Writing in Place: Part 1
‘… Best you don’t sound too local, too regional. … This was the quest, for the universal reached by the straightened road of uniformity, at the cost of a bulldozed landscape. Your story or poem could be set anywhere, because place was now beside the point. Like nature, it was a fabrication anyway, right?’
Tim Winton, 2024:2981
What happens when we experience place without any fabrication? This is a question that keeps hunting me down as I try to come to terms with living in Walyalup-Fremantle. It is a question that was given further light when I recently read more of Fremantle’s very own Tim Winton’s seemingly ‘friction free’ meanderings about being a provincial writer of geography and vernacular. It came to me as a Christmas present. His essay is forceful and compelling.
The above opening quote speaks of a time when geographical and human behavioural inquiry was un-relational; when modernist intellectual inquiry was too often pigeon-holed and constrained within speciality disciplines. Few intellectuals would understand each other from one discipline to the other. It was the likes of Amos Rapoport, Edward Relph, Ervin Zube, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, and others who as environmental-psychologists would go on and explore complex ideas around place attachment. Importantly, they would explore ‘place’ phenomena across and within the cracks of many disciplines. Their work would mature and probe further inquiries into peoples’ associations with place, and how time and space spent in place would reveal further knowledge of how people actually ‘fabricated’ their place bonding experiences - real or imaginary.
For me, this was a time when I was completing my postgraduate studies in landscape under the fierce tutelage of Professor George Seddon at the University of Melbourne. Seddon was quite a task master, and he expected his students to bring exhaustive scholarship to the knowing or making of the Australian landscape. Fortunately, he was quite a ‘mandrake’ in the way he knew that Australia still held many remote secrets about the nature of nature. One great outcome of those studies was the acute realisation that environmental design could both compete with and reinforce the character of a place to enable both meaning and preference for those that cared. A strong sense of stewardship and custodianship was omnipresent. Seddon was never a designer, per se, but he appreciated good design nonetheless. For him, this would be more architectural than landscape—more of the human-hand, as man-power over environment would suggest. Seddon would eventually return to his Fremantle and The University of Western Australia to both enjoy and endure his final days. Interestingly, Seddon would be writing in the English Department while I was across the road teaching in the Design Faculty. We would both attend meetings of professional landscape architecture, nonetheless. We would meet and often chuckle about are shared histories at his numerous book launch events. Strangely, later as his mind started to wander, he thought I was Craig Burton—a very close colleague and the inaugural father of landscape architecture education in Western Australia.
Both Seddon and I would explore the differences between place attachment by knowing the clear differences between emotional meaning-making of place, or whether a simple aesthetic of place was preferred either as beautiful or ugly. By way of extension, we both would learn the extreme limitations of studying and quantifying the rather superficial aesthetics of scenic beauty. This kind of beauty and its associated land management was in vogue at the time, and eventually I would learn that the former deeper relationships to place would encourage me to work in the fields of community development and multi-disciplinary land stewardship both here in Western Australia and elsewhere around the globe. I would also go on and study history, ugliness and melancholy as an attempted means of relearning the deeper shared qualities of landscape, and then Country. My scholarship was useful. As a designer I would always try to give form to its processes and likely outcomes.
But I digress, somewhat. For I’d like to explore my original question of what happens when we come to terms with a human condition where and when the human fabrication of place doesn’t exist. Where place exists in its own right, and when writers try to acknowledge and express and make further meaning of these endemic inherent qualities of place. Fremantle, for example, can be easily defined by its Aeolian identity - where sun, wind, water, soil and limestone dictate the terms for its living. Where shade, shadows and darkness in these difficult conditions are equally as important. Where subtle and brutal seasons play out their vital roles. Where vegetation and rainfall is minimal.Where the liminal and littoral experiences between sea and land are without fabrication. Fremantle has had a mixed set of relationships with these Aeolian driven places. It was their perceived inherent qualities by subsequent-settlers that eventually made many of them wastelands and dumping grounds for human excess. Things haven’t changed that much, for many, in a set of environments called by Captain James Fremantle as ‘A Place of Consequence’.
But here lies the rub.
