visit to Gooram January 28.

It was hot – 34 – and all that entails. Drove though a still dehydrated landscape, with everything washed out in the harsh glare of the sun. Tasting of dust on the tongue and in the nostrils, with the sounds of a massed choir of high pitched insects assaulting our ears we walked carefully down the eroded rocky path to the water’s edge, and we were suddenly in another world all together, where the insects were drowned out by the music of cool water rippling and spilling over rocks, and our surroundings sparkled in a light that here was a gentle green.

When I had settled on to a rocky ledge from where I could dangle my feet in tea coloured water, I looked around to see that I was surrounded by a profusion of plant life – delicate translucent flowering plants clinging to rocky niches, sedges growing along the banks dipping into the water and ancient trees that bore the scars of storms and fires pushed the hot sky far away and well out of reach. I was in a walled garden, a Paradise, not of the original Persian kind where the walled garden was man made, but a natural Paradise where my companions, apart from my husband were ants, geckoes and birds. It was time to get out the sketchbook and the wine. I spent an hour or so doing quick pencil sketches in my journal, trying to get quick impressions of the volume of the rocks, and the way they walled us in.

But another far more interesting change was happening. I began to realise that I was no longer thinking of this place as a landscape, because I felt at that moment that I was part of it in some way. The concept landscape implies that a place is being viewed from a distance, and that a comparison has been made between one place and another. As the writer Stephen Muecke [1992: 166 ] put it, ‘Perceptions of landscape depend on difference, therefore and on displacement.’

A tourist or a visitor might see a landscape in a place we know well, or live in but we don’t think of the place we live in or know well as a landscape. We are more likely to call it country.


This day at Gooram, I was totally immersed in the present, what George Seddon was probably referring to in his book Land prints when he talked of the spirit of place or genius loci. He explained that genius loci consists of geology, landform, soil, hydrology, vegetation, cultural landscape and context. In other words, it takes account of everything that makes a place what it is.

All terms reserve the right to shift and change, and as I have already noted landscape is an elusive term and so is country. I think about the meanings of these words often and I’m always ready to read yet another interpretation. The idea of genius loci was at the back of my mind when I wrote this poem:

At Gooram Falls water collects
in the cool curves and hollows
of rocks to contemplate
an ever-changing future


then it disperses and shatters
into crystals of pure light
and continues on its journey
not knowing how or when  it will return.

indelible texts cast in stone long ago
have been carried away in the hearts
and minds of its people

along the bank
wisps of thought caught in other weathers
stay behind

and there is wisdom here,
a gathering of profound silence
as deep as time

You may not see any of this
so listen  and remember
This is the story

This is Taungurong country
good huntin, good fun for kids
swimming leaping and laughing

good country, a good living
good memories good times
real good mostly . . .

Just before I packed up to leave I saw a hawk with its feet dropped down coming into land. The reality is whether we think of any place, particularly a wild place as landscape or country, our place in it will always be to some extent not anything other than our construct. As Abdelrahman Munif  (Exile and the Writer, Critical Fictions p 110) said,  Country is not an objective fact, but an ephemeral idea – an ever shifting memory of the past and dream of the future.