” (p. 472). In contrast, the basis for an identification with place may be a “momentous” event in a person’s life (p. 472), comparable to the Wordsworth passage quoted earlier in this chapter.6 A person, then, may have one or more bases for connection to a single place or distinct bases of connection with a number of places. This is important for at least two reasons. Firstly, a person can deepen their basis for an attachment to a place, for example, by developing an attitude of stewardship (duty of care). Secondly, people who are nomadic either by choice or by circumstance (e.g. refugees) can nonetheless be disposed to attach to hitherto unfamiliar places in ways that contribute to the welfare of both the places and the people themselves. It is unsurprising that there is a temporal dimension to one’s sense of place, especially when this is intimately bound up in one’s personal, family and cultural history. This temporal dimension is developed as a result of the duration of a person’s association with a particular place as well as the age of the person when this association commenced. In an ethnographic study of residents and out-migrants of Banks Peninsula in New Zealand, Hay (1998) explored the function of time and duration of stay in relation to sense of place, concluding that “…if a person resides in a place for many years, particularly if that person is raised there, then he or she often develops a sense of place, feeling at home and secure there, with feelings of belonging for the place being one anchor for his or her identity” (p. 6). Of relevance to Chap. 4, he found that Māori respondents who had a sense of tribal affiliation to the area felt a particularly strong sense of place (pp. 14–16). Sense of place can also be affected by rupture of various kinds, for example, migration, either forced or voluntary. Exile can be thought as the result of a violent disruption to a person’s association with a particular place and can lead to a lifetime of nostalgia and constraints on the ability to develop an emotional connection with anywhere else. For indigenous people, there is the potential, too often realised, of becoming exiles in their own land because of colonising acts of dispossession. As Gieryn (2000) argues, “The loss of place” has “devastating implications for individual and collective identity, memory, and history – and for psychological well-­ being” (p. 482). (These themes will be developed in Chaps. 3 and 5.)

 For a contrasting discussion of such “spots of time” passages, drawing on spatial factors and their temporal dimension, see Wiley (2015). 6

2.3  Spirit of Place

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2.3 Spirit of Place In the introduction to their multidisciplinary collection of essays on making sense of place, Convery et al. (2012) distinguish between two broad understandings of sense of place in the academic literature: “…in the first, sense of place or genius loci is used to explore a range of factors which together define the character, or local distinctiveness, of a specific place. In the second, the term has been used to emphasise the ways in which people experience, use and understand place, leading to a range of conceptual subsets such as ‘place identity’, ‘place attachment’, ‘place dependency’ and ‘insiderness/insidedness’” (p.  2). Genius loci as understood by these scholars resonates with my reference earlier in this chapter to “something impressed upon the self by the power of specific places”. In the next paragraph, they write: “Places, as genius loci, can be thought of as being made up of a range of factors which include the topographical, the cosmological and spiritual, the built environment and people’s emotional and psychological engagement with place” (p.  2). I would argue that the last phrase here properly belongs with their second use of the term, which draws attention to the way “people experience, use and understand place” (p. 2) with an emphasis on the phenomenological, as discussed earlier in this chapter. I want to reserve genius loci as a synonym for spirit of place (or spirits of a place). When the idea of this book was first taking shape, my inclination was to dismiss spirit of place as a fringe concept that was not germane to a treatment of sense of place. Even so, I found myself recalling a family holiday at a camping ground at Nūhaka, a small coastal settlement in Hawke’s Bay on the east coast of the North Island of Aotearoa. At this time, we took the opportunity to travel to the Māhia7 Peninsula, which hangs off the coast by a narrow isthmus in the shape of a hand adze. At the time, my wife and I both experienced an eerie atmosphere about the place, which we later shared with each other but had trouble finding words for. I found myself wondering whether others had a similar response to the area and had written about it – a ghostly chronicle perhaps. Surprisingly, a Web search located an unexpected occurrence of such a response in (of all places) the Wairoa District Council’s 2004Wairoa Coastal Strategy: Te Maahere Taatahi ki te Wairoa. On the cover of this document were the words “Protecting the spirit of our precious coast”. In its vision statement, it describes the strategy as defining “how the coastal environment is to be protected, used and managed to capture, retain and enhance the unique ‘spirit of place’ that exists” (p. 8) [their inverted commas]. Further on, the strategy notes that “the whole of the Māhia Peninsula has been described as an important cultural heritage landscape of significance to Tangata Whenua” and as “a vital taonga (treasure)” (p.  15). A strategy document such as this is an example of a place-based genre. It is also an attempt at a consensus following a process of consultation with the region’s inhabitants (including a substantial proportion of Māori). Putting the words spirit of place in  Māori for “indistinct sound”.

7

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inverted commas is significant. Even as a nod in the direction of a Māori world view, it bestows a legitimacy on the expression in its use by a publicly elected body. But what is it? The word “exists” gives a strong ontological thrust to the use of the phrase by the District Council. The spirit of place thereby becomes an aspect of the being of the coast. As (a) being, you could say that the spirit of place has been given speaking rights, if only we had ears to hear the Māhia’s indistinct sound (Cf Jeannette Armstrong’s testament in Chap. 4.) There will be some who may wonder if I’m taking leave of my senses here and drifting towards espousing a superstitious animism. So be it. However, as an example of spirit of place in the context of a British sensibility, I refer to John Reppion’s introduction to a collection of essays in Spirits of Place (2016). Reppion’s introduction is a reminder that the spirits of a place are unlikely to be newcomers and that the place in question can be both built and associated with human activity. His first sentence introduces the dimension of time and a suggestion of the paranormal. “When I was a child I had a vision of fourth dimensional time; of paths trod by my own ghosts, past and future” (p. 5). He then moves to a specific place – the suburban South Liverpool Street – where his parents and grandparents lived and a dreamlike sense of himself as a kind of multi-exposure palimpsest of himself at various ages. He then moves to an attempt to define the concept of “spirits of place”. In doing so, he focuses on another specific Liverpool place – Calderstones Park – with its “playground, the duck and goose crowded mini-lake, a café, an ice-cream parlour, ornamental gardens, a miniature railway, and the remains of a Neolithic chambered tomb” (p. 7). He then offers an historical account of the tomb and of the Calderstones themselves, “the origin of the name long lost” and “each covered with curious spirals, circles, and other ancient engravings” (p. 7) almost lost and later memorialised in the vestibule of the Greenhill Greenhouses. He recalls seeing the stones for the first time during a Halloween tour of the park in 2008, where he came under their spell: “Fine spider’s webs, spun across the pitted surfaces of the menhirs, were frosted with moisture, glistening in the glow of the heater elements. The engravings shimmered fierily as if each stone had a core of liquid magma beneath its brittle sandy surface” (p. 8). In 2014, he has one of these “magical marks” tattooed on his right forearm, confident in what the mark signifies: It is a connection between myself and the landscape; between the people who lived and died and left the mark here five millennia ago, and the life myself and my family live here now….The Calderstones physically anchor Calderstones Park to England’s ancient past. They are the proverbial heavy ball-bearing on the rubber-sheet of Time; creating a pocket of deep history into which stories, and spirits, are drawn in ever-decreasing orbits. (p. 9)

I don’t want to pass judgement on the project represented by Reppion’s book.8 What I do go along with, though, is his assertion that “…stories are embedded in the world around us – in metal, in brick, in concrete, and in wood. In the very earth

 I found a visit to the site for Reppion’s book on Goodreads instructive for the variety of comments its publication elicited. Check out https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/33229288-spiritsof-place 8

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beneath our feet” (p. 9). I am sympathetic to the decentring of human subjectivity implicit in such a statement. (This will have a bearing on my critique of personification in Chap. 6.)

2.4 Placelessness A few years ago, a University of Waikato colleague shared with me a draft conference presentation, which subsequently became a book chapter in the form of a collaborative autoethnography (Earl & Kidd, 2018). The collaboration was triggered by a chance meeting of two academic women in their 50 s, one Māori and the other Pākehā, who had viewed a presentation by dance exponent and academic Karen Barbour, which was “a celebration of a collective sacred place” (p.  83). Following the performance, they found themselves sharing a similar unease in their response, generalised to a discomfort with the question (frequently asked in the context of Aotearoa): “Where are you from?” The autoethnography was the product of a journey of exploration of “what place means to those of us who move around living in multiple locations over time”9 (p. 83) and “the meaning of connection to a particular geographical place” (p. 84). Here is a part of Earl’s first response in the duologue: Kerry: Karen’s dance was not really speaking to me or, I thought, to people like me – people who relocate. By that I mean those who move house more than average. We have stories of relocation that are push stories of refugees’ expulsion, leaving rapidly or more cautiously from untenable situations. We have pull stories of new jobs and new opportunities, when people seek a better life for themselves and for their children through moving to a new place when and if they are able….My moves have been the result of active decisions….My first questions in this study arose from my doubtful, if not uncomfortable, responses to the question, where are you from? Is this ‘moving about a lot’ a strength or a weakness? (pp. 84–85)

While this book is written on the premise that there is a potential in everyone for the development of a sense of place, it also recognises that for many its actualisation has not occurred, or has been dislocated (sometimes literally), or is attenuated, or fragmented. I’m struck by Kerry’s impulse to wonder if there is something wrong with her. What does her lack of a response to Karen’s dance say about her? (This is an identity question, which I will address more fully in the next chapter.) At this stage of her exploration, we might describe Kerry as grappling with a sense of relative placelessness. I will be returning to Barbour’s work in Chap. 7, where she herself cites the work of Anderson and Erskine (2014), who explore a specific instance of placelessness – the lifestyle traveller, whom they define as “one who actively pursues travel indefinitely” rather than as a break from routine (p.  136). Like others who theorise placelessness, they view processes such as globalisation and mobility as  Between 1991 and 2006, the number of New Zealanders that moved residences rose from 48.1% to 54.7% of the population (NZ Census, 2006). 9

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undermining topophilia and leading to a situation where “people and place are now being reframed as constantly changing and provisional” (p.  131). They coin the term tropophilia to denote relations between people and place, when the former embrace a “love of mobility, movement and change” (p.  131) and perhaps view topophilia as an inhibitor of personal growth and change. The result is a kind of serial monogamy of person and place – a “coingredient constitution of identity and geography….when their respective paces and trajectories positively coincide” (p. 131). The most comprehensive philosophical treatment of the erasure of place as a concept and its relatively recent restoration is Edward Casey’s book on The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (2013). Casey asserts that “by the seventeenth century place is largely discredited, hidden deeply in the folds of the all-comprehensive fabric of space” (p. 3). This is consistent with Agnew’s (2011) deconstruction of place and space earlier in the chapter, where the idea of placelessness was first introduced. In the remainder of this section, I will be discussing placelessness in relation to two of the three components of Gieryn’s (2000) definition of place: the physicality of its material form and its investment with meaning and value.

2.4.1 Investment with Meaning and Value I will be dealing with this first, because it relates to Kerry’s situation above, with its problem of nonattachment and consequent sense of placelessness. A statement of this problem as a global phenomenon can be found in Fred Shelley’s (2003) commentary on John Agnew’s landmark text Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society (1987). The nub of Shelley’s argument is represented in the following extract: The locus of persons with whom social interaction takes place is constrained less and less by location. Rather, people increasingly identify persons to interact with on the basis of common occupations, personal or professional interests, religious beliefs, political views, languages and ethnic heritages rather than merely on the basis of geographic proximity. An internet chat room, consisting of people from throughout the world with some shared interest, is a much more meaningful venue for social interaction for many persons than is a set of people who happen to reside in the same neighbourhood, parish or territorially defined political unit. These changes also have affected sense of place: the sense of belonging, community and communality associated with sense of place is also less directly dependent on location than has been the case traditionally. (p. 606)

What Shelley is pointing to is a change in the character of sense of place, which results in its weakening. How? Because human needs for such things as “belonging, community and communality” are less dependent on location and likely to be met via “interaction” that occurs in a “locus” rather than “location”. Location has been

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displaced by locus (e.g. an internet chat room). The cause of the weakening is different from what Kerry has identified, i.e. the regularity of relocation. However, there is a similarity in that these phenomena are impacting on the self that invests meaning and value. For Shelley, the investment is being made at a locus rather than in a location, with the inevitable result that sense of place is weakened if not obliterated. Given the option to respond to this critique of the centrality of place, Agnew (its champion) goes immediately on the offensive. As Fred Shelley submits, this geopolitical watershed [the collapse of the Soviet Union] led to an explosion of talk and writing about a “placeless world” in the making associated with such words as globalization, deterritorialisation, time-space compression, a world of “flows” and “networks” replacing a world of “places”, etc. From this point of view, where anything is located no longer matters. The world has become like a giant pinhead or smooth ball. Hyped hysterically beyond all reasonable claims about the undoubted revolution in information technology and the explosive growth in global commodity chains, the wildest assertions about placelessness, however, bear no greater resemblance to the everyday realities of most people around the world than do the old arguments about national Gesellschaft replacing local Gemeinschaft so heavily criticized in P&P. (p. 610)

In developing his counter-argument, Agnew asserts that globalisation has been around for centuries and that “Places have always been part of larger spatial realms” (p. 611) regardless of their configuration. Moreover, he adds that the opposite of what Shelley argues has actually occurred. “With increased globalisation, ‘located places’, to adopt his vocabulary, have often become more not less important in people’s lives” (Agnew, 2003, p. 611). To illustrate his contention, he offers three examples (he could offer plenty more). Here is the first: The electronic village has not replaced the need for the “real thing”. One of the great promises of the Information Age is that people will be freed from the tyranny of geography. No longer would it be necessary to live near the office. No longer, even, would it be necessary to have an office. Cities would wither away as the face-to-face interaction and “buzz” generated by living cheek-by-jowl were eroded by the power of PCs and modems. Paradoxically, however, what has happened is exactly the opposite. Those who spend much of their days and nights doing e-mail like to run into like-minded souls at the corner coffee shop – hence the boom in urban places attached to the internet economy. The innovations in this economy also do not crop up at random but are tightly associated with the informational and associational economies that come from locating adjacently to those involved in the same business. (2003, p. 611)

As a kind of parting shot, he restates a familiar argument: “Place allows for the truly human use of space. If space is the ‘top-down’ impact of institutional schemes of spatial organisation and representation, then place is the ‘bottom-up’ representation of the actions of ordinary people” (2003, p. 613). However, this is still place in the abstract. It is not as if the phenomena pointed to in Kerry’s predicament and Shelley’s critique of place are imaginary. I will return to these in the next chapter, where the focus will be on identity and place.

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2.4.2 The Material Physicality of Place Gieryn’s (2000) first requirement for a place is geographic location. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, he asserts that: “A place is a unique spot in the universe” (p. 464). This may be true if we are referring to a set of coordinates. However, in terms of the material form of a place, some scholars argue that in many locations the uniqueness of place is being progressively undermined by a kind of bland sameness. How can a place be a place if it is identical in most respects to a place (or places) somewhere else? (This was first driven home to me in 1967, when I first visited the United States and was introduced by a McDonald’s enthusiast in San Francisco to what he called a “hamburger”. While the object was edible, it was not by any standard what I was accustomed to in a hamburger. However, what my guide took most pride in was the McDonald’s guarantee that a hamburger bought anywhere in the United States would be identical to the one I had just consumed and purchased from an outlet that was identical in many respects to the outlet in San Francisco.) The association of placelessness with sameness is a central theme of Edward Relph’s (1976) book, Place and Placelessness. In Relph (2016), he reviews changes in his perspective over time and his more recent take on the relevance of placelessness as the product of sameness. At one point in his review, he distinguishes between two meanings of the word “placelessness”: Placelessness involves detachment from the particularity of places. For an individual it is the experience of not belonging anywhere, of being an outsider or a refugee. For those uprooted by civil wars or environmental disasters it is a social condition. As a geographical phenomenon, which is the sense in which I usually use it, placelessness is manifest wherever human-made landscapes lack distinctiveness and have little connection with their geographical contexts. (p. 21)

The first of these is a restatement of the phenomenon discussed in the previous section. (At the beginning of Earl & Kidd (1918), Earl positions herself as “not belonging anywhere”.) It is placelessness as a geographical phenomenon that this section concerns itself with. In his retrospective, Relph notes that the version of placelessness defined by him in the 1970s referred to “the weakening of the identity of places to the point where they not only look alike but feel alike and offer the same bland possibilities for experience” (1976, p. 90). This version, he argues, became dominant in the decades following the Second World War, when Modernist approaches (including architecture and urban design) led to urbanscapes characterised by such features as “social housing projects” with their “sterile open blocks”, “pods of scarcely differentiated houses” and “commercial strips lined with fast food and petrol station chains” (p. 22). However, he concedes, in the 1970s a reaction set in as “concerns for place distinctiveness began to be reasserted” (2016, p. 20). This, he argues, led to a “weakening of the once clear distinction between place and placelessness”, which then became “hastened by increased mobility, international migrations, and electronic communications, and these together have turned places everywhere into networked

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hybrids of distinctiveness and sameness” (p. 21). He concludes this argument with the assertion that: increasingly transitory, transnational, and multi-centered experiences have turned places everywhere into tangled manifestations of distinctiveness and sameness. The paradox of place now lies in the fact that while these two aspects can be differentiated it has become virtually impossible to disentangle them.” (p. 21)

Hybridity, Relph argues, has thus become the new norm. “Places everywhere, no matter how big, small, new, or old, have begun to evolve into hybrids of local distinctiveness and globally shared sameness” (p. 26). In fact, places have always been characterised by a degree of hybridity. However, what is different now is that: ...former limitations to moving people, things, and ideas around, and which once contributed enormously to making and preserving distinctive place identities, have been transcended. Experiences associated with lifetimes rooted in just one or two places were narrow but deep. They have been widely supplanted by experiences of many places visited briefly or lived in for a few months or years, experiences that are broad and comparative yet relatively shallow. (p. 27)

I will conclude this account of Relph’s argument for a contemporary version of hybrid place with the following quotation, where he employs the spirit of place trope, but in a way that is markedly different from how I used it earlier in this chapter: Its genius loci does not come from the earth, but arrives on a wire, and it is neither placeless, nor a non-place, nor exactly virtual. It is, in fact, a combination of all those and the actual setting, a blend of place and placelessness. (p. 31)

Relph’s work as a geographer with an interest in urbanism is a timely reminder that any theorising involving the concept of place must recognise that over half of the world’s population lives in cities.10 With the exception of the initial clause, I think we can go along with this argument for hybridity. In doing so, the challenge becomes quite simple: to work on restoring, developing and fostering the “distinctiveness of places” and replacing shallowness with strength of commitment, depth and durability (see Chap. 9).

References Adams, J. D. (2013). Theorising a sense of place in a transnational community. Children, Youth and Environments, 23(3), 43–65. Retrieved [October 24, 2019] from http://www.jstor.org/ action/showPublication?journalCode=chilyoutenvi Agnew, J. A. (1987). Place and politics: The geographical mediation of state and society. Allen and Unwin. Agnew, J. A. (2003). Author’s response: A different place, a different politics. Progress in Human Geography, 27(5), 605–614.  Derived from the World Bank’s site on Urban Development. See https://www.worldbank.org/en/ topic/urbandevelopment/overview#1 10

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Agnew, J. A. (2011). Space and place. In J. A. Agnew & D. N. Livingstone (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of geographical knowledge (pp. 316–330). SAGE Publications Ltd.. Anderson, J., & Erskine, K. (2014). Tropophilia: A study of people, place and lifestyle travel. Mobilities, 9(1), 130–145. Bachelard, G. (1958). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, trans.). Penguin. Brumfiel, E. M. (2015). Archaeology of states and divilisation. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (2nd ed., pp.  371–375). https://doi. org/10.1016/B978-­0-­08-­097086-­8.13012-­0 Casey, E. S. (1993). Getting back into place: Toward a renewed understanding of the Place-World. Indiana University Press. Casey, E. S. (2009). Getting back into place: Toward a renewed understanding of the place-world (2nd ed.). Indiana University Press. Casey, E. (2013). The fate of place: A philosophical history. University of California Press. Convery, I., Corsane, G., & Davis, P. (2012). Introduction: Making sense of place. In I. Convery, G. Corsane, & P. Davis (Eds.), Making sense of place: Multidisciplinary perspectives (pp. 1–8). Boydell & Brewer. Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. Vintage. Duncan, J. (2000). Place. In R. J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt, & M. Watts (Eds.), The dictionary of human geography (pp. 582–585). Blackwell. Earl, K., & Kidd, J. (2018). Sense-making of identity, community and future(s) in ‘our place’ at this time. In R. E. Rinehart, J. Kidd, & G. A. Garcia (Eds.), Southern Hemisphere Ethnographies of space, place, and time (pp. 83–102). Peter Lang. Foucault, M. (1991). Politics and the study of discourse. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 53–72). Harvester Wheatsheaf. Gabriel, M. W. (2013 May 2). Belong to the place: A conversation with Yi-Fu Tuan. College of letters & science: University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved March 7 from https://ls.wisc.edu/ news/belonging-­to-­this-­place-­a-­conversation-­with-­yi-­fu-­tuan/ Gatley, J. (2008). Shabby and shambling: Decadent housing in Greys Avenue. AHA: Architectual History Aotearoa, 5, 45–54. Gieryn, T. F. (2000). A space for place in sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 463–496. Hardy, S. (2000). Placiality: The renewal of the significance of place in modern cultural theory. Brno Studies in English, 26, 85–100. Hay, R. (1998). Sense of place in developmental context. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 18, 5–29. Kinkade, T. (2013 April 20). Peaceful retreat. Retrieved March, 2022 from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=K5VpXLMSJXc Heidegger, M. (1971). Building dwelling thinking. In poetry, language, thought (A. Hofstadter, trans) (pp. 141–160). Harper & Rsow Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. Vintage Books. Kearney, R. (1958). Introduction. In The poetics of space (pp. xvii–xxvi). Penguin. Kress, G. (2010). A grammar for meaning-making. In T. Locke (Ed.), Beyond the grammar wars: A resource for teachers and students on developing language knowledge in the English/literacy classroom (pp. 233–253). Routledge. Locke, T. (2004). Critical discourse analysis. Continuum. Malpas, J. E. (1998). Finding place: Spatiality, locality, and subjectivity. In A. Light & J. M. Smith (Eds.), Philosophies of place (pp. 21–43). Rowman and Littlefield. Mayhew, S. (2015). A dictionary of geography (5th ed.). Oxford University Press. Online edition accessed March 9, 2022 via the University of Waikato library. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. Pion. Relph, E. (2016). The paradox of place and the evolution of placelessness. In R.  Freestone & E. Liu (Eds.), Place and placelessness revisited (pp. 1–19). Routledge. Reppion, J. (Ed.). (2016). Spirits of place. Daily Grail Publishing.

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Shamai, S. (1991). Sense of place: An empirical measurement. Geoforum, 22(3), 347–358. Shelley, F. (2003). Commentary 1: A different place, a different politics. Progress in Human Geography, 27(5), 605–614. Shelley, F. M., & Clarke, A. E. (1994). Human and cultural geography: A global perspective. Wm. C. Brown Publishers. Spring, J. (2013). Perspectives of a rural music educator: A narrative journey through “sense of place”. Rural Education, 34(3), 27–37. Stefanovic, I. L. (1998). Phenomenological encounters with place: Cavtat to square one. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 18(1), 31–44. Stevens, W. (1957). Opus posthumous. Faber & Faber Ltd. Tindol, R. (2019). Rowing to sublimity: The “stolen boat” episode from The Prelude. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 45(1), 43–68. Tuan, Y. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes and values. Prentice Hall. Tuan, Y. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota. Wairoa District Council. (2004). Wairoa Coastal Strategy: Te Maahere Taatahi ki te Wairoa. Wairoa District Council. Retrieved March 22, 2022 from https://www.wairoadc.govt.nz/assets/ Document-­Library/Strategies/yroacoastalstrat-­21.pdf Wiley, M. (2015). Wordsworth’s spots of time in space and time. Wordsworth Circle, 46(1), 52–58 Wordsworth, W. (1979). In J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, & S. Gill (Eds.), The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative texts context and reception: Recent critical essays. W. W. Norton & Company. Wyly, E. (2007). Sense of place. Urban Studies 200, Cities. Retrieved April 17, 2020 from http:// www.aughty.org/pdf/sense_of_place2.pdf Wyly, E. (2011). Space and place. Urban Studies 200, Cities. Retrieved April 17, 2020 from https:// ibis.geog.ubc.ca/~ewyly/u200/space.pdf

Chapter 3

Sense of Place and Identity

Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

3.1 Identity as the Sense of Who I Am In Chap. 1, in declaring a commitment to human agency, I made a distinction between self and subjectivity. I retained the self as a term for an enduring core of personhood which I saw as akin to Damasio’s (2000) autobiographical self, which he describes thus: The autobiographical self is based on autobiographical memory which is constituted by implicit memories of multiple instances of individual experience of the past and of the anticipated future. The invariant aspects of an individual’s biography form the basis for autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory grows continuously with life experience but can be partly remodeled to reflect new experiences. Sets of memories which describe identity and person can be reactivated as a neural pattern and made explicit as images whenever needed. Each reactivated memory operates as “something-to-be-known” and generates its own pulse of core consciousness. The result is the autobiographical self of which we are conscious. (p. 174)

Subjectivity is that aspect of our intellectual being which is conscripted by or subscribes to particular discourses. Because these discourses are multiple, it is appropriate to refer to them as subjectivities. I am suggesting then that the “I” of identity is a dynamic composite of self and subjectivity. This chapter is about identity as my sense of who I am. My being is at the heart of it. As indicated in the last chapter, identities can also be ascribed to us by others and in some instances can operate as impediments to the development of a sense of emplaced belonging. Reflecting on my own writing about identity as an educationalist (e.g. Cremin & Locke, 2017), I realise that my focus was on the verb identify but collocated with the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 T. Locke, Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4266-4_3

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preposition as. I’ve just done that in writing “as an educationalist”. If you asked me what it meant for me to identify as an educationalist, I would be required to deconstruct “educationalist” as a professional role and a focus of academic study. That would involve me in identifying the discourses that flesh out the concept of educationalist and to which I subscribe and distinguish these from discourses I reject. Such a process would communicate something to you about the educationalist I aspired to be. You will be aware that in Chap. 1, I was doing quite a lot of “identifying as” work, sharing, for example, my identity as an Aucklander and as a Pākehā New Zealander. The poem below explores my own identity in the relation to some of my own memories of place in a way that recognises its multifaceted character.

3.2 Approaching Identity Something must endure       spanning time and place: call it     the actualisation of autobiographical memory as repository of image and constitutive resource: the sound of white chickens     having their own way       in grandma’s cottage kitchen. The stubbornness of temperament     later to be blamed on this or that progenitor whose red hair    took root elsewhere. The impress of environment:    the volcanic cones and residual ridges of lava    long-cooled and crested with white, red-roofed villas.1

3.3 Synecdoche The last four lines of the poem (following the colon) are a cluster of concrete images, which I think of as emblematic of the Tāmaki Makaurau isthmus where I grew up. The cluster represents a much larger whole while, at the same time, aiming to encapsulate some essential sense of that whole: a sense of the geographical place where I grew up. Synecdoche is accorded a two-sentence paragraph in my well-thumbed copy of Abrams’ (1981) Glossary of Literary Terms under “Figurative Language”, which  This section draws on Damasio, 2000, p. 222.

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notes that it typically refers to a device where “a part of something is used to signify the whole” (p. 65). In the nautical expression “All hands on deck”, the hand (part) signifies the whole worker. I will admit now that I found this device so markedly pointless and irrelevant to my work as an English teacher, that I never used it: until 2020. Now I am dedicating myself to rescuing this determinedly iambic, Greek term and putting it to work for a grander purpose: to evoke something too large to be nailed down (a whole) by the felicitous choice of a part (object, image, event) that will serve humbly but powerfully to evoke this whole – a kind of literary embodiment of the “less is more” principle. I am not alone in this project. Here is what doctoral student Jamie Davidson (2022) had to say about a short story he wrote entitled “On Synecdoche”, set alongside the BR-116 – the Brazilian interstate: If the story must be read as an argument, it is that the power of synecdoche has been underestimated. For the part does not merely stand in for the whole; rather, it exceeds the whole, resounding, reverberating, growing, and taking on magical powers.

Synecdoche, New  York, as some readers may be recalling, is the title of Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 movie, which on its release attracted plaudits and brickbats in equal measure. The hero/antihero of this movie, director Caden Cotard (played by Philip Seymour), uses the funding from an impossibly massive grant to build a sprawling set for a play that will represent the true nature of the human condition. Peter Bradshaw, in his Guardian review, in commenting on the movie’s title, notes that “Caden’s huge, mad, pasteboard world stands for the real world, is part of it, is superimposed on to it, and finally melts into it”.2 I’m gratified that both Davidson and Bradshaw draw our attention to the argumentational function of this figure of speech when used in a particular way. In the case of this book, I am aware that in many instances, I have no option other than to select a particular object, event, case, instance, author and so on, to represent something of the complexity of a large portion of an immense canvas. The poem below, written in January 2020, is a version of the argument I have just made but accords recognition of those particulars which are elided by any framing device.

3.4 Synecdoche as Verb There is always too much to take in on, say, the Queen Charlotte Walk, as you urge unaccustomed feet headlong towards the night’s lodging. It is not enough to let it all pass: around your neck the trusty Canon swings  Bradshaw, P. (May 15, 2009). Synecdoche, New York. Retrieved April 24, 2022 from https://www. theguardian.com/film/2009/may/15/synecdoche-new-york#:~:text=The%20film%20is%20 either%20a,influences%20of%20Fellini%20and%20Lynch. 2

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3  Sense of Place and Identity wildly wanting its own piece of the action deaf to the muted call of canopied robin. “Snaps are for taking,” it insists: “Your job is to select the part that best represents the whole; too much randomness will wear us out.” In a flash the eye becomes imperious, souveniring the landscape as wayside fern, the dark beech trunk adorned with a green round-leafed creeper,        the vista of boat on water. So much else drifts away into the haze of backdrop, forever to be overlooked, eluding memorialisation, happy, it may be, to escape the collector’s gaze.

In what follows in this chapter, I begin by developing the idea that our individual sense of place as an aspect of our identity is a reciprocal relationship: places impress themselves upon us, and we in turn endow places with significance. Places speak to us in certain ways; we are disposed to speak back to them in accordance with our patterns of response and conviction. I make the point that sense of place can vary from individual to individual in terms of mutability, basis, strength, cultural association, duration and mediation. For some people, sadly, there are specific cultural barriers to the development of a sense of belonging in a place, often the result of various forms of discrimination. I will then shift my focus to the historical phenomenon of dispossession (with specific reference to England and Scotland), where individuals and communities were forcibly removed/uprooted from places to which they had been historically attached. In keeping with this chapter’s focus on sense of place as an emotional and psychological reality, dispossession will be discussed in relation to experiences of disruption and trauma. Dispossession, it will be argued, is a key element in a weakened sense of place, or a kind of rootlessness, where consciousness of a place stirs feelings of deep loss and/ or nostalgia. At this juncture, the chapter makes a case for the relationship between sense of place and wellness and asks the question how a sense of place might be reclaimed. Anticipating Chap. 6, it links the process of reclaiming, asserting or expressing a sense of place to the process of representation, that is, giving form and substance to one’s sense of place via what Gunther Kress (1997) terms “representational resources”.

3.5 Becoming Places There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day…. or for many years or stretching cycles of years. Walt Whitman

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In the introduction to their edited book on Making Sense of Place, Convery et al. (2012) note that: “The general consensus of the authors is that the relationship between people and place is important for individual and community identity.... Place is thus bound up in people’s sources of meaning and experience; people and their environments, places and identities are mutually constructed” (p. 1). Similarly, advocate of place, Edward Casey effuses: “I shall accord to place a position of renewed respect by specifying its power to direct and stabilise us, to memorialise and identify us, to tell us who and what we are in terms of where we are (as well as where we are not)” (2009, p. xv). The position I adopt in this book is that our relationship to places is reciprocal: places impress themselves upon us, and we in turn endow places with significance. As I write this sentence, I am aware of resorting to metaphor. Impress has the original sense of applying with pressure, as in securing a document with a wax seal. Endow has a connotation of gifting, often associated with formal occasions (as in “endowment” and “dowry”). I think of this recourse to metaphor as poetry interacting with theory in a liminal meaning-making space. If I substitute the word “place” for “object” in the epigraph above from Whitman, it becomes clear that he has captured much of what I am trying to articulate here. This is a poem about our ontological origins. The child is active in respect of their gifting their attention to some aspect of the object-world of place – not just “looking” but “looking upon3”. The child is also passive, in the sense of being a “receiver” of the place’s imprint. However, there is an emotional disposition at work also in this transaction, which has a bearing on its tone, whether of wonder or pity or love or dread. As I read it, this list is not exhaustive. Rather it is indicative of the importance of disposition in the self/object (or organism/environment) interaction. Finally, there is the idea of melding, as a kind of dissolution occurs at the self/object boundary: the child becomes the place. The third line is no less interesting, since it addresses the question of imprint duration. For Whitman, the duration of the imprint of place on the being of the subject’s body is variable. It could be simply for a few hours; it could be for a lifetime; or it could be for “stretching cycles of years”, which I read as having a presence in the repository of human consciousness, that one can visit periodically as a memorial resource. These reflections on Whitman take me back to the Damasio (2000) quotation at the beginning of the chapter. I take Damasio to be arguing for the existence of a core self “based on [my italics] autobiographical memory which is constituted by implicit memories of multiple instances of individual experience of the past and of the anticipated future”. These implicit memories will include the imprints of various places, which, Damasio suggests, “describe identity and person” and are available for reactivation “as a neural pattern and made explicit as images” (p. 174). I take his word “implicit” to suggest that these images have been imprinted, fibred into the  Some versions of the Book of Genesis in the Bible use the words “look upon” to describe God reflecting on his act of creation. Whitman was a keen student of the Bible and viewed it as a text with poetic merit. 3

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body’s neural networks, prior to their being brought to consciousness in an act of mind, deliberate or not. The primacy of the body in melding a person’s identity in place is consistent with Casey’s (2009) philosophy. In ontological terms, he asserts strongly that: “To exist at all as a (material or mental) object or as (an experienced or observed) event is to have a place – to be implaced, however minimally or imperfectly or temporarily” (p. 13 [his italics]). In a later chapter on the concept of dwelling, he insists (this time in epistemological terms) that “in the order of knowing place come first” [italics his], commenting at the same time that “the hero of the day has been the lived body as the principal locatory agent of implacement” (p. 110). I’m happy to heroise the human body (and the bodies of other sentient creatures) as an agent of place-­ consciousness. However, as indicated above, I want to accord equal agency to the impressive qualities of places. I was reminded of this idea of dual agency recently, in reading Sebastian Barry’s (2023) novel Old God’s Time. In the passage below, the main character and centre of consciousness, retired detective Tom Kettle, finds himself wide awake in the early hours of the morning. How different everything looked in the small hours. The boxes of books, the old photos in their frames, vanished scenes, vanished people, all dark and glowing in the pale soup of moonlight. He didn’t like to turn on the lights because he sensed the resentment of the objects as he passed....It was always strange to him, this unscheduled waking, intruding on the privacy of inanimate things – so deeply coveted by them. Chair and table, carpet and knick-knacks, wanting to be alone, like Greta Garbo. (p. 47)

The mise en scène transforms the space into a place, while the emplaced objects and their associations have their part to play in emplacing Kettle.

3.5.1 Places in Themselves In the introduction to his second edition, Casey (2009) sets out to “consider a particular place from the standpoint of all that it incorporates and reflects: such as the history of a class, its endemic culture, its associated beliefs and thoughts” (p. xxv). Viewed thus, place is mutable and might be described as eventful since it is embedded in time and history. He uses the term dimensions to denote the qualities of a place over and above its geographical location. These dimensions, including “culture, ethnicity, gender, class, etc” (p. xxv), are not events, but rather qualities related to a place’s human population. “They act as indwelling forces that contribute to a place its non-physical and non-geographic dimensions” (p. xxv). Further he talks about “two poles”: “place as locatory vs. place as an event with cultural/historical dimensions” (p. xxv). It is a given for me that places cannot be expected to impress themselves upon people in the same way. Below I propose an alternative categorisation of place qualities that have the potential to contribute to a person’s sense of place.

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Physical: This relates to Gieryn’s (2000) concept of materiality. These might be natural features such as rivers, forests, plains, mountains, valleys, cliffs, lakes, and so on. If we reduce the compass, they might include a copse, cove, clearing, or creekbed. They may be artefactual environments such as cities and towns, industrial estates, roading networks, and ports. If we reduce the compass, the place could be a single dwelling or room within it, a hotel lobby, a church, the facade of a building, a monument. Or they could be nature/artefact combinations, such as plantations, farms, parks, camping grounds, resorts of variable compass. The natural/artefactual distinction is at best a crude one. During a recent visit to Adelaide, I noticed a number of traditional workers’ cottages that had become gentrified and prized. They had been built in the Nineteenth Century from Tapley’s Hill bluestone, the colour and texture of which connected them to the source of this material in the Adelaide hills. In a similar way, the old Auckland villa my wife and I used to live in wore in its kauri flooring the imprint of the indigenous forests whence they were profligately removed and milled. A view of nature and culture as mutually imbuing each other is not a new one. As I discuss in Chap. 9 in relation to the Anthropocene, there is a contemporary argument that the “sentimental” idea of a stable nature independent of human modification no longer exists. I don’t personally go this far. Ecological: These qualities relate to the relationships, present-day and historical, among living organisms, including humans, and the natural environment. Sociological: The sociological properties of a place would include a range of aspects of the human population that inhabit or have inhabited it. These would include Casey’s items, “culture, ethnicity, gender, class” (p. xxv) but also include religion, community cohesion, relationships between different groups, and issues around various forms of social injustice.

A fifth category I would add is discursive inscription. In Chap. 1, I shared a recollection of a small, Chinese neighbourhood in Central Auckland and my childhood view of it. Writing that chapter reinforced my awareness that this view was the product of a widespread prejudice of the time. In other words, I had been pre-­ inscribed unconsciously by a discourse that constructed these Chinese people in a negative light. By way of a different, but comparable, example, I can recall being taken as a child by my parents to the West Coast of the South Island, where we visited St James Church, which was famous for its clear glass windows, whence one could view the Franz Josef Glacier.4 My view of this landmark was not only physically framed. It was framed by a discourse of the sublime, which inscribed such landmarks with a particular meaning, associated with words such as “awe” and “reverence” (more of this below). The main point I am making here is that there are meanings awaiting us in our encounters with places that were culturally attached via discursive inscription prior to our arrival there, either as children or adults. Places are impressive but seldom innocent of pre-inscription.

 No longer, sadly. The glacier has long since receded.

4

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3.5.2 Endowing Significance All the same, I am attached to the idea that a place can speak to me untroubled by the toils of discursive inscription. Recently, my wife and I walked the track on Tavora Reserve near her home town of Waikouaiti.5 As we walked along its pristine, orange-sand beach, without anyone else for company, I stopped and took the photograph below (Fig. 3.1). My action was unplanned and unanticipated. It was the patterned quality of the sand that “caught my eye”. My response was a desire to memorialise it – not just by committing it to memory but by photographing it. It has subsequently become part of the meaning of that place for me, just as the beach itself and the landscape it is part of have become a special place. (Sharing the experience with my wife is a key aspect of that specialness.) There is fluidity about this image, as if something is flowing across it from bottom-left to top-right, as if the swish of its creation as an element of the ocean’s undersong has been recorded in its indentations. The image doesn’t need its significance to be nailed down – other than its having become a synecdoche for Tavora the place. I’ve opened this sub-section with a digression, really. My main point here is that, for the most part, the meanings we make of the places that are special to us are a function of our subjectivities, which I described in Chap. 1 as our ways of thinking about the world which subscribe to or have been conscripted by particular discourses. These discourses fashion our identity and underpin our practices and relationships. The discourse that influenced my understanding of the Greys Avenue Chinese community as a child was racist and unconnected with the actuality of the place. The discourse that in part shaped my response to the Franz Joseph Glacier

Fig. 3.1 Tavora Beach sand

5  See https://www.yellow-eyedpenguin.org.nz/our-work/yept-reserves/tavora/. “Tavora” was an ancient Māori name for the hoiho (yellow-eyed penguin).

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hallowed the place for its beauty and splendour. In that respect it had a degree of validity. In the current climate, glacial retreat has become a source of grief in Aotearoa and elsewhere. (In keeping with the theme of Chap. 9, this grief is yet another impetus for action around climate change.) All of us, then, bring sets of culturally constructed dispositions (discourses) to our self-identifications with place. Sometimes these dispositions will be at odds with some of the pre-inscribed meanings of a place. If you are disposed to respond to the mountains surrounding Queenstown (in the South Island of New Zealand) with awe, wonder and reverence, you may experience a sense of dissonance with the way the town is constructed as a tourist mecca. If you are attached to the idea of a town square, you may experience a sense of dissonance with a town that is built around a long, main street. And so on. Below are a number of generalisations in respect of self-identification with place, which reflect the potential variability of response and attachment that exists for people. • One’s sense of place is mutable and can deepen through acts of self-reflection and memorialisation. • Different aspects of a location can contribute to the development of a sense of place, e.g. landscape, a feeling of community, an ineffable sense of presences, associations with memorable experiences, etc. • Some people’s sense of place is highly specific; for others it is generalised to preferred categories of place, e.g. beach, coast, bush, inner-city neighbourhood, etc. • The strength of connection to a place can vary from strong to muted.6 • There is a cultural dimension in one’s connectedness to a place. • Identification with a particular place is strengthened by duration, e.g. how long one’s family has been associated with it. • Having a sense of place can be an aspect of one’s identity without one identifying with a single, particular place. • One’s sense of place can be mediated by others, e.g. indigenous owners. • Concrete objects have the power to represent place in the imaginations of people, functioning as a kind of synecdoche.

3.5.3 Impediments to Self-Identification with Place It is important to recognise that there are a range of impediments to the development of self-identification with a place, i.e. a sense of belonging to a particular place. Such a recognition is distinct from  a theory of placelessness. However, the  Edward Relph (1976) used the concepts of insideness and outsideness to represent the differing degrees of intimacy a person might have with a particular place (See Liu & Freestone, 2016, pp. 0.6–7). 6

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alienation that can result from one of more of these impediments might be classed as a type of placelessness. In Chap. 2, in discussing placelessness, I mentioned Earl and Kidd’s (2018) discomfort with the question: “Where are you from?” In their case, it stemmed from a consciousness of the frequency of their relocation and wonderings about what it meant to be connected “to a particularly geographical place” (p. 84). In their case, the impediment was a high degree of mobility – a kind of nomadism. A different kind of impediment is explored in Hirsch (2018a) in a Financial Times article entitled: “‘Where are you from?’ Afua Hirsch on race, identity and belonging”. In Chap. 2, I noted that ethnic attribution occurs when a group is characterised in a particular way by outsiders. This imposition of “identity” is frequently unwelcome and, as Hirsch illustrates in her article, can interact badly with sociological and discursive aspects of places in themselves. Before examining this article, I digress with a brief illustration of the role attribution can play in constructing a place, in this instance the country that Hirsch was brought to by her parents. I was introduced to the magazine, This England, some years ago by an English expat friend. It has been going strong since 1968, and you can obtain an immediate sense of its mission from its website.7 The blurb tells us that it is “adored” by both locals and expats and is the perfect quarterly for “anyone that loves this green and pleasant land and is unashamedly proud to be English”. Prospective readers are told that they will find articles about English “history and lore” and which celebrate more recent “achievements, innovations, and enterprises”. In short, the blurb concludes that this is the magazine designed to enable one to “commemorate your love of England and the English way of life”. Within the space of a few lines, we have two literary allusions. The first is in the title, which is drawn from the famous John of Gaunt speech from Act ii, Scene I of Shakespeare’s Richard II. Gaunt is dying and has nothing to lose in speaking out: This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself. Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands. This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England... This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,  See https://www.thisengland.co.uk/this-england-magazine. Wikipedia’s claim that the magazine is an “apolitical celebration” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_England_(magazine) is questionable. The Spring 1998 issue has an article on Monmouthshire that attacks bilingual policy in Wales and alludes to the EU as “sinisterly promoting separate status for Scotland, Wales and even for separate regions of England” (p. 32). 7

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Like to a tenement or pelting farm: England....         is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds: That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

There is no doubting the patriotic fervour here. Both landscape and inhabitants are lauded and hallowed. England is well reputed and truly to be envied by other “less happier lands”. But there is a darker side, which appears inconsistent with a jingoistic construction of “This England” (a geopolitical identity I will revisit in Chap. 9). The historical John of Gaunt died in 1399. Richard II was written around 1595. Whichever date we choose, the assertion in the latter part of the speech suggests that this “dear dear land” has become reduced to real estate (“a tenement”) and rendered either “mean” and “insignificant” or given over to the production of pelts from sheep (“pelting” could mean any of these). The second is the phrase “green and pleasant land” as a synonym for England. This might be thought of as an insider attribution, used as a way of characterising a place rather than a person or group. The phrase comes from a prefatory poem by William Blake, “And did those feet in ancient time”, written in 1804 to introduce his long poem: Milton: A Poem. The poem became the hymn, “Jerusalem” in 1916, when it was put to music by Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry.8 I associate it with the BBC Proms and Royal Albert Hall where it often features as a finale with mass singing from the audience. What is easily lost sight of in the fervour and enthusiasm is that Blake’s New Jerusalem is yet to be realised. In contrast, the “dark satanic mills” referred to in the poem had already become a feature of England’s industrial landscape, the negative effects of which became topics in his Songs of Experience, first published in 1794. While the colour green is prominent in these evocations of England, the colours white and black are marked by their absence. Born in 1981, Hirsch was one of the two daughters of a black Ghanaian mother and a white English father. She sets the scene for “Where are you from?” by reflecting on her name, Afua, and its relationship with identity. From her parents’ perspective, she was given this Akan name, meaning “girl born on Friday”, as a cultural signifier linking her to her mother’s ancestral land. However, as a young person growing up in Britain, and specifically in the almost exclusively white enclave of Wimbledon (London), her name became a kind of symbol of unbridgeable difference: “Britain is now littered with people like me; Ghanaians who either mispronounce their own names, or have given in to other people doing it for them.” Her upbringing was undoubtedly privileged, with her attending the private Wimbledon High School and later studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford before eventually qualifying as a barrister. In Hirsch (2018a, b), she notes that “Britain is my home, my nationality, my frame of reference. I’ve spoken its language all my life — correct, middle-class, Thames Estuary English”. The phrase  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time

8

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frame of reference is telling, I think, because it suggests a certain positionality. Outside the walls of her own home, she would have been positioned into subscribing to specific versions of England as a place, including its construction as a green and pleasant land. So why has this land not allowed her to develop a sense of belonging? The clue for her is the question, “Where are you from?” – the fact that it’s not addressed to white people, but rather reserved for people of colour, especially black. She notes: “But when it comes to race, Britain has secrets. They lurk in the language, the brickwork and the patterns of society”. (In Hirsh (2018b), she asserts that “In Britain, we are taught not to see race. We are told that race does not matter” (p. 10).) There is a telling anecdote which follows this assertion, where she evokes Wimbledon Common, which she remembers fondly as an expansive green space, where she and her family would walk “full of Sunday roast....picking berries in autumn, lugging an old sledge down a hill on the golf course on the rare winter days when it snowed”. Later, she discovered that in 1907, near an old windmill at the heart of the Common, Robert Baden-Powell had written part of Scouting for Boys. In her 30 s, she came to a realisation of the impact the future Scout leader had had on her family as a major in Britain’s attack on Kumasi, capital of the Ghanaian Ashanti Empire, where her great-grandmother and family lived. They saved their lives by fleeing on foot and resettling 200 km away in the town of Aburi, which became and remained their home. She comments: “Baden-Powell drew on the experience of defeating and ransacking the cultural heritage of the Ashanti kingdom to reinforce his confidence in the supremacy of the white British male”. (See Chap. 8 for more on Baden-Powell.) There are two ironies here. The first is that this history was right “on her doorstep”, hidden from view, until dragged into the light by her research as an example of what she calls an “overlapping story”. By this she means stories that expose clearly “the true proximity of black people to British people, of blackness to whiteness”. It is a history that would have changed the way she saw herself as a child had she known it, and explained her overwhelming sense of unwelcome and potentially threatening otherness, and the “constant consciousness of feeling at odds with my surroundings” that prevented her from developing a sense of emplaced belonging. The second irony relates to a trip to Ghana made with her family when she was 14. She recalls that the place that made the greatest impression on her was Aburi itself, where her great-grandmother fled and where her maternal grandfather was buried. When her ancestors arrived there, the British had already begun establishing a garden based on the model of Kew Gardens, near her home in London. I was fascinated by the unmistakably British creation at the heart of this garden. It had the sobriety of a Victorian construction, with brick walls and a methodical layout, its plaques of honour dedicated to the names of its curators — British men, until the empire ended, after which the names began to be Ghanaian. It gave me a hint that things could be both British and Ghanaian at the same time — a message I was desperate to hear.

She concludes the article with the assertion that there is no such thing as racial purity and that the need for open discussion of racialised identities is a pressing one.

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The conclusion is a nice one in rhetorical terms, because it marks the trajectory from a sense of fracture in terms identity, and alienation in terms of place, to a position where a kind of hybrid cultural identity is acknowledged alongside a historically rooted sense of place facilitated by the discovery of a connection between two places dear to her: Kew Gardens/Wimbledon Common and Aburi in Ghana. In the next section, I switch from individual to collective sense of place. The specific focus will be the way the invention of private property and individual land title provided a discursive justification for dispossessing countless peoples of their land rights in both the Old World and the New. When place became real estate, it virtually spelled the doom of the “commons”, which Casey (2009) associates with “an intimate relationship between nature and culture: nature in the guise of land that is not built upon as well as the weather hovering overhead, culture as a set of shared practices that act to modify the land in ways beneficial to the local citizenry” (p. xxxiv).

