After all the expected summer interruptions I am well and truly ready to return to the retreat and get back to writing. Even putting it aside for a couple of weeks means that I am beginning to feel out of practice.  

As artist Linda Robertson said in a talk she gave at Highlands Hall last year, a blank page can be intimidating. Linda starts by covering her blank page with pastel and then waits for the figures to emerge, and watching her demonstrate this made it looks easy. Easier than it is of course for an amateur, but it is still a great way to get started.

When it comes to writing, I cover my blank page with notes and then look for the trends and connections between the fragments of thought and words. I also like to use quotes from other writers and in effect set up a dialogue within which I can test and expand my ideas.

Over the years I have built up a large collection of quotes on landscape, a term I am always ready to explore. I read Nicolas Rothwell’s article ‘Mapping our Imagination’, in the Weekend Australian January 5-6, as I read all of his writings, with great interest. Here Rothwell is examining his own and others’ relationship with Australia’s outback, where the landscape is at all times such a dominant force. He says:

‘There is a landscape behind the landscape that we are always reaching for and seeking with our eyes and hearts. It is the landscape that is always there and always receding, and that seems especially well evoked by the Aboriginal conceptual frame of the Tjukurrpa, which is the flash of the present moment and the echo, far off from primary long vanished events.’

Gooram Gooram Gong as landscape offers us, just as the outback offers Rothwell, over whelming moments where questions of self dissolve. One becomes, he writes ‘a creature of a new rhythm’ and instead of him finding the words he wants to capture his thoughts, the desert and the inland are writing him.

To put this into our immediate context, just as we try to record some fragment of the essence of the Gooram site, it makes its mark on us. This is what I was trying to get at in the poem, Visit  - early winter 2006:

Clouds caught in our hair
We listened to the water laughing
at our shimmering reflections

When we climbed up from the riverbed
into the taste of rain
birdsong followed our footprints

We had been to another place
washed our minds clean.

Rothwell’s point is powerful because he is writing about a place he knows well. He has spent many years in various parts of northern Australia and just before writing this piece, with a group of researchers he had  walked across Poeppel corner, a remote part of the Simpson Desert. The symbiosis he speaks of and which takes him well beyond words is what we seek in our relationship with Gooram Gooram Gong. Just as I keep searching for words, Susan Fell Mclean goes back season after season and year after year, always finding new ways to imprint nature’s calligraphy on to her cloth, and Peter Ward goes back as often as he can to record the ever-changing moods and patterns of light and shade.

In the many definitions and explorations of ‘landscape’ that I have read, there do seem to be some emerging themes. In particular, ‘landscape’ unlike ‘country’ is based on our experience and expectations as much as what is physically there. In his wonderful book Landscape and Memory, in Simon Schama provides a good starting point when he writes:

‘Landscape is the work of the mind, built from strata of memory as much as from layers of rock. It relates to a geographical entity but its nature and meaning continually shift. ‘

Schama then writes over five hundred pages examining the origin of the term, and the way various elements of landscape have been incorporated into European culture.

Another one I return to again and again comes from poet Joy Harjo, and her statement is based on her experience of the interconnections Native American people have forged with their land.

‘All landscapes have a history. There are distinct voices, languages that belong to particular areas. There are voices inside rocks, shallow washes, shifting skies. And there is motion, subtle, unseen, like breathing. A motion, a sound, that if you allow your own inner workings to stop long enough moves into the place inside you that mirrors a similar landscape; you too can see it, feel it, hear it, know it.

Susan Peter and I have spent many hours talking about the preconceptions we bring individually and collectively to Gooram Gooram Gong. We each bring part of our own past and personal experience, or our histories to the way we see the place and we also bring many questions.

Gooram Gooram Gong is part of Taungurong country so we need to spend some more time with Taungurong people to hear about its history and continuing significance for their point of view.

For me, respecting the Taungurong view of their country raises the unsettling fact of my own pastoral past and the pervasive colonial mythology and language that originally helped to shape my interest in the land. The only way for me to move away from any contradiction this could lead to is to appreciate the deep history of the Taungurong people. This is crucial to my connection with a place that enriches my soul. Simply, not to respect Gooram Gooram Gong’s place in the history of the Taungurong people would diminish me.

As for finding the perfect definition, when I started looking, I thought it would be possible to find it. I now think that to define landscape would be to diminish it and to dismiss the ever-changing complexity that lies at the heart of any place any of us get to know well.