The difficulty lies in reducing consequential Nature, Environment and Place (and hopefully Country) to a human construct. As fabricated by the ‘top-of-the-pile’ humans. If we were to sense these matters through the lens of other animals and the sensory techniques of little critters, and big creatures, and even shared Country itself, then we have a completely different ballgame. We start to imagine and realise an independent resilient voice of ecosystems, of course. Here we have what I like to call ‘habitat-reckoning’ before any actual fabrication takes place at all. So if we were to understand Fremantle ‘place’ then what of its vernacular and evolving habitat? Some scholars use this ecological tract of thinking to ask about the ‘liveability’ of place and its deserving resuscitation or restoration. For now we can focus on its inherent liveability should it matter for non-humans. So when we think about the Derbarl Yerrigan and its Swan River manifestations can we be alone for just a while to possibly feel like a river? Or like a (lost) estuary? What happens to our ‘place’ when we seek this sanctuary of thought? Where we get to meet ourselves - in moments of solitude (or even at a raucous party). A time of reckoning with oneself. A reckoning of one’s place. Well before any human fabrication takes place, as such. Thinking about ‘place’ as hopeful ‘sanctuary’ would seem worthy in these times of planetary destruction, escape or resurrection. It may well provide a whole new level of pragmatic creativity to how we manifest liveability should healthy habitat seriously matter. Where humans, dare I say, become secondary in the grand experiment. Only primary perhaps in generative ways of being extra creative for habitats’ sake. (I close my eyes to imagine the current transformative efforts that are happening to Naarm’s Birrarung (Yarra River) in Melbourne. Where the hopeful ability for humans to swim in its whole system will guide its ecological and cultural restoration. Where healthy swimming becomes a likely riparian catalyst for healthy ecological recovery.) Above all, this type of place scholarship allows us as a community to reflect on our impacts - or what Winton (2024:301) refers to as our ‘patterns of invasion’ where the arts have somehow ignored the realities of our honest predicaments.
Conversely, a placed-based and artful scholarship that now focuses on non-human presence is within the hopes of the Loving Place project. It is more than timely that Walyalup-Fremantle invites these project gifts to the survival table. Seddon would approve I think, where his own revitalised mapping of Fremantle would increase our sense of knowing and being, navigating up and down our coastline, out into our relational sea, across those vulnerable islands and back into the river’s mouth to travel upstream into its own fragile catchment.
Richard Coldicutt’s gifted story, by way of example, avoids the gaze of place somehow. His short story does the picturing. Richard, as many would know, is very ‘Aeolian’ by nature. A coastal freak that intuitively reads and speaks a language that goes back to bedrock. To the origins of where his generous care and love of place originates. Consequently he is very original. And he never takes his Aeolian character and sensibility for granted. He exercises its visceral qualities daily. From Fremantle’s groin to groin. Not unlike Greg Leaver’s navigational skills by swimming once forgotten Leighton Beach. Time and time again. Ripple by ripple. Where moments are reversed, and humans become backdrops to this liveable habitat, to liveable place. Both Richard and Greg are almost animal-like in the ways they relate to place.
Tom Muller’s gift of Bathers Beach alludes to this. As a newcomer and fellow artist he tries very hard to keep the gates open—for other possibilities of knowing and making loving place— with or without humans. Tony Blackwell’s image of the daisy weed flourishing in the cracks of human matter is not lost on many. It speaks of North Fremantle’s relentless survival tactics caught within the machinery, stench and love of its busy port. The shimmering daisy gives up its own energy to help provide our much needed oxygen. Puff by puff. Next to his daisy lies the structural reveal of a huge old jarrah-framed shed. More like a pavilion. True to itself, it now sits waiting, grounded like a huge carapace from the sea expecting to play another vital role in the future public restoration of the beach and its dunes.
And somehow North Fremantle as a consequential place is still with us. It may just have something to do with that never ending non-human stare and stewardship of Dwert—the Nyungar red dingo, as anonymous Bruce has gifted. Just maybe. Here, Joanne Campbell’s (RIP) old Fremantle shoreline, signified and paved in a row of articulated red brick across the city, suggests a place that is strong by an itinerary of key sites that are relational to each other. Where it’s earnest whole is greater than its individual parts. Where loving place becomes an interconnected system of site based organs and ecologies, peripatetically. Joan’s artery of an old shoreline lives on in the heathy and vital memory of Walyalup-Fremantle. I often imagine just how life-giving those old shorelines may have been. Where shell and fish bones now sit beneath historic buildings. And we ask—‘What went on here?’
Gloria’s Turnip’s own travelling show of all things itinerant, either as self or other, is just another way of loving-place in Walyalup-Fremantle. Again, I like how Gloria tries to ‘join-the-dots’ in the everyday of experiencing a healthy Walyalup-Fremantle. She writes and tells a story like a playwright—or like the urban flâneur. Not dissimilar to the place-biography writings of Sydney’s Louis Nowra.
Sajith Jayaweera’s gifted image of a certain Fremantle railway crossing is full of whimsy where the theatre of place is expressed in a play-back manner, where someone has taken a lot of time and trouble (maybe) to have a forth-right conversation with place and to kindly direct its inhabitants to ‘bliss, happiness and ice cream’! Written evidence of this care-full conversation with place is both intriguing, heartfelt, playful and extremely hopeful. Where place becomes anonymously literate, pluralistic and alive in its own right, simply by describing and experiencing it publicly—generously.
Kate Hulett’s striking image of a cruise ship at ‘The Port’ continues the peripatetic themes of the floating traveller with a vessel full of temporary dreamers seemingly locked in place. Although their generous signatures to land-based onlookers, including Kate, suggest an itinerary only just started. The ship and its welcoming Walyalup-Fremantle becomes an eidetic landscape to other nautical gateways; other possibilities. Where Australia’s interior can be experienced from the top deck for the very first time. If you squint at this gifted image it too looks like a two-dimensional theatre set, slightly animated in the play called Walyalup-Fremantle.