3.6 Dispossession It is the socially constructed aspect of sense of place that facilitates a shared, communal interpretation of a place. For many groups, a sense of place is indistinguishable from a sense of collective (or cultural) identity. Consequently, a shared sense of place allows a bond to be formed among members of a social or cultural community, whether in close proximity in a particular location or geographically dispersed. Bakhtin (1981) and van Eijck and Roth (2010) remind us that our word “place” derives from the ancient Greek word for town square plateia (πλατεία). Such a place was the focus of communal life, where people came together to celebrate, through rituals, events and gatherings, a way of life and common cultural understandings. In the last chapter, I alluded to the theme of this section in quoting sociologist Thomas Gieryn’s comment on the “devastating implications for individual and collective identity, memory, and history” of “the loss of place”. “To be without a place of one’s own,” he asserts, “is to be almost non-existent” (2000, p. 482). The word I have used here for this enforced loss of place is dispossession. However, there are other words, such as displacement, removal and uprooting (suggesting processes) and landlessness (as indicating an outcome). And then, of course, there are euphemisms such as relocation, clearance and ethnic cleansing. As Gieryn further points out, dispossession takes many forms. For example, it can be experienced by the homeless and those discharged from institutions. He also notes that the effects of displacement are likely to vary according to the nature of the enforcement (e.g. natural disasters, urban renewal, exile) and whether it is temporary or permanent. He also points out that one may suffer a sense of dispossession from afar, for example, when a place sacred to one is desecrated or erased. Likewise, one can feel a sense of dispossession when one’s special place is ravaged by economic and social changes (2000, p. 482).

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By way of synecdoche, I have chosen to focus this section on historical dispossession in two countries in the mostly United Kingdom – England and Scotland. My reason for this historical focus is a conviction that the Eurocentric world view I and others inherited, though complex, established a number of habits of thought (conceptualisations/discourses) that have been, and continue to be, destructive. I would contend that these habits of thought have colonised the populations of both their countries of origin and the indigenous populations of those vast tracts of land that European powers saw themselves entitled to occupy – with disastrous effect.9 Here are just some of the words/concepts that became foot soldiers of this discursively hegemonic regime: land, privatisation, property, ownership, improvement, wilderness, nature and savage. Against such odds, it is hardly surprising that sense of place, as both idea and emotional potential, went underground.

3.6.1 Not-So-Merry England This section will draw heavily on Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (2020). The book is deliberately transgressive, with each chapter named for a creature and opening with an act of trespass by stealth and craft. On each occasion the writer (sometimes accompanied) enters without permission one of England’s great estates and summons its history as an exhibit in his case against the illegality, injustice and impropriety of the alienation of land from the common people generally and traditional occupiers specifically. At the front of the book is an epigraph from Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879. “There have existed men who had the power to hold or to give exclusive possession of portions of the earth’s surface, but when and where did there exist the human being who had that right?” Issues of land ownership and land usage are unavoidable in a book such as this that investigates sense of place. My own first encounter with an ideological challenge to individual land title was Lewis Mumford’s book The Culture of Cities (1970), first published in 1938. As a doctoral student, I heroised Mumford, who was a guiding presence as I tried to make sense of the city in American poetry. On the matter of individual title, he was unequivocal: If individual land ownership works against the best utilisation of the land as a human resource, it is not the environment that must be sacrificed but the principle of unrestricted individual ownership. Now land, like the people who live on it, is “given”. It is only in a capitalistic civilisation that people have come lightly to believe that land may be bought and sold, divided up,  Interestingly, in a Guardian column on the historical alienation of land in England and loss of the “freedom to walk”, George Monbiot ends with a kind of clarion call: “It is time to decolonise the land”. Monbiot, B. (August 19, 2020). English landowners have stolen our rights. it is time to reclaim them. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/19/ pandemic-right-to-roam-england 9

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monopolised, and speculated in like any other commodity....What is important in a sound scheme of land utilisation is not individual ownership but security of tenure: this is what makes possible continuity of use, encourages permanent improvements, permits long range investment of effort. The public control of land for the benefit of the region and the city as a whole is the outstanding problem for modern statesmanship: a problem toward whose solution even the legal nationalisation of the land would be only a subordinate step. (p. 327)

I had the privilege of hearing Mumford, then in his late 70  s, deliver a keynote address at an American Studies conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. During question time I had the temerity (of youth) to ask him if he continued to be opposed to individual landownership. “Of course”, he replied, as if the answer were self-evident. In The Book of Trespass, Hayes (2020) offers a compelling account of two related social phenomena, which differ only in terms of which side of the fence you are on: enclosure and exclusion. Enclosure focuses on the remorseless and systematic fencing off of previously commonly utilised land into private estates. Exclusion signifies the fate of those who became landless as a result of these acts of enclosure – often poverty, stigmatisation10 and a variant of the experience of placelessness discussed in the last chapter. Underpinning this account is Foucault’s distinction between sovereign and discursive power as factors in the whole sorry saga. Sovereign power is power over, exercised by a leader or group through the use of force or coercion. In the “Fox” chapter, Hayes provides the example of William the Conqueror’s precedent-setting: “Harrying of the North, an assault on the commoners just shy of genocide....It was a campaign that relied on brute force, the power of the sword and the horse cutting the ties between the people and the land” (2020, p. 46). By the twelfth century, a quarter of England was “forested”, i.e. had become tracts set aside for hunting and no longer available for common use (p. 34). While William established a benchmark for the scale of brutality, the use of force was a regular feature of acts of enclosure. Hayes notes, for example, that “The Tudor era was the goldrush for private property. Common land was being privatised not only by barons of Norman heritage, but by any number of squires and gentry who saw the vast profits to be made in turning the land over to sheep” (p. 35). Discursive power produces an effect through the widespread subscription to the meanings about the world certain discourses represent, especially by powerful groups. How, for example, did the right of an individual to survey, occupy and lay claim to land become established and normalised? This, according to Hayes, “was a problem taken up by a range of Tudor philosophers, jurists and theologians” (pp. 39–41). In the “Fox” chapter, he succinctly sums up the line of argument that begins by referencing the theological Edenic presumption that “all land was given

 As Hayes (2020) points out, when “communities were cleared, they had to go somewhere, so they took to the roads,” where they became stigmatised as vagrants (p. 67). The SOED definition of vagrant is telling: “One of the class of persons who, having no settled home or regular work, wander from place to place, and maintain themselves by begging or in some disreputable or dishonest way”. A comparison with today’s urban homeless is inescapable. 10

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to all people” (p.  42). However, this did not prevent Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, from amending it somewhat to claim that “those who were able to ‘replenish the earth and subdue it”11 had earned their right to exclude others from it. While private property was a man-made invention, it consequently became tantamount to a law of nature. Following Grotius, von Pufendorf went on to insist that “the first person to occupy an area of land had a moral right to it simply because they did not have to displace anyone else to claim it as their own” (p. 42) (more on this below). Finally, Locke, writing in 1689, argued that “exclusive possession” could be earned by working. “Private property in land was an extension of the fundamental ownership of one’s body, and the labour it exerted” (p. 42). The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. (p. 43)

Just as the rule of law was designed to support a person’s right to protect their own life, since property was viewed as an extension of that life, so the rule of law became conscripted to the protection of property. As Hayes sums it up, “logic had led Locke from the natural law of self-preservation to the artificial law of property protection....” (pp. 43–4). Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke and the like were unable, or unwilling, to confront the true mechanism of land seizure, that the notion of peaceful first occupancy is a lie, that the land was already held by people that used it, relied on it and lived upon it. But when the cult of exclusion met the philosophy of the commons, exclusion won because it rode a horse. (p. 46)

It also won because of the discursive hegemony of the various doctrines that people in power, with the literary skills and means of dissemination at their disposal, propounded. In this regard, Foucault’s two types of power – sovereign and discursive power – work in tandem, since the powerful elites who benefited from enclosure and exclusion had both the pen and the sword at their disposal. It’s a mute point which of these emerged as the more effective – the mailed fist or the velvet glove of erudition. Hayes himself is at pains to suggest that these “tracts of logic are not as objective as their authors made out” (p. 54). Locke, for example, “was under the patronage of the Earl of Shaftesbury, and writing essentially in defence of colonialism” (p. 55). In this respect, he was a hired gun. This explains why Locke’s thought, however interpreted, had such a key role in the genocide that occurred in the Americas (see Chap. 5).12 In a similar vein, Fields (2017) asserts that: “Improving land and turning it into property through enclosure was a contingent process involving diverse groups of actors deciding whether individual rights to land served them or contributed to their impoverishment” (p. 26).

 For Hayes’ sources re Grotius, von Pufendorf and Locke, see 2020, pp. 397–8.  Hayes (pp.  330–1) draws attention to the conveniently overlooked “Lockean Proviso” which stated that enclosure of common lands was only justifiable if there was “enough and as good left in common”. 11 12

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As an English undergraduate in the 1980s, I used to associate language change with the great vowel shift13 and viewed the obsolescence and invention of words as largely the result of technological change. Later, as an educationalist and critical discourse analyst, I found myself making use of the concept of sense legitimation (Dale, 1989), which I described as: a strategy for manufacturing consent in a group and thereby achieving the hegemony of a discourse. The strategy involves couching potentially unpopular policy changes, for example, in words whose meanings have been subtly changed. (Locke, 2004, p. 50)

While Hayes (2020) does not make use of this concept, he does offer examples of it. Two can be found in the “Fox” chapter: 1. Acre: According to my ancient, two-volume copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the Old English word acre originally referred to “unenclosed land”, then “tilled enclosed land, a piece of definite size, a land measure”. This change would have occurred over perhaps three centuries, its pithy articulation here embedding a momentous history in a grain of usage. It is momentous because it is the history of a people’s relationship to the land and the way land was utilised – from communal resource to commodity. 2. Property: More significant is the legitimation of a new sense of property. As Hayes tells it, in feudal times, “property meant rights in a piece of land, referring to the customs of permissible actions and their reciprocal duties” (p. 52). (This is consistent with Mumford’s view of land utilisation mentioned earlier.) Medieval lawyers never spoke of owning land, but, rather of holding the land – an aspect echoed in the terms still used today of “freehold” and “leasehold”. The land was yours to use, according to local custom and to the ecology of what each particular site had to offer – you held it, but you didn’t have it. When the commons were particularised...that is, divided up and sold, these rights were part of the deal and became the sole right of the owner of the land – rights in land became rights to land. Property had come to be understood less as a network of relations between community and land, and now referred simply to the land itself. The space without the community.14 (p. 52)

Land had become a commodity. There were numerous enclosure acts in England between 1773 and 1820 which continued to shrink the areas of common land, alienate previous users from their occupations (in both senses of the word) and transform the land itself. I will return to England in Chap. 6, where I discuss the work of John Clare, his perspective on enclosure and his contemporary status as an environmental hero.

 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift  As Hayes (2020) points out, a term like “real estate” has nothing to do with authenticity. Real is derived from res/realis, the Latin word for thing. 13 14

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3.6.2 Scotland My great-great-great-grandfather, Adam Loch, lived from 1768 until 1855  in the parish of Legerwood, Berwickshire, in the Scottish borders. Around the time he died, only 4 per cent of land holdings in Berwick were less than 100 acres. His own grandfather, also Adam, born in 1702, was also born in Legerwood; the family connection with the place was long-standing. By virtue of his occupation as a shepherd, the younger Adam had to travel around the district to find work to support himself, his wife Janet and their children. One of their children was born in Lauder (Berwickshire), another in Meigle Potts (north of Galashiels, Selkirkshire) and another in Selkirk itself.15 The second of these was my great-great-grandfather George, who ended up in London as a successful building entrepreneur, changing his name to Locke and his religion to Anglican. In Māori terms, then, I whakapapa (establish a genealogical link) to a landless shepherd of the Borders named Adam and his wife Janet. I will never know what sense of place meant to him. His grandfather, most probably a cottar (see below), would have had a cottage to live in and some land to till.16 Adam, on the other hand, would have been aware that the landscape was now dominated by large, discrete farms, while contracted labourers like himself would be housed in new rural villages and towns that replaced the old hamlets. (Four of the farms in the district of his ancestors were owned by Henry Ker Seymer, Conservative MP for Dorset from 1846 until his death in 1864, including Legerwood Farm itself.) Maybe he and his family were provided with living space within a steading – a cluster of buildings in a newly “improved”, sizeable holding with one master and which included the master’s house. Did he have a feeling of affection for the fields where his charges grazed? Or to the community that gathered at the Legerwood Kirk, and had done since 1127? Or was he burdened with his lowly place in the new social order, which in both the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland was being changed irrevocably by processes that have become denoted by the word “clearances”? My first introduction to the clearances in Scotland was through John Prebble’s history The Highland Clearances, first published in 1963. It was readable, colourful and tragic. It was also partial. In the main, my guide in this section is Tom Devine, whose book The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed (2018) is aptly titled regarding the themes I am dealing with here. This history involves both severance and erasure: the severance of a connection between whole populations and the lands they traditionally toiled in for what was little better than subsistence, and the erasure of a way of life that would have contributed to the identity of these people and their sense of place. This history of rural upheaval was, as Devine puts it, “a national variant of broader developments in Europe” (p. 13) – another instance of  My thanks to the volunteers of the Borders Family History Society for helping to ascertain this information. 16  “As late as the 1750s, most people in the rural Lowlands had a stake in the land...” (Devine, 2018, p. 143). 15

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synecdoche. As in other parts of Britain, this was a top-down process, where the fate of the many was determined by the decision-making of a tiny, wealthy, landowning elite. In the end, “only a small minority of the many families who once had access to some land still remained in possession by the time this social and economic revolution had come to an end” (p. 13). In what follows, I offer an account of the way of life prior to this revolution and the values that inhered in it. I then say something about the process itself and the discourses which drove it. In doing so I will reflect on the aftermath and its significance for sense of place. Following Devine (2018), I distinguish where appropriate the situation in the Lowlands and Highlands. The former, which he refers to as a “forgotten history” (p.  83), began earlier and involved the dispossession of more people. In the late eighteenth century, the Lowland countryside was dotted with small hamlets (or fermetouns). People lived in “pitiful cots, built of stone and covered with turves, having in them but one room, many of them no chimneys, the windows very small holes, and not glazed” (Aitchison & Cassell, 2003, p. 18, cited in Devine, 2018 p. 63). This was a landscape of bog and moor, where “small islands of cultivation were worked in the runrig system,17 each tenant or group of farmers with their shares of infield, outfield and rough grazing”. Land was unenclosed and worked collectively (as often were the oxen) “with the holdings of tenants dispersed throughout the whole rather than set in compact, individual blocks” (p. 63). Cottars, who occupied the lowest rung in the social ladder, were offered small portions of land by tenants in exchange for their labour at appropriate times. By this time, the landowning laird’s traditional paternalism towards tenants was being replaced by a relationship of “impersonal economic contracts”, with leases now focused on “the economic responsibilities of rental payment, management of livestock and requirements of cultivation” (p. 69). According to Devine, the “thinning of the tenantry” began prior to 1750 but accelerated in the decades that followed. “Progress” and “efficiency” relied on the build-up of stock numbers, and this necessitated the removal of tenants and cottars from arable lands formerly occupied by the fermetoun in a process of “clearance by stealth and attrition” (Devine, 2018, p 150). The “new breed of élite tenants” (p. 92) was charged with the removal of the cottar class, which had all but vanished by 1815. “In essence, an entire social tier of the old order had been eliminated in many areas over the space of a few decades” (p. 166). Prior to the Battle of Culloden in 1745, when the Catholic Stuart army was virtually annihilated by the Hannovian forces under General Cumberland, the population of the Highlands was predominantly made up of crofters and cottars living in bailes (traditional settlements) in the glens and arable areas18 of western islands on estates, many of them huge, owned predominantly by clan chieftains. As in the Lowlands,

 “A ‘rig’ was a narrow strip of cultivated land. A ‘runrig’ involved each tenant being allocated several detached rigs or pieces of land, often on a yearly basis” (Devine, 2018, p. xxii). 18  The whole of Scotland was owned by around 2% of adult males, around 1500 in number. 17

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the runrig system was used to ensure that strips of land were available for tillage. Because this was a kin-based society, the clan’s territory was viewed differently and in a way that was at odds with the concept of private ownership. The areas settled by each clan were regarded as its collective heritage, or duthchas, and the fine [clan élite] were seen, not as the sole masters of these lands, but as the current guardians, protectors and trustees of the people who lived on them. (Devine, 2018, p. 35)

The concept of duthchas was central to a clan member’s identity and would have contributed to their sense of connectedness with the clan’s lands. It would also have offered a sense of security that things would remain the same. As it turned out, this was not to be, as many fine themselves found themselves in debt and began subordinating the “ethic of kinship...to the pursuit of profit” (p. 45). Wholesale clearances occurred later than in the Lowlands and involved fewer people. In places the traditional obligations of kinship of clan chiefs to their clansmen slowed the momentum for change. Elsewhere, a scattering of single crofts remained (the bailes had been destroyed), though often reduced in size, and occasionally with associated cottars. Their small size meant that the crofters “could not provide a full living for their families and pay rents only from work on the land but had to be fishermen or kelp burners as well” (Devine, 2018, p. 120). In some localities, the clearances were brutal and enforced through violence. On the massive Sutherland estate in the north, for example, whole populations were relocated to bleak coastal strips to allow the majority of the land to be given over to the pasturing of sheep. As Devine summarises it, “social transformation in Gaeldom was more traumatic and cataclysmic than anywhere else in Scotland. The highlands moved from tribalism to capitalism over less than two generations” (2018, p. 120). It was not as if the Highlands became depopulated, at least not in the first instance. Rather its people became largely dispossessed, dispersed and proletarianised. Depopulation occurred later via death by famine, recruitment into England’s overseas wars and migration elsewhere both within Britain and to “New World” countries (especially Canada). Significant to the theme of sense of place was the persistence among landless Highlanders of a refusal to countenance any basis for the evictions and an ongoing attachment to the lands they had been excluded from. In a chapter entitled “Rejecting the Highlands”, Devine (2018), in seeking an explanation for the “community exodus” to Upper Canada between 1773 and 1802, inferred that it arose from a repudiation of the position that was being offered to them in the social order of the reconstructed Highlands. “They specifically complained not of over-population but of losing their land to incomers who would break up the traditional bailes and merge the lands into single, large pastoral farms....They chose Canada because it satisfied the peasant aspiration for land and since emigration allowed the whole community to remain together as a functioning social entity” (p. 275). A poem penned by Rory Roy Mackenzie on his departure for Canada, translated as “The Emigration”, concludes:

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Now we are cramped. in gloomy huts without recompense, and the fields are occupied by sheep. owned by the unfriendly rich. (Devine, 2018, p. 279)

The focus here is both injustice and outrage at the way in which land is being used. However, Devine makes the further point that, based on the discourse of duthchas, Highlanders retained a belief in their rights to land, long after the legal battle had been lost. He cites from the Napier Commission of 1882–1883 as follows: The opinion was often expressed before us that the small tenantry of the Highlands had an inherited inalienable title to security of tenure in their possessions while rent and service are duly rendered which is an impression indigenous to the country though it has never been sanctioned by legal recognition, and has long been repudiated by the actions of the proprietors. (2018, p. 300)

3.6.3 More on Discursive Power In discussing dispossession in England, I drew attention to changing discourses around the processes of exclusion and enclosure and the concept of private property. In this section, I focus on the discourse of improvement and the relationship of property to the franchise. The first of these had a crucial role in the emerging industrial regime of power, because it became a central doctrine in the enforced alienation of territory from “non-improving” or supposedly nomadic occupiers. The second had a role in hallowing the landowner as a superior human being and therefore endowed with the power to govern non-landowning people as of right. I live in a country that was once famously described as a “Half-Gallon Quarter-­ Acre Pavlova Paradise”.19 The “quarter-acre” refers to its people’s aspiration to own a home on a quarter-acre section. This may have been feasible for most in 1972, but is no longer the case. According to a recent report, Aotearoa is the sixth least affordable country to buy a house.20 I became a small apartment co-owner in 1970 and thereby earned the right to pay rates to my local council. Then, as now, the value of the property had two components: “land value” and “value of improvements”. In terms of this nomenclature, which has come down to us from Elizabethan times, one can remove the topsoil from a section of land, cover it with concrete and build a monstrosity on it: these will still be “improvements”. Hayes has this to say about the concept’s endurance: The watchword of Tudor enclosure was “improvement”, a euphemism for privatisation that councils and building contractors use to this day. It contains the idea that unowned space was a waste of potential profit, and that society at large could be bettered by the private regulation of land. (2020, p. 35)

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Half-Gallon_Quarter-Acre_Pavlova_Paradise#cite_note-1  https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2022/03/new-zealand-ranked-sixth-least-affordablecountry-to-buy-a-house-report.html 19

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The concept, defined thus, is central to Devine’s analysis of the way in which clearance by stealth occurred in the Scottish lowlands. It was, of course, able to occur because landowners had absolute authority over the uses to which their estates were put. The discourse of improvement was both a justification for maximising profit and implementing enclosure/eviction/relocation. As Devine points out, these ideas were widespread in Europe, “but they seemed to have been introduced in Scotland with unusual force and vigour” (2018, pp. 140–1), and disseminated via its universities, its intellectuals (such as Adam Smith) and educated professionals. It found its way into the schemes of estate managers, such as the hated Patrick Sellar, a factor of the Sutherland estate. It became characterised by a wholesale rejection of traditional ways of life and land management as mindless and inefficient. As Devine summarises it: Uncritical intellectual legitimacy and credibility were afforded instead to virtually everything that was novel and innovative. Communal holdings and traditional patterns of work were especially damned because they were thought to inhibit individual freedom of enterprise and the natural aspiration of man to strive for profit and reward. Common lands were also unacceptable and they should be taken over, put under the plough and worked by industrious husbandmen. Nature was not preordained but could be changed for the better by rational and ordered human intervention. (2018, pp. 141–2)

A similar line of argument is reported in the work of Gary Fields (2017): Promoters of land improvement argued that productivity advances in agriculture depended on subdividing the landscape and assigning individual rights of ownership to these subdivided spaces. Such subdivisions of the landscape had a long-standing pedigree. The practice that converted common land to individual ownership and demarcated such land within hedges, walls, or fences was the practice of enclosure. Enclosing land in England was part of a long-term project of improving land by “making private property” on the English landscape....This transformation represents a decisive moment in the long-standing lineage of reallocations in property rights, in which groups with territorial ambitions gained control of land owned or used by others. Enclosure provided the mechanism for this redistribution of land and was the pivotal event in the agrarian history of early modern England. By the early sixteenth century, enclosure had begun a long, if uneven, march toward eradicating common field farming and remaking a landscape that once boasted a large inventory of land used as a collective resource. What replaced this landscape was a system in which land was recast from a “bundle of rights” into a bounded “thing” able to be possessed by individuals as property.

What adds significance to this restatement is the title of Fields’ book: Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror. His starting point is a desire to explain dispossession in Palestine. The result is a journey back in time to investigate the discursive power operating in the enclosure acts of England and its transplantation onto the landscape of the United States. As one reviewer put it: For Fields, the roots of this massive land theft are far deeper than the Israel–Palestine conflict and more geographically extensive than the contested spaces normally associated with it....the author of Enclosure takes his readers on a long journey – one that begins in Medieval England, that then goes to the settler colonisation of the Amerindian landscape of what is today the United States in the 1600s, and that only thereafter arrives in Israel-Palestine. In all three cases, Fields illustrates, those engaged in the process of land dispossession, directly

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or indirectly, employed a narrative of “improvement” in the effort to re-territorialize the space they coveted. (Nevins, 2018, p. 157)

Owning land is not a perquisite to the development of a sense of place. However, the ability to feel rooted in a place and secure in one’s tenure is crucial to the development of a sense of belonging and rootedness in place. What we have been confronting in this section is a process of uprooting, dispossession, dislocation and rupture on a monumental scale which would in many cases have caused psychological damage to those who survived the process and didn’t die as a result of it.

3.7 Sense of Place and Wellness The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (1946, first bullet). Williams and Eyles (2008) note in the introduction to their edited book on Sense of Place, Health and Quality of Life that sense of place has generally been overlooked as a factor in health/well-being, partly because it is difficult to measure. They identify three characteristics of place which have the potential to impact on health: the physical environment, social relationships and the psychological, “e.g., identity and attachment to the physical and or social attributes of the locality” (p. 4). They use the concept of the therapeutic landscape to acknowledge the way places can positively affect a person’s well-being (p. 6). DeMiglio and Williams (2012) go so far as to suggest that sense of place might well be considered a kind of sixth sense, contending that “just as the five senses play a role in sustaining health and well-being, it is possible that sense of place does the same” (p. 17). This does not just apply to the natural world. They cite urban planner Kevin Lynch’s belief that the sensed quality of a place encompasses: …what one can see, how it feels underfoot, the smell of the air, the sounds of bells and motorcycles, how patterns of these sensations make up the quality of places, and how that quality affects our immediate well-being, our actions, our feelings, and our understandings… What is sensed has fundamental and pervasive effects on well-being. (1976, pp. 8–9, cited in DeMiglio & Williams, 2012, p. 18)

Mary Oliver is just one of the many poets who explore the relationship between place and feelings of well-being in their work. At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened. (1992, p. 226)

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Conversely, a place can become toxic for both individuals and communities. Clearly those Highland Scots that Devine writes about, who were part of an exodus to Canada, had become deeply alienated by the changes that reconstruction had wrought on their traditional lands. American social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove (1996, 2004) has written extensively about the negative psychological effects that can occur when people’s sense of place is ruptured through such processes as displacement, particularly in urban settings. Place identity is concerned with the extraction of a sense of self based on the places in which one passes one’s life. Each of these psychological processes – attachment, familiarity, and place identity – is threatened by displacement, and the problems of nostalgia, disorientation, and alienation may ensue. (1996, p. 1516)

However, such trauma can occur in a range of contexts. Australian researchers Ellis and Albrecht (2017) studied the “mental health impacts of climate change on family farmers who retain close living and working relationships to the land” and discovered that “recently observed patterns of climate change” had “exacerbated farmers’ worries about the weather, undermined notions of self-identity, and contributed to cumulative and chronic forms of place-based distress, culminating in heightened perceived risk of depression and suicide” (p.  161). Relevant to the theme of this chapter, these farmers valued their farms as “a meaningful place, central to personal understandings of family, home and personal identity” (p. 164). As argued in Chap. 1, the development of a sense of place as a positive aspect of identity is crucial to the health of the planet, as well as to the health of individuals and communities. Essentially, the two go hand in hand. As Williams and Eyles (2008) point out, “Place-based research contributes to a better understanding of environment as a health determinant and may be applied to solutions directed at improving health, such as enhancing the health promoting qualities of the places where people spend their time” (p. 5.) Environmental degradation and exploitation are unlikely to be health promoting. Nor are they going to assist people who are facing the task of rebuilding a sense of place as a result of such processes as immigration, relocation and displacement. Finally, of relevance to the climate crisis, is the notion that “sense of place plays a role in the development of environmental stewardship” (DiMiglio & Williams, p. 26). This is another key proposition in the argument that this book is making. Nature researcher Bjørn Kaltenborn (1998) studied the responses of residents of the Svalbard (Spitsbergen) archipelago in the Norwegian high Arctic to a range of recent environmental impacts. As he pointed out, “The past couple of decades have witnessed a rapid expansion of natural resource exploitation and industrial activity throughout the Arctic” (p. 169). In general, his respondents viewed their environment favourably, viewing it as the “last wilderness area of Europe” (p.  177). However, those with a “strong sense of place” distinguished themselves from other respondents by their “stronger interest or willingness to contribute to solutions to environmental problems” (p. 184).

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3.8 Re-membering Sense of Place In 1993, I located the stone farm-cottage and outbuildings that my Irish grandmother, Annie Lowery, grew up in in the townland of Cornacartan21 in the civil parish of Killererin in the Barony of Dunmore near Tuam in County Galway. The townland was around 110 acres in size and included 50 acres of bogland. Their small land holding was part of a settlement of houses called a clachan – in 1891 inhabited by nine families. All were tenants of the landowners, descendants of Hugh Henry, who had purchased the Toghermore Estate near Tuam in1790.22 Most inhabitants were semi-literate. My grandmother – my father’s mother – was one of the eleven siblings, nine of whom emigrated to Australia and New Zealand around 1900. Discovering the cottage was a combination of luck, one or two documentary clues and local assistance. We were led to the cottage by a local man, Paddy Mannion, a relative of whom had formerly lived in Cornacartan. Accompanied by my 10-year-old daughter, Susanna, I entered through the front door of the cottage, which still had its original thatch (though this had been sheeted over with polythene). At either end were dark sleeping spaces without windows to avoid a window tax. The main area had been given over to the storage of hay bales and the visitations of turkeys. It looked as if it had been unoccupied since the death or departure of my great-grandparents some time before the census of 1911. Above the doorway was a water-stained picture of the Sacred Heart; a pewter eggcup nestled on a window sill; in the hearth hung cooking pots and implements; a two-sided spade (sleán) for digging peat leaned against the mantlepiece. I am writing this from memory, engaging in a process we might term recollection or recall. However, something else is happening here. Firstly, because remembering is an active process, I am representing this experience by the dual process of selecting and organising words, some of them concrete images, since I’m wanting to convey something of the sensuousness of this place. I am also re-membering. I am using the act of writing as a way of connecting with the place that my father’s mother occupied for the first 19 years of her life – a place she shared with other family members and the eight other families in the clachan. I think of this social world as an aspect of the place and a communion of presences. Through re-­ membering I can connect with them and, in doing so, evoke them as presences in the ongoing life of my mind. It is an active process; I am calling them to mind. And they feature as an aspect of my sense of place.

 Corn a Ceártan: roundhill of the forge or smithy  See https://killererin.galwaycommunityheritage.org/content/places/toghermore-house-man-gaveaway-branded-communist 21 22

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3.8.1 The Clearances Revisited Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod’s short story, “Clearances”, written in 1999, has its primary setting on Cape Breton Island, on the north-eastern side of Nova Scotia, around 270 nautical miles from Prince Edward Island, one of the favoured destinations of the exodus Devine (2018) wrote about as rejecting the Highlands. We experience the action through the eyes of an old man, 10 years after the death of his wife, but reliving her death in the present moment, when the narrative begins to unfold. He lives on a small, mixed-use holding, alone with his dog in the house that his grandfather built and where he grew up as the only son – thereby having the customary right to join his father catching fish for market in the family boat. Within the family circle, Gaelic was still spoken, as it had been for generations, but proving to be an impediment in the business of buying and selling. He identifies with the French-speaking Arcadians “across the river” and the “Mi’kmaq to the east. All of them trapped in the beautiful prisons of the languages they loved” (2011, p. 418). The secondary setting is the north-west of Scotland, which (in a narrative flashback) the narrator visits by train while on leave during the Second World War. While doing so, he encounters Gaelic-speaking people and specifically a shepherd and his dog, with whom he strikes up a conversation in his native tongue. “You are from Canada? You are from the clearances?” Beyond the train’s windows the empty moors stretched to the base of the mist-shrouded mountains. The tumbling white-watered streams cascaded down the mountains’ sides and a lonely eagle circled over the stone foundations of a vanished people. (p. 419)

At one point the shepherd asks him whether it is possible in Canada to “own and keep your land”, to which he replies in the affirmative. “‘Fancy that,’ replied the shepherd. He was an older man who reminded him of his father” (p. 420). Over the course of a week exploring the area around Ardnamurchan, he bonds with the shepherd, who offers to teach him how to breed dogs similar to his. “They will be with you until the end” (p. 421). The Scottish interlude is important because it enables a process of re-­membering, where the narrator establishes a connection with his ancestral past, its way of life (including its craft knowledge), its language and its history of dispossession. On his return to Canada after the war, energised by his survival and new knowledge, he clears more of his land and invests in better livestock. Ironically, what he doesn’t do is adequately survey and mark off the land he gives his sons to build their houses on. (He is not strong on boundaries.) When the younger son dies in a building accident, his widow sells “her property to a surly summer couple who erected a seven-foot privacy fence and kept a sullen pitbull who paced restlessly behind it” (p. 423). Back in the narrative present, he and his older son John face a number of threats that enable readers to view their plight as not unlike that of their Highland ancestors: 1. Economic forces have rendered their way of life untenable. Changes in fishing quotas have meant that his son’s boat sits idle, “unable to be of use and unable to be sold” (p. 423). Like the crofters in the Highlands, John is reduced to the status

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of wage labourer, displaced from his home, working for Portuguese fishermen on Lake Erie. “‘The crying gulls followed the boats of Lake Erie too,’ John said, ‘but they were a different species’” (p. 423). Many neighbouring farms are no longer stocked and properly maintained. His own farm is regularly reclaimed by spruce trees, which he can use as a cash crop, but with collateral damage to the rural environment. 2. Changes in land use and occupation are displacing the traditional way of life and its hallowed crafts. This displacement has already been anticipated by the symbolic reference to a Condon’s woollen blanket at the start of the story, woven in Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island. He and his wife had once sent quality fleeces to the mill.23 The local area is now targeted by tourists and lifestylers from New England and further afield, who think of it as a “prime recreation area” rather than a place to make a living from farming and fishing. He himself can no longer fish for salmon: They had fished under the threat the Government would eliminate such customs as theirs because it was thought to be more beneficial if their few salmon entered the mainland rivers for the benefit of summer anglers. And the rumours had proven, eventually, to be true. (p. 426)

He is also under threat from the Park located to the north of his home, moving “like a slow-­moving glacier, claiming more and more land to be used as hiking trails and wilderness areas, while the families in its path worried about eviction notices”. (p. 426)24 Towards the end of the story, he is visited by a real-estate salesman bringing a couple from Germany, who are looking for “land with ocean frontage”: “They say there is no land like this for sale anywhere in Europe” (p.  427). One of the Germans observes that the area is sparsely populated, to which he responds that many former inhabitants have moved to the United States, Halifax and southern Ontario. This is comparable to the Highland exodus and for similar reasons. As the story concludes, he recalls his visit to Condon’s Woollen Mill but then remembers it no longer exists. He then finds himself with his dog confronting the neighbour’s pit bull advancing on them bent on attack. “‘Neither of us was born for this,’ he thought, and then, from a great distance, across the ocean and across the years, he heard the voice of his friend the shepherd,... ‘They will be with you until the end’” (p. 430–1). This story is an example of the fiction writer’s representation of sense of place and the attendant themes of identity, displacement, dispossession, land use and stewardship and community. Apart from a passing reference to the Mi’kmaq people, issues related to the traditional owners of this part of Canada are not treated in this story. They, and other indigenous peoples, are the subject of the next chapter.

 The mill shut down in 1989, but the blankets are still collectors’ items.  For a Parks Canada view of the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, see https://www.pc.gc.ca/ en/pn-np/ns/cbreton/info/plan/ebauche-draft#section-0 23 24

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References Abrams, M. H. (1981). A glossary of literary terms (4th ed.). Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Aitchison, P., & Cassell, A. (2003). The lowland clearances: Scotland’s silent revolution, 1760–1830. Tuckwell Press. Hirsch, A. (2018a). ‘Where are you from?’ Afua Hirsch on race, identity and belonging. Financial Times (January, 26). Retrieved May 5, 2023 from https://www.ft.com/content/84b4c0a2-­ 0097-­11e8-­9650-­9c0ad2d7c5b5 Hirsch, A. (2018b). Brit(ish): On race, identity and belonging. UK. Vintage. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel: Notes toward a historical poetics. In The dialogic imagination (M. Holquist & C. Emerson, Trans.) (pp. 84–228). University of Texas Press (original work published 1937–1938. Barry, S. (2023). Old God’s time. Faber & Faber. Convery, I., Corsane, G., & Davis, P. (Eds.). (2012). Making sense of place: Multidisciplinary perspectives. Boydell & Brewer. Cremin, T., & Locke, T. (Eds.). (2017). Writer identity and the teaching and learning of writing. Routledge. Dale, R. (1989). The state and education policy. Open University Press. Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. Vintage. Davidson, J. (2022). On synecdoche. Current Anthropology, 63(1), 125. DeMiglio, L., & Williams, A. (2012). A sense of place, a sense of well-being. In A. Williams & J. Eyles (Eds.), Sense of place, health and quality of life (pp. 15–30). Routledge. Devine, T. (2018). The Scottish clearances: A history of the dispossessed 1600–1900. Penguin Random House. Earl, K., & Kidd, J. (2018). Sense-making of identity, community and future(s) in ‘our place’ at this time. In R. E. Rinehart, J. Kidd, & G. A. Garcia (Eds.), Southern hemisphere ethnographies of space, place, and time (pp. 83–102). Peter Lang. Ellis, N. R., & Albrecht, G. A. (2017). Climate change threats to family farmers’ sense of place and mental wellbeing: A case study from the Western Australian wheatbelt. Social Science & Medicine, 175, 161–168. Fields, G. (2017). Enclosure: Palestinian landscapes in a historical mirror. University of California Press. Fullilove, M. T. (1996). Psychiatric implications of displacement: Contributions from the psychology of place. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 153(12), 1516–1523. Fullilove, M. T. (2004). Root shock: How tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America, and what we can do about it. Random House. Gieryn, T. F. (2000). A space for place in sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 463–496. Hayes, N. (2020). The book of trespass: Crossing the lines that divide us. Bloomsbury Publishing. Kaltenborn, B.  P. (1998). Effects of sense of place on responses to environmental impacts: A study among residents in Svalbard in the Norwegian high Arctic. Applied Geography, 18(2), 169–189. Kress, G. (1997). Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronically mediated communication: The potentials of new forms of text. In I. Snyder (Ed.), Page to screen: Taking literacy into the electronic era (pp. 53–79). Allen & Unwin. Liu, E., & Freestone, R. (2016). Revisiting place and placelessness. In R.  Freestone & E.  Liu (Eds.), Place and placelessness revisited (pp. 20–34). Routledge. Locke, T. (2004). Critical discourse analysis. Continuum. Lynch, K. (1976). Managing the sense of a region. The MIT Press. MacLeod, A. (2011). The clearances. In Island: The complete stories (pp. 413–431). W. W. Norton & Company. Mumford, L. (1970). The culture of cities. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Nevins, J. (2018). Enclosure: Palestinian landscapes in a historical mirror. Socialism and Democracy, 32(2), 156–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2018.1508973 Oliver, M. (1992). New and selected poems: Volume 1. Beacon Press. van Eijck, M., & Roth, W.-K. (2010). Towards a chronotopic theory of “place” in place-based education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 5(4), 869–898. Williams, A., & Eyles, J. (2008). Introduction. In A. Williams & J. Eyles (Eds.), Sense of place, health and quality of life (pp. 1–13). Routledge. World Health Organisation (WHO). (1946). Constitution of the World Health Organisation. World Health Organisation Interim Commission.

Chapter 4

Indigeneity and Sense of Place

The thesis of this chapter is that there are commonalities in respect of sense of place that can be found among a range of indigenous peoples, based on a particular relationship between the society or culture and the land it occupies (or once occupied). This relationship will be explored with reference to a number of indigenous peoples, drawing in the main on indigenous sources. The character of this relationship, I contend, is something others (e.g. descendants of colonisers, inheritors of European intellectual traditions) can learn from, especially as we address the current climate crisis.

4.1 The Piktukowaq of Nova Scotia At the end of Chap. 3, I discussed at some length Alistair MacLeod’s (2011) short story, “Clearances”. The land the ageing narrator of this story lived on was once part of the territory occupied by the Mi’kmaw people, who had occupied most of what became Canada’s Maritime Provinces for around 11,000 years. “For the Mi’kmaw, wandering was the cultural norm for being on the land, a sustainable and altering use of territory so as not to deplete available resources” (Lewis, Castleden, Apostle, Francis, & Francis-Strickland, p. 70). In 1967, the Nova Scotia government gave permission to a pulp and paper mill near the town of Pictou to begin dumping 85 million litres of effluent daily into a lagoon which adjoins a small Mi’kmaw community of around 480 people – mostly members of the Piktukowaq band  – called Pictou Landing First Nation (PLFN). Consequently, “what was once a culturally significant estuary known to the community as A’se’k [‘the other room’] – providing food, medicines, berries, and recreation” – became a potential health hazard, and its destruction was “an assault on the very identity of the Piktukowaq” (Lewis et al., 2021, pp. 68, 74). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 T. Locke, Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4266-4_4

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This article touches on issues that I will be focusing on in Chap. 5 in relation to colonisation and its attendant processes/practices of dispossession and genocide (including forms of cultural erasure). As these authors put it: “Environmental dispossession is the process through which traditional access to the resources of the environment is reduced, and is characterised by displacement, environmental contamination, unprecedented resource extraction, or land rights disputes” (2021, p. 68). Of significance to the theme of this chapter, however, is the authors’ concern with “place-based identities” with special reference to indigenous communities and how these identities are affected when a traditional environment is polluted. (The relation of sense of place and health and well-being is a theme of Chap. 3.) Rather than using a conceptual framework derived from European linguistic, cultural and academic practice, these authors developed a conceptual framework based around key concepts in the Mi’kmaw language while at the same time drawing on English language to develop an heuristic that communicates something of the Mi’kmaw people’s world view to non-indigenous readers. As Tuhiwai Smith (2012) asserts, the epistemological foundations of indigenous peoples are embedded in language. The resultant world view is a relational one, and place is at the heart of it. I summarise below the Mi’kmaw conceptual framework developed by the indigenous researchers and PLFN Knowledge Holders, who enabled us access to this exemplary study. It is a framework based on “the deep and sacred connection the Piktukowaq had to A’se’k and all that was lost when A’se’k was destroyed” (2021, p. 71). The authors share six concepts with their readers: 1. Piktuk: This might be thought of as a vantage point or stance – “The Piktukowaq come to know by interacting with the land, with each other, through experience, through observation, through oral history and legends, and through dreams and visions” (p.  72). When this is disrupted, for example, by the degradation of A’se’k, the Piktukowaq experience a profound disorientation. 2. Weji-squalia’timk (“where we sprouted or emerged from”) communicates the Mi’kmaw belief that the “origin of people” and “cultural memory” are rooted in the land. “Land is integral to the cultural and spiritual psyche of the Mi’kmaq, to their language, to their social order, and to their way of being” (p. 72). 3. Tlilnuo’lti’k: This concerns “the process of maintaining the Mi’kmaw worldview” (p. 72). 4. Netukulimk: This “reflects a value system that dictates the interaction between the Mi’kmaq and nature. As a set of rules and obligations, it embraces the cultural norms for being on the land and for the sustainable use of resources” (p. 72). Take no more than what you need, give back and give thanks. 5. Ko’kmanaq (“our relations”): “A value system of how Mi’kmaq extend a relationship to both animate and inanimate objects, creating a relationship of respecting kinship and a reciprocity that includes obligations” (p. 72). This particular belief deepens one’s appreciation of the grief experienced by members of this community when they first encountered fish dying in A’se’k. 6. Tiljim msi’ko’ltiek (“we are so sorry”): This word embraces such experiences as the loss of the fish and the continuing grief for the loss of the traditional connec-

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tion to A’se’k. Tellingly, the same word is used “to express sorrow when someone loses a family member” (p. 73). While Lewis et  al. are reluctant to translate their approach “universally to all Indigenous worldviews – Piktukowaq knowledge only applies to the place it was created, in Piktuk” (p. 78), they are prepared to generalise in stating that “Indigenous knowledge systems, worldviews, languages, cultures, and spiritualties depend on a strong relationship to land and environment…” (2021, p. 68). Reflecting on this, I’m bound to wonder whether the concept of tiljim msi’ko’ltiek, had he had access to it, would have resonated with the narrator of “Clearances” and his Highland ancestors. I would like to think so.

4.2 Indigeneity Thus far I have been using the words “indigenous/indigeneity” with a connotation that is relatively modern and more likely to be understood and used in some parts of the globe more than others.1 My ageing SOED dates “indigenous” (from Latin indigena: ancient) back to 1646 and defines it as “born or produced naturally in a land or region, native to”.2 In an article in The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education on culturally responsive research and pedagogy in music education in relation to indigenous peoples (Locke & Prentice, 2016), my co-author and I drew attention to the fact that no UN agency had adopted an official definition of “indigenous” owing to the diversity of indigenous peoples (United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, n.d.). For our purposes we opted for a widely used definition based on Special Rapporteur José Martinéz Cobo’s (1983) report to the Commission on Human Rights, a part of the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The definition comes from a section of his report entitled “Ideas for the definition of indigenous populations from the international point of view”. In a paragraph of only one sentence, he notes that, “This is, of course, an extremely complicated, difficult and delicate task” (para 363, p. 48). However, he goes on to state that he wants to do his duty to the committee that appointed him and offer a “provisional formulation” (para 365, p. 48). His position throughout this process is that “a definition is one that must be left to the indigenous communities themselves” (para 368, p. 49). Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their

 In general, I have not capitalised “indigenous” in this book. However, I had not altered citations where authors do capitalise the word. 2  Devine (2018) regularly uses the word “indigenous” to refer to the original populations of both lowland and highland Scotland who were dispossessed of their holdings. 1

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4  Indigeneity and Sense of Place ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems. (para 379, p. 50.)

There is an implied distinction here between definition and usage. There is no suggestion that the term should not be used, but rather that the definition that Martinéz Cobo offers should be viewed as provisional. In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Body’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, n.d.) which, building on Cobo Martinez’s work, had been worked on since 1982, when the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) established the Working Group on Indigenous Populations charged with developing a set of minimum standards to protect indigenous peoples. At the time, four nations voted against a motion for its adoption: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. It is not a coincidence that the indigenous peoples who feature most prominently in this chapter come from these countries, all of which eventually signed the declaration. A clue for this reluctance can be found in Article 26.1, which states that: “Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired” (p. 19), and Article 27, which calls for a “fair, independent, impartial, open and transparent process, giving due recognition to indigenous peoples’ laws, traditions, customs and land tenure systems” (p.  20). The Declaration clearly posed problems in respect of land law, including legislation based around an exclusive commitment to individual title. Peters and Mika (2017) offer a useful overview of the contentious nature of terms such as “indigenous” and “aborigine”. Calling on Foucault’s contention that any term is a product of discursive construction, they note that: “Most indigenous peoples prefer to be named or referred to by their specific nation or tribe names which themselves are sometimes contentious” (p. 1229). They also make the point that in a range of official, legal and academic contexts, their use has “the effect of homogenising peoples in ways that early imperial anthropology created ‘others’ as ‘indigenous’ in differentiation and opposition to colonial settlers” (p. 1229). As Roach and Egan (2008) argue, postcolonial attempts to define indigeneity are inevitably influenced by the etymological origins of its recent construction, which conflate meanings derived from historical connotations of “aboriginal” and “native”. Modern international definitions generally require both aspects for recognition as “indigenes”, that is, both colonisation/subjugation as well as aboriginality or first occupancy. The union of these two distinct elements within a single construct leads to discomfort on the part of nation-states involved with the drafting of rights compacts. (p. 28)

While the first of these aspects calls for the adoption of an emancipatory agenda entailing, for example, the rights of full citizenship within the nation state, the second offers to those self-identifying as aboriginal occupiers the basis of claims for self-determination, sovereignty and unique rights (including collective rights). It is this latter aspect which poses a challenge to a nation state, where the legal system is essentially built around an emphasis on individual rights, and why the privileging of a minority population raises a range of thorny issues. “Indigeneity rests on the

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recognition of ‘collective’ or ‘group’ rights, which can be interpreted as conflicting with individual rights in important ways” (2008, p. 26). In this chapter, I am adopting a way of classifying minority groups drawn from the work of educationalist and applied linguist Stephen May (2002, 2017), who has written extensively on the entitlements of minority populations of the modern national state. In investigating this topic, he distinguishes between: 1. National minorities: “those groups who have long been associated historically with a particular territory but who, as a result of colonisation, confederation, or conquest (or some combination of all three), now find themselves socially and politically marginalised” (2017, p.149). “These groups can include, for example, Welsh in Britain, Catalan and Basques in Spain, Bretons in France, Quebecois in Canada, and some Hispanic groups in the United States” (2002. p. 27). Indigenous peoples form a distinct subset within the category of national minority. 2. Ethnic minorities: These are either voluntary migrants to a new country or those forced unwillingly to relocate (2017). In what follows I offer a series of indigenous perspectives on sense of place, in part for what they have to offer in a world facing its own demise and in part because I believe they offer to those of us with European ancestry a glimpse into the kind of connection to traditional lands our tipuna3 may have had before they were dispossessed and/or before changes in land use and stewardship turned it into a commodity. As much as possible, I will be privileging indigenous voices or the voices of those whom indigenous people have trusted with their stories. Aotearoa/New Zealand Tukua mai he kapunga oneone ki ahau hei tangi māku. Send me a handful of soil so that I may weep over it. (Pihama et al. 2019, p. 11)

The above proverb is taken from He Kare-ā-roto: A selection of whakataukī related to Māori emotions. Germane to this chapter is the authors’ explanation of the whakataukī: As Māori we have an intimate connection to the land and as tangata whenua we see ourselves as kaitiaki of this taonga. This connection to the whenua provides us with a source of identity, spiritual nourishment and emotional healing. Being away from home, one feels a sense of aroha and longing for the land and often feels compelled to return to fill the wairua and nourish the soul. The land absorbs the tears that we may shed and can also provide healing in times of emotional turmoil. (p. 12)

While published in Aotearoa, the book’s URL describes it as “downloadable”. In its explanations it positions itself as reaching out to (non-Māori) readers. Even so, the explanation of the proverb above is laced with Māori terms that readers are

 Māori for “ancester”. Visit https://www.newzealandartwork.com/shop/product/225755/tipuna/ #:~:text=%22Tipuna%22%20meaning%20%22ancestor%22,%2D%20The%20Rope%20of%20 Mankind%22 for an example of the way this concept might function for a contemporary Māori visual artist. 3

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expected to understand or grapple with. Tangata whenua is a collective term for the aboriginal inhabitants of Aotearoa and literally means “people of the land”. The intimacy of the people/place connection is reinforced by the secondary meaning of the word whenua as “placenta”. The word wairua is somewhat akin to “spirit” or “soul”. However, like other Māori concepts, it cannot easily be separated from te ao Māori – the Māori world view. Kennedy et al. (2015), in an article published by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, begin their discussion of wairua by quoting from Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012), who draws attention to the connection between the “essence of a person” and “indigenous concepts of spirituality” (p. 77) In these views, the essence of a person has a genealogy which can be traced back to an earth parent, usually glossed as an Earth Mother. A human person does not stand alone, but shares with other animate and, in the Western sense, ‘inanimate’ beings, a relationship based on a shared ‘essence’ of life. The significance of place, of land, of landscape, of other things in the universe, in defining the very essence of a people, makes for a very different rendering of the term essentialism as used by indigenous peoples. (p. 77)

Kennedy et al. (2015) comment on “the refusal of indigenous peoples to be spiritually separated from our mother earth and all our relations that co-exist on this planet” and to subscribe to a Western ontology where the spiritual is “excluded as either intangible…or simply irrelevant” (p. 85). Rather, they argue that a spiritual awareness is essential to individual health and well-being (see also, Teddy et al., 2008). Pihama et al. (2020) include the following as a justification for their focus on whakataukī as offering insight into “the traditional wisdom of our ancestors” (p. ii). Te reo Māori is replete with emotional expression that is more than simply ‘emotive’ or ‘metaphorical’ but rather there is a deep ontology of emotions within te reo Māori and mātauranga Māori that transforms how emotions are understood and expressed. Exploring Māori views of emotions affirms that there are unique ways of ‘feeling’ within Indigenous worldviews that can serve to decolonise current understandings of emotional wellbeing to support wider Kaupapa Māori approaches to wellbeing. Wider Indigenous research highlights emotional wellbeing as essential to overall wellbeing and healthy relationships. (p. iii)

In Aotearoa, Māori language is often referred to simply as te reo. Mātauranga Māori can be understood as the body of knowledge developed on the basis of a Māori ontology and epistemology that predates contact with Europeans. The concept is systematically treated in Guide to the mātauranga framework (EPA, 2020), which includes the following description: Mātauranga has its own unique characteristics which are as valid as, but different from, other knowledge systems, including science. However, some disregard mātauranga, because they perceive it as “myth and legend, fantastic and implausible”. In fact, mātauranga includes knowledge generated using techniques consistent with a scientific approach, but which are explained according to a Māori world view. (p. 4)

The word kaupapa might be thought of as the principles and ideas which underpin a course of action. In recent years, a range of Māori scholars, theorists and

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practitioners have systematically developed a kaupapa Māori framework.4 These include tino Rangatiratanga (the principle of self-determination) and whānau (the principle of extended family structure). The latter acknowledges “the relationships that Māori have to one another and to the world around them” and “the responsibility and obligations of the researcher to nurture and care for these relationships” (Rangahau, n.d., para 6). Tellingly, for the trajectory of this book’s argument, the framework includes ako Māori – the principle of culturally preferred pedagogy. This acknowledges “teaching and learning practices that are inherent and unique to Māori, as well as practices that may not be traditionally derived but are preferred by Māori” (n.d., para 4) [italics mine]. From their first encounters with Europeans, Māori adopted “preferred” practices without necessarily seeing these practices as undermining their traditional kaupapa. I will revisit this principle in Chap. 5, where I explore the notion of cultural hybridity as a kind of epistemological code-switching. While the perspective that is emerging thus far is drawn from a relatively small collection of sources, a number of clear themes are emerging: 1. Ontology: For Māori, to be is to be in connection with both other people, especially one’s extended family and community, and the land and its life forms and (supposedly) inanimate forms. 2. Epistemology: Māori have a distinctive knowledge system (mātauranga) which offers a spiritual orientation to practical knowledge and how this knowledge should be applied in one’s interaction with the social and natural environment; there is an ethics of applied knowledge. At the same time, this system does not preclude the development of practical knowledge through empirical processes. (In the Western world, the separation of what we nowadays call science from natural philosophy occurred over the course of three centuries beginning in the seventeenth century. The modern usage of the word “science” dates back to the nineteenth century. One could argue that this separation has not occurred in mātauranga Māori – and even that this may not be a bad thing.) 3. Collectivity: There is an overwhelming focus on the collective and one’s network of obligations and relationships to others. 4. Conservatism: Poststructuralist theory does not take kindly to terms such as “essential” because of the way it can be employed to reify (or fix) entities and identities. My use of the term in Chap. 1 is consistent with such a critique because of the way essentialising can work negatively in the stereotyping of, for example, ethnic groups. Linda Smith (2012), in referring to “the very essence of a people”, insists that indigenous peoples have a “very different rendering” of the term (p.  77). My use of the word “conservatism” should not be read primarily in political terms, but rather in relation to the word conservator: a person or group charged with preserving and sustaining a cultural artefact. In this case, of course, the artefact could not be more high stakes, since it is foundational to an indigenous 4  Readers are invited to visit Rangahau (n.d.). Principles of Kaupapa Māori (http://www.rangahau. co.nz/research-idea/27/) for a clear and helpful articulation of these principles.

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person’s identity. And these identities, like their associated languages, have (one might say) become a threatened species as a result of colonisation and/or genocide. In this case, then, essentialising identity can be viewed as a strategy for cultural survival and sustainability. Dame Anne Salmond, Distinguished Professor in Māori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland, is an example of a Pākehā scholar who has over many years gained the trust of Māori.5 The background to her article, “Ontological quarrels: Indigeneity, exclusion and citizenship in a relational world” (2012), is the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 between a number of Māori chiefs and the British Crown. The Treaty exists in two versions, English and Māori, both of which contain concepts that were poorly understood by the other side. While the Treaty has become a foundation document in Aotearoa, its legacy requires a recognition that to some extent the sides were talking past each other and that there are implications of this in New Zealand’s ongoing efforts to frame workable bicultural policy that addresses such issues as sovereignty. Salmond (2012) draws on the work she did for the Waitangi Tribunal6 investigating how rangitira (chiefs) might have understood the agreement they made with the Crown. In presenting her report to the Tribunal in 2010, she became acutely aware that, “Different ‘worlds’ were at stake, along with cash settlements and political influence, and these were mutually implicated” (p. 118). Drawing on a traditional chant, Salmond comments that in terms of te ao Māori, “there is no radical disjuncture between mind and matter, thought and emotion, subject and object, the ideal and the real. Because everything is animated by hau tupu and hau ora, the winds of growth and life, including objects and people (ahau means ‘I’ in Māori), animate and inanimate phenomena are not distinguished” (p. 120). She goes on to say that: At the time of Te Tiriti [the Treaty], when rangitira or chiefs spoke of an ancestor in the first person as ‘ahau’, or ‘I’, it was because they were the ‘living face’ of that ancestor, and when they spoke of their kin groups in the first person, it was because they shared ancestral hau together….People cared for the hau of the kin networks and the land and the sea on which they grew, giving them offerings (known as whāngai hau or ‘feeding the hau’), and particular animals or powerful beings acted as kai tiaki, or guardians…the same term tiaki that was used in relation to Queen Victoria in the final clause of Te Tiriti. (p. 120)

Drawing on the words of Ranapiri, spoken at the beginning of the twentieth century, Salmond concludes that “hau is the breath of life, the force in people and things that impels utu or reciprocal exchanges” (p. 121). For Māori, the confidence accompanying the gifting that was negotiated by chiefs in the signing of Te Tiriti was explained by an expectation that it would be “returned in good measure” (p. 122).

 It is noteworthy that in the acknowledgements at the end of Salmond (2012), she lists a number of her Māori teachers and mentors. 6  “Set up by the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, the Waitangi Tribunal is a permanent commission of inquiry that makes recommendations on claims brought by Māori relating to Crown actions which breach the promises made in the Treaty of Waitangi”. See https://waitangitribunal.govt.nz/ 5

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“If a gift was not requited, this was hau whitia, or ‘hau turned aside’, and serious breaches of mana (termed hauhau aitu) could also threaten the life force of the group, demanding restitution” (p. 122). Problems arose, because the assumptions that underpinned the Māori version of Te Tiriti were different from the “presuppositions that shaped the English draft of the Treaty, with its notions of ‘Rights’, ‘Property’, ‘Subjects’ and ‘Sovereignty’…” (p.  123). Salmond notes that the Ngāpuhi people she was representing experienced the 2010 hearing into their grievances as resonating with the power relations operating in 1840. It marginalised their own knowledge and called into question the validity of Te Tiriti itself. The seeds of the land wars that erupted between Māori and colonial forces in the 1860s can be found in the concept of tuku, which at the time of the Treaty signing was the term used in land transactions. “This was the term used in gift exchange when a treasured object (taonga) was handed over….The text of Te Tiriti is…phrased as a series of gift exchanges between the rangitira or chiefs, and the Queen” (2012, p.  116). Most Europeans at this time viewed land as “property to be bought and sold”, while Māori assumed that “gifts or tuku of land created an alliance with the recipient, binding them and their descendants to occupy the place and maintain an active relationship with the original occupants, or lose their use rights” (p. 127). The focus was effectively on land use and certainly not on the prospect of alienation. As Salmond points out, the notion of land as “an ancestral taonga (treasure)” is an enduring one, so an action resulting in alienation would have been inconceivable – a chief’s connection to his whenua was strong enough for him to identify it with his own body. She cites an instance where in 1850 a group of Taranaki chiefs wrote to Sir Donald McLean (Protector of Aborigines in Taranaki),7 challenging the Government’s attempt “to claim lands that had been released (tuku) to European settlers” (p. 127): This land was given to you for cultivation, and you should assent to that agreement, and not listen to what another says. I myself have the say for my land, and it is right to say that my land is my own. It is not as if you can divide up my stomach, that is, the middle of the land. (pp 127–8)

As can be seen here, the Māori sense of place cannot be separated from the network of relationships that underpin Māori cosmology and ontology. At the heart of it is a deep spiritual connection with one’s traditional whenua – the lands of one’s ancestors. In her 2020 memoir, Alison Jones describes meeting up with Maria, a childhood friend from Dannevirke, 50 years after she had last seen her. Maria, now active in Ngāti Kahungunu tribal affairs, tells Jones about her motive in returning from a well-paying job in Wellington to her home marae at Kaitoke, where she was born.

 Donald McLean was a Scottish Highlander, whose own father had ironically suffered the fate of dispossession at the hands of the Duke of Argyll in respect of his lease on the Hebridean island of Tiree. 7

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4  Indigeneity and Sense of Place I was earning good money in Wellington, but something did not feel right – do you understand that – so I came home...I had lost myself, and got myself back. I had to come back here, back home. (p. 66)

Does she understand? As a Pākehā she is not sure. My own sense of place is different. I had left Dannevirke’s darkly mysterious mountains, and never wanted to return. And I have no ancient history rooted in any particular New Zealand landscapes; I love it all. I particularly love my city, Auckland. I feel constantly the pull of the friends and family and the work I have there, the cafés and parks, the sparkling harbour and the wild sea. Of course, I nod, I understand. But I am not so sure I do. (p. 66)

4.3 Australia My first encounters with Australia’s Aboriginal peoples8 were through representations in movies, which offered such “types” as the “black tracker” who helped white police officers track offenders and skilled stockmen on outback cattle stations. Occasionally, the representation became nuanced, as in the character of Fingerbone Bill, played by David Gulpilil in the 1976 film Storm Boy (based on the book by Colin Thiele, first published in 1964), which hints at the precariousness of aboriginal identity in the context of widespread racism. The website related to footnote 8 makes the point that: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures developed over 60,000 years, making First Nations Peoples the custodians of the world’s oldest living culture. Each group lived in close relationship with the land and had custodianship of their Country. (Australians Together, 2022, para 1)

The nature of this “close relationship” is the subject of this section. Australians Together is a website that offers resources for educators and has the slogan: “We bring Australians together by telling the stories that need to be told”.9 The same page tells us that, “We’re a group of people – First Nations and non-Indigenous – who work together to build a brighter future for this nation”. In this section, unless quoting a source, I will be using the term “Aboriginal” capitalised. However, I acknowledge that the adoption of the term “First Nations” (also capitalised) is widespread. (For an extended discussion of these terms, see Peters & Mika, 2017).

 Some estimates suggest that prior to the European invasion, “more than 500 First Nations groups inhabited the continent we now call Australia, approximately 750,000 people in total” (Australians Together, 2022). Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://www.australianstogether.org.au/discover/ australian-history/colonisation/ 9  https://australianstogether.org.au/about-us/ 8

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4.3.1 The Mithaka People as Synecdoche Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines (1998) was first published in 1987. When my wife and I visited Alice Springs in 2019, the book was prominently displayed in bookshops. The current publisher’s online blurb informs prospective readers that: “In this magical account, Chatwin recalls his travels across the length and breadth of Australia seeking to find the truth about the songs and unravel the mysteries of their stories”.10 Chatwin is positioned heroically as both a seeker of “the truth” and a decoder of the arcane mysteries of Aboriginal culture. It also positions The Songlines as an example of a traveller’s tale, which Linda Smith lumps with “real” research as contributing to “the West’s knowledge of itself” – and generally “random, ad hoc damaging” (2012, pp. 2–3). A number of writers have commented on Chatwin’s attainment of celebrity status via the self-mythologising that occurs in this work (e.g. Clarke, 2009). An aspect of this relates to a long and seemingly random section in the book which muses on humankind as essentially unsettled and nomadic. It is just a small step to characterise Aboriginal people themselves as fundamentally nomadic – hunters and gatherers. Such acts of characterisation have consequences. They offer a plank for rationales for territorial alienation as justified by discourses of inadequate land stewardship (as outlined in the last chapter). They also provide an impediment to a view of Aboriginal peoples as having a sense of place arising from a deep attachment over time. In Dark Emu (2014), Bruce Pascoe challenged the characterisation of Aboriginal people as hunter-gatherers by citing early settler references to agricultural practices and the building of infrastructure to support them. In a later essay, Pascoe (2019) argued that the frequent use of the term “bush tucker”: … reinforces an image of First Nation peoples as wanderers, opportunistic hunters and gatherers, people who it could be claimed did not own or make utility of the land. I believe this selective reference to the Aboriginal economy is part of the colonial process. Unfortunately, it has robbed us of important agricultural and environmental information. (p. 35)

Pascoe’s work precipitated a predictable backlash, some of it pointedly racist, some that questioned his claim to an aboriginal identity (see next chapter) and some scholarly and balanced. The last of these include Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe (2021), who draw on anthropological evidence and Aboriginal elder accounts to challenge Pascoe, question his evidence and contend, provocatively, that Aboriginal hunter-gatherer society was as sophisticated as any traditional European, agriculture-­ based culture. In a review of Sutton and Walshe, Nicholls (June 14, 2021) describes their book as the definitive critique of Pascoe’s argument. She also suggests some common ground with Pascoe, for example, in their shared rejection of Aboriginal people being viewed as “simple nomads”. They didn’t wander “around randomly, 10

 https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-songlines-9780099769910

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opportunistically searching for food and water. They knew their country intimately…. Rather, hunter-gatherers engaged in purposeful travel to sites with which they [were] familiar and able to source seasonally available food, water and shelter at variable times of year” (Nicholls, 2021, “Hunter-gatherer mobility and stasis”, para 3). My attention was drawn to the Mithaka People by a piece that appeared in The Conversation just four days after Nicholls’ review. Written by Michael Westaway and Joshua Gorringe (June 18, 2021), it was entitled: “Friday essay: how our new archaeological research investigates Dark Emu’s idea of Aboriginal ‘agriculture’ and villages”. Westaway is a non-indigenous archaeologist, while Gorringe is General Manager of the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation (MAC). While they reference critique of Dark Emu, their main emphasis is on their own work: ...in a landscape that provides an important test of the Dark Emu hypothesis. In partnership with the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation, who occupy the Channel Country in Central Australia, we have begun investigating Aboriginal settlement sites, pit dwelling huts (known as gunyahs) and quarries. (para 3)

They point to their own landscape study, which “has found over 140 quarry sites, where rock was excavated to produce seed grinding stones. We have also developed a method to locate traces of long-lost village sites” (para 4). They take the issue with the farmer/hunter-gatherer binary and question the appropriateness of even using such terms to define “socio-economic networks in Aboriginal Australia” (para 5). None of the authors mentioned in the last few paragraphs questions the significance of Aboriginal knowledge, nor the importance of drawing on the wisdom of Aboriginal elders, nor that Aboriginal peoples had a deeply spiritual relationship to place/landscape. Of particular pertinence to me, as a Pākehā writer, is the role of the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation in establishing a framework for the partnership of indigenous elders and both indigenous and non-indigenous researchers that enabled the Westaway/Gorringe essay to emerge in The Conversation as a response to Nicholls a few days earlier. The following observations are drawn from the MAC (2017) website: • The title of the site – Ngali Wanthi (“we search together…”) – is based on an ideal of partnership. The Framework refers to “the benefits of cross-cultural partnerships and epistemologies” (p. 3). • An ethic of care resonates in MAC’s slogan: “Care for Country, Care for Culture, Care for Our People”. (“Country” is the generic term for the territory a particular Aboriginal people identifies with.) MAC’s overall mission statement reads: “To strengthen our individual and collective Cultural identity and language, to successfully participate in local and wider society, grow sustainably into the future, and care for our Country and Culture” (p. 3). • There is a map which superimposes on a European map the Mithaka People’s native title and claims. (The role of maps in both colonising and decolonising projects is a topic in itself and touched on in Chap. 5.) • There is an expectation of non-indigenous research partners to “develop, promote and engage with Indigenous research” (p. 3), in a kind of symbiotic rela-

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tionships through research that “traverses and benefits western and traditional knowledge” (p. 3). • It is clear that the research priorities have been developed to serve the Mithaka People’s “rights and interests”. There are four categories: “Understanding Culture and Society”, “Healthy People and Resilient Culture”, “Bio-Cultural Heritage” and “Innovative Systems” (p.  4). Westaway and Gorringe’s Conversation piece draws largely from the third of these. • The developers of the framework emphasise connectedness to place and its relationship to their Traditional Knowledge and research. “Our Culture and knowledge is inherently connected to the landscapes and skyscapes around us, and for generations our People have studied and recorded Traditional Knowledge through our own research systems” (p. 5). A lot is at stake in an enterprise of this nature: cultural recovery in all senses of the word, assertion of place attachment and the knowledge systems that are derived over time based on a people’s deep emplacement in a particular landscape.11 In 2019, my wife Millie and I were fortunate enough to participate in a choral journey (called “Singing to the Heart” by its promoter) from Adelaide to Alice Springs. In a number of places, the choir performed both with and without an audience. As we drew near Alice Springs, we were privileged to spend time with Alison Hunt, an elder of the Pitjantjatjara people, but raised after her own mother died in the Areyonga Mission as a Western Aranda woman.12 In a documentary made about this journey by Pin Rada, a professional musician, recording artist and sound engineer based in Alice Springs,13 Alison notes that: “This is not an empty country. This is full of Tjukurpa, full of culture, and Aboriginal people are always willing to invite visitors to come and sit down and spend time with us on our country”. Uluru is probably Australia’s most iconic landscape feature. The Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park it resides in is owned by the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara people (the Anangu). The Visitor’s Centre offers a stunning explanation of Alison’s use of the word Tjukurpa as a way of capturing the essence of an Aboriginal sense of place. Its guidebook explains that, “This land was created by the creation ancestors. In their travels they left marks in the land and made laws for us to keep and live by”. The concept of Tjukurpa “has many deep, complex meanings”. It “refers to the creation period when ancestral beings created the world”. It provides “answers to important questions, and rules for behaviour and for living together. It is the law for caring for one another and for the land that supports us. Tjukurpa tells of the relationships between people, plants, animals and the physical features of the land. It refers to the time when ancestral beings created the world as we know it. Knowledge

 It must also be noted that this Framework takes its cue from research guidelines produced by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies: Guidelines for ethical research in Australian Indigenous studies. See https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-09/gerais.pdf 12  See “Alison Hunt: Senior Desert Woman” at https://www.electronicswagman.com.au/blog. asp?id=22&pid=324 13  See https://vimeo.com/416160939 11

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of how these relationships came to be, what they mean and how they must be carried on is explained in Tjukurpa”. None of the places we know existed until our ancestors, in the form of people, plants and animals, travelled widely across the land. As they travelled they formed the world as we know it, creating trees, rocks, caves, boulders, cracks, waterholes. These features are the physical evidence that these events really did take place, they are the Tjukuritja. This land is still inhabited by the ancestors and their spirits. Their journeys across the land from place to place are called iwara. They are also referred to as songlines. You can follow the stories and songs of certain ancestors along iwara, sometimes for many hundreds of kilometres.

Such an explanation hardly suggests that these peoples were nomadic. A number of the significant stories are relayed in the Centre and represented by art works. One of these ancestors, the python woman, Kuniya, is represented by the shape of the building itself. Kuniya and Liru (the python woman and poisonous snake man) helped create Uluru, according to the guidebook. “This is a living cultural landscape. Kuniya is still here. Her spirit is here. The art caves are still used by An angu today. This is a special place”. I want to give the last word in this section to Aboriginal singer and songwriter Archie Roach, whose sentiments with respect to ancestral land echo those of the Aotearoa chiefs who made their 1850 challenge to the so-called Protector of Aborigines in Taranaki (see previous section). One of his signature songs, “Into the Bloodstream”, references Australia’s longest river, the Murray, currently at a crisis point owing to the damage to its environment. In the song, he identifies bodily with both land (“Oh my body is this land”) and river (“like my veins/Carrying sweet, precious life/To the muscles and the brain”).14

4.4 Canada Jeannette Armstrong is a Syilx Okanagan, writer, educator and activist, regarded as the first First Nations woman to have a novel published in Canada. Cultural Survival is an organisation that “envisions a future that respects and honours Indigenous Peoples’ inherent rights and dynamic cultures, deeply and richly interwoven in lands, languages, spiritual traditions, and artistic expression, rooted in self-­determination and self-governance”.15 In 2010, it published in its quarterly magazine an article by Armstrong entitled “Sharing One Skin” (Armstrong, 2010). The extracts below are quoted verbatim and sit companionably with the previous sections of this chapter. I am from the Okanagan, a part of British Columbia that is much like most of California in climate  – very dry and hot. Around my birthplace are two rock mountain ranges: the Cascades on one side and the Selkirks on the other. The river is the Columbia. It is the main

14 15

 Visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzj4zHOjEks to listen to the song.  See https://www.culturalsurvival.org/our-approach

4.4 Canada river that flows through our lands, and there are four tributaries: the Kettle, the Okanagan/ Smikanean, the San Poil, and the Methow. My mother was a river Indian. She is from Kettle Falls, which is the main confluence of the Columbia River near Inchelieum. The Kettle River people are in charge of the fisheries in all of the northern parts of the Columbia River system in our territories. My father’s people are mountain people. They occupied the northern part of British Columbia, known as the Okanagan Valley. My father’s people were hunters – the people in the Okanagan who don’t live in the river basin. My name is passed on from my father’s side of the family and is my great-grandmother’s name. I am associated with my father’s side, but I have a right and a responsibility to the river through my mother’s birth and my family education. So that is who I am and where I take my identity from. I know the mountains, and, by birth, the river is my responsibility: They are part of me. I cannot be separated from my place or my land. When I introduce myself to my own people in my own language, I describe these things because it tells them what my responsibilities are and what my goal is. It tells them what my connection is, how I need to conduct myself, what I need to carry with me, what I project, what I teach and what I think about, what I must do and what I can’t do. The way we talk about ourselves as Okanagan people is difficult to replicate in English. Our word for people, for humanity, for human beings, is difficult to say without talking about connection to the land. When we say the Okanagan word for ourselves, we are actually saying, “the ones who are dream and land together.” That is our original identity. Before anything else, we are the living, dreaming Earth pieces. It’s a second identification that means human; we identify ourselves as separate from other things on the land. The second part of the word refers to the dream or to the dream state. “Dream” is the closest word that approximates the Okanagan. But our word doesn’t precisely mean dream. It actually means “the unseen part of our existence as human beings.” It may be the mind or the spirit or the intellect. So that second part of the word adds the perspective that we are mind as well as matter. The third part of the word means that if you take a number of strands of hair or twine, place them together, and then rub your hands and bind them together, they become one strand. You use this thought when you make a rope and when you make twine, thread, and homemade baskets, and when you weave the threads to make the coiled basket. That third part of the word refers to us being tied into and part of everything else. It refers to the dream parts of ourselves forming our community, and it implies what our relationships are. The Okanagan perception of the self and that of the dominant culture has to do with the “us” that is place: the capacity to know we are everything that surrounds us; to experience our humanness in relation to all else and, in consequence, to know how we affect the world around us. The Okanagan word for “our place on the land” and “our language” is the same. We think of our language as the language of the land. This means that the land has taught us our language. The way we survived is to speak the language that the land offered us as its teachings. To know all the plants, animals, seasons, and geography is to construct language for them. We also refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable. This means that the flesh that is our body is pieces of the land come to us through the things that the land is. The soil, the water, the air, and all the other life forms contributed parts to be our flesh. We are our land/place. Not to know and to celebrate this is to be without language and without land. It is to be “dis-placed.”

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4  Indigeneity and Sense of Place The Okanagan teach that anything displaced from all that it requires to survive in health will eventually perish. Unless place can be relearned, all other life forms will face displacement and then ruin. As Okanagan, our most essential responsibility is to bond our whole individual and communal selves to the land. Without this self and this bond, we are not human. Land bonding is not possible in the kind of economy surrounding us, because land must be seen as real estate to be “used” and parted with if necessary. I see the separation is accelerated by the concept that “wilderness” needs to be tamed by “development” and that this is used to justify displacement of peoples and unwanted species. I know what it feels like to be an endangered species on my land, to see the land dying with us. It is my body that is being torn, deforested, and poisoned by “development.” Every fish, plant, insect, bird, and animal that disappears is part of me dying. I know all their names, and I touch them with my spirit. I feel it every day, as my grandmother and my father did.

4.5 The United States Like many New Zealand males of my generation, I played cowboys and Indians as a child. In doing so, I was buying into a mythology and iconography that misrepresented and distorted the relationship between colonisers and First Nations people. In 1981 New Zealand was a divided country, marked by violent protest against a visiting South African rugby team, which was seen as a symbol of that country’s Apartheid regime  – a protest that precipitated an at times violent response from police. In a poem entitled “Demonstration” (Locke, 1982), where I reflected upon this protest, I recalled my childhood exposure to popular culture and in particular my heroisation of Sitting Bull. It included the lines: To Custer’s last     echoes of childhood reading Sitting Bull and the Little Big Horn of Plenty Westward Ho never Ho Hum of Wild Bill Carson slick-gunned and keen-eyed the path-finding Daniel Crockett and the Bash Street Knights Templar crusading dreams of Strongbow the Archer of barbed death…. (p. 8)

My actual awakening to the horrors of colonisation in the United States occurred at the same 1971 American Studies Conference, where I directed my question about landownership to Lewis Mumford (see Chap. 1). During the morning break following Mumford’s address, I was approached by a participant, who introduced himself as Mike the Comanche and invited me on a tour of working class cottages in Maryland. On this occasion, he also introduced me to Dee Brown’s recently published Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). It is one of a handful of books over my lifetime that has reduced (or perhaps elevated) me to tears. There are many accounts of the pre-invasion civilisations that lived in the Americas (e.g. Stannard, 1992). As I have illustrated in previous sections of this chapter, one can also access contemporary First Nations voices in the United States willing and able to share their enterprise and efforts around cultural, linguistic, cultural and territorial recovery with non-indigenous others. However, to conclude this

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chapter, I have chosen to reference a book by Gary Fields (2017) with the unlikely title Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror. My point in doing this is that Fields’ work traverses the same discursive terrain as Chap. 3 of this book. It also shows how these same discourses were at work in rationalising the alienation of indigenous lands in the United States and Canada as a first step in the colonising project. In doing so it provides a link to the next chapter on “Decolonising Place”. In the fifteenth century, Native American communities occupied most of North America, thus belying later European claims that they had discovered a wilderness. In his chapter on “Amerindian Landscapes”, Fields (2017) argues that a range of principles connected to land tenure underpinned Amerindian efforts to “shape the environment and craft systems for subsistence” (p. 97). Spiritually, these principles recognised the provenance of the Great Spirit, who had given land to people for their livelihood. To this effect he quotes from Black Hawk (1767–1838), the great Sauk Nation chief: The Great Spirit gave it [land] to his children to live upon, and cultivate as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil….Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away. (Black Hawk, 1834, p. 114, cited in Fields, 2017, p. 97)

He notes ironically that this belief is comparable to pre-enclosure English understandings of “property as moveable” (p. 97). Land use for Native Americans was intimately bound up with a spiritual sense of place. Drawing on the work of Nabokov (2015), Fields also explains the way in which space and place relate in Amerindian cosmology: Sacred…was the notion of a center, or “pivot,” where indigenous groups located the origins of existence essential to human life. Central to this idea is the fundamentally geographical construct of the four cardinal directions, which allow territorial space to radiate outward from the pivot. This gives a spatial dimension both to the spirit world and to material life on earth. Born of the four directions, territorial space is what anchors human life to places on the landscape and provides the foundation for cultivating crops. At the same time, the four directions and the spaces they embody enable mobility across the land for hunting, fishing, and foraging. Thus are symbolic and spiritual attributes of the cosmos connected to the terrestrial and material landscape…. (p. 106)

Understanding and representing a place required an engagement with features of landscape and the way particular features were storied. Places were named on the basis of these features and their cultural meanings, significance and utility in terms of subsistence. This orientation led to an indigenous concept of mapping at odds with the cartographic practices of invading Europeans (see Chap. 5). Practically, land was held in common by the tribe and its use governed by principles of land tenure, as Fields explains: Although the boundaries in indigenous systems of rights to land established areas of access and trespass, such lines did not demarcate freehold ownership over plots of ground. Rights to land corresponded to entitlements for the use of resources on the land surface….In this way, Native landscapes were bounded environments, but what existed within these bounded areas was the defining idea of Amerindian land tenure: the right to use land, otherwise known as the right of usufruct, a right exercised most fundamentally in securing subsistence. (p. 98)

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In the remainder of the chapter, Fields (2017) – like Stannard (2012) before him – makes it clear to readers that whatever notions European invaders had of themselves as a civilising force, they were in fact encountering sophisticated civilisations which had developed a range of technologies for meeting their material needs in variable environments. All survived on “varying combinations of four basic activities: hunting, gathering, fishing, and agriculture” (p. 98). The cultivation of corn (together with beans and squash) was a crucial activity and was a basis for the establishment of networks of towns and villages and, in places, the construction of irrigation systems. Mobility was also an element in ensuring a secure livelihood. Villages could be relocated as part of a drive to access and profit from more fertile land. It was also an aspect of the hunting, foraging and fishing that complemented the products of agriculture, which “required extensive territorial hinterlands” and “was driven…by factors of seasonality” (p. 102). As Fields (2017) explains, villages developed their landscape resources by allocating access to areas nearby and at a distance to individual families for their use. “What was ‘owned’ by members of the village community...was the right to use areas of the village landscape for growing crops, hunting game, and collecting foodstuff s from the land and water” (p. 103). He identifies two basic concepts underpinning Native American usufruct: 1. Sovereignty: “Sovereign use right over a certain territorial domain became vested within the village chief – the sachem – who was generally chosen by a council of chiefs from different family lineages” (p. 103). This domain was “configured by precise boundaries” which were recognised by other villages. However, because of the mobility factor, these boundaries could be re-established elsewhere, given the agreement of other villages. 2. Allocation of use rights: Most commonly, this was done by the village chief in consultation with his council. However, in villages largely dependent on agriculture, the female elders of various families might assign plots of cultivation to various families. There are plentiful indications that English colonists were well aware of Native American concepts of boundaries, trespasses and land rights. However, as we shall see in Chap. 5, “cultural differences over the meaning of rights to land, one based on notions of mobility and use, the other based on ownership of fixed plots of ground” (Fields, 2017, p. 106) would form one of the bases for conflict between colonists and indigenous tribes. It was a pattern that would be repeated elsewhere.

References Armstrong, J. (2010). Sharing one skin. Cultural survival quarterly magazine (30,4, Land & Resources in the Americas). Retrieved June 21 from https://www.culturalsurvival.org/ publications/cultural-­survival-­quarterly/sharing-­one-­skin

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Australians Together. (2022). Colonisation: Dispossession, disease and direct conflict. Retrieved June 9, 2022 from https://www.australianstogether.org.au/discover/australian-­history/ colonisation/ Black Hawk. (1834). Life of ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak or black Hawk. Publisher not known. Brown, D. (1970). Bury my heart at wounded knee. Holt, Rinehart & Winstone. Chatwin, B. (1998). The songlines. UK. Vintage Books. Clarke, R. (2009). Star traveller: Celebrity, aboriginality and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987). Postcolonial Studies, 12(2), 229–246. Devine, T. (2018). The Scottish clearances: A history of the dispossessed 1600–1900. Penguin Random House. Environmental Protection Authority. (2020). Guide to the mātauranga framework. EPA. Fields, G. (2017). Enclosure: Palestinian landscapes in a historical mirror. University of California Press. Jones, A. (2020). This Pākehā life: An unsettled memoir. Bridget Williams Books. Kennedy, V., Cram, F., Paipa, K., Pipi, K., & Baker, M. (2015). Wairoa and cultural values in evaluation. Evaluation Matters–He take Tō Te Aromatawai, 1, 83–111. Retrieved May 2022 from https://www.nzcer.org.nz/system/files/journals/evaluation-­maters/downloads/ EM2015_1_083.pdf Lewis, D., Castleden, H., Apostle, R., Francis, S., & Francis-Strickland, K. (2021). Linking land displacement and environmental dispossession to Mi’kmaw health and well-being: Culturally relevant place-based interpretive frameworks matter. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 65(1), 66–81. Locke, T. (1982). Demonstration. Landfall, 36(1), 6–10. Locke, T., & Prentice, L. (2016). Facing the indigenous “other”: Culturally responsive research and pedagogy in music education. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 45(2), 139–151. MacLeod, A. (2011). The clearances. In Island: The complete stories (pp. 413–431). W. W. Norton & Company. Martínez Cobo, J. (1983). Study of the problem of discrimination against indigenous populations: Third part: Conclusions, proposals and recommendations. United Nations Economic and Social Council Commission on Human Rights. Retrieved May 20, 2022 from https://www. un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/MCS_xxi_xxii_e.pdf May, S. (2002). Where to from here: Charting a way forward for language and education policy in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The TESOLANZ Journal, 10, 22–35. May, S. (2017). National and ethnic minorities: Language rights and recognition. In A. S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 149–167). Routledge. Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation. (2017 July). Ngali Wanthi “we search together”: Mithaka Research Framework. Retrieved June 20, 2022 from https://mithaka.org.au/ wp-­content/uploads/2020/06/mithaka-­aboriginal-­corporation_research-­framework_web-­ version-­72dpi1.pdf Nabokov, P. (2015). How the world moves: The Odyssey of an American Indian family. Penguin books. Nicholls, C. (2021 June 14). Book review: Farmers or hunter-gatherers: The Dark Emu Debate rigorously critiques Bruce Pascoe’s argument. The Conversation. Retrieved June 13 from https://theconversation.com/book-­review-­farmers-­or-­hunter-­gatherers-­the-­dark-­emu-­debate-­ rigorously-­critiques-­bruce-­pascoes-­argument-­161877 Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture. Magabala Books. Pascoe, B. (2019). The imperial mind. In Salt: Selected stories and essays (pp. 27–38). Black. Peters, M. A., & Mika, C. T. (2017). Aborigine, Indian, indigenous or first nations? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(13), 1229–1123. Pihama, L., Greensill, H., Manuirirangi, H., & Simmonds, N. (2019). He Kare-ā-roto: A selection of whakataukī related to Māori emotions. To Kotahi Research Institute. Rangahau. (n.d.). Principles of Kaupapa Māori. Retrieved June 2, 2022 from http://www.rangahau.co.nz/research-­idea/27/

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Roach, D., & Egan, A. (2008). The equivocal definition of indignity and ambivalent government policy toward self-determination in New Zealand’s health and foreign policy a­ pparatus. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, 11, 25–41. Accessed May 24, 2022 from https://junctures.org/index.php/junctures/article/view/33/369 Salmond, A. (2012). Ontological quarrels: Indigeneity, exclusion and citizenship in a relational world. Anthropological Theory, 12(2), 115–141. Smith, L.  T. (2012). Decolonising methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Otago University Press. Stannard, D.  E. (1992). American Holocaust: The conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press. Sutton, P., & Walshe, K. (2021). Farmers or hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu debate. Melbourne University Press. Teddy, L., Nikola, L. W., & Guerin, B. (2008). Place attachment of Ngāi Te Ahi to Hairini Marae. MAI Review, 1. Retrieved from http://www.review.mai.ac.nz United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Indigenous Peoples. (n.d.). United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/ development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-­on-­the-­rights-­of-­indigenous-­peoples.html United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. (n.d.). Indigenous peoples, Indigenous voices (Factsheet). Retrieved March 14, 2023 from https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/ documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf Westaway, M. & Gorringe, J. (2021 June 18). Friday essay: How our new archaeological research investigates Dark Emu’s idea of Aboriginal ‘agriculture’ and villages. The Conversation. Retrieved June 13 2022 from https://theconversation.com/friday-­essay-­how-­ our-­new-­archaeological-­research-­investigates-­dark-­emus-­idea-­of-­aboriginal-­agriculture-­and-­ villages-­146754

Chapter 5

Decolonising Place

Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world, That has such people in’t. Shakespeare: The Tempest

The University of Waikato, where I worked for 20 years as an academic, is located in the small city of Hamilton, through which flows New Zealand’s longest river, the Waikato. The land on which the university was built is owned by the Tainui tribe and was returned to them in 1995 as part of a Treaty of Waitangi settlement, in part in compensation for tribal lands that were confiscated in the aftermath of this country’s land wars of the 1860s. Not all places have names, but naming is one means of inscribing a place with meaning. During the process of colonisation, naming often served as a technology for cultural erasure, where the indigenous culture’s sense of place became superseded by the sense of place of the settler. Traditionally, it can be argued that the names of places had something to say about landscape. In the Middle Ages, there was a (now deserted) village in Leicestershire, whose name derived from two Old English words: hamel (craggy hill) and dun (hill). It was a compound of these words which produced the surname de Hameldone, which later in Lanarkshire (Scotland) became Hamilton. By the fifteenth century, the Hamiltons had become a powerful family of influence in Scotland. After changing their support to Robert the Bruce in his war of independence, the family was gifted with a medieval settlement at the place named Cadzow, after the Celtic word cadihou (beautiful castle). In renaming this settlement “Hamilton” in 1455, they were implementing their own act of erasure and supersession.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 T. Locke, Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4266-4_5

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The Hamilton family name became a colonising force in its own right. According to one researcher, 129 places in the world share the name.1 The Tainui tribe’s name for the place where Hamilton, NZ, was founded in 1864 was (and still is) Kirikiriroa. Like Hamilton’s own origin, it had something to say about the place, translating as “long stretch of gravel”. Tainui were not consulted on the naming of this new settlement. The name was chosen by the 4th Waikato Regiment Militia, who named it after John Fane Charles Hamilton, an officer in the colonial forces killed in the Battle of Gate Pā, during which the Commander, General Cameron, unleashed the biggest artillery bombardment of the land wars. There is no evidence John Hamilton ever visited Hamilton. A life-size statue of Hamilton was gifted to the city in 2013 but removed by the City Council 7 years later at the request of Tainui. As I write, there is a strong lobby supporting re-re-naming Hamilton Kirikiriroa. These opening paragraphs have sought to communicate a toponymic sense of place based on an “understanding of the origin, significance and the very processes of naming itself” (Barbour, 2016, p. 132). This chapter begins with an overview of the “colonisation project”, viewing it as a special case of dispossession, characterised not just by an unprecedented and unlawful appropriation of territory but also by ideological warfare and cultural erasure. In this regard, it will explore the concept of the “wild”, as given meaning by both colonisers and colonised and utilised in struggles to establish a hegemonic discourse based on the ideology of improvement as a way of justifying a proprietorial relationship to the land and acts of genocide in obtaining it. Decolonisation is a calling to account of the colonising project, not just in relationship to processes of redress and reparation but also in relationship to discourse, ideology and identity. This chapter will explore decolonisation, both as an assertion of indigenous identity and as a process of discursive deconstruction guided by indigenous wisdom. It also views the decolonising project as offering a space for the descendants of colonisers to develop hybrid identities which embrace indigenous ways of being, thinking and doing.

5.1 The Colonisation Project In her book Decolonizing Methodologies, Smith (2012) draws attention to the close connection between imperialism and colonialism, noting the general agreement that the latter is but one expression of the former. My own country, New Zealand/ Aotearoa, got its name from Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who called it after his own province of Zeeland. It was another name that stuck, but at least its geographical connotations are appropriate to a country with a coastline of around 15,000 km. Humourists enjoy suggesting that New Zealand gained its independence by stealth. Once an adjunct of New South Wales, New Zealand became a colony in its

 Brooker, T. (2012). Hamiltons of the world. Hamilton, N.Z.: Hamilton East Rotary Club.

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own right in 18412 and became self-governing in 1852. Dominion status was conferred in 1907; full independence was granted in 1931, but not ratified by New Zealand until 1947. None of these dates are observed in Aotearoa nor generally well known. The Commonwealth site reports that at a 1926 conference of Britain and the Dominions, it was agreed that they were all equal members of a community within the British Empire. While they would owe allegiance to the British king or queen, they would not be ruled by the United Kingdom. The British Empire thus became the British Commonwealth of Nations and then simply (and less problematically) “The Commonwealth”.3 Imperialism is an overt strategy undertaken by one political entity (province, state and so on) to incrementally extend its control beyond its original borders to other territories through various means of subjugating their populations. These means include invasion and violent conquest, but can include more covert strategies, such as the support of puppet regimes (being played out in Eastern Europe as I write) and gaining control or dominance in respect of crucial aspects of a territory’s economic infrastructure. Fields (2017), for example, argues that Amerindians were weakened by the middle of the eighteenth century, because they were forced to “jettison notions of reciprocity and instead embrace a different set of incentives lying at the core of market economies: supply and demand” (p. 111). Sometimes imperial policy is rationalised ideologically by claims that annexation and colonisation are “good” for the inhabitants of the territory seized. When the United States annexed Texas in 1846, and then gained cession from Mexico in 1848 of present-day New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Colorado and Arizona and parts of three other states (55% of Mexico’s territory), it did so under the banner of “Manifest Destiny”.4 At the heart of Manifest Destiny (and similar imperial doctrines) is a belief in the superiority of the Empire’s version of civilisation and the polity it aims to impose as it expands its territory and reach. Once a territory is sufficiently subjugated by an imperial power for a sovereign regime of power to be imposed, it becomes a colony. “With English colonies going back to the 1550s”, writes a contributor to Wikipedia, “Ireland was arguably the first English and then British territory colonised by a group known as the West Country Men”.5 While the so-called New World countries are the main focus of this chapter, I suggest that aspects of the colonisation experiences of native Scots and Irish peoples are worthy of acknowledgement, since they offer a reference point for what happened in North America, Australia and Aotearoa. As indicated in Chap. 3, once land became enclosed and commodified in Scotland, it rapidly passed into the hands  https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/new-zealand-becomes-a-separatecolony#:~:text=On%201%20July%201841%20the,islands%20and%20the%20Australian%20 colony 3  https://thecommonwealth.org/history#:~:text=At%20the%201926%20conference%20 Britain,Nations%20or%20just%20the%20Commonwealth 4  h t t p s : / / w w w. c s . m c g i l l . c a / ~ r w e s t / w i k i s p e e d i a / w p c d / w p / m / M a n i f e s t _ D e s t i ny. htm#:~:text=This%20era%2C%20from%20the%20end,States%20as%20they%20are%20today 5  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ireland 2

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of a propertied elite (including many from England) who, it might be said, imposed a legal system and a discursive regime, which favoured the few over the many.

5.1.1 Another Synecdoche: Bandon, Cork In the sixteenth century, the nice-sounding word “plantation” was the term used for the process of Irish colonisation. The Munster Plantation of 1585, for example, was the result of an unsuccessful revolt by the Catholic Earl of Desmond and led to his Munster landholdings being confiscated by the English. As a result of the depopulation of these lands through war and famine, settlers (mainly from the West of England) were brought to repopulate the area (Gregory et al., 2013). When my wife Millie and I visited Ireland in 2017, we based ourselves in Bandon (Droichead na Bandan in Irish). In the Munster Plantation, a Londoner name Phane Beecher (as “Undertaker”) became feudal lord of 14,000 acres of land in Kinalmeaky in Cork, which included Castlemahon, a Norman-type stronghold near present-day Bandon built by the O’Mahoney clan some time before 1400. Beecher was a well-­ connected London merchant, member of the Haberdashers Guild and son to Henry, Alderman and Sheriff of London.6 The town of Bandon was established in 1604 by Beecher’s son Henry and other English settlers. Surrounded by a protective wall, the original town was populated by Protestants as a result of a by-law banning Catholics as residents. What we have in microcosm here is a blueprint for Irish subjugation: the deployment of an occupying army, the branding of resistance to occupation as rebellion punishable by the confiscation of land, the cleansing of native Irish through violence and the destruction of means of subsistence and the repopulation of “cleansed” areas by settlers of different ethnic, linguistic and religious persuasion.

5.2 Sovereign Power In Chap. 3 I drew on the distinction between sovereign and discursive power in mapping the history of enclosure and land dispossession in England. Drawing on Foucault, sovereign power is power over, exercised by a leader or group through the use of brutality or coercion. Discursive power is a way of producing an effect through remaking the world through meaning – through significant shifts in ways of thinking on a grand scale. By anyone’s standard, the scale of the death and misery inflicted on the indigenous populations of the Americas, Australia and Aotearoa as a result of European imperial ambitions is unprecedented. It is difficult to view the conduct of imperial

 https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/beecher/131/

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operatives in these territories from the time their respective invasions began as anything other than genocidal, if not by intent and design, then at least by effect. Churchill (1997), for example, asserts that “the genocide inflicted upon American Indians over the past five centuries is unparalleled in human history, both in terms of its sheer magnitude and duration” (p. 97). In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (1944), Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphaël Lemkin defined genocide – a term he himself coined – as follows: Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilatng the groups themselves [even if all individuals within the dissolved group physically survive]. The objectives of such a plan would be a disintegration of political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. (Lemkin 1944, p. 79, in Churchill, 1997, p. 70)

Lemkin was a member of the group charged by the United Nations General Assembly in 1946 to develop what has become known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), which was adopted by the General Assembly in 1948. The Convention began as a specific response to the Second World War atrocities committed against Jews and other groups under Nazi policies in a range of territories. While the United States played a leading role in having the Convention drafted, it did not itself become a party to it until 1988 (40 years later), in part because it did not want to be internationally accountable for actions in its own history. Churchill (1997) dedicates a whole chapter to detailing ways in which the United States managed to subvert and weaken the initial drafts of the Convention in ways protective of its own interests (pp. 363–398). Check out the Wikipedia entry on the “Genocide Convention”, and it comes across as curiously Eurocentric, as if the Holocaust were a Nazi invention. Though there are some who insist that the term “Holocaust” be applied exclusively to Nazi dealings with Jewish minorities, American scholars such as Stannard (1992) and Churchill (1997) argue otherwise. Churchill (1997), whose book is unashamedly polemical, spends a chapter paralleling the similarities between Christopher Columbus and Heinrich Himmler. No one knows the precise numbers of indigenous people killed nor the rate of attrition that occurred in the Western Hemisphere from 1492 onwards. Drawing on a range of sources, Churchill (1997) posits a population of over 100 million people at this date. Within two centuries, he argues that only 10% remained, and by the 1890s this number had reduced to 2%. Everywhere, in the Americas, he argues that a similar “extreme demographic catastrophe” occurred, and continues to this day (p. 97). More recently, Smith (2017) has argued for an estimate of 12 million indigenous deaths since 1492 in what is now the United States, together with 790,000 deaths as a result of colonisation in Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico. For the entire

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Western Hemisphere, his estimate for the number of indigenous deaths between 1492 and 1900 stands at a staggering 175 million. The website “Australians Together”7 estimates that at least 20,000 Aboriginal people were killed in colonial violence in the early part of the nineteenth century. However, this does not include those who died as a result of disease, dispossession and the destruction of livelihoods. The worst example of systematic genocide in Australia occurred in what was then Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). Boyce (2008) contends that while the violence between settlers and Aborigines in Tasmania is well documented, there has been scant attention to the government-sponsored ethnic clearance that followed it. (There is a sobering appendix in Boyce’s book entitled: “Towards genocide: Government policy on the Aborigines 1827–38.”) In my own country of Aotearoa, disease, dispossession and the destruction of Māori economic infrastructure were the major contributors to the depopulation that had occurred by 1900, when it was popularly believed (by non-Māori) that the indigenous people were a dying race. In a statement that has resounded down the decades, the prominent scientist Doctor Alfred Newman wrote in 1882 that: “Taking all things into consideration, the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race” (p. 477).8 This scenario for the fate of indigenous people resonates with the sentiments of a prominent historian in the US context, Francis Parkman, who wrote that the natives “were destined to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power, which now rolled westward unchecked and unopposed”. The fault was theirs, since they were not disposed to “learn the arts of civilisation, and he and his forest must perish together” (Parkman, 1915, p.  44, in Stannard, 1992, p. 244). Given the nature of European imperial expansionism and the demographic catastrophe in respect of indigenous peoples that resulted from it, it is hardly a surprise that (as discussed in Chap. 2) place as a concept effectively had to be reclaimed and restored by such geographers as Tuan (1977) and Agnew (1987). For many Europeans these vast territories were spaces to occupy rather than places to embrace and nurture. Many settlers were people whose sense of secure rootedness in a place had been already destroyed by acts of dispossession that occurred in the “old” world. With the genocide that occurred, it was not just a matter of the multitudes of peoples that were erased or decimated. It was, drawing on Lemkin’s definition of genocide (1944), the concomitant erasure of their social institutions, cultures, languages, spiritual belief systems and economies. This erasure included a deeply spiritual orientation to place, a glimpse of which has been offered in Chap. 4. With few exceptions, European colonists and settlers had little interest in learning from  Australians Together (March 8, 2022). Colonisation: Dispossession, disease and direct conflict. Accessed July 18, 2022 at https://www.australianstogether.org.au/discover/australian-history/ colonisation/ 8  Newman, A.  K. (1882). A study of the causes leading to the extinction of the Maori. Trans. N.Z.  Inst., 14, pp.  459–477. Newman was president of the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1879 and 1885. 7

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this orientation, let alone adopting it. For the most part, indigenous peoples were viewed as inferior. Near the beginning of his article on “Counting the dead”, Smith (2017) draws attention to the increase in the indigenous populations in the Western Hemisphere during the twentieth century and continuing into the present day, remarking that their survival has been “truly extraordinary” given the odds (p. 7). Chapter 4 of this book is further testimony to the resilience, determination and resurgence of these peoples. In many instances, the reassertion of indigenous voices has involved remarkable acts of collective innovation. One of the worst instances of genocide, as mentioned above, occurred in Tasmania. 2018 saw the release of The Nightingale, written, directed and co-produced by Australian Jennifer Kent. The film, set in 1825  in Tasmania, provides a harrowing account of the plight of both convict women and Aborigines at the time. In an interview with Vox Media (Wilkinson, 2019),9 Kent shares her pride in the collaborative relationship established with surviving Aboriginal people in the state, especially “Uncle” Jim Everett, senior indigenous scholar at the University of Tasmania. She notes that there were around 11 distinct nations prior to the establishment of a penal colony in 1803, all with their own distinct languages. In recent times, despite the extent of the genocide that occurred, “current descendants…have recreated a language called palawa kani” – constructed from linguistic remnants from the old languages as a kind of lingua franca. Having the language spoken by the Aboriginal characters in the film was aimed at giving this revived language status and encouraging its use. Kent asserts that it is now a “living breathing thing”. For her, the use of subtitles was non-negotiable, because she wanted people to understand what was being said. The concluding scene from The Nightingale is an eloquent expression of the indigenous assertiveness I have been referring to. It takes place on a beach at dawn. At one point, the wounded Aboriginal character Billy, with his upper torso daubed with ochre and wearing European trousers, shouts defiantly, “I’m still here, you white bastards! I’m still here. And I’m not going nowhere”. He then switches to a chant in his own palawa kani language: I am Letteremairrener man, back on my homeland. I am with my mother and my father. We are strong. I am home.