Robert Drewe’s story-gift is a classic Fremantle tale, where place remembers its occupied performances and gives a strong sense of belonging by knowing and telling felt-history. It makes you want to put your feet up to imagine a set of places so graphic, revealing, risky and dangerous. It takes you down alleyways that still exist. Drewe avoids the antiseptic that many writers or novelists have of real experiential place. Not unlike reading one of his great books. He speaks up about those ‘patterns of invasion’ that Winton writes about. He also makes more memory.
Yet if I was to be self critical of this Loving Place project (in such a short space of time) I would say whole heartedly that a more meaningful strategy may have been given to non-humans. Maybe that will come, with time. Where humans would possibly digress eidetically to choose a gift on behalf of non-humans. And of course I wonder what they could be? For the sake of a past-present-future Walyalup-Fremantle.
So when I see the partial relocation of the Fremantle Port, for example, I sense a responsibility and obligation for coastal restoration. I sense Walyalup-Fremantle as a bio-region. Or just free, restored open-space. I sense a wild liveable habitat for non-humans. Or maybe a generous balance between the two. I go back to the productive littoral zone between land and sea, where rising water levels symbiotically adapt within new ecologies. I see a healthy coastal biosphere. Where places can be edited and restored and where dreams of urban living are relocated to where they perform and deserve better. I don’t see real estate habitat for 65,000 extra people away from Fremantle’s city centre. I see urban revitalisation and population growth right within its colonial core. Right next to its wailing empty shops, deep physical heritage and growing public transport system. I see respect and transformation of its port’s shorelines into a possible coastal park and conservation reserve system. I see clever, creative engineering efforts of ingenious ecological recovery—real or artificial. More oxygen, habitat and less heat. Where humans have a chance to find and take care of a sanctuary for thinking and feeling about non-humans. Where humans have a chance to be better humans and not just earnest (un)real-estate agents. Where the ecological lungs of Walyalup-Fremantle are revitalised and even made anew.
Importantly, this Loving Place project has its own origins in how I wonder about the true deep voice of Walyalup-Fremantle. I sense strongly that it knows we can no longer escape and it desperately invites us all to stay on and fight—to avoid the enemies as our Tim Winton suggests. Avoid their scorches of ill-conceived capitalism. And find stronger ways to be artful, creative, ingenious and healthy. And practical like the bricoleur.
Maybe this long-term project will help start a series of old and new fires in the bellies of Walyalup-Fremantle to continue the good fight by loving place ecologically. A new habitat of reckoning—for the sake of the planet and our home Walyalup-Fremantle.
Yet in the beginning, which was many, many years ago, I fully expected that Walyalup-Fremantle was always destined to be a messy mix of nature and culture, with a strong sense of laziness, wild activism, artful care and due respect that feeds the spirit of Walyalup-Fremantle daily. For the study of ‘place’ allows us to tackle change on all fronts. That is its uniqueness. From ecosystems damage or restoration, to local or world heritage conservation, to the consumerist beauty, awe and wonder of all things material or sublime—special Walyalup-Fremantle has it all.
I am also more than concerned that this Loving-Place project may feed the dynamic well-being of Walyalup-Fremantle in good and bad ways. For I am aware of the likes of consumerist ‘place-porn’. But importantly for me, I will always hang onto and encourage the confidence in the Walyalup-Fremantle community to self-manage these place-based contradictions and conundrums. There is no other choice, really. Yet our own marginalisation seems like a new model to public consultation.
Above all, the images and short stories of this project have their own certain power. Collectively their archive, their own sanctuary will gain more power over time. For this is the agency of community photography, writing and story-telling. They are all intimate subjects of our only home called Walyalup-Fremantle. When we gaze we see. We don’t often look for the lost, the forgotten or the disappeared; for that is gone. A phenomenon often referred to as ‘survivorship bias’ where we notice things and events that are still in place, rather than all those things gone2. Yet our new-memory making of the vanished is still important to place.
My love and trust with this project is that this human and non-human story-sanctuary will expand and mature in its own living cultural geography, and that we as an energetic and enigmatic Walyalup-Fremantle community—with all its visitors—can actively decide on its hopeful future—all the time.
Finally, I’ll leave you with a kind reminder from musician, photographer and image-maker Patti Smith, and the slightly reconfigured words of Roy Batty, a character portrayed by Rutger Hauer in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner—for Walyalup-Fremantle’s Loving Place project—‘we’re all about to see things that most of us would not believe.’
So as we fight for the possible development scenarios of expanding Walyalup-Fremantle with the possibilities of 65,000 extra residents I long for the truthful living in a coastal reserve. A prioritised biosphere where the wildness of our aeolian character is maintained and where revitalised living within a coastal reserve system is just plain common sense. Where our collective refuge of place is both enhanced and maintained. Not lost. Where our habitat for living is inspired by a fine balance of restored nature and culture.
‘To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.’
George MacDonald