He then shifts to a traditional dance. While doing so, he utters his own individual call that expresses his connection to his dreamtime alter ego the blackbird: “Yah! Yah! Yah!” (Billy’s name in palawa kani is Mangana – “blackbird” – the yellow-­ tailed black cockatoo.) As he does so, the sun slowly rises. He then says in palawa kani: “The sun. The sun. My heart”. The convict woman Clare, who has been observing all of this, takes up the theme of hope in her own Irish tongue: “Summer  Wilkinson, A (2019). “Why Babadook director Jennifer Kent hates period pieces, and why she made one.” Vox. Retrieved July 25, 2022 from https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/31/18197649/ nightingale-jennifer-kent-interview-language-gaelic-aboriginal. (Kent would not agree with Wilkinson’s description of the film as a “revenge movie”.) 9

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will come, and the grass will grow. Green leaves will sprout on top of the trees. My true love will come at the break of day, and he’ll strike up a song out of love for me”. The last shot of the film is a close-up of Clare drawing in breath.

5.3 Discourse The colonisation I have been discussing above references the process of European expansion into colonies the various imperial powers established from 1492 onwards. However, there is a sense in which the word “colonisation” can be used as a metaphor for the way in which an individual person’s self can become incrementally and unconsciously inscribed by a way of thinking (discourse) that will manifest itself in that person’s belief system and behaviour. In my work as an educator, for example, I have written about the way in which teachers who began their training in Aotearoa (among other places) in the 1990s were more likely to identify with a discourse of managerial rather than classical professionalism. While the classical professional is defined by their subscription to the principles of autonomy, expertise and altruism, the managerial professional is one “who clearly meets corporate goals, set elsewhere, manages a range of students well and documents their achievement and problems for public accountability purposes. The criteria of the successful professional in this corporate model is of one who works efficiently and effectively in meeting the standardised criteria set for the accomplishment of both students and teachers, as well as contributing to the school’s formal accountability processes” (Brennan, 1996, p. 3). It is no coincidence that in this decade, educational reform in Aotearoa was being couched in the language of accountability, discrete standards, performativity and achievement. A curriculum was something to be delivered rather than taught; outputs took precedence over inputs. The italicised words are discursive markers for managerial professionalism, and, in the course of their formation at this time, many teachers were colonised by the discourse itself. European colonisers took with them into their conquered territories discourses which were used to justify their actions; indeed, these discourses were the basis for the actions taken. In this section, I argue that these colonising discourses wrought incalculable harm in this (hardly) “brave new world” and were certainly not conducive to a sense of place based on a deep, spiritual connection to the natural environments of these places that had been occupied by various indigenous peoples for centuries. Let me recall these before introducing more: • The invention, justification, and legalisation of private property (individual title) and the resulting right to enclose it and exclude others. This shift in the meaning of property meant that land became a commodity, and ownership the prime determinant re the use made of it, and who might be allowed to occupy it and under what conditions. A community’s interest in the lands associated with it became secondary to the interests of landlords. As Stannard (1992) observes, in

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the sixteenth century, private property became a good in its own right and a touchstone of civilisation. • The idea that one had a moral right to “unoccupied” land. This notion would be resorted to in colonised territories, where lands that were deemed to be “empty” or lacking settlement became ripe for the taking. In their book on Discovering Indigenous Lands (2010), Miller, Ruru, Behrendt and Lindberg take this idea further, relating it to what is sometimes referred to as the “Doctrine of Discovery”. Established in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and justified by “religious and ethnocentric ideas of European superiority” over cultures elsewhere in the world, this doctrine meant that “newly arrived Europeans immediately and automatically acquired legally recognised property rights in native lands and also gained governmental, political, and commercial rights over the inhabitants without the knowledge or the consent of the indigenous peoples” (p. 2). A clear articulation of this position can be found in a document John Winthrop penned in England in 1629 prior to his becoming the Massachusetts Bay colony’s first governor. The argument responds to a possible objection to the venture on the basis of the land having been possessed by indigenous people for such a long time: That which lies common, and hath never beene replenished or subdued is free to any that possesse and improve it: For God hath given to the sonnes of men a double right to the earth: theire is a naturall right, and a Civill Right The first right was naturall when men held the earth in common every man sowing and feeding where he pleased: then as men and theire Cattell encreased they appropriated certaine parcells of Grownde by inclosinge and peculiar manuerance, and this in time gatte them a Ciuill right…. As for the Natives in New England, they inclose noe Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to improve the Land by, and soe have noe other but a Naturall Right to those Countries, soe as if we leave them sufficient for their use, we may lawfully take the rest, there being more then enough for them and us. (pp. 4–5)

For the Puritan settlers, the act of enclosure had a moral force, since hedges and fences served symbolic duty in protecting God’s church and keeping the demonic wilderness at bay (see below). • The idea that improving land gave one a right to it (and the corollary that a claim to land without a perceived effort to “improve” it discredited one from claiming it). As noted in Chap. 3, the discourse of improvement was both a justification for maximising profit and implementing enclosure/eviction/relocation. This idea operated nicely in tandem with the above bullet, since it allowed colonisers to adopt a moral stance in respect of indigenous land use and stewardship, deeming native peoples as either indolent/inept or nomadic/of no fixed abode. Though his writings pre-dated the English colonisation of the Americas, Thomas More, in his Utopia (published in Latin in 1515 and in English in 1551), subscribed to this discourse. Imagining the inhabitants of his Utopia adventuring into colonisation, he doesn’t hesitate to recommend that: If the natives refuse to conform themselves to their [i.e. the colonisers’] laws, they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist, for they account it a very just cause of war for a nation to hinder others from possessing a

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part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated, since every man has, by the law of nature, a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence. (More, 1551, “Of their traffic”)

5.3.1 The Wild In the last chapter, I quoted Canadian First Nations writer Jeannette Armstrong as referring to a non-indigenous belief that “‘wilderness’ needs to be tamed by ‘development’ and that this is used to justify displacement of peoples and unwanted species” (2006). Development, as a discourse marker, is currently the more common synonym for improvement. The reference to wilderness (and wild) invites an examination of Eurocentric discourses in relationship to the natural environment as it exists/existed in a state prior to humans altering it for their own ends. These discourses attribute a negative value to this state. (They are not reflected, however, in the favourable reference of the residents of Svalbard quoted in Chap. 3 to their environment as “the last wilderness area in Europe” (Kaltenborn, 1998, p. 177).) The Judeo/Christian tradition did not get off to a promising start in setting the Fall of our first parents in a garden. Initially, there was no suggestion that the Garden of Eden needed improvement; nor was there a suggestion that its inhabitants needed to expend energy in planting (or even pruning). However, once the fruit offered by the wily (and wild) serpent had been consumed, banishment to a very different sort of environment ensued, and labour (in all its forms) became the human lot. The English word wild is Old English (originally from Proto-Germanic), originally meaning “in the natural state”, “uncultivated”, “untamed”, “uncultivated”, “undomesticated”, “uncontrolled,” and “uninhabited/uninhabitable” (of places). However, by the Middle Ages, meanings such as “sexually dissolute” and “morally loose” had been added. The word has a role to play in a 97-page section of David Stannard’s American Holocaust entitled “Sex, Race and Holy War” (1992), where he sets out to explain the peculiar nature of the genocide enacted in the conquest of the Americas and elsewhere. His explanation, unpalatable as it may be for many people, is rooted in the specific discourses subscribed to by the killers, i.e. versions of Christianity which had developed in Europe in the centuries immediately preceding the Middle Ages and after. All Christian Gospels (bar John) tell a narrative of Christ being led by the Spirit into the wilderness (the Judaean desert) following his baptism in the Jordan River, where he suffers and rebuffs the Devil’s temptation. While the desert here is a wild place in the sense of its being uninhabited, there is also a suggestion of its being a place where the Devil is likely to lurk. On the plus side, though, it can be viewed positively as the setting for a test of a person’s character – a kind of preparatory phase preceding a return to society to fulfil an important vocation or mission. As Stannard (1992) explains, however, by the Middle Ages, wilderness had come to connote not so much a place (though there were places that fitted the description) as a moral state. Non-Christians (infidels), by definition, inhabited a “spiritual

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wilderness” which in a perverse way mirrored the “sinful wilderness” that lurked in the minds and especially the bodies of Christians themselves. It was a wildness that seemed to withstand all efforts to suppress or expunge it (p.  154). Mankind was irrevocably “fallen” and enslaved sexually to the corruption rooted in bodily flesh. As Stannard puts it: “Not only was human flesh thenceforward to be regarded as corrupt, but so was the very nature of humankind and, indeed, so was nature itself” (p. 155). The Puritan colonisers of New England exemplified this discourse. For them, the wilderness was the antithesis of civilisation. Historian Peter Carroll (1969) quotes thus from the preacher John Cotton: “All the world out of the Church is as a wildernesse, or at best a wilde field, where all manner of unclean and wilde beasts live and feed”. For the Puritans, Carroll argues, “Because of its disorder and unrestraint, the wilderness symbolized the sinful world of unregenerate men” (p. 111). It was where the devil lurked – “the realm of the Antichrist" – and the Indians (see next section) were trapped by his snares and “instruments of his malice” (p. 11).

5.3.2 A Brief Digression on the Word “Nature” In my two-volume SOED, in over a column of text, there are four distinct categories of meaning associated with the word “nature”, all dating back to the Middle Ages. Two of these can be found in Stannard’s last-quoted sentence above: 1. The essential qualities of a thing: as in “the very nature of humankind”. 2. The features and products of the earth itself, as contrasted with those of human civilisation: as in “nature itself”. There is a third meaning worth acknowledging here: 3. The creative and regulative physical power which is conceived of as operating in the physical world and as the immediate cause of all its phenomena. Here is Thomas More again, this time in the section of his Utopia entitled “Of the Travelling of the Utopians”: “They define virtue thus – that it is a living according to Nature, and think that we are made by God for that end; they believe that a man then follows the dictates of Nature when he pursues or avoids things according to the direction of reason”. He (and many indigenous people) might demur at the use of the word “physical” to describe this power. This is Nature with a capital “N”, sometimes personified as a woman. It is the benignant Nature that is appealed to by the good characters in King Lear, as discussed by Danby (1962), which is in contrast to the “nature” of Edmund and the wicked daughters – a closed system of cause and effect, “devoid of intelligence, impervious to Reason” and ripe for exploitation by men as a means of “satisfying the appetites with which we were born” (p. 38). In this respect, the latter relates to Stannard’s second use of the word above – the wilderness that the Puritans declared war on to save their souls and exploited to line their pockets.

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5.3.3 The Great Chain of Being I’ve just taken down from my shelf a book I have not opened since the 1970s. The title is The Great Chain of Being (first published in 1936) and based on lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1929 by Arthur Lovejoy in honour of the memory of William James. The subtitle of the book is: “A Study of the History of an Idea”. I want to admit that I bought the book because I was captivated by this idea myself; it was an aspect of my early love affair with the mediaeval world view. On this occasion, however, I went straight to the last chapter, entitled “The Outcome of the History [of this idea] and its Moral”. I wondered if I would find reference to Amerindian genocide. There wasn’t. However, there was an admission that the idea had been a failure. Even so, Lovejoy (1974) wrote: “I may, therefore, perhaps best bring these lectures to a close by a reminder that the idea of the Chain of Being, with its presuppositions and implications, has had many curiously happy consequences in the history of Western thought” (p. 333). Consequences? Yes. Happy? “Devastating” would be a better word for it. European explorers were predisposed to encounter monstrous, semi-human/sub-­ human beings as they discovered lands on the fringes of the known world. Europeans, as mentioned previously, considered themselves superior representatives of the “most civil domain of human life”  – a chosen people of sorts (Stannard, 1992, p. 167). The wild man of the European imagination was “the outer personification of the beast-like baseness that existed within even the most holy of the Church’s saints, the beast-like baseness that must be overcome – if need be, by excruciating rituals of self-torment or by terrifying campaigns of violence – were the Christian saint or the Christian soldier or adventurer to attain a proper state of holiness” (pp. 171–2). Whether the savage was beyond redemption (“unregenerate”) through the agency of conversion was a matter of debate. Though the Irish were viewed as sub-human, there was a general belief that they could be civilised. For most Puritan New England colonists, on the other hand, the Indians were in league with the anti-Christ and were therefore unregenerate. Viewed thus, wars aimed at exterminating indigenous tribes in the region took on the tone of a moral crusade. Much debate from the fifteenth century onwards sought to establish whether this or that indigenous people was truly human. Calling it a debate is ironic, since it was conducted by Europeans only. The Great Chain of Being was central to it. Here is fifteenth-century Jurist Sir John Fortescue’s description of it, written originally in Latin in a scholarly work on the law of nature: In this order angel is set over angel, rank upon rank in the kingdom of heaven; man is set over man, beast over beast, bird over bird, and fish over fish, on the earth in the air and in the sea: so that there is no worm that crawls upon the ground, no bird that flies on high, no fish that swims in the depths, which the chain of this order does not bind in most harmonious concord….God created as many different kinds of things as he did creatures, so that there is no creature which does not differ in some respect from all other creatures and by which it is in some respect superior or inferior to all the rest…nor from man down to the meanest worm is there any creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature

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and inferior to another. So that there is nothing which the bond of order does not embrace. (Tillyard, 1963, p. 39)

For some European thinkers, Stannard (1992) points out that the “murky zones of species overlap” became a space for slotting in human-like beings – the wild man, for example, who for a variety of reasons could not be accorded the status of full and unequivocal humanness. Even Locke, whom some might regard as the father of empirical science, subscribed to a belief in the existence of hybrid species that were part-human, part-animal. Caliban, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, his only New World play, is a theatrical instantiation of such a “species” and decidedly unregenerate. An English colonist could describe the Virginia Indians in 1609 (2 years before the staging of The Tempest) as “wild beasts, and unreasonable creatures, or…brutish savages, which by reason of their godless ignorance, and blasphemous Idolatrie, are worse that those beasts which are of most wild and savage nature” (Gray, 1609, cited in Stannard, 1992, p. 227). The best-known debate on the essential nature of indigenous people took place in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550, 70 years prior to the founding of New England. At this time, King Charles V suspended the Spanish conquest of the Americas until a decision had been reached whether the Amerindians were human or not. The two adversaries pitted against each other were the Dominican monk Bartolome de las Casas, who had witnessed the genocide first hand (and who argued that Amerindians were fully human), and the theologian Juan Gines de Sepulveda. For the record, las Casas won, but to no effect. The ban on conquest was lifted, and the discourse constructing indigenous people as a sub-human link in the Great Chain prevailed. Indigenous people continued to be candidates for extermination, whether on the basis of convenience or conviction or both.10

5.4 Decolonisation Decolonisation is any process that seeks to address and where possible remedy the negative effects of colonisation. Some effects are permanent, such as colossal loss of life and the extinction of so many indigenous languages. Some effects can be addressed in part, such as the return of indigenous lands, even if the return represents a tiny portion of what was illegally confiscated (e.g. the various Land Acts in Ireland between 1870 and 1909 and the return of lands in New Zealand under the provisions of the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act). Much of this chapter has been concerned with the discourses which were imposed and/or inscribed on indigenous populations as a result of colonisation and which continue to hold sway today. Decolonisation demands a critique of these discourses

 For an account of the debate, see Wood, M. (2000). Conquistadors. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 266–274. 10

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both in public forums, academia, the education system and in the hearts and minds of individuals via a process of critical self-reflexivity (see Chap. 1).

5.4.1 Breaking the Chain Utilising the concept of race to attribute inferior status to other groups has been around for many centuries and endures. So is the collective trait of viewing one’s own group as more civilised than another, even when one’s fellow citizens are engaging in barbaric or unjust acts. However, what was particularly toxic about the Chain of Being metaphor was that it inscribed a sub-human identity on entire groups and justified it in the name of a Providential God. At its worst, this discourse persists in White extremist ideology, which now has an overt presence in the United States and other countries (including here in Aotearoa/New Zealand). However, there are subtle ways in which this discourse persists in colonised nations (and the nations these colonists came from). One of these is the deficit theory of education, which attributes the failure of “abnormal” children in a particular school system to the child’s background (including their use of non-standard or non-mainstream languages in the home and practices deemed to be culturally backward and deficient). Such a theory takes the spotlight away from the effectiveness of the school system itself – is this where the deficiencies lie? – and appears to support people who view indigenous languages as unsuited to learning and “higher” enquiry and indigenous cultures as either beyond help or as inhibiting self-­realisation in individuals. When Luis Moll and his colleagues at the University of Arizona (Moll et al., 1992) came up with the concept of funds of knowledge, they were turning this discourse on its head, viewing the households of minority groups as a positive resource in a child’s learning and challenging schools to take steps to bridge the gap between home and school. One can also find this discourse lurking in responses to First Nations peoples of finger-pointing (blame), the shrugging of shoulders and a withdrawal into silence. These responses relate to statistics among indigenous peoples related to such social indicators as alcoholism, unemployment, a low academic achievement, violence and abuse (as both victims and perpetrators), suicide and imprisonment. Emeritus Professor Judy Atkinson is a Jiman (central west Queensland) and Bundjalung (northern New South Wales) woman, with Anglo-Celtic and German heritage, best known to many Australians for a TEDx Talk entitled “The value of deep listening – The Aboriginal gift to the nation” (August 2, 2017).11 For Atkinson and other indigenous scholars, a major explanation for these social indicators, characterising many indigenous communities worldwide, lies in intergenerational trauma which has been neither recognised nor addressed (Atkinson, 2002). Without a response of

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6wiBKClHqY. See also https://www.sharingculture.info/ judys-story.html 11

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understanding from non-indigenous people and the institutions they have created, it is all too easy to blame indigenous peoples themselves as somehow lacking in moral fibre. Reaching understanding, of course, is also contingent on a willingness to lift what Schultz (2022) terms an “architecture of silence” and recognise the degree to which colonisation tore apart the very fabric of indigenous civilisations. There is another aspect of the chain metaphor’s hierarchy of beings that warrants contestation: its ranking of the non-human natural world below human nature, which positions nature as subordinate and ripe for human domination. An instance of this occurs in a troublesome verse in the book of Genesis (1:26–28) where God commands Adam and Eve to subdue the earth and exert dominion over its creatures. We have already encountered the idea of nature needing subjugation earlier in this chapter in relation to the concept of wilderness and human nature as itself unruly. In general, indigenous peoples have no truck with this hierarchy (see Chap. 4). Nor do ecofeminists such as Val Plumwood. Ecofeminist theory posits a structural parallel between patriarchal domination of women and discourses that would justify the idea that the natural world is to be subdued and exploited for human gain. Plumwood became something of a celebrity owing to a 1985 encounter with a crocodile in the Kakadu National Park in Australia’s Northern Territory, where she was lucky to escape with her life. In a film written and directed by David Greig as part of a 1986 series on the Australian wilderness, she reflects on this encounter during a return to the park a year later.12 At one point she reflects: The crocodile has become an important symbol; it’s a very powerful force here….I remember calling out aloud that I’d learnt my lesson. I was sorry I’d come too close. I hadn’t paid enough respect. I felt very strongly then that the crocodile was like the spirit of the place.

In a 2005 essay, Plumwood wrote that: “There are many good reasons to conclude that a rich, deep connection with land and place is a key part of a healthy human culture, a source of human wisdom and sustainable living, of caring for the land and ensuring a healthy future” (p. 371). She also shared the view, argued in this chapter, that because non-indigenous Australians’ inherited from European Christianity “dominant traditions” that have been: …hostile to nature and place, locating the sacred in a transcendent higher world beyond the fallen earth, the development of a non-superficial spirituality of place that locates the sacred as immanent in particular places is highly problematic for Western culture, and requires major rethinking and reimagining. (p. 376)

Here, as in Kakadu: Land of the Crocodile, she advocates for what she terms “convergence and hybridization” as a way of interacting with Aboriginal people to develop some kind of collective spiritual identity for the country – one that would embrace a different kind of spirituality from the damaging spirituality of other-­ worldly transcendence and Puritan fear and suspicion of the wilderness. The most obvious way to subvert the Chain metaphor is to acknowledge the way in which indigenous peoples around the world, against the odds, have put paid to

12

 Kakadu: Land of the Crocodile retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caHtrztOyBM

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dying race predictions and have survived, found a voice, asserted their identities (see Chap. 4) and called colonising traditions to account. Another way is to listen deeply and to learn from what indigenous voices have been trying to tell colonisers from the start. This, for many of us, may be the hardest task of all, since it will have implications for our identities and our sense of place. It will necessitate a rethink of discourses around land, land tenure, land use, property, improvement, the wild and nature itself.

5.4.2 Unsettled Narratives and the Potential for Hybrid Identity In December 1814, Thomas Kendall was one of three missionaries who set up a station in the Bay of Islands of Aotearoa under the patronage of Māori chiefs Ruatara and Hongi Hika. Kendall was both a schoolmaster and a student of te reo and in 1815 published the first book in Māori. Around 1821 he engaged in an affair with Tungaroa, daughter of Rakau, a local tohunga, which he later justified as part of his inquiry into Māori cosmological thought.13 As his biographer wrote: “Kendall, half-­ blinkered by his Calvinist-influenced world views, tried to understand Māori cosmology. In his mind he had engaged in a struggle with the devil, and was liberated but ultimately destroyed through the contest” (Binney, 2005, p. 10). However, in this later edition of her biography, she revised this view and now saw Kendall as attempting “to enter the imagination and knowledge systems of people whom he had come to know and respect. It is perhaps the most human journey on this earth, and for a missionary, who came to convert others to his beliefs, it was unquestionably so” (p. 10). In a letter to fellow missionary, John Eyre, on December 27, 1822, Kendall confessed: “I have been almost completely turned from a Christian to a Heathen”, contaminated by the “apparent sublimity of their ideas” (p. 106). (For Samuel Marsden’s response to this fall from grace, see Chap. 1.) For Kendall and other missionaries, the apparent lack of inhibition in Māori sexual beliefs and practices was a challenge to their Puritanical self-loathing. Kendall’s engagement with Māori tikanga (Chap. 4) was more than a dalliance and may have led to a split in his identity that would have been unendurable. However, there is a sense in which Kendall is the forerunner of a process of identity reconfiguration resulting from a deep, humble engagement with indigenous wisdom  – an engagement that involves a critically self-reflexive interrogation of the colonising discourses that can lurk in one’s intellectual make-up. In relation to such a process, there is no room for the misguided presumption that a non-indigenous person might simply assume an indigenous identity. On the contrary, the process is fraught with perils, as recent work by Cook (2021) testifies.

13

 See https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1k9/kendall-thomas

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I use the term unsettling narratives to denote a non-fictional narrative where the narrator engages with his/her family’s settler past and the roles various family figures have played in the historical acts of colonisation. Such narratives can operate as an element in an individual’s own decolonising project. Functioning in this way, these narratives can: • Challenge a person’s ignorance of the nature and consequences of colonisation for indigenous groups; • Lead to a growing awareness of indigenous perspectives on colonisation and its enduring legacies; • Precipitate self-reflexive soul-searching where individuals begin identifying those “settled”, colonising discourses (belief systems) which have characterised the actions/beliefs/behaviours of ancestors right up to the present day and contesting them. • Lead to shifts in identity, as the narrator’s discursive subscription “mix” undergoes a degree of modification, sometimes transformative. Sometimes this shift can result in a kind of hybridisation (see Plumwood above) – where a person describes themselves as subscribing to two dynamic discursive clusters (which may overlap to a degree), one of which represents allegiance to or alliance with aspects of an “indigenous world view” (as constructed by that person) and the other representing discourses contributing to that person’s subjectivity but derived elsewhere (e.g. from their culture(s) of origin, disciplinary training and so on). In this section, I discuss two instances of these from Aotearoa New Zealand.14 In the Aotearoa context, the word Pākehā was applied by Māori to white inhabitants as early as 1815, with one possible origin being the word pakepakeha (imaginary beings resembling men). Since this time, the word has had something of a tumultuous history, with many non-Māori objecting to the use of the  word with reference to themselves as an insult, even though there is no evidence that it ever had pejorative connotations  – unlike words applied by colonisers to indigenous peoples (Marcetic, 2018). In the middle decades of the twentieth century, a number of non-Māori writers and intellectuals began using the word in reference to themselves as New Zealanders, who had a history of settlement in this country, as a way of asserting a kind of national identity distinct from those derived from their countries of origin (especially “Mother England”). However, as Grimshaw (2017) has pointed out, the myth of Pākehā identity, fashioned by South Island writers in particular, was premised on their regarding this island (called Te Wai Pounamu by its Ngai Tahu people) as terra nullius – an empty land or blank slate upon which these literary “Pākehā” could inscribe their version of settler identity without any reference to its indigenous

 For an Australian example, see Denborough, D. (2021). Unsettling Australian histories: Letters to ancestry from a great-great-grandson. Adelaide, SA: Dulwich Centre Foundation. 14

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inhabitants. Grimshaw cites from a poem by Charles Brasch, first published in 1945, entitled “The Silent Land”: The plains are nameless and the cities cry for meaning The unproved heart still speaks a vein of speech.

Seventy years on, it would be inconceivable for a non-Māori New Zealander to refer to themselves as Pākehā without reference to Māori. In 2021, Richard Shaw, a Professor of Politics at Massey University, published a family memoir, The Forgotten Coast, which was in part an attempt to reconcile himself with ancestral history, particularly in respect of his great-grandfather, Andrew Gilhooly, a poor farmer from County Limerick in Ireland, who arrived in New Zealand in 1874. In the book, Shaw confesses to “subscribing to the standard liberal position on the colonisation of Aotearoa” and his inaction in this regard, noting that he was “close to fifty-five years of age before those things finally began to disturb the comfortable rhythm of my days” (p.  207). In part prompted by his father’s death, he engaged with the “process of unsettling” (p. 207), which led to his writing a colonial narrative of his family and ending his “personal silence”. In a chapter entitled “Ending the forgetting”, he asserts that meaning can be found in “silences and the things not said” (p. 221). Writing the book was his “crack at making present things I have long taken to be absences” (p. 221), but without achieving any resolution: “But it has provided a kind of clarity, bringing into sharper focus the big narrative of colonisation in which my own small story sits” (p. 221). Ironically, given his own history of being colonised, Shaw’s great-grandfather ended up joining the Armed Constabulary, a militarised, law-enforcement agency, which helped construct a military road between Okato and Opunake in Taranaki and was involved in the brutal invasion and sacking of the peaceful Māori town of Parihaka on November 5, 1881. At the time, this settlement had become a symbol of Māori resistance to land confiscation through the preachings and passive resistance of prophets Te Whiti and Tohu Kākahi (see Buchanan, 2009). The family story that Shaw was never exposed to was that, as a direct result of his colonising efforts, Gilhooly and his wife ended up in possession of three blocks of land in Taranaki, which financially benefitted subsequent generations including himself. Shaw does not shy away from detailing the grim facts surrounding the land confiscations, the treatment meted out to Māori resistance leaders and their followers, the violence and rape that accompanied the sacking and destruction of Parihaka and the dispossession of or alienation from highly fertile land that Māori in Taranaki suffered. Maps play a large role in Shaw’s “unsettled” restorying of what happened in Taranaki. They serve as icons of what happens to land in the aftermath of dispossession and alienation following colonisation. They become part of the process of erasure, or they serve as graphic palimpsests where pre-European meanings for the land exist in occasional place names and in contours, rivers and coastlines. Those maps are framed and hanging on my wall, and as I gaze at them it becomes clear that the word “map” is a weighty and powerful one. Maps are hard-working things whose job is to control space and give it meaning. They make some things visible and ensure that others vanish. The victors do not just write the histories – they also get to draw the maps. In doing

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so, they get to determine how the world is seen. In the case of the Taranaki maps the purpose is to impose Pākehā order on te ao Māori – to depict Taranaki as it should be (from a settler perspective) by converting uncharted territories where taniwha roam into tidy parcels of land on which Friesians and Jerseys will graze. (p. 63)

He goes on: Maps call some things into existence by destroying others. I try to imagine a map of the Parihaka area as it might have been conceived by Te Whiti and Tohu. I can’t, of course, because that is beyond me on many different levels. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have had a surfeit of straight lines….on the maps on my wall the taniwha of Parihaka have been slain. A series of mostly straight lines denoting sections have been superimposed on land where Parihaka’s cultivations once were. Even Māori reserves that once had names – Tarakihi, Ōkawa, Ikaroa, Te Putatuapo, Waitaraiti, Te Ngaue, Otuakaia – are reduced to numbers, sections and blocks. Rendered nameless and rubbed out of existence. The maps have done the political work of Bryce, Rolleston and the AC, slicing open the acres, roods and perches, obliterating the presence of Māori and erasing the history inscribed upon the land. (p. 64)

What strikes me as a reader of Shaw’s narrative at this point is that his sense of layering (and my own metaphor of the palimpsest) is instrumental in deepening his sense of place and owning this as a fixture in his sense of himself. Despite the fact that family farms have now been sold off, he writes, “our origin story will always be there [on the Coast]” (p. 89). For Shaw, “‘The Coast’ is as much a state of mind as it is a place, and both exert a powerful pull”. It is unquestionably where I come from: the ghosts and the histories and the memories and the stories and the characters and the landmarks and the living and the dead and the sheer weight of the Coast have collectively tethered me to it. It is a place of power and I could not disentangle myself from it even if I wished to, and I don’t. (pp. 89–90)

Such reflections, of course, are inevitably accompanied by an inverse – an awareness of what this place must mean for dispossessed Māori. Again, he concedes that as a Pākehā, this is beyond his ken. “I cannot begin to imagine the despair that must be felt by Taranaki Māori who drive on that same road past that same land each day – exiles in their own country – and wonder what might have been had the colony’s government kept its word and obeyed its own laws” (p. 90). In this regard, he quotes political commentator Emma Espiner’s point15 that “looking is not neutral – and I don’t doubt that what I see as a landscape is seen by others as a ‘traumascape’ in which the past is never over” (p. 90). Alison Jones’s 2020 book, This Pākehā Life: An Unsettled Memoir, is a personal yet scholarly account of her life from her childhood days in Dannevirke to her becoming a distinguished sociologist of education at the University of Auckland. At the heart of her book is the idea of “being Pākehā”, as well as the encounters with Māori, especially academic colleagues, that have shaped her understanding of what this identity involves. For New Zealand readers, the title of Jones’ book inevitably

 Made in a presentation to Waitohu: Women Reclaiming The Ink, a celebration of mana wāhini hosted by the National Library Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa in October 2020. The reference to traumascapes is from Maria Tumarkin (2005), Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press. 15

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resonates with a number of books written by the country’s most popular historian, Michael King: Being Pākehā: An Encounter with New Zealand: The Māori Renaissance (1985), Pākehā: The Quest for Identity in New Zealand (1991) and Being Pākehā Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native (1999), the last published 5 years before his death. As the title of the last of these suggests, the version of “Pākehā” that King advocated for was very much related to the unique circumstances of settler history and an assertion of a non-Māori conceptualisation of “nativeness” or indigeneity (see Grimshaw, 2017 above and Locke, 2000). In contrast, Jones focuses on personal consciousness – ways of thinking – and her gradual realisation of the kind of hybridised subjectivity I referred to above. In a key passage, where she reflects on her learnings, derived from her relationship with Māori former student and then colleague Kuni Jenkins, she writes: It occurred to me that I was learning, finally, to think like a proper Pākehā. If Pākehā people exist in terms of our relationship to Māori, then we have to be able to think with a Māori-­ informed point of view. How else can the relationship work? However imperfect or limited our Pākehā perceptions might be, to be Pākehā, to fully inhabit that identity, is to be permanently oriented to Māori, as well as to know about our historical entanglements. If “Pākehā thinking” has a reflexive openness to Māori, then it is quite different from European thinking. It is peculiarly located here, with Māori. And once you “get” that, you can no longer “un-get” it. (p. 190)

Having said that she resists essentialising Māori, noting pragmatically: “But Māori seem to have some pervasive shared ways of being, and it was these that I was absorbing” (p. 190). Elsewhere, Jones insists on resisting simple binaries, even though “te ao Māori and te ao Pakēhā – our two worlds – rest on different ontologies and epistemologies (assumptions about the nature of being and knowledge)” (p. 215). While the negative effects of colonisation have to be faced, “New Zealand’s history is not simply a story of bad-coloniser and good-Māori” (p. 215). I alluded in an earlier chapter to Jones’s admission that she cannot really grasp her childhood Māori friend Maria’s rootedness in place, which she later connects with the centrality of relationality in Maori ontology and epistemology (drawing on Salmond, 2012). “It is in the space between us as we face each other where everything happens, where these is energy of all sorts  – the complex, fluid, shifting site occupied by the hyphen in Māori-­ Pākehā engagements” (2020, pp. 225–6).

5.4.3 A Personal Digression Reading what I have just written takes me in two directions. The first of these is to Bakhtin and his dialogic approach to speech acts as communication. In keeping with the context within which he was writing, his focus was naturally on communication across class boundaries. However, his notion of dialogue has equal relevance to talk across perceived cultural divides. The concept of dialogue subverts the speaker/listener binary and replaces it with an emphasis on

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reciprocal relationality – where words occupy borderzones rather than travel to and fro without modification. As he writes in a late essay (1986), “From the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually created. As we know, the role of the others for whom the utterance is constructed is extremely great….the role of these others…is not that of passive listeners, but of active participants in speech communication. From the very beginning, the speaker expects a response from them, an active responsive understanding. The entire utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response” (p.  94). This is Bakhtin’s account of Jones’ hyphen and the indigenous/non-indigenous interface/space where meanings are created through good will and reciprocity. The second is more personal and relates to my epistemological stance shared in Chap. 1. In that chapter, I distinguished between two modes of meaning-making, the first poetic/aesthetic/intuitive and the second analytical/rational/detached. The first is disposed to imaginative leaps, flights of fancy and unanticipated connections; the second is concerned with demarcation, categorisation and pigeon-holing. I regard both of these as sense-making utilities, each fit for distinct purposes. However, as I see it, each engages me in different ontologies and epistemologies. The first takes me closer to the ontology and epistemology Salmond (2012) and others associate with indigenous peoples. When I describe myself as having a spiritual relationship with the earth through specific places that are dear to me, I am occupying a stance that offers a sense of alliance with Māori ways of thinking. Of course, this doesn’t make me an indigenous person, though it does enable me to imagine myself back to Irish and Scottish ancestral figures who were. I don’t think of these two modes as a binary, since I don’t think of them as mutually exclusive. Rather, exercising both modes makes me a hybrid of sorts. Linguists use the term code-­switching to refer to a speaker alternating between two or more languages in a specific situation. In switching between these two modes of meaning-making, I think of myself as engaging in what might be called epistemological code-switching.

5.4.4 Decolonising Naming In The Idea of Australia, Julianne Shultz refers wittily to “names bestowed on random sites across the length and breadth of Australia, giving local maps another dimension, an honour board of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political power in another hemisphere” (2022, p. 98). The same could be said for all “new world” countries. Val Plumwood (2005) might be referencing many countries in asserting that “deeply colonised and colonising naming practices” with their “underlying narratives of Eurocentrism and of colonial power…still figure too large on the Australian map” (p. 386). She writes:

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5  Decolonising Place It is precisely such cultural practices we have to take on if we Australians are ever truly to belong culturally to this land and develop a mode of exchange that attends to and respects the uniqueness and power of place as well as recognising its prior naming and occupation by Aboriginal people. (p. 386) An empty and highly conventionalised naming practice is both a symptom and a partial cause of an empty relationship to the land. If we want a meaningful relationship with the land that expresses a healthier pattern than the colonial one, we have to look to naming it in meaningful terms that acknowledge its agency and narrative depth. (p. 387)

For her, decolonisation calls for what she calls a renaming project, reflective of “cultural convergence, cross-fertilisation, [and] reconciliation”, that would bring indigenous and non-indigenous communities together collaboratively “to rework their relationship to each other and to the land” (p. 387). Such a project calls for non-indigenous people to strive to understand the significance of and restore the names that have been erased by colonisation. Shultz herself provides an example of this in a chapter entitled “From Somewhere”, where she evokes her strong sense of a particular place: Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), across Moreton Bay from Brisbane. She notes that “Places put a sensory stamp on you, even if you don’t realise it at the time”. In the case of Minjerribah, it is “the peppery smell of the summer wallum” (coastal ecosystem) (p. 31). But it is deepened by what Plumwood (above) calls its “narrative depth”, which for Shultz has been mediated by her relationship with Quandamooka poet and activist, Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), through whom “middle-class Brisbane kids learned that Aboriginal connections with their city were alive, deep and close by. And beautiful” (p.  33). In 1972, the first time Shultz visited Minjerribah, Oodgeroo published Stradbroke Dreamtime. “It has been in print ever since and took root in my being” (p. 33). I began this chapter with reference to the naming of Hamilton and the case currently being made for changing it back to Kirikiriroa. On April 26, 2022, Hamilton City Council’s Community Committee approved an application to rename Von Tempsky Street to Pūtikitiki Street, referencing a gully occupied prior to the city’s founding in 1864 (and also the word for a “top-knot” hairstyle favoured by Māori chiefs). In a report prepared for the Council, historian Vincent O’Malley16 offered overviews of four historical figures associated with the naming of the city: John Fane Charles Hamilton, Sir George Grey, Gustavus Ferdinand von Tempsky and John Bryce. It is clear to anyone reading this report that Von Tempsky’s behaviour during the land wars demystifies and contests nineteenth-century views of him as a romantic adventurer and war hero. The name of the street named after John Bryce, architect of the destruction of Parihaka, is presently unchanged.

 O’Malley, V. (2020). Historical report on Hamilton street and city names. Retrieved August 9, 2022 from https://4626096.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/4626096/Documents/Website/ Historical%20Report%20on%20Hamilton%20Street%20and%20City%20Names%20FINAL.pdf 16

References

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References Agnew, J. A. (1987). Place and politics: The geographical mediation of state and society. Allen and Unwin. Atkinson, J. (2002). Trauma trails: Recreating song lines. Australia. Bakhtin, M. (1986). The problem with speech genres (V.  McGee, Trans.). In C.  Emerson & M.  Holquist (Eds.), Speech genres and other late essays: M.  M. Bakhtin (pp.  60–102). University of Texas Press. Barbour, K. (2016). Place-responsive choreography and activism. In E. Emerald, R. E. Rinehart, & A. Garcia (Eds.), Global south ethnographies (pp. 127–145). Sense Publishers. Binney, J. (2005). The legacy of guilt: A life of Thomas Kendall. Bridget Williams Books. Boyce, J. (2008). Van Diemen’s land. Black Inc. Brennan, M. (1996). Multiple professionalism for Australia teachers in the information age? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York. Buchanan, R. (2009). The Parihaka album: Lest we forget. Huia Publications. Carroll, P.  N. (1969). Puritanism and the wilderness: The intellectual significance of the New England Frontier 1629–1700. Columbia University Press. Churchill, W. (1997). A little matter of genocide: Holocaust and denial in the Americas: 1492 to the present. City Lights Books. Cook, E.  A. (2021). Unsettled bliss of cruelty: Pākehā in Aotearoa. Doctoral thesis, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury. Retrieved from https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/ handle/10092/103306 Danby, J. F. (1962). Shakespeare’s doctrine of nature: A study of King Lear. Faber& Faber. Fields, G. (2017). Enclosure: Palestinian landscapes in a historical mirror. University of California Press. Gray, R. (1609). A good speed to Virginia. Gregory, I.  N., Cunningham, N.  A., Lloyd, C.  D., Shuttleworth, I.  G., & Ell, P.  S. (2013). Troubled geographies: A spatial history of religion and society in Ireland. Accessed July 15, 2022 at https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/troubledgeogs/chap2.htm#:~:text=The%20Munster%20 Plantation%20(1585),to%20re%2Dpopulate%20the%20area Grimshaw, M. (2017, July 25). “I am a Pākehā because I live in a Māori country”: Pākehā identity and the North Island myth. The Pantograph Punch. Retrieved from https://pantograph-­punch. com/posts/North-­Island-­Myth Jones, A. (2020). This Pākehā life: An unsettled memoir. Bridget Williams Books. Kaltenborn, B.  P. (1998). Effects of sense of place on responses to environmental impacts: A study among residents in Svalbard in the Norwegian high Arctic. Applied Geography, 18(2), 169–189. Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis rule in occupied Europe: Laws of occupation, anlysis of government, proposals for redress. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Locke, T. (2000). The indigenous Pākehā: Interview with Michael King. English in Aotearoa, 41, 72–77. Lovejoy, A.  O. (1974). The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea. Harvard University Press. Marcetic, B. (2018, March 3). A history of outrage over the word “Pākehā”. The Spinoff. Retrieved from https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/03-­03-­2018/a-­history-­of-­outrage-­over-­the-­word-­pakeha Miller, R. J., Ruru, J., Behrendt, L., & Lindberg, T. (2010). Discovering Indigenous lands: The doctrine of discovery in the English Colonies. Oxford University Press. Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes & classroom. Theory Into Practice, 32(2), 132–140. More, T. (1551). Utopia (H. Morley, Ed.). Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2130/2130-­h/2130-­h.htm Newman, A. K. (1882). A study of the causes leading to the extinction of the Maori. Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 14, 459–477.

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Parkman, F. (1915). The conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the conquest of Canada (Vol. 1). Charles Scribner’s Sons. Plumwood, V. (2005). Belonging, naming and decolonisation. In J. Hillier & E. Rooksby (Eds.), Habitus: A sense of place (2nd ed., pp. 371–391). Ashgate. Salmond, A. (2012). Ontological quarrels: Indigeneity, exclusion and citizenship in a relational world. Anthropological Theory, 12(2), 115–141. Schultz, J. (2022). The idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation. Allen & Unwin. Shaw, R. (2021). The forgotten coast. Massey University Press. Smith, L.  T. (2012). Decolonising methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Otago University Press. Smith, D.  M. (2017). Counting the dead: Estimating the loss of life in the indigenous Holocaust, 1492-present. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Native American Symposium 2017. Southeastern Oklahoma State University. Accessed July 2022 at https://www.se.edu/ native-­american/2017-­native-­american-­symposium/ Stannard, D.  E. (1992). American holocaust: The conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press. Tillyard, E. M. W. (1963). The Elizabethan world picture. Penguin. Tuan, Y. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota. Wilkinson, A. (2019). Why Babadook director Jennifer Kent hates period pieces, and why she made one. Vox. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/31/18197649/ nightingale-­jennifer-­kent-­interview-­language-­gaelic-­aboriginal Winthrop, J. (1629). Reasons for establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Retrieved July 15\8, 2023, from https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3-euw1-ap-pe-ws4-cws-documents. ri-prod/9780415818124/Document2.pdf

Chapter 6

Locating Sense of Place in Literary Studies

When I enrolled in 1966 at the University of Auckland in what turned out to be an English major, “English” was regarded by many as the jewel in the University’s curricular crown. The first edition of Auckland-born Karl Stead’s modernist classic The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot had just been published in 1964.1 He was just one of a number of lecturers with global reputations in their fields. A number of significant New Zealand literary figures were also members of the Department: Allen Curnow, Bill Pearson, M. K. Joseph, K. O. Arvidson, Kendrick Smithyman and others (including Stead himself). First-year students filled the biggest lecture hall on campus and were generally on the receiving end of lectures crafted in accordance with the tenets of the New Criticism, though I could not have said that at the time. The literary canon was almost exclusively derived from the United Kingdom. American literature had barely established a toe-hold nor had literature written by New Zealanders. I taught in the Department in the 1970s and 1980s  – long enough to witness cracks opening up in the “English” monolith with the advent of “theory” and the assaults by its disciples and missionaries. These decades heralded a time of uncertainty for English Departments worldwide, which books such as Peter Barry’s English in Practice: In pursuit of English Studies (2003) have sought to account for. Nowadays, I am tempted to say that English has lost its way, at least in my own country. At Auckland University, it is just another Arts option, in an Arts Faculty where enrolments are shrinking. Here English struggles to compete with more “relevant” curriculum areas while attempting to attract students who may well have been put off the subject at school by the way it has been constructed by the current qualifications regime. A colleague in the Department informed me recently that level-one enrolments in English had decreased from 600 in the 1980s to 190 in the present day. While this chapter focuses on what I am calling literary studies, I’m experiencing some nostalgia as I write about the subject that won my heart in my formative years.  It is still in print. See Stead, C. K. (2005). The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. London, UK: Continuum.

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In this chapter, I will be engaging in a degree of critique, but prompted by a desire to see the discipline/region reform, regenerate and revive. Whatever we end up calling it, it has a role to play in helping people enhance or even develop a sense of place. In what follows, I traverse literary criticism, or more generally literary studies, in search of concepts, orientations and discourses in relation to which sense of place might have some relevance. I begin with a focus on figures of speech, and the implication of viewing these not as neutral and universal, but rather as culturally constructed and thereby intriguingly unstable. I reflect on how I used to understand metaphor and personification, and how this understanding lacked an ontological dimension, especially the kind of indigenous ontology referenced in Chap. 4. I was taught to view these figures of speech in Eurocentric terms – and position my students to view them similarly. I then explore the concept of setting, arguing that in literary studies a case can be made for its comparative absence, or marginalisation, or subordination to plot and character. I turn to Bakhtin’s (1981) treatise on “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, because of the way it offers an explanation for the various forms which setting (space/place) have taken historically in the novel as genre. Then, drawing on Foucault once more, I further argue that setting and sense of place are inevitably acts of representation and subject to an author’s/character’s discursive leanings. Such acts are worthy of critical interrogation, especially given the centrality I am assigning to sense of place in this book. I then revisit the theme of decolonisation (see Chap. 5) by showing how the genre of traveller’s tale can be used to highlight contrasts in values attributed to specific places, in texts where indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives are opposed. I then move to poetry with a particular focus on the genre of pastoral and the way it was reshaped in the work of John Clare. The discussion of Clare’s work leads on to some considerations of ecopoetry as a category. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of ecocriticism and how it relates to my purpose in writing this book.

6.1 Figurative Language My dog-eared copy of Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms (1981) describes figurative language as “a deviation from what speakers of a language apprehend as the ordinary, or standard, significance or sequence of words, in order to achieve some special meaning or effect”. While these figures have a history of being viewed as largely ornamental, Abrams insists that “they are entirely integral to the functioning of language, and in fact indispensible not only to poetry, but to all modes of discourse” (p. 63). In 1992, while still a high-school English teacher, I produced and self-published Every Student’s English Language Manual, a slender book designed to sit neatly in students’ ring binders as a reference text.2 Reflecting on this book three decades later, I now find myself questioning some of its content, as I’ll explain below.  In 1996, Macmillan published an Australian version of the book. At the time, both books found a ready market among teachers who were insecure around their own “grammatical” knowledge. 2

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In attempting to find a way of explaining metaphor to high-school students, I approached the topic (like Abrams) by beginning with concrete language (imagery) and introducing the distinction between literal and figurative language. I wrote: Images can be literal or figurative. Literal images refer to objects actually present in a situation being written about. If I describe a flax bush as having long, thick, green and pointed leaves, then I am writing literally. If, on the other hand, I write about leathery spears of flax, then I can be described as using figurative images. In a figurative image, I am introducing references to objects outside the literal situation for the purposes of comparison. The texture of the leaves justifies my using the comparison with leather. The shape of the leaves justifies my using the comparison with spears. But there are no spears or pieces of leather present in the actual situation. (1992, p. 8)

There are two aspects of this paragraph that strike me now. The first is the degree to which I am positioning myself as active – as the deliberate user of figurative language (“describe”, “am writing”, “write about”, “am introducing”). Then, in the two following sentences, a feature of the flax itself becomes a subject of the active verb “justifies”. It’s as if I’m giving voice to the flax itself. The second aspect is around the legitimacy of my metaphorical usage. At the time of writing, I would have been making the point that there is nothing random about the selection of a figurative image and that a critical reader can call a writer to account in respect of this selection. However, as I read this paragraph today, it appears to me that I have unconsciously accorded the flax bush the right to confirm (or not) the aptness of my metaphors. For New Zealanders, the flax bush is iconic. For Māori, flax (harakeke) fibres were and still are crucial to their way of life and are used for a multitude of purposes. The harakeke plant is a symbol of whānau (family). The significance of its parts has a bearing on the way it is harvested. The inner shoot (rito) is compared to a child and never removed. Structurally the shoot is protected by the awhi rito, nearby fronds viewed as parental figures (mātua). Only the outer leaves, members of the wider family, are harvested.3 This is clearly a figurative “treatment” of the harakeke. But I suggest that it is so removed from mere ornamentation that figurativeness does not get to the heart of it. The heart of it (and, yes, let go with this metaphor) is an identification with the plant that is so deep that it commands reverence and is implicated in a code of behaviour. I am aware of writing this as a non-indigenous person looking in. I recognise the ontology of the above instance as similar to what is taking place in Archie Roach’s song, “Into the Bloodstream”, cited in Chap. 4. It is an ontology that is at the core of the indigenous sense of place I attempted to communicate in that chapter. At the same time, I’m finding myself drawn to identifying with it – which means identifying a capacity for connection in myself to a non-human world that would speak to me were I prepared to listen to it. The poem below was written in 2022 but is an irruption into consciousness of something that has been in preparation for a few years now. I think of it as concretising what I have just enunciated in prose.  https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/topic/3623#:~:text=Symbolism%20%E2%80%93%20the%20 harakeke%20family,if%20it%20is%20to%20survive 3

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6.2 The Place of Rocks I am entering in to     the place of rocks beyond the reach of stars    and the olive-grey eyes of dealers. Every smooth face     is a facet of something else as the granite melts     in the play of shadow and the music of ash. Here is the place    of unreadable metres where the past is     a tide pulling me back to the ground of stillness. I hug the dark     which washes over the cracks out of which a poem     crystalises in its own glory of stone.

Back in 1992, I wrote in Every Student’s English Language Manual that: “The words leathery and spears are both metaphors. With metaphor, the comparison is made as a blunt identification” (p. 8). Is metaphor really a blunt instrument? Goneril professes her love for her father in the first scene of King Lear by proclaiming: “Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter”. Wield is a metaphor, which bestows on her “word” sword-like qualities. The original audience would have recognised the figure immediately as emptily rhetorical – mere decoration for calculated and weaponised speech. There is a sense in which my 1992 definition is technically correct. But nowadays, I prefer to think of metaphor, at least potentially, as the wording of an intuitively felt connection between two apparently distinct objects that is anchored in the nature of their being.

6.2.1 Personification In the same Manual, I defined personification as a “metaphor where an object that is non-human is described in terms of human characteristics” (1992, p. 8). Abrams is less bland: “...either an inanimate object or an abstract concept is spoken of as though it were endowed with life or with human attributes or feelings” (1981, p. 65). However, he omits any reference to animate, non-human objects (animals, birds and so on). Like me, he resorts to passive voice: “is spoken of”, “were endowed with”. By way of example, he cites Keats’ ode “To Autumn”. Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

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Here the concept of autumn is concretised and idealised in the figure of a woman. This commonplace and generally uncontested definition of personification becomes problematised if we exchange the phrasal verb “spoken of” by “spoken for”. When a person is spoken for, the force of the speech act is an erasure of identity. (As I suggested in Chap. 4, this has been the lot of indigenous peoples for centuries.) Hamlet was the first Shakespearean play I read and viewed as a high-­ school student. I have always been enchanted by these lines from the first scene, where Horatio alerts his companions to impending daybreak: But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.

Here the dawn is compared to a person walking in russet clothing. We get a sense of the colour of the sky, but really very little information about the hill other than its height and direction. The force of the personification is to generate a mood rather than convey a sense of place or of the natural world. There is no relationship suggested. Hone Tūwhare (1922–2008) was the first Māori poet to achieve national prominence in Aotearoa. His poem “Deep River Talk” gave its title to his collected poems (1993). The poem is set beside a river which broadens out as it approaches the sea.

The river’s wide here: it’s undecided: it’s steeling itself never to turn and go back uphill. (p. 194)

In conventional terms we might observe that the river is being personified. But again, such an observation ignores an ontological dimension which will be clear to readers of the poem in its entirety, where the speaker positions himself as just one participant (and the only human one) among a number of participants: river, sea, a daddy-long-legs, mullet, eels and trout. The talk is deep in more ways than one, and the wairua (spirit) that animates the setting eludes categorisation as human or non-human. I noted earlier that Abrams (1981) defined personification as bestowing human attributes or feelings on inanimate objects while overlooking animate, non-human creatures. (Most definitions are more inclusive.) “Deep River Talk” contains the sentence: “The veins of the river are swollen”. Is this personification in Abrams’ terms? We can’t say for sure, since most animals have veins. In addition, if the river in question (and clearly the setting is a specific place) is braided, as are most rivers in the South Island of Aotearoa, “veins” may be functioning as a metaphor. And does it matter? For me, the key talking point is ontological – a suggestion that the river and the participants of the scene are united in one overall “conversation”. Pertinent to the ontology of Tūwhare’s poem is the fact that: “In March 2017, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was the first river to officially receive the status of a legal person. This legal personhood is based on the ontological understanding of the river as an indivisible and living whole and as the spiritual ancestor of the Whanganui Iwi (a Māori tribe)” (Kramm, 2020, p. 307).

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6.3 Resetting Setting During my time as a high-school English teacher, the study of narrative fiction was framed by the plot/character/setting triad; of the three, setting was very much the poor cousin – what Green and Clark (2013) acknowledge as “a subordinate albeit necessary consideration” (p.  3). Lurking in the thicket of this triad were themes, which were to be flushed out and argued for in formulaic essays. Themes tended to be ideas other people said were to be unearthed in texts. In a hand-out on teaching setting I used with my students, I wrote that “At its simplest, setting describes the place and time that a story is set in…where and when the action takes place”. Under three headings, “Identifying setting”, “Exploring setting” and “Analysing setting”, I offered students a number of close reading prompts. Under “Exploring setting”, I invited them to identify a major setting and the key events that occurred there, describe it in words and represent it pictorially or diagrammatically. The prompts related to “Analysing setting” were mostly focused on the way power was exercised in a particular setting, the behaviours that were countenanced (or not) and what was valued (or not). However, there was a prompt inviting them to identify ways in which a character was “affected” by this setting. Looking back on this practice, I realise that in large part I was framing setting on the basis of a critical literacy discourse and that I was mostly interested in context and location rather than place. My focus was not especially on place and the way place was concretely articulated or discursively constructed. Nor was there a focus on spatiotemporal aspects of place. Were my students engaged or captivated by this framing? I don’t know. I now find myself wondering whether the precariousness of place as a concept in geography (see Chap. 2) has been mirrored by something similar in literary studies  – where setting has been marginalised and place relatively absent and untheorised in literary critical discourse. The following reflections are based on my own random but not arbitrary engagement with literature in English (including translations) and various schools of criticism over five decades.

6.3.1 Epic In respect of epic, place looms large in Homer’s Odyssey, especially in relation to the status of Ithaca vis-à-vis the wanderings of Odysseus and Telemachus. Having said that, Ithaca is a legendary, symbolic and imagined place. Fast-forwarding to the second millennium, we find Spencer locating The Faerie Queene in a fantastical, allegorical realm, while Milton locates Paradise Lost and Regained in his own version of earthly and supernatural realms; Dante does the same in The Divine Comedy. By the time we get to the nineteenth century, Keats doesn’t manage to emulate Milton, and Wordsworth stumbles into a poem about the developing self in relation to its lived experience of actual natural and man-made settings. As discussed in

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Chap. 2, it is in Wordsworth’s geographically located, so-called spots of time passages (Wiley, 2015) that we finally arrive at the articulation of a sense of spirit of place. By the time we get to the twentieth century, arriving non-coincidentally in the United States, we discover Hart Crane writing The Bridge and William Carlos Williams writing Paterson. Hart Crane’s hero is a bard trying to bring America into focus by the sheer strength of his poetic virtuosity. It is arguable, however, that the various settings he evokes buckle under the symbolic weight that is piled upon them. A truly radical reorientation of the epic occurs with William Carlos Williams. The epic hero for Williams is the place itself. Paterson is essentially an epic treatment of the sense of place, motivated by a belief in the need for a cultural revival – re-establishing what it means to be a creative, human spirit on different terms. In a 1934 essay on “The American Background”, Williams argued that culture is a process: It has to be where it arises, or everything related to the life there ceases....It is the realisation of the qualities of a place in relation to the life which occupies it; embracing everything involved, climate, geographic position, relative size, history, other cultures – as well as the character of its sands, flowers, minerals and the conditions of knowledge within its borders. It is the act of lifting these things into an ordered and utilised whole which is culture. (1969, p. 157)

As this passage suggests, Williams views culture and sense of place as outcomes of the same process and even synonymous. Reading this essay, I feel drawn to suggest that there is a “New World” sensibility at work in its disposition.4

6.3.2 Theatre There is an argument being sketched here that literature in English and literary criticism generally have had a role to play in the European colonisation project. We have seen it reflected in the theorisation of figures of speech in relation to their designs on the world of non-human objects. We are now encountering it in the relative marginalisation of setting as a window into place and human emplacement. Aristotle’s Poetics was the first text I was asked to read when I studied literary criticism in 1969. In Chapter VI, Aristotle offers his definition (or formula) for tragedy: It is necessary, therefore, that tragedy as a whole have six parts in accordance with which, as a genre, it achieves its particular quality. These parts are plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and melody. (p. 12)5

 The approach to culture is in stark contrast to T. S. Eliot (1967). Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London, UK 5  Page references are to Leon Golden’s translation (1966): Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall). 4

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The most important of these is plot, since for Aristotle the central focus is a particular kind of action, involving either noble or scurrilous men. Character, while important, is subservient to action. “Poets do not, therefore, create action in order to imitate character; but character is included on account of the action” (p.  12). Characters become means for the enactment of predicament, rising action, turning point, climax, catastrophe and so on, which have been central to our thinking about the art of fiction (regardless of the genre) up to the present day. There is no mention of setting. For the most part, if we do a cursory scan of plays in English, places don’t particularly matter. For Sophocles, Thebes might as well have been Sparta or Athens. A scholarly article entitled “Why place doesn’t matter in the plays of Shakespeare” is yet to be written.6 In the Globe, set was minimal and the actors dressed as Elizabethans. The nearest Shakespeare approaches a drama of place is in The Tempest, which, non-coincidentally, is his only New World play. As Leo Marx pointed out in his discussion of The Tempest as Shakespeare’s “American Fable”, this is a play written “in the hour colonisation began” (p. 46): Prospero’s situation is in many ways the typical situation of voyagers in newly discovered lands. [He means Europeans.] I am thinking of the remote setting, the strong sense of place and its hold on the mind, the hero’s struggle with raw nature on the one hand and the corruption within his own civilisation on the other, and, finally his impulse to effect a general reconciliation between the forces of civilisation and nature. (1964, p. 35)

On a relatively bare stage, the setting is a major thematic focus, communicated partially through a range of contrasting descriptions, which enact the European debates about nature discussed in the last chapter. Marx’s primary focus is on the concept of pastoral as it will play out in American culture. His discussion of Caliban too easily treats the character as merely symbolic of some universal potential for human evil, rather than the representation of an indigenous person, who has been dispossessed of his land by Milanese colonisers. The relative “placelessness” of theatre is borne out by the way stage and film directors of Shakespeare make up their own minds regarding the sets and settings for their productions. The same goes for modern classics such as Waiting for Godot. Of all literary forms, plays are the most susceptible to recontextualisation and resituating. Moreover, set is one remove from setting – a designer’s interpretation of a setting. There is potential, however, for a designer to evoke a sense of place. Years ago, when I was a high-school drama teacher, I directed Miller’s The Crucible. In order to communicate a sense of the forest as threatening and demonic, we created a backdrop of white skeletal trees painted on a row of black flats, which could be observed through framed but unclad structural units representing each of the plays four indoor settings. This negative sense of the forest (see Chap. 4) is evoked by a number of characters throughout the play. Christopher Hampton’s play Savages (1974) premiered in London in 1973, but is even more relevant today. The focus of the play is the genocide of Amazonian  If you Google this title, you will find lots about why the plays matter.

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peoples and based on an actual event involving the Cintas Largas tribe. The plot, such as it is, revolves around an English diplomat, Alan West, based in Brazil, who has become captivated by various tribal myths and legends. The sense of place of the Cintas tribe is communicated in three ways in this play: firstly, when West periodically delivers versions of various tribal myths to the audience; secondly, in scenes showing West in conversation with the anthropologist, Miles Crawshaw; and thirdly, and most poignantly, in the actualisation on stage of the Quarup ritual,7 on the occasion of which most of the tribe were massacred in real life. (The massacre is enacted as the climax of the play and coincides with the death of West.) Throughout the play, Hampton provides detailed stage directions for this actualisation, including notes on choreography, costume, music and cultural props.

6.3.3 Prose Fiction Below I list the results of a random search of treatments of “setting” in some critical literature, followed by reflections on place in relation to various paradigms of English as a subject. • Terry Eagleton (2007), How to Read a Poem. There is no mention of setting or context in this book, which is not exclusively focused on poetry. • J. Hillis Miller (1990), discussing “Narrative”, follows Aristotle in ignoring setting, but does allude to cultural critique. Rather, he is interested in archetypal plot structures, i.e. plots with typical characters and able to take place in virtually any “setting”. • In Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983), the term “environment” is subsumed under characterisation to denote a character’s “physical surrounding (room, house, street, town) as well as his human environment (family, social class)” which are often used as “trait-connoting metonymies” (p. 66). Settings are not mentioned. She is apt to dismiss the “pseudo-scientific connection between character and environment” (p. 66) and any suggestion of a causal or even dialogical link between setting and character. Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978) was written prior to Rimmon-Kenan’s book. Chatman does address setting, though his focus is more on “space” than “place”. In Chap. 3 on “Story: Existents”, Chatman begins by theorising the distinction thus: “As the dimension of story-events is time, that of story-existence is space”. For him, events occur in story-­ time and “are not spatial, though they occur in space” (p. 96). Story-space contains “existents” (namely, characters and setting). Alluding to visual narratives, he further distinguishes between “explicit story-space” (“the segment of the world actually shown on the screen”) and “discourse [or ‘implied’] space” – “everything off-screen

 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarup

7

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to us but visible to the characters, or within earshot, or alluded to by the action” (p. 96). In prose fiction, he argues that story-space is abstract and requires “a reconstruction in the mind” of the reader (p. 97). Existents, i.e. characters and settings, are “what the reader is prompted to create in imagination (to the extent that he [sic] does so), on the basis of the characters’ perceptions and/or the narrator’s reports” (p. 104). Of the two story-existents Chatman discusses, 22 pages are given over to character and 7 to setting. As he addresses setting, a telling act of prioritisation occurs, where he uses the metaphor of figure and ground. “Just as we can distinguish, in a painted portrait, the person from the background against which he or she is posed, so we can distinguish the character from the setting in a story” (p. 138). In this configuration, setting is literally and figuratively backgrounded. The setting “sets the character off” in the usual figurative sense of the expression: it is the place and collection of objects “against which” his actions and passions appropriately emerge. (138–9)

One of the texts analysed by Chatman is James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” (published in 1914), which he uses to illustrate his contention that a “normal and perhaps principal function of setting is to contribute to the mood of the narrative” (p. 141). However, his analysis is anything but consistent with this contention. He begins by offering an overview of the various settings evoked by the story, describing these as “scenic props” (very much a backdrop). He then undermines his original contention by asserting that “Elements of setting can serve multiple functions” (p. 142), including their associative value for a character. Towards the end of the story, he writes: “The normally effaced narrator cannot resist several climactic metaphors precisely at the moment of the heroine’s greatest anguish” (p. 142). A bell clanged upon her heart.....All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing....Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish. (p. 377)8

Chatman’s reading asserts that: “What makes the metaphors powerful is the way they fuse character and setting, subject character to the onslaught of setting, making setting almost a character” (pp.  142–3). It is only at the climax of the story, he claims, that such metaphorical density occurs. I concur with Chatman’s view on the fusion of character and setting but see its use here as doing more than contributing to the story’s mood. Moreover, this is not the first instance of it. Here is the story’s first paragraph: She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains, and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired. (p. 374)

As I read “Eveline”, it is clear that aspects of place evoked in this story extend beyond the use of metaphor to reinforce a mood. The word “invade” might connote  Page numbers are drawn from The Essential James Joyce (ed. H. Levin)(1963). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. 8

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something threatening, but equally it implies the irresistibility of time. The description of Eveline’s posture is not metaphorical, but portrays her connection with her home (which enjoys a lengthy tribute in the third paragraph). Nor is it metaphorical to say that the “odour of dusty cretonne” had entered (invaded?) her nostrils. Altogether, the language of the opening paragraph suggests an interpenetration of character and setting, which goes beyond metaphorical decoration. The first page of the story anticipates Eveline’s inability to leave her home and risk all for Frank; at least in part, this stems from the strength of her strong, enduring and communal sense of place – a theme endemic to Irish literature. I concur with Chatman’s suggestion that setting can serve a range of functions. And I further concur with him that “questions of the functions of setting and its relation to character” are something that narrative theory cannot ignore (p. 145).

6.3.4 Bakhtin: A Digression on the Chronotope “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (Bakhtin, 1981) is on one level an attempt to map the history of the European novel and the social conditions that enabled the production of particular novelistic archetypes. This work is aptly entitled a “historical poetics”, because these archetypes are time-bound, and each is characterised by clusters of aspects: character types, plot (and various structural motifs) and settings (spaces, locations and places) that are particular to it. Bakhtin uses the word “complex” regularly to refer to the cluster of aspects that constitute a particular genre, sub-genre and hybrid, e.g. the idyllic complex. For Bakhtin, a particular archetype has a dialogical relationship to its cultural context: it is shaped by it and in turn shapes it. It is also relational in the sense that formal elements such as plot, character and setting become defined in terms of their relationship to one another. Taking his cue from Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bakhtin “gave the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (p. 84). As the following quotation suggests, this connectedness is concretised in a literary work and underpins its coherence. In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterises the artistic chronotope. (p. 84)

Bakhtin commences his “Notes” with an investigation of three ancient classical genres: the Greek romance, the “adventure novel of everyday life” (p. 111) (a good example of structural motifs) and ancient biography and autobiography (pp. 130ff). In each case, his focus is primarily on the problem of time (“the dominant principle in the chronotope”) and factors “that have a direct and unmediated relationship to time” (p. 86).

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By way of example, the Greek romance is characterised by what he calls “adventure-­time”, which requires “an abstract expanse of space” (p. 99) [his italics]. In Greek romance, “The contingency that governs events is inseparably tied up with space, measured primarily by distance on the one hand and by proximity on the other (and varying degrees of both)” (p. 99). The focus of this genre, then, is on space and location. “The world of these romances is large and diverse. But this size and diversity is utterly abstract. For a shipwreck one must have a sea, but which particular sea (in the geographical and historical sense) makes no difference at all” (p. 100). Similarly, while Bakhtin makes much of the “chronotope of the road (‘the open road’)” (p. 98), the road is no more than a location that lends itself to chance encounters. Any location is not a place since, as I discussed in Chap. 2, it has not been endowed with human meaning and value. In Chap. 7, Bakhtin focuses on the Rabelaisian Chronotope, which is for him a pivotal moment in the history of the novel, which derives from its reassertion of folk tradition. In part it enabled “a restoration of the spatial and temporal material wholeness of the world on a new, more profound and more complex level of development” (p. 166) at a time (not coincidentally, I would say) when the New World was being discovered. At issue in Rabelais’ novel was “that special connection between a man and all his actions, between every event of his life and the spatial-temporal world” (p. 167). This special relationship we will designate as the adequacy, the direct proportionality, of degrees of quality (‘value’) to spatial and temporal quantities (dimension)….these images were deliberately counterposed to the disproportionality inherent in the feudal and religious world view, where values are opposed to a spatial-temporal reality, treating it as vain, transitory, sinful….Rabelais’s task was the re-creation of a spatially and temporally adequate world able to provide a new chronotope for a new, whole and harmonious man, and for new forms of human communication. (p. 167-8)

This line of argument has particular resonance with this book, since Rabelais is being positioned as providing an antidote (via his “new chronotope”) to the diseased European view of nature deconstructed in Chap. 5. As an aspect of this chronotope, Rabelais constructs what Bakhtin terms local myths: A local myth explains the genesis of a geographical space. Each locality must be explained, beginning with its place name and ending up with the fine details of its topographical relief, its soil, plant life and so forth—all emerging from the human event that occurred there and that gave to the place its name and its physiognomy. A locality is the trace of an event, a trace of what had shaped it. (p. 189)

The last sentence clearly articulates the way in which a location is endowed with meaning by its human history. As a result, it becomes a place – no longer a location but a locality. Bakhtin argues that the folkloric basis of the new form of time in Rabelais is collective: It is differentiated and measured only by the events of collective life; everything that exists in this time exists solely for the collective....This sense of time works itself out in a collective battle of labor against nature….It is a time of growth, blossoming, fruit-bearing, ripen-

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ing, fruitful increase, issue....This time is profoundly spatial and concrete….Time here is sunk deeply in the earth, implanted in it and ripening in it. (pp. 206-8)

Bakhtin’s suggestion that folkloric wisdom viewed nature as something to be battled against is a consistent theme. Earlier he identified a “precious kernel of folk humanity” as “a faith in the indestructible power of man in his struggle with nature and with all inhuman forces” (p. 105). Nature here is just one of the inhuman forces human beings struggle against. However, as Chap. 4 has indicated, it is a limited view of nature and not too removed from European discursive constructions of the wild discussed in Chap. 5. However, it also serves to hint at a collective sense of place operating in the actual world at the time Rabelais was writing and prior to the widespread dispossession that occurred in Europe described in Chap. 3. In Bakhtin’s history, the genre of the idyll is seen as “restoring the ancient complex and for restoring folkloric time” (p. 224). In relation to setting and place, the idyll is characterised by a special relationship between time and space in a unity of place [his italics]: “an organic fastening-down, a grafting of life and its events to a place, to a familiar territory with all its nooks and crannies, its familiar mountains, valleys, fields, rivers and forests, and one’s own home. Idyllic life and its events are inseparable from this concrete, spatial corner of the world where the fathers and grandfathers lived and where one’s children and their children will live” (p. 225). In the idyll, we might say, place comes into its own. In considering the history of the idyll as a genre, Bakhtin reflects on the potential for its disappearance in the context of social changes, which lead to the disintegration of “the immanent unity of time”, when the collective loses its force and “individual life-sequences [are] separated out”: ... ...when collective labour and the struggle with nature had ceased to be the only arena for man’s encounter with nature and the world – then nature itself ceased to be a living participant in the events of life. Then nature became, by and large, a ‘setting for action,’ its backdrop; it was turned into landscape, it was fragmented into metaphors and comparisons serving to sublimate individual and private affairs and adventures not connected in any real or intrinsic way with nature itself. (p. 217)

The social conditions which produce this effect in the novel as a genre, especially in relation to the aspect of setting, include both the industrial revolution and its inverse – the agrarian revolution – both of which produced widespread landlessness and urban squalor. By the nineteenth century, at least in the “Old World”, the potential for most people to develop a positive sense of place was limited. The natural world had not disappeared; it had simply become fenced off. It is not surprising that the above passage from Bakhtin resonates with the view of setting articulated by Chatman (1978) above, namely, as little more than a contributor to mood and a metaphor for character. Towards the end of his sprawling overview, Bahktin concludes that “the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materialising time in space, emerges as a centre for concretising representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel” (p. 250). In doing so, he draws attention to both the problem and solution regarding setting and sense of place as chronotopes. In Locke (2004), I wrote that Foucault’s

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archaeological method set out to describe what he called an archive – “set of rules which at a given period for a given society define” such things as “the limits and forms of the sayable” (1991, p.  59). Representation, as I will explore further in Chap. 7, is a discursive practice, in the sense that ways we represent the world reflect the discourses we subscribe to. Bringing a Foucaultian lens to Bahktin’s work would describe it as an archaeology of the novel as a genre, which identifies ways whereby its various chronotopes have been produced by the episteme of the historical context whence they emerged. The nature of the archive constrains the practice of representation (e.g. of nature, place and so on). However, Foucault also refers to rules that define “the limits and forms of reactivation”. In doing so, he opens up the possibility for changes to occur in the archive through such actions as discursive “importation” and “reconstitution” (1991, p. 60). Novelists have agency in the ways they construct setting and character/sense of place chronotopes. Likewise, it is appropriate for novelists to be critiqued for the way places are represented in their novels, either directly or through the dispositions of their characters.

6.4 Travellers’ Tales The travel novel is one of the genres Bakhtin (1981) analyses in the work I have discussed above. “First and foremost”, he writes, “we have at the centre of the travel novel’s world the author’s own real homeland, which serves as organising centre for the point of view, the scales of comparison, the approaches and evaluations determining how alien countries and cultures are seen and understood” (p.  103). The term travellers’ tales, I argue, extends the range to include the host of non-­fictional accounts of voyagers and explorers of the lands “discovered” by European forces from the fifteenth century onwards. As discussed in the last chapter, Europe was the “organising centre for the point of view” in terms of which indigenous peoples, their lands and their sense of place were seen, evaluated and understood. In such writing, indigenous peoples were more often than not exoticised. (Caliban is certainly exoticised in The Tempest.) Inevitably, as discussed in Chap. 5, these accounts had a role to play in justifying colonial acts of ethnic cleansing and dispossession. Another form of the traveller’s tale involves a setting familiar to the tale’s readers but which is viewed through the eyes of a stranger or alien. (An example is Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, which recounts the experiences of two imaginary Persian noblemen travelling in France in the eighteenth century.) This form, I would argue, involves a kind of bi-centrism rather than monocentrism. Bi-centrism involves the overt or implicit clash of two perspectives: one is a powerful, widely subscribed­to, societal-given perspective, and the other is a minority, marginalised or alien perspective. In the course of this clash, the hegemonic perspective finds itself challenged and to some extent subverted. Such a form is ideal for conscription to the decolonisation project.

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By way of illustration, Tina Makereti’s (2018) novel, The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, details the travels of a “stranger” or “outsider” (James Pōneke). At the commencement of the novel, the narrator, James (Hemi), becomes orphaned through a sequence of events in Aotearoa. Later, he travels to England via the patronage of an English artist (the Artist), who befriends and later exploits him. In this alien “Old World” London environment, James becomes the defamiliarising lens – the centre of consciousness – through which readers experience place, character and culture. For his own part, he finds himself exoticised by the rude and the curious as an indigenous exhibit in a gallery. Before his travels begin, his indigenous world view is clearly established. Here we find him expressing his understanding of whakapapa: What is whakapapa? It is a magnificent cloak that connects each person around the fire to each other person and the places they are from. It is kinship to the mountains and waters and lands. It is who one is, who one is connected to, who one’s ancestors are. (p. 51)

This account of place and identity represents a non-European point of view (cf Chap. 4) and would have been alien to most European settlers grappling with who and where they were in the nineteenth-century New Zealand. In a later passage, James describes being taken through Regent’s Park to the London Zoo, where he experiences distress at seeing the great cats in cages. Finally we returned through the park to the house for lunch, and my eyes traced those straight paths and cleverly designed gardens once more, and I began to understand my earlier unease. There were no cages here, yet the natural way of the forest had been tamed and contained to such an extent that the effect was similar. I yearned now for the smell and shade of forest grown up fully around me, the crunch of dead leaves underneath, the vines growing up around thick trunks, branches fallen and eaten away by grubs. I yearned for the encompassing density of trees, the feeling that I was small and insignificant but somehow protected, somehow part of something greater than me. In this place everything of Nature was subject to the will of man’s designs. I couldn’t settle the churning of my insides. It felt like a slow twisting of bone, pushing my inner structure out of alignment. (pp. 106-7)

Having its origins in Russian formalism, defamiliarisation was viewed as the way poetic language (and other artistic resources) might sharpen or transform a reader’s sense of the ordinary (Selden, 2014). However, as in Makareti’s novel, defamiliarisation can also be achieved via the management of point of view and the dislocation of perspective. In this instance, the indigenous narrator represents place in a way that challenges a range of discursive norms operating in English society in the Nineteenth Century, including those operating in its view of the natural world as something to be “tamed and contained”.

6.5 Poetry In concluding my discussion of Bakhtin, I contended that the nature of what Foucault termed the archive constrains the practice of representation (e.g. of nature, place and so on). I suggest that the same can be said of poetry (as a form) and its various

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genres: lyric, ballad, didactic poem and so on. I have already mentioned the idyll as a novelistic genre in reference to Bakhtin’s overview. However, the idyll is also a genre of poetry and preceded the novelistic variant. Abrams (1981) offers a useful overview of the idyll, viewing it as synonymous with pastoral, which originated in the work of the third-century BC poet Theocritus, whose poems evoked the life of Sicilian shepherds. (Pastor is Latin for “shepherd”.) Abrams defines pastoral as “an elaborately conventional poem expressing an urban poet’s nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the life of shepherds and other rural folk in an idealised natural setting” (p. 127). He also refers to critics who apply the term to “any work which envisions a withdrawal from ordinary life to a place apart, close to the elemental rhythms of nature, where a man achieves a new perspective on life in the complex social world” (p. 128). I used the term bi-centrism above in my discussion of the traveller’s tale to draw attention to the potential of a structural device involving a clash of perspectives. A similar potential is implicit in the pastoral genre, which gives rise to a number of possibilities: • The voice of the urban-dweller, who favourably compares rural life with his own; • The voice of the rural-dweller, who favourably compares his own life with the life of the town/city dweller; • The voice of the rural-dweller who compares unfavourably the rural way of life in the present with the rural way of life in the past. Bakhtin talks about “the destruction of the idyll” with reference to some kind of upheaval, where this rural past has been destroyed by social forces (p. 1981, p. 229). The English “peasant” poet John Clare (1793–1864), who spent most of his life in poverty-stricken circumstances in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston, wrote a number of poems in this third category. Clare’s work offers a first-hand, poetic account of the enclosures in England, which I discussed as a historical phenomenon in Chap. 3. In 1799, when he was 16, an act was passed in Parliament allowing for the enclosure of lands within the parishes (including Helpston) where Clare roamed freely during his boyhood. As his biographer, Jonathan Bate (2004) observes, “The principal purpose of the act of enclosure was to maximize the profit available from the land” (p. 46). Helpston was an example of a pre-enclosure open-field system. As Bate describes it, the agricultural land around the village was divided up into three large fields. Each of these: ...were divided into “furlongs” and the furlongs into “lands”, strips of ground ploughed into ridges. Each landowner or tenant in the village held a number of lands dispersed around the three fields. (2004, p. 47)

It is noteworthy that this pattern of communal use is similar to the runrig system in Scotland, which I described in Chap. 3. South of the village were Royce and Oxey Woods, which were boyhood haunts of Clare. Further south was “the common land, available for rough grazing, of Emmonsales Heath”. Bate draws attention to the “intimate relationship between society and environment”  – the “sense of

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community” the open-field system encouraged (2004, p. 47). It was a sense of place developed out of a community’s long-standing relationship with and labouring in a particular environment. Bate cites John Barrell’s analysis of the “open-field sense of space”, which noted that “the topography and organisation of an open-field parish was circular, while the landscape of parliamentary enclosure expressed a more linear sense” (Barrell, 1972, p. 103). As Bate puts it, “The enclosure award map of 1820 is ruled by a sense of linear – and again in the most literal sense – enclosed space” (2004, p. 48 [his italics]). The final enclosure, the Award of 1820, enumerated the ownership of every acre, rood and perch, the position of every road, footway and public drain. Fences, gates and No Trespassing signs went up. Trees came down. Streams were stopped in their course so that the line of ditches could be made straight. (2004, p. 48)

The replacement of circularity by linearity resonates with Fields’ (2017) description of what happened to the use of indigenous lands in the United States in the aftermath of its European conquest (literally paving the way for Frost’s laconic dictum, “Good fences make good neighbours” in “Mending Wall”, which opened his 1914 volume, North of Boston). Clare wrote “The Mores” in the mid-1820s, initially as an autumn moorland landscape rounding off the first draft of his poem “October”, but later revised and enlarged as a discrete poem, described by Bate as “one of the great poems of the Nineteenth Century” (2004, pp. 315–6). Structurally, the poem is made up of three to-and-fro movements between an idyllic past and a post-enclosure present. The poem begins in the recent past of Clare’s boyhood: Far spread the moorey ground a level scene Bespread with rush and one eternal green That never felt the rage of blundering plough Though centurys wreathed spring’s blossoms on its brow Still meeting plains that stretched them far away In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene Nor fence of ownership crept in between To hide the prospect of the following eye Its only bondage was the circling sky (ll. 1-10)

The “unbounded freedom” that governs here extends beyond human subjects to the far-spreading landscape itself, with its “uncheckt shadows” and the absence of the “fence of ownership”, which will signal its doom in the present. Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free, And hath been once, no more shall ever be Inclosure came and trampled on the grave Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave (ll. 15-20)

The word “wild” occurs three times in the poem. In the second section related to the idyllic past, Clare writes that “Cows went and came, with evening morn and night, / To the wild pasture as their common right” (ll. 25–6).

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While this poem fits the definition of pastoral, the pre-Enclosure landscape Clare describes is not the landscape that Leo Marx (1964) derives from Virgil and locates “in a middle ground somewhere ‘between’, yet in a transcendent relation to, the opposing forces of civilisation and nature” (p. 23). As we have observed in relation to Bakhtin, there is a construction of nature here (consistent with American Puritanism) as a force to be somehow tamed or subdued. Clare’s nature is rather a guide to be heeded and a bestower of largesse. While husbandry is practised in this world, the “wild pasture” offers cows and sheep a place to roam in fellowship with shepherd and swain. It is not until the second present-day section that Clare enters the poem overtly as both boy and then as amateur botanist: Mulberry-bushes where the boy would run To fill his hands with fruit are grubbed and done And hedgrow-briars – flower-lovers overjoyed Came and got flower-pots – these are all destroyed And sky-bound mores in mangled garbs are left Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds Of field and meadow large as garden grounds In little parcels little minds to please With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease (ll. 41-50)

Also inconsistent with middle-ground pastoralism is Clare’s stance as a selftaught peasant, who was well acquainted with hard labour, poverty and rural ways of being and thinking. He was not interested in picturesque scenes, penned at their “leisured ease” by Oxbridge graduates  – “well-to-do-poets [who] had played the role of swain and made pretty love to imaginary shepherdesses” (Bate, 2004, p. 312–3). As Bate also points out, his poetry further embodied the “art of noticing”. “He had astonishingly sharp eyesight and an intuitive responsiveness to minute particulars” (2004, pp. 300–1). While he was uniquely gifted, he was also a son of Helpston; his lexicon was imbibed from his locality as well as from his reading. We find this reflected in his earthy and unapologetic use of Northamptonshire dialect. His use of cowslap (l. 59) for “cowslip” (Primula veris) is particularly so in the way it preserves its Old English associations with boggy ground and cowpats. Other dialectal uses in this poem include blea (meaning “exposed”) and headache (l. 61) for “wild poppy”. Clare would have known the association of grubbed with the destructive digging of badgers, though in this poem, he transfers it to the destruction of mulberry bushes as a result of Enclosure.9 The intimacy of Clare’s knowledge of the Helpston landscape, his membership of its labouring community and his enculturation into its specific dialect collectively contributed to his deep sense of place, which in turn enabled him to develop his own

 I am indebted to Anne Elizabeth Baker’s 1854 Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases for this information. See https://forgottenbooks.com/fr/download/GlossaryofNorthamptonshire WordsandPhrasesWithExamplesofTheirColloquialUseandIllu_10670220.pdf 9

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particular construction of authentic pastoral. Writing about the poem “Helpstone”, which headed Clare’s first volume of poetry, Bate describes it as: ...stamped with Clare’s own hallmark insofar as it insisted on the intimate relationship between his own feelings and his native place. It established his “strong attachment” to every local landmark, right down to the posts and stones by the wayside. (2004, p. 154)

Two hundred years after Clare was born, when he had finally achieved his plaque of honour in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, Seamus Heaney remarked, in a commemorative lecture on him, that in poems such as “The Lament of Swordy Well”, “what opens the channels of expression so exhilaratingly is the removal of every screen between the identity of the person and the identity of the place” (1995, p. 75).

6.5.1 Ecopoetry On July 16, 2009, in a blog posting entitled “John Clare: Eco-poetry and the reenchantment of nature in a time of climate challenge”, the writer comments that: “The genius of John Clare, eco-poet par excellence, is a gift for our times” (para 10).10 Such an appellation has become more common, as Clare’s poetry has entered the mainstream, and he has become something of a darling for environmentalists. In her review of the field, Walton (2018) defines ecopoetry as: “poetry that addresses, or can be read in ways that address, the current conditions of our environmental crisis” (p. 393). Ecopoetry can be deliberately written as such or can be so categorised by readers and critics. As a form of polemical writing, “ecopoetry can be framed as an active and activist form of writing and reading, contributing to the task of repairing divisions between humanity and the ecosystems that constitute and support us” (p. 393). As Walton argues, this polemicism can take two forms: • An overt attack on the policies, technologies and practices that are currently putting the future of live on earth at risk. • Critique of certain types of poetic discourse itself, which either compromise ways in which nature is constructed (e.g. by being anthropomorphised) or marginalise certain perspectives on the relationship between people and their natural environment). Examples of the latter can be found earlier in this chapter. Janet Newman’s award-winning essay, “Thinking like a leaf: Dinah Hawken, romantic ecopoet” (2017), is a fine example of criticism which examines closely the work of a contemporary New Zealand poet, who accepts being categorised in this way. It is also useful in offering a historical overview of poetry in Aotearoa that invites the ecopoetic label, citing, as an early example, Hone Tūwhare’s gentle, antinuclear protest poem, “No Ordinary Sun”, first published in 1964 (1993, p.  28).

10

 See http://davesdistrictblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/john-clare-eco-poetry-and-re.html

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Newman begins by offering her own definition of ecopoetry as “poetry of persuasion towards better environmental stewardship” (p. 8).11 The essay is useful in locating Hawken’s work in a minor ecopoetic romantic tradition, best represented by Jonathan Bate in his book The Song of the Earth (2000). According to Newman, Hawken “speaks of an association between internal and external landscapes” (2017, p. 24), which she connects with Bate’s definition of this tradition of ecopoetry as “the exploration of the relationship between external environment and ecology of mind” (2000, p. 252). (Bate can take credit for disturbing the English canonical tradition by defining both Wordsworth and Clare as ecopoets in this sense, notwithstanding the fact that poems such as “The Mores” have a polemical aspect to them.) A poetics based on a consciousness of congruence or interpenetration between the inner world of self and the outer world of nature is consistent with the logic of this book, which argues that a strong sense of place is based in a deep and enduring attachment, which is crucial to a person’s well-being. This attachment can be thought of as a precondition to a commitment to environmental stewardship, as per Newman’s definition of ecopoetry – a commitment that is vital if humankind is to address the challenge of climate change. Stewardship insists that nature is something to be done with rather than done do (hence Clare’s reference to a “blundering plough” in “The Mores”). For Newman, “Hawken departs from ecopolemic in favour of a more nuanced approach to the relationship between people and the natural world” and ways in which this relationship can be restorative and foster resilience (p. 10). One of the poems she cites is “Talking to a Tree Fern”, first published in 1987, and one of a number of poems written at a holiday home on Lake Rotoiti. The poem is in 12 numbered sections, recalling the form of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, but with a different mode of address. The “you” of Hawken’s poem is a tree fern, though it is not the same tree throughout. Yes, there is a particular tree located on the Rotoiti lake front that annoys the “man at the back” because it impedes his view. However, other members of the species are in the bush or surviving defiantly in city sites. Section 10 reads: Under your dark arms that night with no moon I decided to let my life climb up quietly like the rata on your trunk. (Hawken, 2001, p. 13)

The life-changing decision at the heart of this section is a commitment to alignment with nature in its processes. To that extent she is like the rātā, one species of which (the northern rātā) begins its life as a flowering epiphyte. She is neither

 Newman notes that the term “ecopoetry” was coined by William Rueckert in his 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (in C. Glotfelty & H. Fromm {Eds.}, The Ecocriticism Reader. Landmarks in Literary Ecology, The University of Georgia Press, 1996). 11

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positioning herself as one with nature nor anthropomorphising nature. She is both close and other. Even in this poem, the threat of environmental destruction is never far away: “I hear a chainsaw preening itself / and sense the spokes stiffening in your trunks” (2001, p. 13). This poem has a companion piece, “Talking to a Tree Fern at Lake Rotoiti”, published 14 years later, this time in 13 sections. In the later poem, the tree is in bad shape, and the tone is elegiac – a kind of lamentation verging on anger that is not dissimilar to what occurs in Clare’s “The Mores”. Section 11 recalls the earlier stanza cited above: Under your dark arms that night with no moon I decided to let my life climb up quietly – and I have, I have but now we’re afraid of quietly, we drive and drive and do not see the graceful things that lift us up, with such definition, to our own gracefulness. Heron, tree fern, cello: all the same thing. (Hawken, 2001, pp. 120-1)

6.6 Ecocriticism Earlier in this chapter, I referred to my introduction to Aristotle in 1969 in a course on literary criticism. The orthodoxy underpinning that course was the New Criticism; T. S. Eliot’s Selected Essays (Eliot, 1951) was a prescribed text. I still have it, and note that I highlighted a part of his 1923 essay on “The Function of Criticism”, where he asserts that “Criticism...must always profess an end in view, which, roughly speaking, appears to be the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste” (p. 24). Despite his modal softening of the verb “to be” in this definition, Eliot conducted his life as a critic very much in terms of these two goals. Most of the essays in this selection can be thought of as a re-evaluation of the significance and deserved (or not) canonical status of a large range of writers. Jonathan Bate’s work on Clare and other Romantic poets, referred to previously in this chapter, can be broadly thought of as concerned with the “correction of taste”, in the sense that there is such a thing as an appetite for reading. Before turning to ways ecocriticism has been defined in the literature, I find myself asking whether in writing this book there is something distinctive about the way I have approached the various literary figures whose writing I have commented on (critiqued if you like) so far – Wordsworth, Tūwhare, Clare and Hawken, for example. The answer is yes:

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1. In the first instance, I deem such writers as relevant to a case I am making that connects sense of place, directly or indirectly, with climate change action. 2. Secondly, in selecting these writers, I am wanting to draw attention to the way they construct their relationship with the natural environment (and the discourse this stance reflects) as something we can learn from. At the same time, I am establishing a basis for contrast with other ways of constructing this relationship with nature (e.g. as spelled out in Chap. 5). 3. In the case of Clare and Hawken, again to support my argument, I am drawing attention to ways in which they adopt what I would call an activist stance on large-scale social transformations which have contributed to environmental abuse – land use policy in the case of Clare and pollution in the case of Hawken. To some extent these points line up with the literature on ecocriticism. Garrard (2018), for example, notes that “The roots of ecocriticism are in environmental activism, and it continues to attract scholars who wish to bring about social change” (p.  385). He also posits an intellectual landscape he terms “Eco-criticism after nature” (p. 385), where nature has become a thing of artifice through human ecological agency – a kind of naturelessness that resonates with the so-called phenomenon of placelessness discussed in Chap. 2. A more substantial treatment is a chapter by Kate Rigby on “Ecocriticism” (2002), made available in digital form by ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) founded in 1992. Rigby notes that it was only towards the end of the twentieth century that a study of literature in relation to the environment achieved prominence. Consistent with my second listed point above, she draws attention to the social constructedness of nature as a concept, citing Raymond Williams’ contention that it is “perhaps the most complex word in the language” (1983, p.  219). She positions herself as theoretically aligned with an “ecocritical move” beyond the advent of structuralism and poststructuralism: The physical reality of air, water, fire, rock, plants, animals, soils, ecosystems, solar systems etcetera, to which I refer when I speak of “the natural world” nonetheless precedes and exceeds whatever words might say about it. (p. 153)

Unsurprisingly, then, Rigby has scant tolerance for the sort of argument referred to by Garrard (2018) that “the precedence of nature has now become questionable”. She continues: “It is however precisely the imperilment of the biosphere wrought by that alteration which impels the ecocritical reinstatement of the referent as a matter of legitimate concern” (p. 154). She sums up ecocriticism thus: Ecocriticism, then, remembers the earth by rendering an account of the indebtedness of culture to nature. While acknowledging the role of language in shaping our view of the world, ecocritics seek to restore significance to the world beyond the page. More specifically, they are concerned to revalue the more-than-­human natural world, to which some texts and cultural traditions invite us to attend. (p. 154).

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In a similar fashion to Romantic scholars such as Bate, Rigby sees ecocriticism as a platform for canonical critique, especially around ways in which nature is constructed in discourse. In her terms, much of Chap. 5 in this book would be an example of canonical critique. She also refers to the role of ecocriticism in textual reframing, citing as an example Jonathan Bate’s reinterpretation of Keats’ ode “To Autumn” as a direct response to an actual meteorological event (p. 157). In concluding this chapter, I provide a checklist by Lawrence Buell (cited by Rigby), which sets out to identify the characteristics of environmentally oriented work: 1. “The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history”. 2. “The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest”. 3. “Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical framework”. 4. “Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text” (1995, pp. 7–8). The first of these resonates with my discussion of setting earlier in this chapter. This chapter has shared a number of reflections on sense of place in relation to literary studies. I will be revisiting aspects of it in Chap. 8 on “Locating sense of place in the school curriculum”, where I envision a place-responsive curriculum in keeping with the overall argument presented in this book. In the next chapter, I will be sharing a number of reflections on sense of place in relationship to other arts disciplines, beginning with the problem of representation.

References Abrams, M. H. (1981). A glossary of literary terms (4th ed.). Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel: Notes toward a historical poetics. In The dialogic imagination (M. Holquist & C. Emerson, Trans.) (pp. 84–228). University of Texas Press (original work published 1937–1938). Barrell, J. (1972). The idea of landscape and the sense of place 1730–1840: An approach to the poetry of John Clare. Cambridge University Press. Barry, P. (2003). English in practice: In pursuit of English studies. Arnold. Bate, J. (2000). The song of the earth. Picador. Bate, J. (2004). John Clare: A biography. Picador. Buell, L. (1995). The environmental imagination: Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture. Cambridge University Press. Chatman, S. (1978). Story and discourse: Narrative structure in fiction and film. Cornell University Press. Clare, J. (2004). John Clare: Selected poems (J. Bate Ed.). Faber & Faber. Eagleton, T. (2007). How to read a poem. Blackwell. Eliot, T. S. (1951). Selected essays. Faber & Faber. Fields, G. (2017). Enclosure: Palestinian landscapes in a historical mirror. University of California Press.

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Garrard, G. (2018). Ecocriticism. In N. Castree, M. Hulme, & J. D. Proctor (Eds.), Companion to environmental studies (pp. 383–387). Routledge. Green, B., & Clark, U. (2013). Editorial: English(es) and the sense of place: Linguistic and literary landscapes. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 12(2), 1–10. Hampton, C. (1974). Savages. Faber & Faber. Hawken, D. (2001). Oh there you are Tui! New and selected poems. Victoria University Press. Heaney, S. (1995). John Clare’s prog. In The redress of poetry: Oxford lectures (pp. 63–82). Faber & Faber. Hillis Miller, J. (1990). Narrative. In F. Lentricchia & T. McLaughlin (Eds.), Critical terms for literary study (pp. 66–79). University of Chicago Press. Kramm, M. (2020). When a river becomes a person. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 21(4), 307–319. Locke, T. (1992). Every student’s English language manual. DS Publishers. Locke, T. (2004). Critical discourse analysis. Continuum. Makareti, T. (2018). The imaginary lives of James Pōneke. Penguin Random House. Marx, L. (1964). The machine in the garden: Technology and the pastoral ideal in America. Oxford University Press. Newman, J. (2017). Thinking like a leaf: Dinah Hawken, romantic ecopoet. Journal of New Zealand Literature, 35(1), 8–27. Rigby, K. (2002). Chapter 7: Ecocriticism. In J. Wolfreys (Ed.), Literary and cultural criticism at the twenty-first century (pp. 151–178). Edinburgh UP. Retrieved October 18, 2022 from https:// www.asle.org/wp-­content/uploads/ASLE_Primer_Rigby.pdf Rimmon-Kenan, S. (1983). Narrative fiction: Contemporary poetics. Routledge. Selden, R. (2014). Practising theory and reading literature: An introduction. Routledge. Tūwhare, H. (1993). Deep river talk: Collected poems. Godwit Press. Walton, S. (2018). Ecopoetry. In N.  Castree, M.  Hulme, & J.  D. Proctor (Eds.), Companion to environmental studies (pp. 393–398). Routledge. Wiley, M. (2015). Wordsworth’s spots of time in space and time. Wordsworth Circle, 46(1), 52–58. Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Fontana. Williams, W.  C. (1969). The American background. In Selected essays (pp.  134–161). New Directions.

Chapter 7

The Problematics of Representing Sense of Place

7.1 Homo Symbolicum In Chap. 1 I drew on Fairclough’s definition of discourse as “a practice not just of representing the world, but of signifying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning” (1992, p. 64). Representation is a key concept in this chapter. Following its introduction, the first essay to appear in Lentricchia and McLaughlin’s classic collection Critical Terms for Literary Study (1995) was Mitchell’s chapter on “Representation”. Mitchell begins by suggesting the likelihood that “the most common and naive intuition about literature is that it is a ‘representation of life’” (p.  11). He also points out that the term is not exclusive to literary theory. He cites the Poetics, where Aristotle “defined all the arts – verbal, visual, and musical – as modes of representation, and went even further to make representation the definitively human activity” (p. 11). From childhood men have an instinct for representation, and in this respect man differs from the other animals in that he is far more imitative and learns his first lessons by representing things. (Section 1448)1

Mitchell goes on to suggest that for many philosophers, the human being is a “‘representational animal’, homo symbolicum, the creature whose distinctive character is the creation and manipulation of signs – things that ‘stand for’ or ‘take the place of’ something else” (p. 11). Semiotics is the study of sign systems. Eco (1979) notes that “there is a signification system (and therefore a code) when there is the socially conventionalised possibility of generating sign functions” (p. 4). The existence of understood conventions in a signification system enables one to make

 I refer readers to the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University. The Poetics can be accessed and searched at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0056 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 T. Locke, Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4266-4_7

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meaning by the process of encoding and comprehend (at least in part) another person’s meaning-­making attempt through decoding. There are three types of signs. With icons, the sign resembles its object in some way, as in a road sign....An index is a sign whose meaning is based on association or causality (e.g., graffiti as signifying anti-social behaviour). In the case of symbol, the meaning of the sign is conventional, for example, a rose as signifying love. That is why we describe written language as a symbolic system. (Locke, 2015, pp. 21–2)

Mitchell (1995) describes the structure of semiotic forms of representation as a “triangular relationship: representation is always of something or someone, by something or someone, to someone” (p. 12). He then adds a “fourth dimension” to the triangle by bringing in “the ‘intender’ or ‘maker’ of the representation, the one who says, ‘let this dab of paint stand for this stone to someone” (p. 12). He further complicates the picture by alluding to Aristotle’s contention that: representations differ from one another in three ways: in object, manner, and means. The “object” is that which is represented; the “manner” is the way in which it is represented; the “means” is the material that is used. (1995, p. 13)

Mitchell equates “means” here with coded systems of signification, such as language, musical form and paint. As I have discussed elsewhere, all systems of signification come with a unique set of affordances for meaning-making; they bring with them distinct sets of representational resources. “The word ‘affordance’ relates to the idea that particular modes and technologies allow for particular approaches to meaning-making” (Locke, 2015, p. 102). “Modes are ways of categorising different semiotic resources that have the potential for cultural systematisation into codes” (p. 101). These representational resources include written language, sound, visual images, colour, dress and dance. A text is “an assemblage of representational resources that is capable of being read” (p. 102) or decoded. A multimodal text is one that makes use of more than one mode in its meaning-making. Semioticians such as Gunther Kress argue that all modes come with their own meaning-making affordances, contending, for example, that “speech-based cultures, oriented to the world through the deep logic of speech, are...likely to differ distinctly from the image-based cultures...[in] their habitual modes of representing the order of the world” (1997, pp. 70–1). According to Mitchell, Aristotle’s use of the word manner “suggests yet another feature of representation, and that is the particular way a representational code is employed” (1995, p. 13). In terms of representational resources, this might refer to the way specific affordances are used to achieve an impact with a reader or viewer. In a rhetorical view of textual production, “manner” would relate to purpose and function, and ultimately to the formation of genres, which might be thought of as stylised, textual means of representing content for a particular purpose to a particular audience in a particular context. Critical discourse theory draws attention to the historically situated, discursive constructedness of genres. This constructedness determines such aspects as who is entitled to author the genre, its typical audience and the character of its content

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(including its ideological orientation). In the last chapter, I noted how Clare’s poetry challenged the discourse of pastoral. In his case, authorship was claimed by a farm labourer, and a radical shift occurred in the way the natural environment was both addressed and hallowed. Bearing in mind the overall argument of this book, there are specific aspects of representation this chapter will be addressing. Firstly, using an ecocritical lens, I will be deconstructing some examples of representations of the environment, particularly in visual art. In doing so, I again argue that sense of place be viewed as a contested space, especially in relation to the various agendas operating in the representation of place in landscape painting, and how these relate to the sorts of dispositions or modes of attachment discussed in Chap. 3. Secondly, I will illustrate how the arts can enhance a sense of place in ways conducive to human well-being and a disposition towards environmental stewardship. Both visual art and dance, for example, can be used to support the decolonising project discussed in Chap. 5. In moving to a focus on music, I will be showing how music can both mediate one’s sense of place and enhance it. I will also provide examples of music/sound-making practices which espouse environmental discourses and “place” composition in specific natural sites.

7.2 Constructing Landscapes in Paint In his “Fox” chapter in The Book of Trespass (2020), Hayes intersperses his account of the invention of private property (see Chap. 3) with an analysis of Thomas Gainsborough’s famous marriage portrait commissioned by Mrs. Frances and Mr. Robert Andrews and painted in 1750.2 The Wikipedia entry on this painting notes its iconic status, evidenced by its being chosen to represent British art in the 1953 Paris exhibition celebrating the coronation of the late Queen Elizabeth II. The entry also cites a comment by British art historian Sir John Rothenstein in 1947 to the effect that: “there are few interpretations of civilised man in his relations with cultivated nature more lovely or psychologically profound”. Rothenstein is offering us an interpretation of an interpretation – a representation of the middle-ground ideal I referred to in Chap. 6, where a harmonious balance is achieved between human society (at its best) and the forces of nature (which is at its best when it is as “cultivated” as the human agents that render it thus). Representing human society at its best are Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, painted beside an English oak on their estate of Auberies near Sudbury in North Essex. The painting’s Wikipedia page informs us that “such an identifiable and accurately depicted location is unusual in Gainsborough’s work” (see footnote 2).

 Visiting https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/thomas-gainsborough-mr-and-mrs-andrews is a good way to view the painting because of the zoom facility. The Wikipedia entry on this painting can be accessed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MrandMrsAndrews 2

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Hayes’ transgressive visit to Auberies offers an occasion for him to contest this claim. He begins by noting that the tree must now be around 500  years old and somewhat the worse for wear. He writes: You have to go to the land itself to see the artifice of the image. Standing by the tree...nothing in front of us correlated with the version Gainsborough had painted....Villages have moved. The church that Gainsborough painted through the trees is All Souls Church, which is actually at a right angle from the painter’s view. In real life, the land falls sharply away and rises to the crest of another hill, which blocks out anything but a few distant trees. In the painting you can see at least four fields, plus the distant blues of hills in the background. (2020, p. 55)

What you also see in the painting, if you zoom in, is a wooden fence with a white gate enclosing sheep and, near to the couple, a cluster of sheaves of wheat. No farm workers are in sight. The fence has particular relevance for Hayes’ chapter. He notes: “The fence, which had for so long existed to keep things in, had by now had its dynamic reversed, and was the primary technology of keeping things out” (2020, p. 51). From this perspective, Hayes continues, “this painting of the newlyweds is in fact a symbolic representation of a contract of land ownership, marriage as a business merger” (p. 55). Following an account of the way in which the marriage became a means of combining the two properties of the couples’ respective fathers, Hayes confirms that the “rest of the picture falls into place” (p. 56). The gun and the dog, like the sheep and wheat, are symbols of rights conferred by land ownership, hunting and farming. These were the same rights that were removed from the community when the land was enclosed...and given to the only two people who remain: its owners. This is a painting not of people and their property, but a portrait of property itself, as it was now conceived, an icon of the cult of exclusion. (p. 56)

In synecdochic terms, the painting stands for the power of representation to support a particular discourse, in this case, a hegemonic discourse related to land utilisation and property rights. Rothenstein’s interpretation of the painting (above) is a good example of the way in which more euphemistic meanings can become naturalised and thereby colour the popular imagination. Hayes’ work here is ecocritical, since his deconstruction of the painting’s meaning has environmental implications. A similar deconstruction, this time of an overt landscape painting, occurs in Fields (2017), also drawn on in Chap. 3. The painting here is also iconic – David Hockney’s “Garrowby Hill” – painted in the 1990s after he returned to his native Yorkshire as an old man.3 For a “conventional” reading of Hockney’s painting, it is worth visiting “David Hockneys [sic] Hymn to the Hills”4 – but bear in mind as you read this that the painting was picked up for a cool £14 million. Early in his book, on Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror, Fields observes “how large portions of the landscape [in England] succumb to a broadly geometric order....

 Visiting https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/modern-contemporary-evening-­auction/ garrowby-hill is a good way to view the painting. 4  Sotherby’s (Feb 26, 2022). David Hockneys Hymn to the Hills. Retrieved from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=KnxXYA91sds 3

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To the uninitiated viewer, these linear patterns on the land may qualify as an otherwise innocent representation of what is ‘English’ about the landscape” (pp. 23–4). To the discerning viewer, however, these angular contours, represented so masterfully by David Hockney in his painting of the Yorkshire Wolds..., document a more contested story about landscape, but one largely hidden from view. Encoded in the contours of this landscape is a narrative about how land assumed the status of “property” and how the ground itself was transformed into privatized spaces – of inclusion for some, exclusion for others. This transformation in turn provided the foundation for the socioeconomic, legal, and cultural changes that remade England as a nation-state and ushered in a modern economy built upon the institutions of free markets and private property. (p. 24)

Fields’ use of the word “encoded” here is consistent with semiotic theory, where (in this case) visual representational resources are utilised to make meaning, say, of a landscape. In this view, a “discerning viewer” would recognise that, regardless of Hockney’s intention in creating this painting, the representation of the landscape in terms of “angular contours” is symbolic of the use made of it over time, in the same way that symbolic resources were used to similar effect by Gainsborough. In each case, the painter is being positioned as a representative (in more ways than one) of a particular discourse of land use. There is something comforting about the warm, Californian coloration of Hockney’s painting, just as there is something enchanting in viewing Gainsborough’s painting as a celebration of young, married love. It takes an effort to see symbols as tools for discursive work – for establishing, naturalising and maintaining ways of seeing – that have power effects such as dispossession and alienation (deeply personal and destabilising as it was in the case of John Clare).

7.2.1 An Etymological Digression My ancient SOED tells me that “land” historically has a range of meanings, including (1) that which is not sea, (2) a territory or region (e.g. England as “land of the Angles”) and (3) an “expanse of country of undefined extent”. This third meaning is also one I have used occasionally in this book as a synonym for an environment, especially when treated as a vista. As Wylie (2011) points out, “Landscape is both the phenomena itself and our perception of it” (p. 302). The word “landscape” (and “landskip”) entered the English language via Dutch at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It originally denoted an inland scene as represented in a painting. The suffix “skip” (like “ship” in Old English) derived from the Old Teutonic verb to create – in the sense of shaping or defining the condition of something. Landscape painting can be thought of as having two meanings depending on the word class one assigns to “painting”: If a noun, then landscape painting is the thing produced by a painter; if a gerund, it is the act of painting a particular place, typically dominated by natural features.

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As cultural geographer Wylie (2011) puts it, “Landscape as a way of seeing... foregrounds the question of how we look, rather than what we see. And, importantly, it is predicated upon the understanding that how we look is more a cultural than a biological matter – we see the world from particular cultural perspectives, the ones into which we have been educated and socialised” (p.  306). The two works discussed in the last section illustrate the way “landscape is suffused by connotations of authority, control and ownership”. Such a claim justifies the ecocritical work of Hayes and Fields to “specify and critique the forms of power encoded within and sustained by cultural products such as landscape art” (2011, p. 306). I’m inclined to view the word “landscape” as inevitably yoked to environments that have a history of human inscription, that is, evidence of human design in the features on show. These might include weirs, dams, paved ways, bridges, fences and so on. But they also include features that over time end up appearing like a “natural” feature. An example of this in Aotearoa would be the terracing of hillsides for traditional Māori fortified villages (pā) or furrows, strip lynchets5 and tumuli in the context of Great Britain. Even without the representational work of visual artists, these features, which I am calling inscriptions, can be read as symbols and a meaning ascribed to them. Like place names and the graphic features of maps (see Chap. 5), these meanings are telling a story – a story of particular designs a certain group had on a place, for good or for ill.

7.2.2 Landscape in Van Diemen’s Land The invention of private property and policies of exclusion were still revolutionising Great Britain when John Clare was a young man at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, as James Boyce writes in Van Diemen’s Land (2008), “there was more than one Britain” at this time (p. 6). I suggest we can think of these as pre-­ enclosure and post-enclosure “Britains”. As I have noted in regard to Scotland, certain pre-enclosure ideals (such as those celebrated by Clare in his poetry) persisted long after individual title had transformed the land into a mosaic of private holdings. As Boyce argues, despite the growing hegemony of “absolute property rights.... many smallholders, agricultural labourers and farm servants in Britain, as well as the itinerant poor, were still reliant on common land and communal rights over ‘private’ land to graze animals and gather food and fuel” (2008, p.  6). This was Clare’s Helpston before enclosure, as discussed in the last chapter. As Boyce puts it, Tasmania’s first European settlers were “unwilling invaders” – convicts without means and privileges – exiles who “still held pre-industrial mores”: In this context, to gain freedom by obtaining the essentials of life directly from the new land became the chief motivation of their enterprise, and convicts showed themselves willing

 See Winchester, S. (2021), p. 45.

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and able to make changes in clothing, diet, housing and social norms to achieve this. (2008, p. 7)

At the beginning of the nineteenth century then: Early Van Diemen’s Land saw two decades of largely shared land use, with convicts and small landowners using grasslands for pasture without seeking exclusive possession. Smallholders grew what they could consume and the little they could sell, but the major economic activity occurred in the unowned (according to British law) grasslands, where kangaroo was hunted and sheep and cattle thrived under the loose supervision of convict stockmen. (p. 7)

The flurry of “free settlers” (non-convicts) given access to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s sounded the death knell of this way of life and land utilisation. Those settlers deemed desirable by the British authorities and possessing letters of recommendation were offered land grants based on the amount of money they brought with them. Subsequently, the property claims of these privileged newcomers led progressively to the eviction from the best grassland farming areas between Launceston and Hobart of both Aborigines and white occupiers. Boyce quotes from outspoken English missionary, John West, who lamented in his 1852 History of Tasmania that: “‘the English of modern times’ did not comprehend ‘joint ownership, notwithstanding the once “common” property of the nation has only been lately distributed by law’” (p. 7). The pictorial gallery Boyce provides at the midpoint of his book effectively illustrates the “two Britains”. Some time in the early 1920s, convicted fraudster Joseph Lycett painted his View of Tasman’s Peak, from Macquarie Plains, Van Diemen’s Land (see Fig. 7.1). The painting offers the vista of an expanse of grasslands, clumps of trees and a small lake. In the mid-ground we see a flock of sheep; in the foreground are two figures – one standing (a shepherd perhaps) and one sitting (who, on the evidence of a bandolier, may be a soldier). There is not a fence in sight. Roll on a decade and one finds a different sort of landscape represented in Belgian lithographer and watercolourist Louis Haghe’s Panshanger – the Seat of Joseph Archer Esq.6 (spelled “Penshanger” in Boyce’s book). Haghe was a celebrated figure in his day and never actually visited the Antipodes. The lithograph bearing his name was copied from a painting by soldier/settler William Thomas Lyttleton, who would have known Joseph’s brother Thomas, who was in charge of the store at Port Dalrymple from 1813 to 1817, and also William Lycett, with whom Joseph rented acreage in addition to the two grants of land he obtained when he returned to Hobart in 1825 with his wife and family. These were the names, biographies and country homes that became celebrated from the mid-1820s onwards, as those dispossessed of their grassland holdings drifted into oblivion. There is a tone of homage towards Joseph Archer and his

 Haghe’s lithograph is best viewed on the Trove website because of the zoom facility: https://nla. gov.au/nla.obj-135882859/view. The original by Lyttleton can be viewed at https://www.colvilleauctions.com.au/artists/auction2018_3.php and is dated 1835. 6

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Fig. 7.1  Joseph Lycett: View of Tasman’s Peak, from Macquarie Plains, Van Diemen’s Land

brother Thomas in their brief biographies, first published in 1966, which can be accessed online in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.7 Joseph’s letter of ­recommendation was from Downing Street. In 1820 he brought with him £3250 in goods and cash and a flock of pure merino sheep. On arrival he purchased 2000 acres on the Lake River next to his brother Thomas, which was supplemented by a grant of a further 2000 acres by virtue of his importation of stock. Stillwell (1966) quotes from a letter written by William Sorell, Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, to George Arthur (who would become his successor) that: “There is no Person in the Colony whom I can recommend to you as better entitled to consideration than Mr Joseph Archer, from his Capital, his Improvements in Land & Stock”. However, his appointment as a magistrate did not eventuate. Stillwell’s biography of Thomas notes that by the mid-1820s, “he had not neglected his own interests” and by 1825 had accumulated 6000 acres via grants and “other property by purchase”. He further notes that the “Archer brothers were good farmers. They lived on and developed their land, and in 1826 earned high praise from those captious critics, the land commissioners”. Their homesteads are listed and described as “among the finest in northern Tasmania and are a memorial to their sagacity and taste”. Boyce (2008) is less fulsome in respect of Thomas Archer, whose dealings as superintendent of the store are recounted to illustrate “the dubious character of those in power”. In this role, Boyce writes: he “discriminated against small farmers  Stillwell, G. T. (1966). Archer, Joseph (1795–1853). Australian Dictionary of Biography (https:// adb.anu.edu.au/biography/archer-joseph-1479/text1865) and Archer, Thomas (1790–1850). Australian Dictionary of Biography (https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/archer-thomas-1475/ text1867). 7

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in both wheat and meat purchases, and in doing so enriched his own pocket, laying the foundations for his subsequent fortune” (p. 108). The Panshanger Estate was established as the result of a land grant to Joseph and Elinor Archer in 1823. The family mansion was built in the early 1830s. Stillwell (1966) cites Professor of Architecture Brian Lewis as regarding it as “the finest colonial house in Tasmania. Here from the four-pillared portico the prospect was of another England: the park, the hedged fields and the tower glimpsed through the trees”. Tanner and Cripps (1999) describe Panshanger as “perhaps the best known of the grand estates of central Tasmania”. Referring to Haghe’s lithograph they write: Here a Claudian mood pervades the landscape; groups of trees, animals and figures are carefully positioned to suggest an Arcadian setting where English eighteenth century landscape ideals have been fulfilled. (p. 11)

In his chapter on “The Triumph of Little England”, Boyce refers to the Tasmanian northern midlands as best exemplifying colonial attempts to reproduce “the social and natural environment of late-eighteenth-century rural England” (p.  204). He quotes a comment from Jane Williams, who visited the Archer family from further south in 1835: “...the people here are very gay looking...they dress in great style, and their houses are so large and so handsomely furnished that really it does not seem as if we were in this country” (p. 214). The preceding paragraphs reference another sliver of colonial history to complement the content of Chap. 5. They also mirror in a compressed way the pattern of enclosure and dispossession discussed in Chap. 3 – all of it occurring over a mere four decades. We see it in the hallowing of so-called improvement (see Chap. 3) and the supplanting of land by property. The Archers were rich, privileged and powerful. Their versions of events prevailed and were celebrated in the official histories. The stories of convicts and smallholders trying to make good, and in many cases achieving a degree of accommodation with indigenous Tasmanians, were marginalised until restoried by historians such as Boyce. The latter reflect a different sense of place than we find in Haghe’s lithography, because the relationship had a different basis – certainly not one based on individual entitlement. It was a tribute to Joseph Archer’s wealth and connections that he managed to contract a partner in the most celebrated lithographic printing company in London to produce an artwork replicating a painting of his property done by William Lyttleton, a contact of his brother Thomas. Check out the landscape, and you will notice that it is relatively unpeopled. On the left, near a small herd of cattle wading near a river bridge, you see a farm worker and his wife. Behind them is Joseph’s version of a Norman tower and a cluster of farm buildings. On the right, dominating the scene, is the porticoed mansion itself with two figures on a sloping lawn in front of it. Dominating the foreground is a wooden fence which extends across the painting. In the right mid-ground, there is a dog and its master, who is hunched over what might be a telescope, a reminder to the viewer that this is a vista to be seen and admired. The trees are English – their planting another instance of “improvement” to complement the introduction of farm animals. Bar the contours of the land and the course of the river that runs through it, the original environment has suffered

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erasure. Indigenous academic Marcia Langton would have had paintings like this in mind when she noted that: The very idea of an ‘Australian’ landscape is based on an erasure. This erasure is not simply that of nature subsumed and recast by culture, but that of the distinctly Aboriginal, autochthonous spiritual landscapes obliterated by the recreant settler visions which literally followed the frontier in the canvas bags of artists who came to paint the new land. (2020, Section 1, para 18)

There is another kind of erasure that operates in the discourse that underpins this lithograph, which relates to Stillwell’s association of the Archer brothers with “sagacity and taste” (see above). In his study of the persistence of the picturesque in colonial Tasmania, Denney (2012) argues that “colonial perceptions of the Australian natural environment were informed by a predominantly British landscape aesthetic which triumphed in the late eighteenth century....[the conventions of which] enabled settlers to identify with, control and ultimately take possession of the colonial environment” (p. 86). Aural considerations were an aspect of this aesthetic, since the development of a taste for the picturesque landscape was accompanied by “a shift from an acoustic to a visual mode of knowing and valuing the land and its society, leading to a change in the dominant image of the countryside, from noisy to quiet” (p. 87). Denney’s discussion of this late eighteenth-century aesthetic brings together a number of themes this chapter has been addressing: This new insistence on a silent landscape was clearly connected to the proprietorial attitude to nature ushered in by various forms of agricultural improvement. Enclosure, for example, was often praised for making the countryside quiet as well as orderly. The dense network of customary rights and responsibilities, it was argued, caused conflict rather than cooperation, idleness rather than industry. As one clergyman wrote of his own parish in Northamptonshire, the pre-enclosed village was characterised by cursing, grumbling and “bitter speech”, while the fields resounded with “ear-piercing cries”, evidence of the apparent savagery of the common-field system. This attack on rural plebeian noise was related to a growing tendency to define the land by its visible properties rather than its collective social activities. In fact, the elevation of sight over sound was a central component of the ideology of agricultural improvement, with enclosure seeking to make the rural environment conform to an exclusively visual idea of order. (p. 93)

The clergyman in question was James Tyley, Vicar of Raunds, who penned his “Inclosure of Open Fields in Northamptonshire” about the same time that John Clare was establishing himself as a poet in the same county. Poems such as “Remembrances”, where the speaker recalls himself as a small boy, who “swaggered like a man... / While I held my little plough though ‘twas but a willow twig, / And drove my team along made of nothing but a name – ‘Gee hep” and ‘hoit’ and ‘woi’” – offer a glimpse of pre-enclosure shouts as labourers worked their assigned plots. Presumably the Reverend Tyley would have been gratified by the post-­ enclosure reality, “Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own / Like a ruin of the past all alone” (Clare, 2004, pp. 132–3). Panshanger was a landscape park, where a discourse of propriety and display was inscribed on the environment like a coat of arms. It was “the supreme expression of the new proprietorial attitude to nature, as landowners displayed their ability

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to control and rearrange the rural environment for the purpose of satisfying their own aesthetic pleasure. Accordingly, as well as offering the observer an air of gentility, to see the land as laid out almost like a nobleman’s park was to see it laid out in a way which was amenable to being altered, reshaped, and ultimately brought under individual control” (Denney, 2012, p.  103–4). This proprietorial sense of place explains the figure with his telescope in Haghe’s lithograph. He is there precisely to model what Denney describes as “obtaining the correct viewing station necessary for seeing the land as if it were a painting; and for the land to resemble a picture, to be picturesque, by definition it has to be silent” (pp. 93–4). There is nothing in Panshanger – the Seat of Joseph Archer Esq. conducive to the unwelcome intrusion of noise: none of the human figures are labouring, and many of the farm animals are in repose. The barbaric yawp of indigenous Tasmanians and ex-convict smallholders is far away – in another time and another place. The social system that enabled the Archers to establish their estates did not preclude family members from developing an attachment to the place that was based on something other than its real estate value. What it did do, however, was contribute to mass evictions (for underprivileged Europeans) and extermination (for indigenous Tasmanians). In different ways, these groups were dispossessed of places that they were attached to and had stewardship over; for the latter, this had built up over thousands of years. As a result, large numbers of people were uprooted – physically, emotionally and spiritually from their special places – far more than the number who profited from the system that transformed the pre-European island which, for a short time, was known as Van Diemen’s Land.

7.2.3 The Visual as Deepening Connection to Place In 1979, I staged a production of New Zealand playwright Renée’s play, Wednesday to Come (1985), with my drama class. Renée was a lesbian feminist writer with Māori heritage. The play, first performed in 1984, is set in the 1930s Depression and features four generations of women dealing with the suicide at a labour camp of Ben, the husband of Iris, the main character. With the help of the school’s art department and the talent of a group of its students, large flats, which constituted the backdrop to the play’s action (set in two rooms of a cottage), were used as canvases to reproduce six of painter Colin McCahon’s Northland Panels. There was no connection between Northland and the supposed location of the cottage. My choice of McCahon’s work was based on its mood, which expressed McCahon’s feelings about rural Northland as a place. McCahon is viewed by some as the outstanding figure in New Zealand visual art of the twnetieth century. The panels were roughed out by McCahon on recycled canvases using house paint on a single afternoon in 1958 and were worked on over subsequent weeks. He had been hugely influenced previously during a trip to the United States by the large-scale works of such painters as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. His time in Northland following this American

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experience was a way of managing his resultant turmoil as an artist and reconnecting with a place he was deeply attached to. The panels, purchased by Te Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New Zealand) in 1978, had an overall width of 5.638 metres and were 1.779 metres high.8 In an essay on the paintings on the Te Papa website, Gallery curator William McAloon comments that: “Like the landscape on which they are based, the Northland panels combine rawness with moments of great beauty”. McAloon also highlights McCahon’s use of texts in his landscapes. The text does inscriptional work on the painting as landscape, as a human artefact does inscriptional work on an actual landscape. By way of contrast, here is the theme of inscription as it occurs in an early poem by Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar”, first published in 1919. I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

The notion of a “slovenly” wilderness would not have been subscribed to by McCahon (but is consistent with the discursive tradition I critiqued in Chap. 5). However, there is a similar evocation of the way in which an inscribing object (such as a jar or a text in the frame of a painting) establishes both a point of focus and a relationship. Stevens’ jar occupies a dominant position centre-stage. McCahon’s “Tui/Tui/T” on Panel 6 signals a boundary between two natural realms. As the eye tilts down through the three words, there is a sense of attenuation, as if the bird’s call is fading away. This is a landscape that invites listening as well as seeing. There is also a connection with the Māori phrase “Tui tui tuia”, which connotes a call for unity – oneness with the land itself, perhaps, consistent with the scrawled message at the top of Panel 5: “a landscape with too few lovers”. Within the purview of the Northland Panels, the inscriptions know their place. In Alison Jones’ memoir, which I discussed in Chap. 5 as an example of an unsettled narrative, the writer recalls encountering the Aotearoa landscapes of Colin McCahon. She writes: I saw the black in the New Zealand landscape – not only in the hills and shadows, but also at the edges of the land and the sea. McCahon’s canvas panels series named Walk9 transformed every afternoon stroll on Muriwai Beach – in rain, storm or sun – into a spiritual experience, transcendent, delightful. In Walk, McCahon’s layered lines of the horizon, of bird footsteps, of the clouds and the waves spoke, one to the other, and to me, about their divine place in the universe. (2020, p. 145)

Jones is clearly honouring McCahon’s role as visual artist in guiding her in the direction of a Māori sense of a place’s “mysterious and unseen energies” – what I referred to in earlier chapters as spirit of place. “It was clear in some of McCahon’s  The “Northland Panels” are based viewed at https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/38664#open-­ iiifViewer, which allows scanning and zooming. McAloon’s essay can be accessed at https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/38664 9  See https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/657795 8

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paintings that he not only sought to speak of spiritual forces through Christian imagery, but that he sensed Māori atua in the land” (2020, p. 145). Of particular significance to Jones was McCahon’s painting May his light shine (Cornwall Park),10 which represented her own birth mountain One Tree Hill. In this arresting canvas, across the black face of the rounded hill were the words “HE’S The ONE may his Light shine on the Kumara Garden”. Inscribed in small writing below: “Kumara god set in concrete, Cornwall Park”, and a phrase derived from a Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “Mine Thou Lord of Life send my roots rain”. (2020, p. 146)

The painting stirs in Jones her ongoing difficulties in reconciling the dual cultural histories of her birth mountain, what she calls her “doubled sense of the land, Māori and Pakēhā” (p. 146): McCahon seemed to have captured my thinking and laid it on canvas, confronting me with more questions and suggesting the possibilities in a deeper relationship with my (literal) birthplace. I puzzled over the words and symbols in the painting. Was the kūmara god, the god of the ancient Waiohua kūmara gardens, the block of wood, standing at the base of the hill? Or is the god in the white post at the summit splitting the orange evening sky, letting in the white light of another world beyond this one? A subtle political message seemed to be at work in the painting as well. Both posts – whether of European block manufacture, metal or concrete – suggest interference in Māori life that may need a celestial remedy from Thou Lord of Life or the light of The One. (2020, p. 146)

She describes her urge to interpret these inscriptions as an “excited struggle” and views the religious language as “a placeholder for something other, the realm of the spiritual” (p. 146). The painting further serves to remind her that if she is going to “understand the Māori world”, she can only do so by being “open to the idea of spiritual forces” (p. 147). Later in the memoir, in the aftermath of a personal health crisis, it is clear that her engagement with McCahon’s painting has predisposed her to embrace a Māori sense of place as a way of anchoring her to Aotearoa. She calls on her friend and colleague Kuni Jenkins “because she is Māori. Her uncomplicated spiritual connection to the land and all its forces was right for my moment of crisis” (2020, p. 220). My own people’s spirits – those of the Christian God – do not inhabit this place, for me. I do not feel them. On the other hand, Māori gods – atua – are here, for me, somehow. I do not adopt those spiritual connections so much as encounter their forces. It is as though they inhere in the rocks, waterways, skies, birds and trees, the landscapes of Aotearoa. I never feel this same steadying relationship with the land and its creatures when I look out over the mighty canyons of the Blue Mountains in Australia…. (2020, p. 220)

 For a detail of this painting and a discussion of it, see https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/ explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/12389/may-his-light-shine-tau-cross?q=%2Fexploreart-and-ideas%2Fartwork%2F12389%2Fmay-his-­light-shine-tau-cross 10

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7.2.4 Decolonising Landscape Efforts at decolonising landscape (painting) can take a number of forms: • Ecocritical deconstruction (Hayes on Gainsborough is an example). • Approaches that evoke nature or problematise human inscription in ways that elude the webs of colonising discourse (McCahon is an example). • The work of indigenous artists who reclaim the territory of their own land/skyscape and use visual resources to communicate their own sense of place. A case in point re the last of these is indigenous painter Emily Kame Kngwarray, whose reputation and meaning for twenty-first-century Australians are explored in an essay by prominent Aboriginal scholar Marcia Langton (2020). Two of Langton’s concerns are of particular relevance to this chapter: 1. The way Kngwarray’s paintings encapsulate an indigenous Australian sense of place. 2. The way in which this way of painting challenges mainstream categories of Australian landscape painting (e.g. the Heidelberg School11). Kngwarray (1910–1996) was very old when she became an artistic icon in her own country, at least among the avant garde. As Langton points out, “She was of a small Arrerndic culture in the central Desert, [and] lived according to the traditions of an unknown antiquity” (Section 2, para 5). As a woman artist, she shouldered “gender specific responsibilities” (Section 2 para 8); her “task was that of the exegete of the women’s role in upholding the Dreamings of the Aylawarr for future generations” (para 5). Not growing up in a mission, “She was authentically Aboriginal, but in the traditional partly nomadic, hunting and gathering society of the Sandover River region whose lands were confiscated and granted to white settlers as pastoral leases from the 1860s. She would have already been a very old woman when those lands were granted to the Alyewarr under the Land Rights Act” (Section 2, para 6).12 As Langton asserts in the article’s abstract, the most significant aspect of Kngwarray’s art is its demonstration of “the possibility of human intimacy with landscapes”. The word intimacy is crucial here, with its suggestion of the closest form of connectedness – emotional, historical, material and spiritual. In this regard, she argues that her paintings have three things in common with classical Aboriginal artists: “First, they are regarded as having spiritual content. Second, they represent sacred landscapes through ancient iconographies. And third, they are narratives of interspecies relationships and of human and non-human biogeography” (Section 2, para 3).

 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidelberg_School  Check out https://nga.gov.au/on-demand/emily-kam-kngwarray-ntange-dreaming/ to view a short National Gallery of Australia video featuring Kngwarray’s painting Ntange Dreaming. 11 12

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In reflecting on Kngwarray’s legacy, Langton goes beyond attributing the appeal of her work to a kind of fashionable exoticism. Rather, at a deep level, it offers “a whole new aesthetic category for European connoisseurs [and] (more importantly) a new idiom for Western art” (Section 1, para 8). It also makes a political statement, since the meaning of her representation of her homeland cannot be separated from an assumption of: native title – landscapes humanised over tens of thousands of years and subject to a system of laws and religious conventions which bind particular people to particular places. People and places are transformed from a mere species and a mere geography into sacred landscapes. (Section 1, para 9)

It is this particular character of these landscapes  – and the character of their inscriptions – that makes them a target for “tirades against Aboriginal people by the inheritors of the frontier settler state” (para 10). At the same time, however, Langton contends that the ongoing fascination with these representations of landscapes has the potential for reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, since it reflects both “a desire for a homeland and a sense of loss and shame at the fate of so many Aboriginal societies” (para 12). Effectively, painters like Kngwarray offer non-indigenous Australians another way of thinking about place. “The fascination with Aboriginal art lies in the fact of starkly different relationships with place. Whereas settlers see an empty wilderness, Aboriginal people see a busy spiritual landscape, peopled by ancestors and the evidence of their creative feats” (para 18): This contrast can be understood in terms of the different approaches to framing the natural world: one minimalist and ancient, based in a hunting, fishing and gathering economy, and the other maximalist, based on imported European land management systems dependent on large-scale alteration of Australian environments. (para 15)

In concluding her essay, Langton (2020) explains the key to the power of Aboriginal landscape painting in the following terms: It makes available a rich tradition of human ethics of relationships with place and other species to a worldwide audience. For the settler Australian audience, caught ambiguously between old and new lands, their appreciation of this art embodies at least a striving for a kind of citizenship that republicans wanted: to belong to this place rather than another. (Section 2, para 10)

Many of us who are citizens of former European colonies would endorse this sentiment, which is consistent with the argument I am making in this book.

7.3 Embodying Place in Dance When my son William was 4 years old, my wife and I enrolled him in a Saturday morning dance class. He was the only boy in the class. I wrote the poem below in 1989 after watching him negotiate this new cultural terrain via his small body:

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Watching William Dancing William is in love with his black     tights and leotard. At four      he is discovering a grace he never lost.      Suddenly, he is a bear in a largely female jungle     he barely acknowledges.      Is his mind writing songs in his body?      Or is his body writing a deeper music     out of his self-forgetfulness? One day      I will arrive at work with the knowledge of a passing tree           still dancing in my body.

Thinking back, I see that writing the poem gave me an opportunity to think about bodies conducting themselves in space, and connecting with a place via the arrangement of trunk and limbs and reconfiguring this arrangement over time, with or without the accompaniment of music. It was the first time I had imagined the human body as being inscribed by or fashioning a kind of music without sound. As the last stanza suggests, the poem also made me realise the potential my body gave me to register in an intimate way the imprint of an environment (and also how much I didn’t experience on my way to work as a result of being locked into an inner world of tasks and lesson plans). If you’re a dancer reading this, you’ll be immediately aware that I’m trying to find words to communicate something you could express much better. When I was at the University of Waikato, I had the privilege of having Karen Barbour (mentioned in Chap. 2) as a colleague, who was remarkable both as a dance exponent and writer about dance. She also introduced me to site-based dance, where she would design a dance event that encapsulated in movement the dancer’s sense of a particular site on campus via the choreographing of the body’s interaction in time with a range of site features. At this juncture (by way of another synecdoche), I want to draw on Barbour (2016), which begins with an assertion that goes to the heart of this book: “Sensory encounters with place, site and landscape have the potential to stimulate new and deeply felt engagements with local places, and to prompt discussion about the relationships between place, culture and identity” (p. 127). As a dance artist and researcher, autoethnographic performance is for her the medium whereby such encounters can be expressed bodily and represented textually. She elaborates:

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Site-specific dance practices utilising sensory encounters provide methods that support slowing down and paying attention through participatory observation, acclimatisation and acculturation, and the development of movement repertoires....These methods potentially evoke a sense of belonging, connectedness and responsibility for specific places. (p. 127)

Her chapter describes the genesis of Whenua, which began as a site-specific dance focused on specific places on campus, but rapidly expanded beyond a sensory encounter. Barbour identifies two aspects of the process: • A centripetal spiraling inwards “to encompass a sense of belonging to and responsibility for local place”, and • A centrifugal spiraling “outwards to political engagement with issues of land contestation and spiritual, cultural, economic and environmental concerns”. (p. 127) The resulting performance “thus became a form of critical autoethnographic performance and place-responsive activism” (p.  127)  – a kind of ecocritical choreography. In developing the project, Barbour begins with her own journey of “sensory encounter and somatic” engagement, as she remembers certain park benches and walks around the campus lakes as a child holding her grandmother’s hand – recognising the place as “intimately layered with memories of people” but also prompting “an embodied experience of belonging, love and care for this place” (pp. 128–9). In her role as researcher, however, she finds herself experiencing the place anew, generating choreographic detail to be later incorporated into the performance: For example, tuning in to the audible presence of Tūī (native bellbird) on the campus grounds and paying attention to the richly textured campus landscaping on fertile Waikato land, offered many sensory images of birds and nests, seeds, moss and dark wet soil, dense green undergrowth, lake water and weed, busy insect life and oxygen-saturated air. Paying attention to these details reminded me that our islands were once populated only by birds in a lush, sub-tropical ecosystem uninterrupted by animals hunting and human agendas. (p. 129)

One aspect of the outward spiraling is an awareness of the past, which in this instance reminds her of Aotearoa’s unspoiled pre-human past (and conversely of the environmental damage that has accrued, especially following European settlement). She also comments on the way such a relationship to place can have a spiritual dimension, recalling that in the initial research phase “forms of affective spiritual encounter arose for me”, which she attributes to her relationship to the land as a “life force...[offering] nurturing to inhabitants  – birds, insects, plant life and humans – and responds to our care or neglect” (p. 129). Like other New Zealanders mentioned in this book (e.g. Alison Jones), she derives this sense of the spiritual, at least in part, from indigenous sources, citing childhood awareness of Māori land activist Eva Rickard, who drew her attention to the dual meaning of whenua as both “land” and “placenta”. Rickard was important to Barbour, because her world view “connected women and land as sacred and life-giving” and resonated with her own

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experience of motherhood and the realisation that her “spiritual relationship with this land is experienced in my belly, womb and sacral area” (p. 129). All of this contributed to the opening dance sequences, where images of “tūī, birds, nests, insect life and fertility were embodied in the choreographic motifs and also woven through the sound score composed by Jeremy Mayall” (p. 130).13 Also adding their input were three other women invited by Barbour, who contributed their own choreographic ideas to the realisation of the performance. In the next section of her chapter, “Narratives of Place”, there is a centripetal impulse, rather like an archaeological dig in dance, where Barbour spirals back in time through layers of this place – the university and its environs – taking in the pastures that immediately preceded the building of the university and surrounding housing, and further back the draining of swamps for intensive housing, and further back still a landscape of Māori pā (fortified villages), wetlands and connecting pathways. At this point a theme emerges, already addressed in Chap. 5 – colonisation and dispossession. In the 1850s a sub-tribe of Tainui, Ngati Parekirangi, lived in this same area at Waipahihi Pā – that is, until their lands were confiscated following the land wars and subsequently opened up for European settlement. Barbour is brought face to face with the unsettling truth that the “cozy wooden home near Peachgrove Road” where she and her partner are raising their family is the fruit of an act of dispossession. She notes: “Underneath most homes in Aotearoa New Zealand today, there are buried or forgotten narratives like this one, part of the historical amnesia of non-Māori New Zealanders” (p. 132). We are back in the territory of unsettled narratives which, like Richard Shaw’s book on The Forgotten Coast (discussed in Chap. 5), seek to address a disturbing and confronting past. In this instance, Whenua articulates an unsettled narrative in dance. For Barbour and other writers of unsettled narratives, the process of unearthing hidden and confronting narratives of past injustice, contestation and colonisation leads to “an appreciation of multiple narratives of responsibility and care for this place so that I increase my own awareness of these histories” (2016, p. 132.) As a spur for the provenance of a disposition towards stewardship, care and activism, ownership of these narratives is as powerful as ownership of land in terms of individual title. As I suggested at the beginning of Chap. 5, it includes ongoing struggles over naming – inscriptions of power on landscape as Māori names became erased – and the development of a toponymic sense of place. Consistent with the argument of this book in relation to confronting climate change, Barbour questions a global emphasis on such issues as sustainability and carbon credits, when local places are ignored. She questions “what happens when we ignore our embodied experience in local places in our striving to participate in the international political or research communities. We remain embodied in a specific place in the world. We must care first for our own place. Sensory encounter over time supports the emergence of a sense of place” (2016, p. 140).  The chapter contains still photographs which convey a sense of the work. Jeremy Mayall’s composition for the work can be accessed at https://soundcloud.com/one-fat-man/he-korokorotui-remix 13

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7.4 Enhancing Sense of Place Through Music At the conclusion of her chapter, Barbour (2016) issues a challenge to ethnographers, autoethnographers and other artists to focus on sensory encounters and “embodied engagement with specific places”. These are, she argues, a prerequisite for a fuller awareness of “social and environmental issues” and have implications for social activism. She challenges researchers in general to develop a receptivity to “performative and artistic representational methods that are not necessarily textual” and a recognition that such methods can and do “offer new insights in affective, sensory and embodied ways to extend understandings of self, culture and place” (p. 142). My  own identity as a music-maker and music-listener began early in my life when, as a six-year-old, I took music lessons from Sister Olga at the convent school I attended. In my primary years, I first undertook the role of accompanist  – for classroom-based choral singing. As I grew into adolescence, there was an expectation from the extended family on my mother’s side that I also assume the role of accompanist, in this instance supporting the family tradition of “singing around the piano”. I never managed to learn to “play by ear” in this role. The best I could do was build up a folder of tunes, drawn from genres such as musical theatre, popular music, and country and western. I would take this folder to family gatherings in case a relative demanded that we “have a sing song”. The relationship between music, culture and identity was a given for me. Looking back, I see myself as being conscripted into a particular discourse of musicking (Small, 1998). In Gee’s (1996) terms (see Chap. 1), my identity as accompanist was an aspect of one of the primary discourses I was born into. I can also perceive the beginnings of an awareness of the relationship between music and place in these childhood years. One of the pieces Sister Olga had me learn was an arrangement for piano of the song, “All Through the Night” (Ar Hyd y Nos), a traditional Welsh song that dates back to the eighteenth century.14 It is my earliest memory of a connection between a song and a place somewhere other than Aotearoa. Later, in my teens, the Irish ballad “Galway Bay” imprinted itself in my memory. It was a favourite of my father’s, whose Irish mother emigrated from County Galway (see Chap. 3); he loved Bing Crosby’s sanitised version of it and played it endlessly.15 In its original form, it became an anthem for my attachment to my Irish roots. The earliest piece of orchestral music to resonate in my memory was “In the Hall of the Mountain King”. I first heard it on National Radio’s Sunday morning programme for children. I was captivated by its low registers and evocation of heavy-­footed and ugly trolls. It was much later that I discovered it came from

14 15

 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar_Hyd_y_Nos  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galway_Bay_(song).

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Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, written in 1875 as incidental music for Ibsen’s play of the same name (written in 1867). According to Britannica Academic (n.d.)16: Program music [is] instrumental music that carries some extramusical meaning, some “program” of literary idea, legend, scenic description, or personal drama. It is contrasted with so-called absolute, or abstract, music, in which artistic interest is supposedly confined to abstract constructions in sound.

Musicologists associate this style of composition with nineteenth-century Romanticism (1780–1910). Peer Gynt (the suite) clearly references a narrative that existed prior to the act of composition. The setting of the Mountain King’s hall is not a specific place. Rather, it is a generic location – the sort of abstract location Bakhtin refers to in his discussion of Greek romance (see Chap. 6). A comparable distinction is proposed by British music educator Lucy Green (2005), between what she terms the inherent and delineated meanings of music. The former are “inherent” in the sense that they are “contained within the musical object, in relation to the historically-constituted, logical properties of the meaning-making processes”. This meaning-making involves the use of what she calls “meaning-­ making constituents” (p.  80). (We can compare these with the meaning-making resources alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, where I discuss representation in relation to semiotic theory.) These constituents involve: “signs” which are made of music materials (a chord, a note, a phrase); and meanings-being-­ meant corresponding with “referents” (the anticipated chord or note, the recognised melody) that are also made up of music materials. (p. 80)

Delineated meanings relate to the “music’s social context and its mediation as a cultural object through historical social institutions…it derives from musical meanings which point outwards from the musical text towards concepts, relationships or things that exist independently of it” (p. 80). Compared to the extramusical/abstract distinction, its applicability extends more widely to include considerations of the way a piece of music (including song) is associated with particular discourses. We have met an example of this in the last section, where Barbour (2016) draws on images of the tūī in Whenua, because of its cultural and local signification, which is then taken up by Mayall in his sound score for the performance.

7.4.1 Musical Expression as Generating/Communicating a Sense of Place Although the literature on this topic is scarce, it does suggest that the relationship between musical expression and sense of place is a reciprocal one. A sense of place can stimulate representation via the resources of music-making. At the same time,  Encyclopædia Britannica. (n.d.). Program music. Britannica Academic. Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://academic-eb-com.ezproxy.waikato.ac.nz/levels/collegiate/article/programmusic/61498 16

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the representation of a place using musical means can enhance and even transform the sense of place of both composer and listener. Given the relationship of sense of place to individual and group identity, it is unsurprising that the studies discussed below are situated in the context of community music-making. Peter Moser’s (2018) work on “Growing community music through a sense of place”, despite the title, is an example of this reciprocity. For him, place denotes in the first instance “the physical geography of where community music can occur – houses, communities, rivers, community centres” but extends to the inner landscape of human beings (what Moser terms “metaphysical space”), such as “time in life, a moment in history, a personal feeling” (p. 214). Moser’s framework for exploring sense of place in community music involves an emphasis on connecting with other people, who are acting out their passion, community cohesion and respect for past traditions and vernacular culture. Central to this framework is the role of creativity, imagination and connection as a way of transforming community through an enhanced sense of place. As we create, we open our minds and souls, we translate our experience through our imagination into expressive cultural activity that we can share with others.... This creative work changes us, and the world in which we live, in ways that are not just to do with the creative activity itself. (p. 217)

Two of Moser’s case studies were situated in the English coastal town of Morecambe, which was experiencing a decline, a loss of identity and a spike in social problems. Starting with people’s anecdotes of the birdlife of Morecambe Bay, Moser worked with members of the community and other musicians to produce and perform vernacular art works. The works themselves were seen as establishing a connection between the community and its past and present place while at the same time transforming inhabitants’ sense of place through music. Like Moser, but in the Japanese context, Koji Matsunobu (2018) also adopts the position that music-making can be place-making, arguing that community music needs a “strong ‘place’ component” (p. 490). He agrees with Stauffer’s (2009) contention that the meanings people construct through musical participation “not only affirm and re-affirm individual identity and social belongingness, but also create place or make places what they are” (p. 176). He conceptualises place and knowledge and then, as a reciprocal relationship, asserts that “place shapes knowing and knowing shapes the place” (p. 491). Somewhat akin to the phenomenological approach to sense of place discussed in Chap. 2, Matsunobu (2018) draws attention to the Japanese concept of ibasho, a combination of i (being or dwelling) and basho (place), which “signifies a space where one feels at peace, safe, valued and fully acknowledged by others [and] where people encounter a sense of belonging” (p. 491). In the Japanese context, music is regarded as a powerful means of creating ibasho. His article reports on a multiple, instrumental case study, where he was a participant engaged in investigating three examples of community music-making to show how “participants are also actively involved in place making” (p. 490). He draws upon interviews, focus groups and informal conversations to establish the

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pedagogical make-up of each specific place from the perspective of place-based music-making and place-based education. In particular, he is interested in the way that the nature of music learning alters when located in a specific place. For example, the first case involves a small island in southern Japan, where people attempt to form a place-based identity through creating island songs. The project “emanated from a desire to overcome the memory and experience of displacement shared by the islanders. It aimed at discovering island identities through reviving a lost instrument and singing a local song” (p. 494). The research confirms the way music-making and learning are enriched once they are placed within a specific locality, with each case illustrating how the location shapes and provides place-specific learning opportunities centred around local themes and issues. There is no one formula for a place-based approach: “Because each place was different, a standard form of place-based approach did not emerge” (p. 498). Generalising across the three studies, he concludes that “music was experienced in terms of a specific place rather than simply as a genre such as folk, traditional, or rock music” and that “performing and making local instruments served as an entry point to place-based education” (p. 498). Overall, as with Moser (2018) in the context of Northern England, “Music making helped the participants to shape each place’s experiences and expressions and contributed to the revitalisation of the community” (p. 499). There is a resonance here between this work and the work reported on by Barbour (2016), where each art form is utilised to deepen both individual and collective sense of place. Figure 7.1 is a diagrammatic representation of the relationship between three entities: place, music and the music-maker. Place is on a continuum, acknowledging that it can be non-artefactual or natural (a virgin forest, a desert), a combination of the non-artefactual and the artefactual (a garden, an urban park) or artefactual (house, railway station). Drawing on Small (1998), musicking denotes all kinds of engagement with music. Making music, performing music and listening to and appreciating music are all forms of musicking (Fig. 7.2). The distinction between inherent and delineated meanings was discussed previously. Relevant to this distinction is the concept of intertextuality. “Intertexuality is basically the property texts have of being full of snatches of other texts, which may be explicitly demarcated or merged in, and which the text may assimilate, contradict, ironically echo, and so forth” (Fairclough, 1992, p. 85). Intertextual meanings can be either inherent or delineated. A well-known classical example of this is Tchaikovsky’s ironic insertion of the French anthem “La Marseillaise” in his “1812 Overture”, which was written to celebrate Napoleon’s retreat from Russia.17

 Sometimes this intertextuality takes the form of a direct allusion. In The Pogues’ song, “Fairytale of New York”, the “boys of the NYPD choir” are described as “singing ‘Galway Bay’”. “Galway Bay” itself is an iconic Irish song, written by Arthur Colahan in 1947, which not only evokes the social and natural landscape of Galway Bay itself, but comments on Ireland’s history of political oppression. 17

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Fig. 7.2  Music-place overview diagram

7.4.2 Connecting with the Natural World Through Music Music composed with the distinct aim of evoking or celebrating the natural world generally or a sense of a particular place might be thought of as another instance of programme music. Twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) is an example of a composer in the European classical tradition, for whom the natural world was both a resource and also integral to his spiritual identity. His biographer, Christopher Dingle (2007), quotes him as insisting that humankind not overlook: Nature, ever beautiful, ever great, ever new, Nature, an inextinguishable treasure-house of sounds and colours, forms and rhythms, the unequalled model for total development and perpetual variation, that Nature is the supreme resource. (p. 137)

His interest in birds and birdsong began in his childhood; in his teens, when visiting his grandmother and aunts in Fuligny, he made his first attempt at notating

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birdsong in the Aube countryside. While other composers in the Western tradition used musical techniques such as trills to suggest the song of birds, Messiaen made a practice of actually listening to them. As Dingle notes: “Birds appear in many guises within his music, from a single melodic line to a five-octave harmonisation, and from an individual species to a chorus of a dozen or more. Birds and their songs are used as soloists, as decoration, as malleable musical material, as dramatic protagonists and as symbols of divine purpose” (2007, pp. 137–8). As a bird is to its habitat, so a person is to their dwelling place. While some of Messiaen’s works incorporate his notated versions of species-specific birdsong, others bring together birds and their habitat and thus become evocations and celebrations of place. The most stunning example is his piano cycle Catalogue d’oiseaux, completed in 1958, which drew upon his journeying in Sologne, Provence and Brittany two years earlier. Dingle (2007) portrays the composer drawing inspiration from the “dramatic Alpine sights to the east of Grenoble and Petichet along the Romanche River” (p. 148) and the view from La Grave upriver. This dramatic landscape provides the occasion for Messiaen to combine his interest in portraying “mountains and gorges” and using birdsong. Messiaen paints on to his aural canvas the landscape, the fauna, the changing light, the smells, other creatures and the colours to create a vast celebration of the variety of nature, with the birds taking pride of place.... [He] treats his birds, and even the plants and rocks, anthropomorphically, often imbuing them with characteristics and motifs, so that the music conveys not only what they look and sound like, but the feelings that they induce in the observer. (p. 149)

Another example of Messiaen’s composing from nature, but on a more intimate scale, is La Fauvette des jardins (1970), a 35-minute piano work, which portrays the countryside surrounding his summer retreat in Petichet as viewed from his window. In this work, the garden warbler takes centre-stage.18

7.5 Can Nature Represent Herself? These examples from Messiaen align with the notion of representation discussed at the beginning of this chapter, i.e. they are representations of certain places with their associated life forms, by the composer, directed at a particular audience (classical music lovers) employing musical resources (certain instruments, formal notation and so on). The music conforms with a conventional aesthetic norm (though some would say that Messiaen, as an innovator, is stretching this).

 A useful site with links to various bird-related Messiaen recordings is Guerrieri, M. (2016). Finding salvation in birdsong. Red Bull Music Academy (2019). Retrieved December 21, 2022 from https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2016/03/messiaen-finding-salvation-in-birdsong 18

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He is deliberately paying homage to nature, which he views as a real, non-human entity.19 Proverbial wisdom would suggest that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. How should we regard Messiaen’s imitation of birdsong though musical means? Is the natural world (or environment) having something done to it or made of it? Postmodern theory would view his compositions as constructions of reality, with nature consigned to a netherworld beyond epistemological reach. If the purpose of art is, in Shakespeare’s words, “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature”, then it is – in terms of such a theory – inevitably a distorting mirror. In relation to composers such as Messiaen, Hogg (2018) offers a different view, drawing in particular on the concept of mimesis, as articulated by Michael Taussig (1993), as an innate capacity “to copy, imitate...explore difference, yield into and become Other” (p. xiii), which carries out its honest labour suturing nature to artifice and bringing sensuousness to sense by means of what was once called sympathetic magic, granting the copy the character and power of the original, the representation the power of the represented. (p. xviii)

Hogg describes this ontological stance as “a dialogic and participatory understanding of the relation of human culture to the natural world” (para 2). In terms of such a view, the hard work Messiaen put into listening to his beloved birds (and the pleasure he obtained in doing so) is to be seen as an act of accommodation to the environment – an openness to the infusion of its presences. It is less an imposition on nature than an expression of humble partnership and a sense of oneness with – not as a mushy merging but rather as an inescapable inseparability. Morton (2008), in reference to the ecological crisis we are currently facing, terms the view that “everything is interconnected” as the ecological thought (p. 310). In his essay on Coleridge’s poems “Effusion 35” and “The Eolian Harp”, he explores the significance of this commonplace and familiar, sound-generating household item to Romantic thought and its relevance to the current moment. Like wind chimes, “The Aeolian harp is an environmental instrument. One places the harp in a window, so that it will catch the undulations of wind. Wind strokes the strings and they sound”. He describes the resulting performance as ecomimesis, giving “the illusion of ‘directly’ relaying the environment, since their sound is directly proportional to the amplitude and speed of wind passing over them [the strings]” (p. 313). His claim that Aeolian harps “organise sound without human input” is open to challenge, however. After all, human craft shapes the box and the order and material of the strings and has a direct impact on timbre. The musical outcome (performance) is really an orchestral partnership, where nature (one might quip) provides the wind section (Fig. 7.3). In a way that resonates with Hogg’s position above, Morton (2008) goes on to quote Shelley’s contention “that ‘man’ is an ‘instrument’ like an ‘Aeolian lyre’ over which phenomena play”, viewing sympathetically the poet’s “anti-dualist idea of

 Regardless of schools of thought that would claim that there is no such thing as a natural world untouched by some aspect of human intervention. 19

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Fig. 7.3  Aeolian harp. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from https:// upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/commons/1/19/ Aeolian_harp.JPG)

the mind as embedded in nature” and the notion of “a continuity between the mind and its environment” (p. 322). A contemporary instance of this partnership is provided by John Coulter, a musician based at the University of Auckland School of Music. In a recent interview (Radich, 2021), Coulter acknowledged that: I’ve always been deeply fascinated by nature. A major driver in my practice has been an attempt to capture or recreate that sense of awe and beauty I feel when I’m out in the bush or watching a sunset or watching waves crashing on the beach. [25.20ff]

In the same interview, he spoke of his sense of belonging to Golden Bay (in Nelson) as a place. “I feel a sense of groundedness and connectedness with the land”. His composition Green (2015),20 for fabricated, electronic wind instrument made from a manuka branch, evokes the Māori concept of mauri, which “translated refers to the energy that binds and animates all things in the physical world” (Locke, 2022, p. 121). In this partnership, Coulter provides the wind energy, while the resultant music is a product of the composition, the qualities of the branch and the attached electronica. Radich’s interview is entitled “Sonic art: The democratisation of sound” and features a number of New Zealand composers who work with this art form, which Coulter himself defines as “sound-based music...[where] the sound forms the most basis compositional unit....as opposed to the note”. Sound has become democratised, because it has become dissociated from traditional musical instrumentaria and expanded to embrace the full gamut of what might be heard and recorded in a particular environment. Once sounds are collected and catalogued, they are available for selecting, processing, cataloguing, arranging and so on. In respect of sounds recorded from the natural environment, the composer (as partner or associate) might take on a role analogous to curation in the visual art world: assembling and framing a gallery of sounds for audience pleasure. In this context, we might say, nature, with a bit of help from her associates, is representing herself. In Aotearoa, the impetus towards sonic art began with the classically trained composer Douglas Lilburn, who established the first electro-acoustic studio in 1967.

 To view a performance, go to https://www.rnz.co.nz/concert/programmes/musicalive/audio/ 201773007/john-coulter-green 20

References

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“Lilburn thought that if he could form a connection with the natural world by recording the sounds you hear in nature, he might find a way to find his identity as an indigenous artist” (Radich, 2021). A later collaborator of Lilburn’s, Ross Harris, had this to say in his conversation with Radich about his mentor: Through Douglas’s influence I was conscious that one might need to have something that belonged, a New Zealand thing....and using the electronic music studio as a way of creating something by using environmental sounds...bird sounds and so forth that did belong here, and you could create something that didn’t sound like a Mozart string quartet....These sounds, in the studio and the way they were treated could be a new way of creating a music that belonged here.” [16.10ff]

Consistent with the focus of this chapter, Harris connects sonic art with the development of a sense of place and a connectedness to his country’s natural environment through sound. Such art was indigenous; it belonged here.21

References Barbour, K. (2016). Place-responsive choreography and activism. In e. emerald, R. E. Rinehart, & A. Garcia (Eds.), Global south ethnographies (pp. 127–145). Sense Publishers. Boyce, J. (2008). Van Diemen’s Land. Black Inc. Clare, J. (2004). John Clare: Selected poems (J. Bate, Ed.). Faber & Faber. Denney, P. (2012). Picturesque farming: The sound of “happy Britannia” in colonial Australia. Cultural Studies Review, 18(3), 85–108. Dingle, C. (2007). The life of Messiaen. Cambridge University Press. Duffy, M., & Waitt, G. (2011). Sound diaries: A method for listening to place. Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, 7, 119–136. Eco, U. (1979). A theory of semiotics. Indiana University Press. Fairclough, L. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press. Fields, G. (2017). Enclosure: Palestinian landscapes in a historical mirror. University of California Press. Green, L. (2005). Musical meaning and social reproduction: A case for retrieving autonomy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 37(1), 77–92. Hayes, N. (2020). The book of trespass: Crossing the lines that divide us. Bloomsbury Publishing. Hogg, B. (2018). Singing the world: A case study in collaborative artistic research on the theme of birdsong. In Paper presented at the MuSA conference, Karlsruhe. Retrieved from https://www. bennetthogg.org/singing-­the-­world Jones, A. (2020). This Pākehā life: An unsettled memoir. Bridget Williams books. Kress, G. (1997). Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronically mediated communication: The potentials of new forms of text. In I. Snyder (Ed.), Page to screen: Taking literacy into the electronic era (pp. 53–79). Allen & Unwin. Langton, M. (2020, March). Homeland: Sacred visions and the settler state. Art, 20(1). Retrieved August 16, 2022 from https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/1387/ homeland-­sacred-­visions-­and-­the-­settler-­state/

 For another take on the way in which the relationship between people, music, sound and place might be explored, see Duffy, M., & Waitt, G. (2011). Sound diaries: A method for listening to place. Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, 7, pp. 119–136. 21

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Locke, T. (2015). Developing writing teachers: Practical ways for teacher-writers to transform their classroom practice. Routledge. Locke, M. (2022). Manākitia a Papatūānuku: Eco-literature pedagogy and music education. Teachers and Curriculum, 22(2), 113–125. Matsunobu, K. (2018). Music making as place making: A case study of community music in Japan. Music Education Research, 20(4), 490–501. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995). Representation. In F. Lentricchia & T. McLaughlin (Eds.), Critical terms for literary study (2nd ed., pp. 11–23). University of Chicago Press. Morton, T. (2008). Of matter and meter: Environmental form in Coleridge’s “effusion 35” and “the Eolian harp”. Literature Compass, 5(2), 310–335. Moser, P. (2018). Growing community music through a sense of place. In B.-L. Bartleet & L. Higgins (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of community music (pp. 213–228). Oxford University Press. Radich, E. (2021, September 13). Sonic art: The democratisation of sound (No. 001) [Audio podcast episode]. The SOUNZ Podcasts. https://news.sounz.org.nz/the-­sounz-­podcasts-­001/ Renée. (1985). Wednesday to come. Victoria University Press. Small, C. (1998). Musicking. University Press of New England. Stauffer, S. L. (2009). Placing curriculum in music education. In T. Regelski & J. Gates (Eds.), In music education for changing times: Guiding visions for practice (pp. 175–186). Springer. Stillwell, G. T. (1966). Archer, Joseph (1795–1853). Australian Dictionary of Biography (https:// adb.anu.edu.au/biography/archer-­joseph-­1479/text1865) and Archer, Thomas (1790–1850). Australian Dictionary of Biography (https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/archer-­thomas-­1475/ text1867). Tanner, H., & Cripps, A. (1999). Australian Garden History, 11(2), 11–12. Taussig, M. (1993). Mimesis and alterity: A particular history of the senses. Routledge. Winchester, S. (2021). Land: How the hunger for ownership shaped the world. William Collins. Wylie, J. (2011). Landscape. In J. A. Agnew & D. N. Livingstone (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of geographical knowledge (pp. 300–315). SAGE.

Chapter 8

Locating Sense of Place in the School Curriculum

In disciplinary terms, I might describe this book as having journeyed thus far from geography and history and arrived, in the last two chapters, at Literary Studies (one aspect of current L1 school subjects) and the Arts. I am aware that in Chap. 7 on sense of place in relation to the arts, I allowed myself to write expansively. My excuse here is that in the course of researching this book, I became increasingly convinced about the pivotal role of the arts in both enhancing sense of place and contesting naturalised discourses around place that (I argue) are detrimental to the overall project of saving Mother Earth. In many educational contexts, the arts struggle to maintain a place in the mandated school curriculum. I did not want this to happen in this book. The focus of this chapter is the school curriculum, both the official or mandated curriculum (what schools are legally bound to teach) and the enacted curriculum (the content and structure of programmes actually taught in schools). I begin with a number of observations about curriculum in general, with specific reference to the New Zealand curriculum and Bernstein’s (2000) theory of recontextualisation. I then review some literature both theorising and advocating for a place-conscious curriculum in the context of compulsory schooling, drawing on the work of scholars in both the United States and Australia (especially Gruenewald, 2003). On the basis of this review, I establish principles, consistent with Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of the book, which might underpin a decision to make a focus on sense of place central to curriculum design and pedagogy. In particular, I articulate a vision of place-­ conscious education, which embraces a decolonising agenda and addresses the climate crisis. I advocate for a strong focus on cross-disciplinary/interdisciplinary learning, building on the traditional subject of Geography as a core. (Dodds (2019) describes geography as earth writing: “An activity that highlights the power of agents and organisations to describe space, to occupy space, to organise space, and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 T. Locke, Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4266-4_8

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to create places invested with particular visions and projects” (p. 6–7)).1 Finally, I offer examples of ways in which sense of place might be integrated into the design of programmes: (1) a cross-disciplinary English/Science unit, (2) Music education (with particular reference to my wife Millie’s work as a primary music specialist), (3) L1 subject English and (4) Outdoor education.

8.1 Some Reflections on Curriculum Curriculum is not a one-size-fits-all kind of word (see Eisner, 2002). I will begin these reflections with the current instantiation of the official curriculum for Aotearoa New Zealand.2 It is March 2023. If you click on the link in footnote 2, you will arrive at the index page of The New Zealand Curriculum Online.3 The title of the page is “The New Zealand Curriculum”, beneath which appear two brief but instructive paragraphs: The National Curriculum is composed of The New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa which set the direction for student learning and provide guidance for schools as they design and review their curriculum. Although both come from different perspectives, each start with a vision of young people developing the competencies they need for study, work, and lifelong learning, so they may go on to realise their potential.

We learn that New Zealand has two official curriculums, one for schools where English is the medium of instruction and the other for kura (schools where Māori is the medium of instruction). The aim of this curriculum is twofold: 1. To establish the “direction for student learning”, a phrase that connects with the traditional meaning of curriculum as a “course to be run” (Eisner, 2002, p. 25). 2. To provide “guidance” for schools as they “design and review” their own curriculums (programmes of learning). On the face of it, this suggests a degree of autonomy and the potential for schools to be responsive to the needs of their own communities. We also learn that these curriculums reflect a “vision” of the competencies pupils need to develop for “study, work, and lifelong learning, so they may go on to realise their potential”. There is no mention of pleasure or leisure, so one might be forgiven for thinking that this vision is primarily about preparing the country’s students for  See Castree (2011) for an overview of its history. Consistent with the argument in this chapter, he cites Livingston’s view of geography as an “attempt to keep nature and society under ‘one umbrella’ in the face of ‘the incipient Balkanisation of knowledge that accompanied the professionalisation of scientific specialities’” (p. 288). 2  See https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum 3  There is no doubt that the content of this page will change over time; however, I suspect that the template will endure for a while. 1

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the workforce. There is a major focus on competencies. A competency is about know how rather than know that, and its prevalence here reflects the discursive shift towards a focus on skills that commenced in New Zealand and other Anglophone countries in the early 1990s. If you peruse the menu bar on the left-hand side of the index page, you will see that the New Zealand curriculum has identified eight learning areas: English, the arts, health and physical education, learning languages, mathematics and statistics, science, social sciences and technology. Click on “English” and you will notice a tab entitled “Achievement objectives”. Click on this tab and you will find that these AOs exist at eight (supposedly) increasingly challenging levels; all begin with a verb, e.g. under “Processes and strategies” at Level 1, pupils will “acquire and begin to use sources of information, processes, and strategies to identify, form, and express ideas”. It is only when one refers to “Indicator” boxes that one has a sense of content as it applies at this level, i.e. the knowledge these new-entrant pupils engage with to indicate that they have acquired the associated competency. Earlier in this section, I referred to this document as the current instantiation of New Zealand’s official curriculum. If you glance again at the left-hand menu bar, you will find a link entitled “Refreshing the New Zealand Curriculum”. “Refreshing” suggests that positive things are afoot. Not just a reboot. More like being doused with rain water after a long hike. As I presently understand it, this “refresh” will bring about significant structural changes. (Readers are invited to refresh the link in footnote 2 at some later date. It is almost certain that the focus on competencies I described in the above paragraph will have become lessened.) One clue to the nature of these impending changes can be found if you click on the link https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/News/Aotearoa-­New-­Zealand-­s-­histories. This page announces that “Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories and Te Takanga o Te Wā will be taught in all schools and kura” as the 2023 school year begins. This in itself is a significant political act, based in part on a growing awareness that for race relations to be enhanced in this country, New Zealanders need to be educated about their own history, including its various narratives of colonisation (some of which I have touched on in this book). The plurals are telling: as a discipline, history cannot escape narrative contestation. The same page offers viewers a link enabling them to download curriculum content. Content is back! An official curriculum is a creature of time and place, liable to be influenced by a range of discourses, subject to the interests of powerful groups, and a prescription for what a country’s young should know and know how to do. Even in a curriculum as solidly grounded in the primacy of skills as New Zealand’s has been from 1991 to the present, content is inescapable, even if it has to be sought in the small print. A curriculum is always arbitrary, even if the forces that are at work in its construction (e.g. economic rationalism) appear irresistible. There is always a might-have-been or an otherwise. Whether at state or school level, there is an inevitable connection between the disciplines, a curriculum (and its subject divisions) and teacher professional knowledge. Young and Muller’s (2010) definition of a discipline is a useful one:

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All disciplines, in order to be disciplines, have shared objects of study, and in order to be robust and stable, display objectivity – that is to say, they possess legitimate, shared and stably reliable means for generating truth....Truth is, by this account, a stable relationship between the objects of study and an informed community of practitioners. (p. 21)

The construction of school subjects (“learning areas” in the New Zealand curriculum) has an indirect relationship to disciplinary knowledge, what Bernstein (2000) terms “primary discourses”, produced by workers engaged in a specific disciplinary field. For any school subject, at any one time, there is always a prevailing discursively constructed mix (what Bernstein terms the “specific pedagogic discourse” [see Fig.  8.1]) which determines what can be said about it and how it can be expressed (via a subject-specific metalanguage, i.e. grammar in the case of English). For Bernstein, the specific pedagogic discourse can be thought of as the mechanism “by which other discourses are appropriated and brought into a special relationship with each other, for the purpose of their selective transmission and acquisition” (p. 32) via a process he calls recontextualisation from a range of primary discourses (bodies of disciplinary knowledge) originating beyond the confines of the school. In Locke (2010) I explored changes in the discursive mix of subject English, noting that (in Bernstein’s terms) it “has always been weakly classified, that is, its boundaries have tended to be permeable to a range of primary discourses” (p. 173). At the beginning of the twentieth century, English was an assemblage of discourses

Fig. 8.1  Bernstein’s view of the pedagogic discourse. (Locke, 2010, p. 172)

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such as philology, rhetoric and an emergent discourse called literary studies or literary criticism. “For most of the 20th Century, it tended to be dichotomised between language (grammar, linguistics) and literary (literary criticism) content, with one or the other holding sway at any one time” (p. 173). In recent times, its boundaries have weakened further, opening up the potential for input from disciplinary fields such as applied linguistics, media and cultural studies, theatre studies, literary criticism, rhetoric and semiotics, each with its own metalanguage. Bernstein made it clear in his writing that the constitution of professional (subject) knowledge in discourse as an aspect of pedagogic practice, while apparently random, is actually the product of a set of “regulatory principles” controlled by what he termed the “pedagogic device [which] acts as a symbolic regulator of consciousness” (2000, p.  37). In political terms, the hegemony of a particular pedagogic discourse is the product of a particular set of power relations (see Fig.  8.1). In Bernstein’s scheme, the top-level “distributive rules mark and distribute who may transmit what to whom and under what conditions, and they attempt to set the outer limits of legitimate discourse” (2000, p. 31). At the time of writing, he argued that these rules were increasingly controlled by the state apparatus. In the above paragraphs, I have offered a once-over-lightly of Bernstein’s thinking. However, I draw from them a number of points, on the basis of which I allow myself to feel hopeful: • A curriculum is never fixed. For example, “Technology” was made a learning area in the New Zealand curriculum in 1991 via ministerial whim. Human players in high places can exercise power. • The discursive constructedness of subjects (learning areas) is dynamic, both in strongly classified subjects such as Physics and weakly classified subjects such as English and Social Studies. • Bodies of disciplinary knowledge (primary discourses) are also dynamic entities and are continually spawning sub-disciplines, hybridised disciplines, and entering into conversations with one another in interdisciplinary settings. • Schools are potentially cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary settings.4 • Bernstein was writing in 2000, at a time when in England (and other Anglophone countries) the state was adopting a heavy, hands-on approach to curriculum design, delivery and assessment. However, in the Aotearoa context, educational policy has proved susceptible to progressive influence. For example, widespread professional disenchantment contributed to the abandonment of national standards in literacy and numeracy in 2017. A range of social pressures, including decolonising initiatives in a range of contexts, contributed to the introduction of a new history curriculum for all New Zealand schools.

 In Locke (2017) I make a case that a focus on cross-disciplinarity is crucial in developing a culture of writing in the secondary school. 4

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8.1.1 The Knowledge Society: A Diversion In 2004, Rosemary Hipkins,5 a researcher based at NZCER (New Zealand Council for Educational Research), delivered a paper entitled: “Changing school subjects for changing times”. Between 2002 and 2004, this country had progressively introduced a radical, senior secondary school qualification (the National Certificate of Educational Achievement) based around a separate-standards model of achievement units or standards (see Locke, 20076). In these early years of NCEA implementation, Hipkins was leading a team investigating the way in which a number of schools utilised the flexibility offered by this separate standards model to reconfigure their subject offerings. My interest in citing this paper here is its subscribing, at least in part, to “knowledge economy rhetoric”.7 For example, early in the paper Hipkins refers to “the technologically enhanced lifestyle of a Knowledge Society” (p. 2). Her discussion of school subjects is preceded by a reference to her colleague Jane Gilbert, who had addressed the same conference, comparing “industrial age understandings of knowledge and of schooling with the new understandings of the knowledge society” (p. 3). This comparison is schematised in a table, which I have in part reproduced below (Table 8.1). At least some readers will have encountered this kind of polarising account of “then” versus “now” in discussions of schooling. It looks neat, but is in fact vague. Table 8.1.  Values that an “information economy” demands Value Initiative Speed

Industrial age Management decides, workers follow directions Stable knowledge base of learning predetermined by experts

Imagination Curriculum based on memorisation, followed by standard operating procedures at work Cleverness Intelligence measured knowledge of facts Creativity Recitation and reproduction of knowledge

Information age Minimal direct supervision – Workers need to act independently Rapid growth of knowledge base – Need ability to sift large amounts of information Anticipation or creation of consumer demand expected Identification and solving of problems are a mark of cleverness Creativity and innovation essential in fast-moving markets

Hipkins (2004, p. 3)

 At the time of writing, her son Chris, having been New Zealand’s Ministers of Education and Health, has found himself replacing Jacinda Ardern as Prime Minister. 6  At the same time, I was leading an action research project that developed and implemented an alternative, “integrated standards” qualification in English in a range of trial schools (Locke, 2007). 7  The standard-bearer for this discourse in the NZ context is Jane Gilbert’s 2005 book Catching the Knowledge Wave? The Knowledge Society and the Future of Education. Wellington, NZ: NZCER. 5

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When did this “Industrial Age” begin (and end)? In its focus on facts, it evokes Dickens’ novel, Hard Times. As a matter of fact, I’ve never worked with a curriculum centred on facts (which is not synonymous with content). Eisner (2002) writes eloquently of a factory model of education in the context of the United States, but this is discourse-related: when a discourse of standards becomes hegemonic, it produces factory-like effects in the classroom, e.g. drilling based on phonics, which is enjoying a current revival in New Zealand schools. What “knowledge base” are we talking about here: Content knowledge? Pedagogical content knowledge? Curricular knowledge? (Shulman’s well-known 1986 classification). These have never been “stable” in my years as an educator, though I would like to think that as bodies of knowledge, a high degree of expertise was at work in their creation. Disciplinary knowledge? But, I would argue, it is the essence of disciplinary knowledge that it be open to modification, i.e. dynamic by virtue of scholarly processes of rigorous inquiry, contestation and review. There is more I could say apropos to this table. However, let me put on a kind of neo-Luddite hat at this point and (for a paragraph only) vent a little. At the precise moment I am writing this, my country’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has just retired, having admitted that she realised that she had been running on empty. In May 2022, Ardern was invited to deliver the Harvard Commencement Speech, where she spoke on the topic of “Democracy, disinformation and kindness”.8 Specifically, she drew attention to the manipulation and unbridled nature of web content, the lack of accountability of mainstream media and the proliferation of what she termed keyboard warriors. Such sentiments lend a hollow ring to phrases like “knowledge society”. Terms such as “misinformation society” and “disinformation society” may be more apt. I can list other contemporary phenomena, such as the anomie and trivialisation of communication produced by social media, the damage being done to attention spells through a constant diet of information bites, the negative ergonomic impacts of digital technologies and workspaces and the valorisation of virtual reality (as a substitute for engagement with actual environments). But then, I could not have written this book without word processing, the internet and the digitisation of information in accessible depositories. The above reflections lead me to begin a process of suggesting some general principles that I would suggest underpin a curriculum that specifically highlights sense of place and the climate crisis. (There will be more later.)

Principle 1: The curriculum will be content-centred. Principle 2: Assessment will be content-driven and not vice versa. (continued)

 See https://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/harvard-commencement-speech-democracy-disinformation-and-kindness (though this link my not survive a change of government in NZ).

8

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Principle 3: Curriculum content (at state, school and classroom levels) will be referenced to stable, authentic and authoritative sources (e.g. bodies of disciplinary knowledge and time-honoured traditional/community/ indigenous wisdom). Principle 4: Pedagogical content knowledge will be student-centred and culturally inclusive.

Despite the “knowledge society” rhetoric, Hipkins is clear in asserting that her “line of argument does not mean that content doesn’t matter” (p. 11). On the contrary, she contends that “knowledge of the central organising concepts of any discipline is a prerequisite for the transfer of knowledge to new contexts” (p. 11). The aspect of her argument that relates most closely to my own is her interest in the potential for the recontextualisation of knowledge originating beyond the confines of the school (see discussion of Bernstein above) offered by the NCEA’s separate standards model. It particular, she draws attention to instances of interdisciplinarity in what she calls “locally redesigned courses”, where standards from two subject areas are brought together in a single course, even if the content juxtaposed is unchanged (i.e. is still “traditional”). She also instances examples of what she calls “contextually-focused courses”. Such courses, she argues, have the greatest potential to challenge the make-up of “traditional-discipline” courses, where students: ...are strongly initiated...into a culture of existing knowledge that is predominantly the archived and valued knowledge of Western scholars. It is often abstract and is typically generalised beyond local contexts. Students are expected to absorb this ready-made knowledge and to use it for cognitive tasks – at the very least recall, but preferably some level of application, critical thinking, or similar task. (p. 9)

With a few caveats, I have some sympathy with this description, especially in relation to colonising processes in countries such as New Zealand and the need for curriculums to be decolonised (see below). (I would, though, suggest that the neo-liberal construction of curriculum via assessment technologies such as the NCEA has had a deleterious impact on the recontextualisation of disciplinary knowledge.) By contrast, Hipkins argues, “students in contextually-focused courses are more likely to work with knowledge that is local, socially embedded, and linked to the contingencies of practical tasks at hand – at least some of the time” (p. 9). What Hipkins is referring to here are attempts by schools to package content in ways which cater to the needs of “less academic” students. However, she is clear that she does not favour courses that don’t serve to extend pupils’ thinking and horizons, noting that “Learning needs to be grounded in the best of historical knowledge but not straight-­ jacketed by its limitations and subject divisions” (p. 10). Unlike Hipkins (2004), I view subject English as weakly rather than strongly classified (Bernstein, 2000). Indeed, rethinking Bernstein 20 years on, I have begun to

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question the utility of his strong-weak disciplinary continuum. Rather, I would want to focus on the potential offered by interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to knowledge construction.9 These have the potential to enable schools, via their specific programmes and schemes, to recontextualise disciplinary knowledge in ways that enable them to ensure that all courses are, in some way, context-specific. As an example of this, Shortland and Locke (2017) report on a successful case study involving cross-disciplinarity, which took place in the Māori immersion unit of an Auckland secondary school. In this study, a Rumaki pūtaiao kaiako (Science) teacher (Shortland) trialled the use of creative narratives with her Year 10 biology students as a way of developing their understanding of the human digestive system. The use of creative narratives was a contextually focused bridge between science discourse and the cultural knowledge these students brought to their learning. They engaged in an activity more likely to be found in their English programme to narrate the story of a tomato pip travelling through the human digestive system. Related to the above, I now add three further principles to a revisioned curriculum. Principle 5: At school level, the enacted curriculum will be contextually focused. Principle 6: Content-centred is not the same as discipline-centred. Curriculum content (see Principle 3) will be open to interdisciplinary and cross-­ disciplinary approaches to course and unit development. Principle 7: Curriculum content (see Principle 3) will be developed with a view to respecting and incorporating indigenous and/or traditional community knowledge. Where relevant, curriculum content development will be guided by a decolonising agenda (see Chap. 5).

8.1.2 Critical Pedagogy I discussed critical theory, discourse and critical discourse analysis in Chap. 1. Critical literacy is a specific pedagogical application of critical theory and is an approach that has been in vogue in a range of settings (especially Australia) since the early 1990s. In Locke and Cleary (2011), we explained that: Critical literacy puts a value on encouraging language-users to see themselves as engaged in textual acts which are part of a wider set of discursive practices that actively produce and sustain patterns of dominance and subordination in the wider society and offer members of society prescribed ways of being particular sorts of people.... All texts, using a range of  “Cross-disciplinarity differs from interdisciplinarity: In the case of cross-disciplinarity, the boundaries of disciplines are crossed but no techniques or ideals, while interdisciplinarity blends the practices and assumptions of each discipline involved”. See Seel, N. M. (Ed.) (2012). CrossDisciplinary Learning. Encyclopedia of the sciences of learning. Springer, Boston, MA: Springer. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_1476 9

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linguistic devices, seek to position readers to view the world in a particular way. No reader is innocent either. Each brings to the act of reading a set of discursive lenses, each of which will interact with the discursive designs of a text in a particular way, ranging from submission to resistance. (p. 121)

In accordance with this approach, critically literate writers are being called upon to be self-reflexive, that is, to be aware of their own positionality as writers and to be honest about the designs they have on a prospective reader or viewer. As the above quotation indicates, there is a focus on language use, since linguistic devices are the building blocks of a discursive position. As this book has continually illustrated, a critical appraisal of any act of representation necessarily involves an examination of the means (linguistic or otherwise) by which that representation is produced. It is unsurprising, then, that critical literacy calls on teachers and students to develop and apply self-reflexively an appropriate metalanguage, so they are knowingly aware of the function language serves in engaging its audience. We can take this discussion further and suggest that all disciplines employ a metalanguage to represent both the processes, objects and products of their disciplinary inquiry. To the extent that a school subject derives from a particular discipline, it is incumbent upon the subject teacher to find ways of inducting students into a degree of mastery of the related disciplinary literacy and its metalanguage. In the case study I discussed above (Shortland & Locke, 2017), the biology teacher was investigating ways of inducting her students into mastering the metalanguage of this branch of science, by creating a bridge between the discipline and their own personal and cultural funds of knowledge. In this case study, the induction was relatively uncritical. Critical theorists such as Moje (2008, p.  97) argue that ideally disciplinary literacy is a “form of critical literacy because it builds an understanding of how knowledge is produced in the disciplines, rather than just building knowledge in the disciplines” (p.  97) [my emphases]. However, as I argue in Locke, 2015a, an explicit focus on disciplinary literacy is relatively undeveloped and somewhat uncritical in most settings.

Principle 8: Students will develop a critical understanding of the relationship between ways of thinking and power relations. Principle 9: Students will develop a critical understanding of how disciplinary and other bodies of knowledge are produced. Principle 10: Students will understand that mastering a discipline’s practice of inquiry will involve learning the metalanguage relevant to its processes and content.

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8.2 A Place-Conscious Curriculum Typically, the literature on place-conscious education begins with a discussion of place, sometimes in relation to space and time. The following aspects of place have been established in earlier chapters and will be taken as givens in what follows: • Place has three requirements: geographical location, material form and investment with meaning and value (Gieryn, 2000; see Chap. 2). • The investment of meaning and value in a place (“sense of place”) can be personal or communal, based on a range of attributes (of the location) and dispositions (of the subject) and has a temporal dimension (i.e. it can change over time). • The meanings associated with places have a cultural dimension (i.e. are discursively constructed) and are liable to contestation. The choice of place-conscious as an epithet recognises the relationship between sense of place and human consciousness. This consciousness can be both self-­ reflexive (i.e. involve an awareness of one’s own senses of place and how they have been derived) and disinterested (i.e. recognise that others have senses of place that will be different from one’s own). My initial focus in this section is a seminal essay by David Gruenewald (2003), a former secondary-school English teacher, who developed his theoretical rationale and framework for place-conscious education at time when, as he puts it, “institutional accountability” was defined by “standards and testing” (p.  619) and when place was a neglected concept in education. Consistent with my own argument, he acknowledges the multiplicity of what he calls “place-conscious traditions”, listing, for example, phenomenology and critical geography, to which I would add such fields as eco-criticism, eco-literacy, the arts disciplines and environmental education. Place, he argues, is a “multidisciplinary construct” (p. 619). It is this aspect that makes it apt as a core focus of a curriculum that encourages inter- and cross-­ disciplinarity. Similar to my own argument, Gruenewald further contends that “place-conscious educational thinking” can address “some of the complexities that plague the world and our institutions of education” (p. 620). (In the case this book is making, the specific plague is environmental depredation and the climate crisis.) Writing out of the US context, he explains his rationale as follows: The point of becoming more conscious of places in education is to extend our notions of pedagogy and accountability outward toward places. Thus extended, pedagogy becomes more relevant to the lived experience of students and teachers, and accountability is reconceptualised so that places matter to educators, students, and citizens in tangible ways. Place-conscious education, therefore, aims to work against the isolation of schooling’s discourses and practices from the living world outside the increasingly placeless institution of schooling. (p. 620)

Of note here is a radical reorientation of the educational institution outwards towards the wider world and the places that compose it. Educational accountability becomes redefined in terms of a relationship of stewardship and care in relation to these places rather than to educational systems with inward-looking assessment

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regimes based around individual test scores. Gruenewald is at pains to note that there are already initiatives and approaches that have proved conducive to this orientation, such as contextually related course design (see Hipkins, 2004, above), outdoor education, critical literacy, indigenous education and ecological education  – these being “a vibrant counterpoint to the dominant system of education” (p. 621). In the first section of his article, he identifies five dimensions of place so as to establish “the relevance of place as a unit of cultural and ecological analysis” and show “the many ways that places are pedagogical” (p. 621). In many ways, his aim is congruent with Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of this book, so my summary here will briefly indicate this congruence rather than needlessly repeat earlier material. Gruenewald begins by noting that we all live in specific places and that these places “teach us about how the world works and how our lives fit into the spaces we occupy” (p. 621) [his italics]. Further, our identities are shaped by the places we inhabit. However, the “teaching and shaping that places accomplish” are determined by “the kinds of attention we give them and how we respond to them” (p.  621). (This is the phenomenological aspect of place discussed in Chap. 2.) This is where the educational system comes in, either in terms of the attention it fosters or negatively by its neglect of place. As I have argued in this book, it is also where various kinds of cultural framing and discursive construction come in. It is inevitable that the various discursive hegemonies at work in the wider society, for good or ill, will impact on the education system. After a discussion that acknowledges the various disciplines that have contributed to theorisations around place as a concept, its contested nature, its relationship with space and its history of marginalisation (cf Chaps. 2 and 3), Gruenewald (2003) offers five interrelated dimensions, each based on the idea that places are pedagogical.

8.2.1 The Perceptual Dimension Citing Abram (1996), Gruenewald argues that “our collective carelessness” (towards the natural world) “can be traced to ways of perceiving and ways of using language that deny our connection to earthly phenomena, that construct places as objects or sites on a map to be economically exploited” (p. 624). He describes this disconnection between the human body and nature as “modernist”. (This book, in contrast, traces the discourse of dissociation back to the middle ages and relates it to the invention of private poverty.) The pathway to spiritual and epistemological remediation is via a theory of perception where “all things are ‘alive’ and capable of entering into a relationship with a human perceiver” (p. 623). The theory is drawn from phenomenologist Merleau-­ Ponty as interpreted by Abram (1996) who writes:

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The sensible world...is described as active, animate, and in some curious manner, alive....so that we may ultimately describe perception as a mutual interaction, an intercourse, “a coition, so to speak, of my body with things. (p. 55)

In Abram’s theory, perception is “inherently participatory... an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives” (p. 57). We have encountered the idea of a participatory relationship between humans and their environment earlier in this book, especially in Chap. 4, where I invited indigenous voices into the text to share their sense of place. One hope for the future of this planet, I argue, rests in the potential for synergies between indigenous and non-­ indigenous senses of place, and alliances being formed on the basis of shared values. For Gruenewald (2003) this kind of perception, based as it is on a reciprocal relationship with nature, is a prerequisite for developing a disposition of care and stewardship towards places. A problem that a place-conscious curriculum seeks to address is that “human institutions, such as schools, governments, and corporations, have not demonstrated an orientation of care and consciousness toward the places that they manipulate, neglect, and destroy” (p. 624). Part of the solution is the fostering of “renewed attentiveness and rejuvenation of carnal empathy with place” that challenges the ways formal schooling disciplines the body (senses and emotions) and, through its spatial configurations, produces an “enforced isolation of children and youth from culture and ecosystem” (p. 625). By way of a little relief from the turgidity of educational discourse, here is an excerpt from Coleridge’s poem “Frost at Midnight” (1798) where he recalls his own schooling in London: For I was reared In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

8.2.2 The Sociological Dimension The focus here is on the connectedness of place, identity and culture and the human activity of place-making. He cites Basso’s (1996) evocation of “the marriage of geography, mind, and culture” thus: “Place roots individuals in the social and cultural soils from which they have sprung together, holding them there in the grip of

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a shared identity, a localised version of self-hood…Selfhood and place hood are completely intertwined” (Basso, 1996, p. 146, cited in Gruenewald, 2003, p. 616). The key topic here is the way in which human beings (as discussed earlier in this book) invest places with meaning, and thereby become place-makers, even when the place in question is a wilderness. Because the cultural bases for our place-­ making (its discursive underpinnings) have social and political consequences, it is imperative that we bring these to awareness and interrogate them. (As discussed previously in this book, this is a function of eco-criticism.) A failure to do this naturalises10 the discourses that have constructed places in certain ways and not others. This can happen whether the place in question is a landscape, a cityscape, a town square, or a national park. Places, then, “produce and teach particular ways of thinking about and being in the world” (p. 627). This is a compelling reason for a place-conscious curriculum and a justification for including, say, critical geography in its disciplinary make-up. It also justifies “a more active role for schools in the study, care, and creation of places” (p. 627).

8.2.3 The Ideological Dimension Here Gruenewald draws on critical geography to highlight the ways in which “spaces and places are expressive of ideologies and relationships of power”. This dimension rehearses a consistent emphasis in this book, i.e. the politically contested nature of space and place, their relationship to discourse, and the power effects produced when certain discourses of place become hegemonic (as per, for example, my discussion of property, enclosure, dispossession and colonisation in Chaps. 4 and 5). While there is a tendency to focus on the spatial here, there is still a need to recognise that discursive ascendency and decline occur over time. Foucault’s concepts of archaeology and genealogy encompass the temporal aspect of ideology (as does Bahktin’s concept of the chronotope (see Chap. 6)). While geography as a discipline might claim centre-stage in a place-conscious curriculum, history has a crucial role as disciplinary partner. Gruenewald contends that, when an education system fails to pay attention to “spatial forms [that] maintain geographical relations of domination...schooling conceals the production of space from view and obscures the role for citizens in the potentially democratic process of place making” (p. 629). (An example of this in my own country is the practice of establishing zones which allow schools to filter their clientele and foster exclusivity.) In this regard, Gruenewald draws attention to the importance of schools offering students an opportunity to analyse how the so-called global economy works as a “contest of occupying, exploiting, and profiting from the geographical space and the

 When a discourses is subscribed to unconsciously and becomes for us a common-sense position on something, we can say that it has become naturalised. 10

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social and ecological relationships that take place there”, thereby addressing themes of imperialism and neo-colonialism that draw attention to such discursive effects as “uneven development” (p. 629). In this section, he also addresses the effects of private land ownership – “the privatisation and control of space by elites” (p. 630) – in a range of settings (cf Chap. 5). In short, if educators and students are to understand culture in the places where they live, they must explore the interdependent economic, political, ideological, and ecological relationships between places near and far. (p. 630).

Rather wryly, I recall an occasion when I had my high-school English students study Brecht’s play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. I invited the Economics teacher to a debate on Marxism (as illustrated in the play) versus neo-liberal economics. He declined.

8.2.4 The Political Dimension Gruenewald begins by arguing that “a political geography of place in a global context of power, struggle, and resistance” with a focus on “spatialised cultural study [has] much to offer a place-conscious education that is concerned with issues of identity and difference.” Of relevance to Principle 9 above, he draws on critical geography to generate a list of terms (a subject metalanguage) denoting spatial relationships that reflect power, struggle and resistance: “ethnic space, marginality, territoriality, movement, disruption, displacement, exile, annexation, division, segregation, absorption, diaspora, and panopticonism” (p.  631). Others would include occupation: Teachers can occupy students with busy work; Russian troops can occupy territory in the Ukraine. Readers will have their own suggestions. He illustrates his argument with a discussion of the concept of marginality, noting that a margin is both “a metaphorical and a material space from which relationships of oppression might be reimagined and reshaped” (p. 631). I have used the spatial metaphor “position” frequently in writing this book. In many instances, as indicated in Chap. 1, I am positioning myself on the margin, contesting various hegemonic discourses I see as a threat to human well-being, the environment, and ultimately the planet.11 As Gruenwald argues, place-conscious education needs to address such phenomena as marginalised communities. (See my discussion of funds of knowledge in Chap. 5, and the need for schools to view the knowledges of minority groups as a resource.) How might a teacher invite students to reflect on marginalisation? Gruenewald offers the following suggestions: “Where are the margins? How have they been constructed? How do they reveal not only multiple forms of oppression, but possibilities for resistance to and transformation of domination?” (p. 633).

 My daughter Cybèle Locke’s book, Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-War New Zealand (2012: Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books), used the same metaphor. 11

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8.2.5 The Ecological Dimension Here Gruenewald turns his attention to the “nonhuman world” and the damage currently being wreaked by current economic regimes on the “ecological systems that support human and nonhuman communities” (p. 633). He makes the ironic point that while environmental education is becoming widespread in schools, these same schools are preparing their students to be cogs in these same economic regimes. Similar to my own argument, he argues for a focus on the local and immediate in terms of place-conscious education. Drawing on the work of Wendell Berry, he advocates for what he calls “a bioregional understanding of place”: Bioregionalists seek to revive, preserve, and develop cultural patterns in specific bioregions that are suited to the climate, life zones, landforms, and resources of those regions. (2003, p. 634).

Bioregional practices include fostering local economies of production, consumption and waste management with a focus on responsible stewardship and an acknowledgement of both the limits and affordances of local places. Such practices challenge cultures of denial that advocate unlimited growth, individualism and anthropocentrism. He directs educators committed to a space-conscious curriculum to recent intellectual disciplinary fields such as social and human ecology, environmental justice, ecofeminism, and indigenous literatures. In respect of ecofeminism, for example, he notes that one of its aims is “to recognise how dominant cultural patterns destroy diversity in particular places and to take the political action needed to conserve diverse cultures and ecosystems” (p. 635). Place-conscious education would seek to provide diversity of experience, create bridges between schools and the cultural and ecological life beyond their walls, address marginality by contesting factory models of learning management and assessment (Eisner, 2002), and acknowledge ways in which the education system itself can be conscripted to serve the global economy. Drawing on the above discussion, I list further principles to underpin a place-­ conscious curriculum.

Principle 11: Schools should have an active role in the study, care and creation of places. Principle 12: As a multidisciplinary concept, “place” is an apt focus for a contextually oriented curriculum with a cross/interdisciplinary focus. Principle 13: The primary goal of place-conscious education is the development of a disposition of care and stewardship towards specific places. Principle 14: Geography and history are core disciplines in a place-conscious curriculum. (continued)

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Principle 15: A place-conscious curriculum will enable students to identify and reflect on ways in which the global impacts the local and local initiatives can contribute to global effects. Principle 16: A place-conscious curriculum can offer a range of lenses to investigate ways in which space and place speak to social injustice and its potential remedies. Principle 17: A place-conscious curriculum will require pedagogies that foster a reciprocal, perceptual (bodily, sensory) relationship with the natural world, attention to personal and social narratives that construct places in particular ways over time and place-based ecocritical analysis.

The set of principles offered so far are not exhaustive. Rather, they reflect a work in progress  – conversation starters offered in the knowledge that, even in an age of standardisation, the degree of constraint and possibility around curriculum change will vary from country to country, region to region and school to school.

8.3 Place-Conscious Pedagogy: Some Examples To conclude this chapter, and in the spirit of synecdoche, I provide a number of instances that reflect some of the above principles – rooted in places but speaking out to the world we are trying to save.

8.3.1 Murphy’s Bush Murphy’s Bush is a small remnant of indigenous forest in South Auckland, which is now a public reserve with a short walking track.12 In the early 1990s, when I was Head of the English Department at Pakuranga College, I became aware that the Science Department would bus the entire cohort of Year 9 students (around 13 years of age) to Murphy’s Bush, where they would undertake a study related to the curriculum topic, “Living Things”. The Science Department was happy to collaborate with the English Department on a cross-disciplinary project, where English teachers drew on a rhetorical model of teaching writing to have students produce (in groups) a nature-trail pamphlet (see Locke, 2015b). Using the content gathered via their  See https://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/parks-recreation/Pages/park-details.aspx?Location= 331 12

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Fig. 8.2  Nature trail pamphlet production brief (2015b, p. 134)

botanical field trip, they developed their nature-trail pamphlet in accordance with the following brief (Fig. 8.2).13 While this unit had a cross-disciplinary focus on a specific place, there are ways I would change it were I teaching it today. For example, students would engage with such questions as: • How did Māori name this area? How did it get its present name? Why is there no mention of Māori naming on official websites about the reserve? • Why is it that there is so little forested land still existing in South Auckland? • Is Murphy’s Bush under threat and from what? • Are there ways we can actively care for Murphy’s Bush as pupils? As a school? I would also explore ways a school might set up a relationship with a school in another country so as to allow for a compare and contrast project that focuses on the production of texts that enhance knowledge of a specific local place.

 Their model was a nature-trail pamphlet developed by the Auckland Regional Council for the Shakespear Regional Park of Auckland. In the 1990s there was no such pamphlet for Murphy’s Bush, but there is now (see https://kura.aucklandlibraries.govt.nz/digital/collection/maps/id/9199/) 13

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8.3.2 Henderson Valley Between 2003 and 2012, my wife Millie Locke was Music Specialist at Henderson Valley Primary School, nestled in the foothills of the Waitakere Ranges west of Auckland. (It is uncommon for primary schools in Aotearoa to have music specialists.) She was fortunate in her time at this school to be in a position to work collaboratively with generalist teachers in developing themes in the music programme that complemented the topics their classes were addressing. At this time, Henderson Valley was an Enviroschool. The Enviroschool programme began as a collaboration between the University of Waikato and the Hamilton City Council in 1993 and was a response to the 1992 Earth Summit (Eames & Mardon, 2020). The programme invites schools “to commit to a long-­ term sustainability journey, where students connect with and explore the environment, then plan, design and take action in their local places in collaboration with their communities” (Toimata Foundation l, n.d. para 1). Encouraging schools and pupils to become place-makers is consistent with Principle 11 above. Locke’s students at Henderson Valley interacted regularly with the natural environment, freely explored the nearby Opanuku Stream, and were knowledgeable about local flora and fauna and the local geography. During her time at Henderson Valley, she moved beyond a focus on sustainability and environmental awareness to a professional commitment to eco-literacy as a way of confronting the climate crisis (Locke, 2022). The term was coined by Orr (1992), who argued that eco-literacy begins with “an uncompromising commitment to life and its preservation” (p. 133). She was influenced in her pedagogy by Goleman, Bennett and Barlow (2012), who defined eco-literacy as the integration of “emotional, social, and ecological intelligence” (p.  10). They identified five practices viewed as fostering eco-literacy: • • • • •

Developing empathy for all forms of life Embracing sustainability as a community practice Making the invisible visible Anticipating unintended consequences Understanding how nature sustains life.

Of relevance to this book, American music educator Daniel Shevock (2018) viewed eco-literate music education as a way of addressing climate change through a focus on interdisciplinarity. Briefly summarised below are two examples of an interdisciplinary approach to learning in the primary school, where music can play a part in supporting collaborative sustainability projects and developing eco-literacy.

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Sounds of Waitakere This project involved a group of accomplished and keen recorder players (regular members of school ensembles). The aim was to have the pupils explore conventional and unconventional ways of playing the recorder, couple these with found sounds (natural objects such as stones, driftwood and seed pods) and compose a piece of music which drew upon their “rootedness in place” (M.  Locke, 2022, p. 117). The stimulus to the composition was the study of a selection of artworks by painters who had represented the Waitakere Ranges in their work, “paying close attention to shape, line, light, colour, contrast, mood” (p. 117). They were encouraged to identify and incorporate musical equivalences of these features in their compositions.14 Improvisation and Composition Project Based on the Opanuku Stream This project integrated creative writing, environmental education and music making and was a collaboration between Millie as music specialist, a generalist classroom teacher and teachers involved in the Enviroschools programme. As mentioned previously, Henderson Valley students engaged actively with the local Opanuku Stream as caregivers (e.g. through regular water-testing). They were also well versed in the stream’s importance to local Māori and viewed the Valley’s taniwha, Mokoroa, as the stream’s kaitiaki (caretaker).15 The project involved the following steps: 1. Facilitated sensory experience, imagining themselves as human cameras capturing a range of images of the stream at different distances and registering the sounds they heard. These visual and aural images were recorded as written notes. 2. Haiku writing based on these notes, for example: Criss-cross leaves on tree. Curling ferns fan upwards. Sly singing waters.

3. Composing and performing a soundscape, drawing on a range of sound sources to reflect a selected haiku. 4. Working with Waitakere musician and composer David Parker to collaboratively compose a piece for group performance using tuned and untuned percussion, ukuleles and recorder. (M. Locke, 2022, p. 119). Over the course of such projects, she was strengthened in her belief in the power of music to foster acts of attention-giving to the natural environment as a way of

 For a detailed treatment of this project, see Locke, L., & Locke, T. (2011). Sounds of Waitakere. Using practitioner research to explore how year 6 recorder players compose responses to visual representations of a natural environment. British Journal of Music Education, 28(3), 263–284. (Locke, L. is Millie). 15  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokoroa_Falls 14

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developing “mind as care, in the sense of solicitude … the active looking after of things that need to be tended” (Dewey, 1958, p.  263). In M.  Locke (2022), she quoted the Mayday Group’s adoption in 2020 of Ideal IX, which is consistent with the theme of this book: Music education practices are inescapably bound within ecology  – interactions among organisms and physical environments. Diverse cultures and species can be sustained by environmentally regenerative music education attuned to cultural and physical commons, pollution-free soundscapes, the inherent value of non-human being, and people musicking for environmental activism. (Mayday Group, 2022).

In the present day, the range of activities and practices associated with musicking (Small, 1998) is expanding rapidly (cf the discussion of sonic arts in Chap. 7). Soundscape ecology, for example, investigates “the interaction between organisms and their environment through acoustic composition”, allowing for a widening of our concept of music from: ...one which is limited to anthrophony (sound created by human beings) to one which also includes the biophony (sound generated by flora and fauna) and geophony (sound generated by weather and/geological features). Such a definition invites us to attend to the soundscape of our environment, offering the opportunity for critical interrogation and appreciation of sounds and their sources. (M. Locke, 2022, p. 121).

8.3.3 Reshaping L1 Subject English This section continues the theme of eco-literacy discussed in the last section, with a particular focus on the work of Sasha Matthewman, who had been an English teacher in both England and Aotearoa. Between 2016 and 2018, she led a cross-­ disciplinary TLRI study (involving English, Social Studies and the Arts) in Aotearoa investigating literacy and environmental identities.16 In Matthewman (2020), she begins by addressing the problematic history of L1 subject identities in both colonising (e.g. England and France) and colonised nations (e.g. Australia and New Zealand). (In Chap. 6, while my focus was on literary studies in general, there is an implied critique of the construction of literary study and a number of related concepts in subject English classrooms.) The phrase “subject English” is itself evidence of the problematics of naming this subject area. In the New Zealand curriculum, English is a stand-alone “learning area”. “Learning languages” is another learning area, which “provides the framework for the teaching and learning of languages that are additional to the language of instruction” [my italics] which in Aotearoa is either English or Māori.17 “Subject  See http://www.tlri.org.nz/tlri-research/research-progress/school-sector/tuhia-ki-te-ao-write-naturalworld. Her book Teaching secondary English as if the planet matters was published by Routledge in 2011. 17  See https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/Learning-languages/What-islearning-languages-about 16

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English” is not “English as an Additional Language” (EAL), though English in fact is an additional language for many students in schools where English is the language of instruction. In such schools literary texts studied are almost invariably texts originally written in English. Most Māori and all non-Māori students in mainstream New Zealand English classrooms, then, have little opportunity to gain knowledge of home languages other than English or an appreciation of literary texts composed in languages other than English. English the language (as L1) is hegemonic; moreover, this hegemony is accompanied by subtle forms of discursive enculturation (Locke & May, 2004). As Matthewman puts it: The legacy of empire infuses the project of teaching L1 English wherever one stands in the world. Ideas of nature, place, landscape and environment are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination that emerges out of this colonial past. (2020, p. 236).

One aspect of a project to reshape the L1 curriculum is to reveal and contest this “cultural imagination” (Principle 8). For Matthewman (2020), subject English has an essential part to play “in forming environmental identities and engaging with representations of the natural world” (p. 238). One might think of an environmental identity as a sense of place coupled with an environmental awareness that embraces an understanding of the impact of climate change at local, national and global levels (Principle 15). She argues that traditional representations of the natural world as something stable and enduring, for example, in English nature poetry, do not speak to the current moment.18 For her, the concept of the Anthropocene (discussed in Chap. 9) communicates a radically new understanding of humanity’s relationship with the planet. In this view human beings have become “geological engineers laying down a fossil record of carbon and plastic to mark a new epoch written in the very layers of the Earth itself, the stratigraphic record” (p.  245). Consequently, this exercise of power has led to unprecedented and uncontrolled weather events and irreversible damage to the planet’s life forms and ecological diversity. Like Gruenewald (2003), whose work I discussed above, she views school curriculums as implicated in the global capitalist system. She uses the term carbon curriculum to highlight how “school systems arose out of the twin processes of industrialisation and urbanisation attended by a massive acceleration in the use of carbon energy and the exploitation of natural resources” (p.  241) and how discourses consistent with these processes found their way into the overt and hidden curriculum (see my earlier discussion of recontextualisation). Matthewman (2020) draws on the ecocritical tradition from literary studies (see Chap. 6) to underpin her revisioning of the L1 English curriculum, which she characterises as requiring “a shift of attention to foreground the natural world and environmental issues in reading all kinds of texts” (p. 246). She sees this tradition as

18

 As my discussion of John Clare in Chap. 6 suggests, I think she overstates the case here.

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absent in the New Zealand curriculum – as she does the broader pedagogical tradition of critical literacy.19 Her TLRI project was an intervention study that trialled a “3D eco-literacy model” with Year 9 students in a range of classrooms. Drawing on Green and Beavis’s (2012) “3D literacy” model, the research team worked from the assumption that literacy is multimodal and involves three dimensions of engagement: 1. Eco-operational: The focus here is skills-focused, e.g. syntactical competence, map reading and understanding graphic design elements. However, in this study, competence extended to “sensual and environmental knowledge” (p. 247), e.g. names and features of flora and fauna, place names and place-related genres such as the pepeha (see Chap. 1 of this book). 2. Eco-cultural: This focus is on the way the environment is represented across a range of texts and contexts, and how these might change over time. 3. Ecocritical: Although Matthewman does not use the term “discourse”, this dimension can be seen as guiding students to identify the discourses that underpin these representations and the groups these discourses benefit. I refer readers to Matthewman’s chapter for specific instances of student responses to this model.

8.3.4 Outdoor Education A place-conscious curriculum is a specific instance of environmental education, but with a critical edge and, as this book argues, a constructive response to the climate crisis. Outdoor education has a long-established place in the New Zealand curriculum (formal and extracurricular) and, on the face of it, offers the opportunity to take students out of the classroom and into contact with the natural environment (see Principle 17). “Outdoor education” is one of the seven key topics in the “Health and physical education” learning area. Outdoor education is described currently as “an aspect of education outside the classroom (EOTC) and aims to extend the four walls of the classroom” as a way of “reconnecting increasingly urbanised and digitally focused ākonga [pupils] with nature and their local environment”.20 While the footnoted site incorporates Māori concepts, and there is mention of environmental care, there is no reference to climate change. Nor is there any reference to sense of place.  For an explanation of this, see: Sandretto, S., Shafer, D., & Locke, T. (2022). The fate of critical literacy in an age of standards-based hegemonies: The New Zealand context. In A.  Goodwyn, J. Manuel, R. Roberts, L. Scherff, W. Sawyer, C. Durrant & D. Zancanella (Eds.), International perspectives on English teacher development: From initial teacher education to highly accomplished professional (pp. 226–240). London, UK: Routledge. 20  See https://hpe.tki.org.nz/health-and-physical-education-in-the-curriculum/key-areas-of-learning/outdoor-education/ 19

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I am concluding this chapter by referencing the work of one New Zealand high-­ school teacher, Jane Townsend (2014), whose autoethnography mapped her journey as she set out to explore why Māori students at Mount Maunganui College were reluctant to enrol in outdoor education and address the “invisibility” of Māori culture and history in the subject as she had been teaching it. Her solution involved adopting a place-conscious and culturally responsive approach that incorporated and valued “traditional [indigenous] ways of learning through the notion of place and the stories attached to them” (p. ii) (see Principle 7). Appropriately, Townsend introduces her thesis with the mōteatea (chanted song/ poem) “E Hika Tū Ake”, followed by her retelling of the legend of Mauao, the traditional name for the mountain that her school is named for. Mauao, she tells us, was the place where she first felt a “feeling of belonging” and where she regularly took her outdoor education students and saw them “make connections of their own with each other and their significant place(s)” (p iii). As a Pākehā of Cornish and Irish descent, she came to realise as a postgraduate student at the University of Waikato that Māori knowledge was marginalised or ignored in outdoor education in Aotearoa. In part, her autoethnography is a deconstruction of outdoor education in New Zealand and other countries colonised by the English, and driven by her urge to write a “decolonising narrative” (2014, p. 10) (Principle 7). She takes issue with the time-honoured emphasis in outdoor education on adventure activities (promoted by Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts movement) as a way of building character through confronting challenges (e.g. through high ropes courses). She notes wryly that this discourse served national goals of having young men (in particular) readied for service in war. In respect of Aotearoa, she argues that: “In outdoor education, Eurocentric values have tended to dominate, and Māori ways of knowing have been devalued” (p. 39). “This focus on self-reliance and individualism is contrary to the interdependent view of self that is inherent in many indigenous cultures, including Māori culture” (p. 40). (See Chap. 4 of this book.) She also critiques the decontextualised nature of much outdoor education, where the location of the adventure-based learning is largely irrelevant. In this regard, place is seemingly immaterial. Moreover, understandings of the natural world are filtered through an “anthropocentric worldview consisting of a more or less consistent set of explicit and implicit concepts, assumptions, biases and ideologies that locate the human being at the centre of the Earth and even the Universe” (p. 45). In contrast, she writes: ...many Māori have a biocentric view of nature. The biocentric world view is a more or less consistent set of beliefs, assumptions, biases or ideologies that place the biosphere at the centre of a person’s way of life, thought and feeling. It represents a partnership model between humans and nature, one of its main tenets being the belief that the human is a member of life rather than its master or even its steward. (p. 46)

It is clear reading Townsend’s thesis that a deepening of her mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) offered her a discursive position that enabled her to contest the Eurocentric thinking underpinning much outdoor education curriculum design as she developed her new Year 12 OE design, first trialled in 2011.

References

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Like Barbour’s approach to autoethnographic dance performance (see Chap. 7), her new approach involved a kind of drilling down into the cultural histories of the places she had her students engage with. Utilising a balance of showing and telling, she set out to: demonstrate how, through physical activity, my students and I move over and experience our Maunga/mountains, islands and coastal trails. How it feels to paddle through and on waves or over our rivers and lakes. How the salt air blowing off the waves tastes on the lips and the feelings of elation when I look down the coast from the summit of Mauao. It is through our senses that we engage with the world and build relationships with each other and our significant places. (2014, p. 15) (Principle 17)

Relph (1976) was important to Townsend’s theorising; she quotes his description of places as “important sources of individual and communal identity, and...often centres of human existence to which people have deep emotional and psychological ties” (p. 141). In the latter chapters of her thesis, she shares ways she slowed down the journeys she took her students on – either on foot (Hīkoi)21 or by kayak – to enable them to enhance their own senses of place. For example, the students’ kayak journey on Lake Tarawera was less about reaching a destination in quick time than an opportunity to learn about the lake’s history, especially stories related to Mount Tarawera’s disastrous eruption in 1886. I leave readers of this book to explore this easily accessible thesis further. Relevant to the final chapter in this book (and its argument overall) is Townsend’s assertion that “if we want students to become truly empowered, then they should be allowed the opportunity to love the earth before they are asked to save it” (2014, p. 57).

References Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous. Vintage. Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique (Revised ed.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Castree, N. (2011). Nature and society. In J. A. Agnew & D. N. Livingstone (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of geographical knowledge (pp. 287–299). SAGE Publications Ltd.. Dewey, J. (1958). Art as experience. Capricorn Books. Eames, C., & Mardon, H. (2020). The Enviroschools programme in Aotearoa New Zealand: Action-­ orientated, culturally responsive, holistic learning. In A. Gough, J. C.-K. Lee, & E. P. K. Tsang (Eds.), Green schools globally. International explorations in outlook and environmental education (pp. 49–60). Springer. Eisner, E. (2002). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs (3rd ed.). Merrill Prentice Hall.

 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C4%ABkoi#:~:text=A%20h%C4%ABkoi%20is%20a%20 walk,taking%20many%20days%20or%20weeks. In one Hīkoi, Townsend took her students in the Kaimai Ranges, inland from Tauranga, using traditional Māori trading routes. 21

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Gieryn, T. F. (2000). A space for place in sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 463–496. Goleman, D., Bennett, L., & Barlow, Z. (2012). Eco-literate: How educators are cultivating emotional, social, and ecological intelligence. John Wiley & Sons. Green, B., & Beavis, C. A. (2012). Literacy in 3D: An integrated perspective in theory and practice. ACER Press. Gruenewald, D. (2003). Foundations of place: A multidisciplinary framework for place-conscious education. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 619–654. Hipkins, R. (2004). Changing school subjects for changing times. Paper presented at PPTA conference: Charting the future: The way forward for secondary education, Wellington. Retrieved from http://www.nzcer.org.nz/pdfs/12815.pdf Locke, L. M., & Locke, T. (2011). Sounds of Waitakere. Using practitioner research to explore how year 6 recorder players compose responses to visual representations of a natural environment. British Journal of Music Education, 28(3), 263–284. Locke, M. (2022). Manakitia a papatuanuku: Eco-literate pedagogy and music education. Teachers and Curriculum, 22(2), 113–125. Locke, T. (2007). Resisting qualifications reforms in New Zealand: The English study design as constructive dissent. Sense Publishers. Locke, T. (2010). Discovering a metalanguage for all seasons: Bringing literary language in from the cold. In T. Locke (Ed.), Beyond the grammar wars: A resource for teachers and students on developing language knowledge in the English/literacy classroom (pp. 170–184). Routledge. Locke, T. (2015a). The English teacher as interdisciplinary resource. English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 14(3), 285–302. Locke, T. (2015b). Writing, reading and rhetoric. In B. Marshall & S. Brindley (Eds.), MasterClass in English education: Transforming teaching and learning (pp. 124–138). Bloomsbury. Locke, T., & Cleary, A. (2011). Critical literacy as an approach to literary study in the multicultural, high-school classroom. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 10(1), 119–139. Locke, T., & May, S. (2004). Dis-lodging literature from English: Challenging linguistic hegemonies. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 3(1), 17–31. Matthewman, S. (2020). Nation and nature in L1 education: Changing the mission of subject English. In B.  Green & P.-O.  Erixon (Eds.), Rethinking L1 education in a global era (pp. 235–256). Springer. Mayday Group. (2022). Action for change in music education. Retrieved from http://www. maydaygroup. Moje, E. (2008). Foregrounding the disciplines in secondary literacy teaching and learning: A call for change. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 42(2), 96–107. Orr, D. W. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the transition to a postmodern world. State University of New York Press. Relph, E. (1976). Place and Placelessness. Pion. Shevock, D. J. (2018). Eco-literate music pedagogy. Routledge. Shortland, L., & Locke, T. (2017). The tomato Pip’s story: Creative narratives as bridging cultural and science discourses for indigenous students. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 47(2), 171–184. Shulman, L.  S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14. Small, C. (1998). Musicking. University Press of New England. Toimata Foundation 1. (n.d.). About Enviroschools. Retrieved from https://enviroschools.org.nz/ about-­us/. Townsend, J. E. (2014). Ko au te whenua, te whenua ko au – I am the land, the land is me: An autoethnographic investigation of a secondary school teacher’s experience seeking to enrich learning in outdoor education for Māori students. (Thesis, master of sport and leisure studies (MSpLS)). University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle. net/10289/9005 Young, M., & Muller, J. (2010). Thee educational scenarios for the future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge. European Journal of Education, 45(1), 11–27.

Chapter 9

The Geopolitics of Place: Framing Avenues for Activism

I am writing this in the Ngongotahā Valley in February–March 2023. It has been a summer of rain. Many of the plants in our vegetable garden have been profoundly disoriented and have exhibited strange growth patterns. For example, the leeks and onions went to seed before their bulbs were fully formed. Auckland, the city of my birth, experienced unprecedented flooding, when the equivalent of a full summer of rain fell in a single day, mostly in the space of a few hours. Houses slipped from their moorings, streets and valleys became rivers, and four people died. Auckland’s mayor, Wayne Brown, in a stuttering performance to journalists, commented that a number of flooded homes had been built in the wrong place. The unsayable truth was that “the wrong place” had become so largely as the result of a climate crisis. A week later, Cyclone Gabrielle ravaged the East Coast of the North Island  – Coromandel, Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay – causing more death and destruction of some of this country’s prime, horticultural land. For only the third time in its history, New Zealand declared a National State of Emergency.1 The poem below was written in response. (I realised after writing it that the penultimate line echoes Hone Tūwhare’s iconic anti-nuclear poem, “No Ordinary Sun” (1993, p. 28).) When Green Turns Loathsome ...and emerald loses its lustre and the parrot’s sheen      shrieks in the canopy and the slime sprouts      on the timbered deck endangering     the frail foothold and the leeks turn to seed

 The previous ones were the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010–2011. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 T. Locke, Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4266-4_9

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     without ripening plump and white and the baby spinach      blooms into old age overnight while the dock and the deadly nightshade      thrive in the ungentle no longer unseasonal rain      our end being writ large in our slide towards unsettlement.

On February 17, 2023, the cartoon below appeared in the online news outlet Stuff (Fig. 9.1). While directly relevant to weather events in New Zealand, Mark Winter was seeking to highlight their global significance. The power of this cartoon is its intertextual reference to Winnie-the-Pooh and his sidekick, Piglet. Stories named for the former were first written by A. A. Milne (with E. H. Shepard as illustrator) in 1926. Despite lexical items such as “copse” and “spinney”, which never managed to attach themselves to the Aotearoa landscape, these stories were favourites in our home and in the homes of many New Zealanders. The cartoon not only nostalgically evokes a bucolic English countryside. It also evokes a time when the natural world was considered by many to be relatively stable and benign.2 On January 31, 2023, Kathleen Maureen Te Wehioterangi Jehly (née Corbett) passed away at the age of 85 (see Chap. 1). Her spirit presided over my long journey to where I stand now as a Pākehā New Zealander. After a night at home, her body

Fig. 9.1  Mark Winter climate change cartoon (with his permission)

 A visit to Winter’s website (https://chicanepictures.com/about/) will confirm that he might be termed both activist and self-reflexive. 2

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was called on to her home marae – Tunohopu3 – on the shores of Lake Rotorua for a period of 2 days before her funeral and interment. During her stay in the whare nui (meeting house), regular groups of manuhiri (mourners/visitors) were “called on” to the marae by Ngati Whakaue elders, who greeted them with speeches (kōrero) and songs of lamentation (waiata mōteatea).4 The scale and the formality of the event was a tribute to Maureen. The core focus of the speeches made by visitors who were able to korero in Māori was the concept of connectedness to Maureen, not just on a personal level, but in a larger, social sense on the basis of genealogy (whakapapa) and place. I can write this last paragraph because the indigenous people of Aotearoa have gifted me my identity as Pākehā. Through Maureen and her children (my nieces and nephews), I have a special connection with Tunohopu. On the day after the funeral, my Brisbane-based son, Jesse, took us for a meal at El Mexicano Zapata restaurant, owned and operated by Eduardo Díaz, for whom he worked some decades before when our family lived in Kingsland in Central Auckland (see Chap. 1). The conversation with Díaz, intermittent as it was, stuck in my mind to such an extent that I followed up with him a few days later. He told me that he had migrated to Aotearoa from his native Chile in 1975. He was well versed in the troubled history of independence in his own country, from the initial proclamation of self-governance in 1810 to the restoration of democracy following the demise of Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990. On a wall of his restaurant, in large lettering, was a quotation from Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata: “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees”. Having read a number of Isabel Allende novels, especially Inés of My Soul (2006), I was aware of the Mapuche people – indigenous to southern Chile and Argentina and comprising 80% of Chile’s native population. I asked Díaz if he had Mapuche ancestry. He replied that he did not know. However, he emphasised that as a Chilean, he wanted to honour them. He pointed to a tattooed band on his left upper arm, where he had inscribed a visual symbol of Mapuche identity on his own body. Now, as a resident of Aotearoa, he had done the same on his upper right arm, honouring the indigenous people and traditions of this country. I was struck with the thought that these acts of inscription were activist expressions; in this case Díaz was wearing his heart and mind, not on his sleeve but on his very body. It was an act of enduring commitment – his assertion of an identity that embraced an awareness of those indigenous peoples, whose lands anchored his sense of place and attachment (Fig. 9.2).

 https://maorimaps.com/marae/para-te-hoata-tunohopu  For an account of a pōwhiri, see https://www.otago.ac.nz/maori/world/tikanga/powhiri/#:~:text= A%20p%C5%8Dwhiri%20encapsulates%20the%20formal,to%20the%20sharing%20of%20kai 3 4

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Fig. 9.2  Eduardo Díaz tattoos. Left to right: Mapuche, Māori, and family crest

9.1 Radicals and Activists My first introduction to the idea of the “radical” was reading Saul Alinsky’s book Reveille for Radicals: A Call to Action for Democracy,5 when I was a doctoral student in the United States. In an online column on Alinsky’s ongoing significance in the US political context, Matthews (2016) offers explanatory quotations from the book indicating Alinsky’s understanding of the idea of the “Radical”. The Radical believes that all peoples should have a high standard of food, housing, and health … The Radical places human rights far above property rights. He is for universal, free public education and recognises this as fundamental to the democratic way of life … The Radical believes completely in real equality of opportunity for all peoples regardless of race, colour, or creed. (Section 4, para 1)

My own understanding of the term radical (in a political sense) derives from its etymology (from Latin) as pertaining to a root or roots. My trusty SOED offers one of its senses as “inherent in the nature or essence of a thing or person; fundamental”. (Alinsky has used the word “fundamental” in the extract above.) If one reflects on the root causes of injustice or inequality of opportunity in a society and develops a view on these, one might be described as a radical thinker. This book is radical in the sense that it identifies one root cause of many of today’s social ills as the discourse of private landownership (private property). Of course, I can espouse this belief, but do nothing about it. Sitting on my hands is a challenge to nobody. At the heart of activism is deliberate agency based on a commitment to a range of beliefs or principles. In this respect, activism is always discursively constructed. In my own work as an educationalist, I have drawn on the work of Judyth Sachs (1998) and others, who coined the term activist professionalism to describe a kind of professionalism aimed at helping teachers reshape and reclaim their professionalism from those who would want to define it in terms of neo-liberal, managerial practices (Locke, 2001). Sachs viewed activist professionalism as characterised by:

 First published in 1946 by the University of Chicago Press

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Active trust: involving the collaborative negotiation of shared sets of values, principles and strategies among a number of interested groups in “new kinds of social and professional relationships”. Generative politics: where individuals and groups “make things happen rather than have things happen to them in the context of overall social concerns and goals”. (1998, p. 7)

The kind of activism I am advocating here involves both of these. However, I would argue for a further requirement, that is, the self-reflexivity I alluded to in Chap. 8. A self-reflexive activist is one who is aware of their positionality – that any position one adopts on an issue originates in discourses that are cultural products of time and place. They are not absolute. We subscribe to them pragmatically, in the sense that we believe in the overall benevolence of their effects. The preceding chapters might be thought of as conversation starters related to the concept of “place” in all its manifold meanings at personal, cultural, ideological and theoretical levels. The remainder of this chapter reflects on ways these meanings might be harnessed politically in the contemporary context of what some commentators term the Anthropocene. Generally it adopts a focus on place as it relates to geopolitics, which Dodds (2019) views as having three aspects: 1. An interest in “questions of influence and power over space and territory”. 2. The use of “geographical frames to make sense of world affairs” (including such constructs as sphere of influence, bloc, backyard and neighbourhood). 3. A “future-oriented” focus on determining “the likely behaviour of states because their interests are fundamentally unchanging” (p. 3). Drawing on geopolitical theory, but with a major focus on place as a geographical entity, I will reflect on a range of contemporary global issues with a view to identifying avenues for activism – strategies for positive change. My focus in this book has been the complex interrelationship between sense of place and the climate crisis. As this chapter argues, addressing the latter cannot be separated from engaging with issues such as soil erosion, land use, pollution and the displacement of human populations – all of which are place-based phenomena.

9.2 The Anthropocene: Narratives and Pathways Brondizio et al. (2016)6appeared in the open-access journal, Global Environmental Change, which published its first issue in 1990. The scholars who contributed to this article were based in United States, Norway, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Portugal and Taiwan. The line-up aptly reflects the title of the article: “Re-conceptualising the Anthropocene: A Call for Collaboration”.  Brondizio, E., O’Brien, K., Bai, X., Biermann, F., Steffen, W., Berkhout, F., Cudennec, C., Lemos, M.  C., Wolfe. A., Palma-Oliveira, J., Chen, C-T.  A. (2016). Re-conceptualising the Anthropocene: A call for collaboration. Global Environmental Change, 39, 318–327 6

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The Anthropocene was mentioned in relation to Matthewman’s (2020) work in the last chapter. There is a reason why grammarians refer to “the” as a definite article. It serves to define an entity as a given – something we can all agree on. The Ice Age. The Middle Ages. In the scale of things, the Anthropocene is a Jenny-come-­ lately. In a bibliometric analysis of the term between 2000 (when it first appeared) and 2015 inclusively, Brondizio et al. drew attention to its rapidly increased use, the range of disciplinary communities adopting it (including the humanities and social sciences) and the multiplicity of its meanings. Their contention is that framing the Anthropocene in an “open and flexible” way enables it to serve a “bridging concept” between diverse domains of knowledge (2016, p. 321). This book has drawn attention to the perils and pitfalls of naming on a number of occasions (e.g. the beginning of Chap. 5). Conceptual nomenclature is always tricky, since concepts are like empty vessels awaiting a school of thought to provide content. The morpheme anthropo “means” human. Brondizio et al. are unequivocal in contending that: “The Anthropocene’s defining feature is the insight that human societies have and are more than ever contributing to regional and global environmental changes, and now have consciousness and agency to potentially reflect on and solve some of the problems that it creates” (p. 322). As far as this book is concerned, this insight is a given. But how and to what extent is humankind implicated in this supposed new age? That is just one point where the debates start. “At its core”, according to Brondizio et  al. (2016), “the concept of the Anthropocene encapsulates the unprecedented planetary-scale changes resulting from societal transformations, at least since the European industrial revolution and particularly over the past 65 years of world development”. For these authors, “the social drivers of global change [include] changes in technology, resource consumption, population and settlement patterns, mobility, cultures and ideas, communication, and trade, as well as civil and military conflicts” (p. 319). On the downside, they argue, the concept has highlighted epistemological divides between and among various disciplinary communities – hence the risk of research agendas fragmenting and disciplinary boundaries hardening. On the upside is the opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration afforded the concept of an earth system – “a single complex system at the planetary level with its own emergent properties, states and modes of functioning”. Conceptualised thus, the Anthropocene refers to a “state change in the Earth system…viewed of [sic] an interdependent social-ecological system” (p. 319) [their italics]. For the natural sciences, conceiving of the Anthropocene as a state-change calls for “the full range of relevant disciplines to understand how such a system functions and how it is changing”. Moreover, because the concept of the earth system is inclusive of the human societies embedded in it, Anthropocene thinking “requires the full inclusion of the analysis of the economic, demographic, ecological, political, symbolic, and cultural aspects of globally interconnected societies just as much as it needs to draw on oceanography, the atmospheric sciences, earth sciences, glaciology and the palaeo-environmental sciences” (all quotations, 2016, p. 319). The number of distinct narratives aimed at explaining the origins and causes of the Anthropocene is just one challenge to our ability to understand and respond

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ethically and effectively to the climate crisis. In their review of the literature, Brondizio et al. identity four: 1. “A naturalist narrative that emphasises the what, how, and when humans have altered the Earth system with particular attention to the potential of interdisciplinary integration to provide scientific and technological knowledge to society and policy makers regarding adaptation to and mitigation of the impacts of global change; 2. “A post-nature narrative that deploys the term Anthropocene as a symbol of post-modernity, where the dichotomy between culture and nature is dissolved and where the Anthropocene concept is seen as a useful alternative; 3. “An eco-catastrophist narrative that tends to focus on vulnerabilities of society and the dangers of unknown social and environmental tipping-points, highlighting the historical studies of civilisational collapses7; 4. An eco-Marxist narrative that focuses on the contradictions of capitalism in promoting growth and inequality and technological advances, while at the same time causing environmental disasters.” (2016, p. 321). The authors position themselves as occupying a “middle ground”, acknowledging potential barriers to collaboration but also identifying potentially productive tensions. For example, a critique of the naturalist narrative draws attention to social aspects of climate change, including “processes triggered by European colonial expansion and industrial revolutions” and the way “capitalist expansion continues to shape national structural adjustments policies, to promote resource extraction schemes with unequal and disastrous consequences” (p. 322). They draw attention to the desirability of addressing such issues from the bottom up, starting with the local and progressing to analysis on a global scale – an approach encouraged by the argument of this book. In this respect they agree with Head’s (2016) contention that: “At a time when top-down intergovernmental action seems not to be up to the task, survival may depend on more localised vernacular understandings and practices” (p. 13). They summarise their overarching position as follows: The nature of these analytical problems suggests that greater knowledge integration is a necessity rather than a choice. In other words, to advance new ways of analysing complexity in social-ecological systems we need to go beyond the recognition that actors, processes and structures are connected and systems are multi-scale, and to recognise that global change research frameworks and narratives involve diverse perceptions of, and assumptions about, human-environment relationships and social relationships. This invites a view of global change complexity as a feature of interdependent biophysical and social systems, including networks of various natures among individuals, groups, and entities with history, expectations, limitations, agency, reflexivity and innovations affecting interactions. (2016, p. 323).

 One might include Head (2016) in this category. In her introduction she writes that: “my contention is that we need to systematically consider the concept of catastrophe, and the way in which our socioeconomic systems could potentially unravel” (p.  4) while avoiding “an unjustified bias towards positive scenarios” (p. 6). 7

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Consistent with the position I have adopted in this book, they draw attention to the way indigenous peoples and local communities currently manage “a significant portion of biodiversity-, water-, and carbon-rich areas considered key to climate change mitigation”. Despite the fact that these peoples “are at the forefront of confronting accelerated social-ecological changes and increasing demands for resources….Their voices, predicaments, and the lessons they have to offer on living with and managing our common pool resources are yet to be seriously considered by the global change and other research communities” (2016, p. 323). The authors touch on a range of topics I will be considering in some detail below, including land use and environmental degradation via the addition of new elements (e.g. chemicals, plastics and invasive species). A key topic for them is the urbanisation/resource nexus, where the needs of cities for expanded infrastructure, water, mineral resources and land (and so on) have become a major driver of climate change. My own country, Aotearoa/New Zealand, is a stunningly sad example of this. While the country accounts for just 0.2% of the Earth’s total land area, it currently accounts for 1.7% of global sediment loss. A 2018 report from the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ entitled Our Land noted that 192 m tonnes of its soil were lost every year, nearly half from erosion. The Gisborne area was one of the hardest hit by Cyclone Gabrielle (see above). Our Land noted that in comparison with the national mean rate of soil erosion of 720 tonnes per square kilometre per year, Gisborne’s annual rate was 4844 tonnes per square km, almost 7 times the average. The amount of erosion, in part attributable to large-scale exotic forestry on steep slopes and the practice of clear-felling and leaving behind unwanted timber (branches, etc.) known as “slash”, made the area extremely vulnerable to extreme weather. Other statistics were similarly disturbing. 44% of sites tested across 11 regions were sub-standard in terms of macroporosity, thus making the soil less productive and more likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions. Between 1996 and 2012, the total size of towns and cities increased by 10%, a third of this expansion consuming some of the country’s most productive land. (35% of such land in the Auckland environs became lifestyle blocks.)8 In their concluding remarks, Brondizio et al. recommend the Future Earth programme as an example of international collaboration. Future Earth’s statement of purpose focuses on establishing a global network of researchers and scholars across a range of disciplines and supporting: international collaboration between these researchers and stakeholders to identify and generate the integrated knowledge needed for successful transformations towards societies that provide good and fair lives for all within a stable and resilient Earth system... [using] a rigorous transdisciplinary research and systems thinking approach throughout its work in

 For more on this report, see Morton, J. (April 19, 2018). Major report: What we’ve done to NZ’s landscape. New Zealand Herald, retrieved from https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/major-report-­ what-weve-done-to-nzs-landscape/V5LSLKS2KVINJFL76IJEAQHY2I and Ministry for the Environment & Stats NZ (2018). New Zealand’s Environmental Reporting Series: Our land 2018. Retrieved from www.mfe.govt.nz and www.stats.govt.nz 8

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which basic and applied research are combined to generate actionable, solution-oriented knowledge to inform and guide decisions by policy makers and practitioners at all levels of governance.9

Its journal has the titleAnthropocene.

9.3 The Geopolitics of Place My tiny sampling of the academic literature on the Anthropocene in the last section found no reference to “place” as a concept. The nearest we got was a focus on the local as a potential starting point for redeeming the global. As a slogan, “The personal is political” dates back to the 1960s.10 The political implications for one’s personal sense of place are a pivotal and recurrent theme in this book. As an academic field, geopolitics offers a wide (typically global) view of the context within which political action, collective and personal, occurs. In his historical overview of the field, Kearns (2011) contended that, “geopolitics developed as the geographical study of the strategic relations between nation-states” and had Darwinian roots in the idea of the survival of the fittest – but acted out at the level of the state (p. 610). The 1740 poem by James Thomson (set to music in the same year by Thomas Arne) has the following, well-known (and, for some, stirring) chorus: Rule Britannia, Britannia, rule the waves Britons never, never, shall be slaves. Rule Britannia, Britannia, rule the waves Britons never, never, shall be slaves.

There are a number of figures of speech here. “Britannia” is a metonymy, i.e. the name of a female personification of Britain stands for the English political establishment. The word “waves” is a synecdoche: a part “waves” is used to represent the world’s oceans, a major geographical feature of this planet. In relation to Kearns’ definition, the only way the English can continue to protect their status as a free people is to enforce dominance over this expanse of water. The jingoism operating here illustrates two themes Kearns (2011) associates with the “geopolitical imaginary”: 1. “a view of the world as containing essentially hostile elements” (p. 617) and 2. “a view of the exceptionalism of the home country. In a world of violence and shrill contest, it is best that one’s own country prevail not only out of self-interest but because this is best for the world due to the global values that one’s own country expresses” (p. 618). Kearns’ central argument is that geopolitics developed as a “study of statecraft in the context of imperialism” and an academic justification of it (pp. 611–2). Dodds  See https://futureearth.org/about/our-work/  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_personal_is_political#:~:text=The%20personal%20is% 20political%2C%20also,nuclear%20family%20and%20family%20values 9

10

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(2019) also connects geopolitics with colonisation, making the point that European imperialism was decisive in its impact on global politics and ecology and can be credited with ushering in the beginning of the Anthropocene. Such statements are of direct relevance to Chap. 5 of this book and underline how, at its uncritical worst, geopolitics served as a lackey to the imperial ambitions of colonising nations, initially European (e.g. Great Britain and its annexation of huge swathes of territory on the basis of an agenda of improvement) and later the United States with its self-­ serving belief in its Manifest Destiny to civilise the backward peoples of the lands it took by force – what Kearns terms “the liberal version of the argument for imperialism” (p. 618). The MAGA slogan (Make America Great Again) trumpeted by a recent American president and his supporters and Make Britain Great Again (a slogan for Brexiters) are both nostalgic evocations of these imperial ambitions, with no heed of the untold millions who suffered grievously as a result of them.11 For Kearns (2011) and others (see Dodds, 2019, below), the analytical practice of critical geopolitics serves to denaturalise the discourses underpinning both traditional colonising and neo-colonising ideologies and practices. For Kearns, the challenge is to move beyond critique to “the moment of utopia and the elaboration of the norms that would shape a fairer world” (p. 619). I want to take a moment here to reflect in a summary way on the consequences of colonising ideology and practice on a person and/or group’s sense of place. With an ironic awareness of my metaphor here, I will do this as a set of bulleted statements: • Colonisation leads to the widespread dispossession of indigenous peoples of their lands. • The erosion of security of tenure produces a psychological trauma which meshes grief with nostalgic attachment to places – a kind of ontological exile. • The cultural and symbolic meanings of places become overlaid or replaced by their commodification as property. • Collective cultural investment in the meanings of places is replaced by the fragmentation of places into individual, privately owned plots of land. • Places as spiritually infused are replaced by places associated with their extractive value (mineral resources, sources of water and energy) and commodification as tourist destinations. Another approach to geopolitics is illustrated by Starr (2013) in his article: “On Geopolitics: Spaces and Places”. Though “place” is mentioned in the title, Starr’s focus is primarily on the need for time and space to be a focus when exploring the geographical context of international (power) relations. Consistent with my approach in this book, he argues for the need to “appreciate both a locational view and the perceptual/symbolic/constructed view of space and place…within an increasingly globalised, interdependent and transnational world system” (p. 433). For his conceptual framework, he draws on the work of American political scientists Harold and Margaret Sprout, who viewed the politics/geography nexus in  Gary Fields’ (2017) work, referenced in Chap. 4 of this book, would view the appropriation of Palestinian lands in similar, critical geopolitical terms. Critiques of Israeli actions in this regard are regularly dismissed as “anti-Semitic”. 11

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terms of their triad of “entity, its environment, and the entity–environment relationship”. An advantage of this framing is that it allows for differences in scale, since the entity can be “a single decision-maker, a small group of decision-makers, a foreign policy organisation, a government as a whole, or the state as an international actor” (2013, p. 434). As a framing device, the ecological triad calls for a focus on the policy−/choice-making processes engaged in by the political actor/entity and the resulting interaction between that actor (and the community it represents) and the environment, regardless of where it is located. The environment, in this view, is seen as offering both opportunities and constraints in terms of human activity (possibilities) and cues to human actors in respect of the pursuit of certain outcomes over others (probabilities). In this respect, it is consistent with bioregional discourse as discussed in Chap. 8. Starr (2013) goes on to note that “all international actors or entities may be located spatially  – in some geopolitical arrangement of typography [sic] and/or some distribution of people, behavior, and resources” (p. 435). It is the subjective aspect of location as a spatial concept to which he directs his attention; it is this aspect which has a bearing on sense of place, since it contributes to the imagery whereby one’s sense of place is constituted. Both place and space take on meaning “only as...perceived by individuals or groups of individuals” (p. 436) and are value-­ laden and identity-related. Relative spaces are types of space that change their meaning depending on the way in which distance and location are viewed in relation to each other. • Time-space relates to time taken to get from A to B and the factors that change this. • Cost-space relates to the cost of moving from one location to another. • Social-space has another relative dimension, which can reflect the number of social interactions a person might be likely to engage in, or “the different ethnic makeup of groups at specific locations or major class differences (which could be reflected not only in local prices but the types of stores in the different areas)” (p. 438). All of these dimensions, and the way these are affected by a range of technological and social changes, can contribute to one’s spatial awareness and influence one’s sense of place. As discussed in Chap. 8, Gruenewald’s (2003) theorisation of a place-conscious curriculum draws attention to the way spatialised cultural study, drawing on critical geography (and geopolitical theory), can provide a lens to grapple with issues of identity and difference (p. 631). Terms indicating spatial relationships that reflect power and struggle were introduced in the last chapter. Starr (2013) adds territory and border to this list; Dodds (2019) adds heartland, pivot and arc. (The word country has a specific significance for Aboriginal people, as per their ritual of “Welcome to Country”.) New Zealand’s recent experience of Cyclone Gabrielle was a critical event, which not only produced monumental changes in landscape and infrastructure (and therefore connectivity between communities) but also changes in the lexicon of place and space. Debates emerged around the relationship of location and

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habitability  – questions re how the relocation of inhabitants of “red-stickered” houses might be financed and who should be deemed responsible for permitting the erection of such houses in the first place. The unprecedented flooding of Auckland introduced its inhabitants to the concept of a “sponge city”.12 The widespread destruction in the Esk Valley in Hawke’s Bay was accompanied by references to flood-plains, stop-­banks and questions over its future viability as a location for farming and horticulture. Based on the above cluster of paragraphs, I will add to the set of bullet points above (as related to colonisation) but with a focus on relative spaces in the current environment: • The use of force in relation to invasion (border transgression) and the erection of exclusionary walls is a source of fear and insecurity and negatively affects the sense of place for many people. • The segregation and marginalisation of particular groups through the manipulation and construction of social-space has the potential to impact on one’s sense of place. • The construction (or branding) of locations (rather than neighbourhoods or communities) in terms of their resale value and social prestige (or the opposite) is likely to be a distraction from other bases for establishing and cherishing a connectedness to place. • Mobility, whether chosen or enforced, can pose challenges to the development of a sense of place, especially an enduring one.13 • Changes in the availability of spaces for human habitation, and in the ease of travel and connectivity between places, have the potential to impact on one’s sense of place. • Changes in a place produced by either extreme climatic events or social changes (e.g. large-scale job losses) will impact on one’s sense of place. Dodds (2019) also embraces critical geopolitics, with its focus on discourse and ideology. Like Starr (2013), he insists that “geopolitics is not the sole preserve of states and governments” (p. 5). In his expansive introduction to the field, he includes, for example, indigenous geopolitics, which refers to the way in which “indigenous groups imagine, mobilise, and interact with the wider world” in negotiating “land claim agreements and political settlements designed to recognise past injustices and future resource rights and cultural autonomy” (p. 10). Rather than speak to the interests of the powerful, he argues, geopoliticians need to pay attention to the “role of different human agents and non-human agents including animals, plants, weather, and ecologies” and such intimate sites as “the home and the everyday” (p. 11).  Seehttps://www.preventionweb.net/news/auckland-floods-even-stormwater-reform-wont-be-enoughwe-need-sponge-city-avoid-future 13  See Tall (2016), who reports that 20–30% of Americans move house annually and Americans typically move 14 times over a lifetime (p. 73). In 2018, it was estimated that there were over 1000 household shifts per day in New Zealand (see https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/march-­ moving-­m adness-looms-as-survey-tips-thousands-of-kiwis-are-preparing-to-shift-house/ CLT6BFKS5P7QKIGSJLCD2YP744/) 12

9.4 Landing

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9.4 Landing Arriving at the words “home” and “everyday” at the end of the last section gives me a sense of landing, having (so to speak) spent considerable time circumnavigating the globe in a hot-air, academic balloon with a group of scholarly companions recalibrating my perspective on the Earth I inhabit with other life forms and observing what’s continuing to happen to its geography – land, air and sea. Despair is skulking in the wings. As I write, the Eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut continues to be locked in a bloody, attritional stalemate evoking the Western Front of the First World War but with more lethal technology. Palestinian land in Israel continues to be subject to dispossession by incremental, occupational creep. In these locations (and others), beloved spaces (towns, cities, dwellings) are being razed and erased, to endure only in the memories of the surviving dispossessed. Meanwhile, the so-called developing countries, often locked into exploitative relationships with their former colonisers and global corporations (based elsewhere), struggle to improve the standard of living (however defined) for their people, so that eventually they might be in a position to opt for a lifestyle (rather than simply survive or subsist). If they eventually find themselves in a position to exercise the former option, they will find themselves facing my own challenge: the grief of knowing that I have to cut back on my consumption and change my ways. I’m thinking of the wise book by Lesley Head (2016), where she argues that hope needs to be decoupled from optimism. “Hope savours the life and world we have, not the world as we wish it to be” (p. 11). In this first month of Autumn, after a summer of wind and deluge, I look out of my office window across a sunlit lawn to persimmon, feijoa and pear trees with their ripening fruit, to the hen run and our faithful brown shavers, to the old, burgeoning oak tree readying to drop its crop of acorns. Beyond my sightline on the right, there is a forested corner, which contains two giant redwoods, two chestnuts and other exotic species. Right now, however, indigenous trees are regenerating: nikau, ponga (silver ferns), kōuka (cabbage trees), horoeka (lancewoods) and kōhūhū (Pittosporum tenuifolium). In the ancient language of trees, they seem to be saying: “We are still here. Make a place for us; otherwise we will make a space for ourselves”. There is a solace in that. The equations of climate change are as simple as cause and effect. The gas emissions for which we are responsible are currently producing a warming in the earth’s atmosphere. This warming is having a pronounced impact on weather and weather-­ induced events (storm, tide, fire and flood), which are becoming increasingly catastrophic. These events are producing geopolitical effects, such as alterations in the size, distribution and availability of habitable terrain, and the nexus between land and arability – and the resultant displacement of human and non-human populations (or their extinction). The term climate refugee has now entered the lexicon. According to UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency: An annual average of 21.5 million people have been forcibly displaced by weather-related events – such as floods, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures – since 2008. These numbers are expected to surge in coming decades with forecasts from international think-

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tank the IEP14 predicting that 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050 due to climate change and natural disasters. (McAllister, 2023, para 3).

Collectively, humankind has the science to work collaboratively to alter the causality by stopping doing things and doing things differently at all levels – household, region and state. Equations related to global pollution are just as simple (and overlap with those of climate change). The industrialisation of the landscape (often, in the name of improvement) for mineral extraction, the planting of monocultures, transport networks and the erection of gargantuan manufacturing estates is currently producing material and visual15 pollution. This pollution is having a pronounced impact on air quality, with flow-on effects for human (and animal) health through cardiorespiratory disease and the development of allergies. It is also producing an environmental crisis on the land and in the oceans, especially through the explosion of plastic and microplastic pollution and the damage this is causing to the Earth’s ecosystems. Again, we have the technologies to reshape the causality by designing and implementing alternative futures in respect of the ways we plan communities to house people, build transportation networks, foster clean and sustainable manufacturing practices (e.g. by eliminating planned obsolescence16), generate energy, produce food, rethink our nutritional needs, mandate recycling systems and reduce consumption and the unnecessary use of plastics.

9.5 Land Use Most of this twofold threat to our survival is being produced on land – that comparatively small proportion of our planet’s surface that is not covered by water. These activities are occurring on land because some political entity (to use Starr’s (2013) geopolitical term) has permitted an area of land to be utilised in a particular way, even when that land is situated in someone else’s region or country. Introducing their work on the drivers of wildlife distribution in New England, Pearman-Gillman et al. (2020) note that, as the main drivers of landscape change, humans are responsible for “Historical alterations in land use, primarily the conversion of undisturbed forest to other forms of land use like agriculture and urban development, [that] have resulted in the modification of landscapes at a global scale” (p. 2). These alterations continue to accelerate and expand globally. More than 30% of the world’s land area is already under some degree of development and over 70% of all forests are in close proximity (