What a Difference Place Makes

Introduction

Place is a recurrent theme in the social sciences and an emerging theme within qualitative inquiry. However, as Anderson, Adey, and Bevan (2010) observe, despite the growing prominence of place in the social sciences the “difference that place makes to methodology has not been fully integrated into traditional research practice” (p. 592). They identify a need to systematically and reflexively account for place and places in research, alongside the social position of the researcher and methods, and call for methodologies to be operationalized “as if place mattered” (Anderson et al., 2010, p. 600).

Yet, what is place? What is it that matters? As place is not only a recurrent but a contested theme in the social sciences, answers to these questions are important because how one understands place has significant bearing on how one envisages the “difference that place makes to methodology.” For Anderson et al. (2010), place is more than the social and thus involves more than accounting for researcher positioning and the power relations that constrain and enable interviewer/interviewee engagements. Place also involves the geographical—the complex and dynamic interactions of the physical, the social, and the cultural. Thus, we may not only look for research interviewees from particular social positions, based for example on demographics, we may also consider where potential interviewees live and how they live in different places. This may add a geographic component to our selection of participants or perhaps influence where we may wish to conduct an interview. Anderson et al. conclude that “research can map out a terrain where place can be acknowledged and harnessed within the methodological action to contextualise, ground and inscribe the knowledge that is produced with a geographical and social signature” (p. 599). Thus, knowledge embodies the social and cultural positioning of the researcher and the research participants, and also embodies the geographical positioning of the research. Research is both place-bound and also place-making as the very act of research is both constituted in places and in the process, constitutes places.

While Anderson et al. (2010) emphasize the physical, social, and cultural constitutions of place, others—particularly those considering people’s experience in relation to specific places—have identified some more intangible constituting elements. These include memory, imaginings, emotions, and dreams. For example, Booth (2008) describes,

As we experience a place we experience an intertwining of ourselves with that place; an intertwining of memories, both personal and collective, with the physicality of place. This interlacing of place and memory can be said to infuse memory with physicality, and place with mentality. (p. 299)

She explores four types of interrelated memory: personal memories, collective memories, memories embedded within myth, and evolved memories (Booth, 2008, 2011). This mix, she argues, adds temporal (including prehuman) and nonhuman agentic dimensions to experiences of place: “The physicality of place not only has mnemonic powers, and is not only open to manipulation in the pursuit of remembrances, but is also both an embodiment of memory and embodiment within memory” (Booth, 2008, p. 303).

Here, place is far more complex than the physical, the social, and the cultural. It is also ethereal, effuse, and elusive, and perhaps at times, chaotic and confusing. How such understandings of place may be explicitly embodied within research and what difference such a take on place would make to methodology is my focus in this paper. I draw upon a research project emanating from my sense of place in my home suburb of Risdon Vale. In this project, I began to explore ways of writing personal experiential accounts of living in place.

Risdon Vale is neither a particularly special nor outstanding kind of place, but a former public housing suburb located on the outskirts of Hobart, the capital of Australia’s island state of Tasmania. There are a number of qualities however that make this place unique, including its proximity to Risdon Cove—the site of first British occupation of the island in 1803 and the site of the first massacre of Aboriginal Tasmanians by the British in 1804 (Boyce, 2008); the location of the Risdon Prison on its western boundary; and the presence of a threatened tree species, Eucalyptus risdonii (Risdon Peppermint) that retains a soft-powdery blue-green juvenile foliage into adulthood, thrives on wildfire for its propagation and is used globally in floral arrangements (Threatened Species Unit, 2003).

The suburb is not big, comprising 900 or so houses most of which were built in a similar style in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is ringed by bush and semirural land. Much of this bushland is a formally declared nature reserve, but the low socioeconomic status of many of the suburb’s residents means that locals interact with this bush in a distinctly nonconservation kind of way. This land is used as a source of free or salable firewood, as somewhere out-of-mind and out-of-sight for stripping down and disposing of stolen vehicles, as the ground for the creation of illegal trail-bike circuits, and as a refuge for teenage parties and lone wanderers. It is also somewhere that I walk a lot, encountering the remnants of these activities and occasionally the people themselves.

During the time that I undertook this research, I was home a lot more than I was used to and immersed in the immediacy of domestic particularities having recently given birth to my son. Given this time and space, I found myself caught up in and enraptured by seemingly mundane things. Previously taken-for-granted entities asserted themselves, demanding emotional engagement, while other entities receded. A substantial shift in identity embodied a substantial shift in the nature of my relationships with things, beings, and happenings within my home and in the surrounding suburb. This was neither a complete loss of a former sense of self nor a total reconfiguration of my relationship with Risdon Vale: not an irreconcilable loss of rhyme and reason. Yet, within the transitory unbalance that this shift created, it was rhyme rather than reason that provided me with some sense of stability. I found expression in the poetic storying of emotional attachment to objects in my home and the weaving of narratives borne of encounters during waking hours, while dreaming and through imaginings.

Jane Bennett (2001) draws attention to the apparent meaninglessness that infuses a world that can be understood and mastered through calculation and calls for attention to be given to the “experiences of wonder and surprise that endure alongside a cynical world of business as usual, nature as manmade, and affect as the effect of commercial strategy” (p. 8). She describes this as the “wonder of minor experiences” in which deep and meaningful attachments are given voice amid, and perhaps despite, the predominance of logics that deny or deflate relationships between people, other beings, things and places. In this, she “calls attention to the magical sites already here” (Bennett, 2001, p. 8). For me, Risdon Vale is one such site.

I begin by recounting my own sense of place in Risdon Vale. This is a sense of place in which thoughts surrounding “who I am” fuse with those concerning “where I am,” and which unexpectedly manifested as a character (or as I describe below, a place gestalt) named gum-tree-man. It is this fluxing, open, relational, and impressive manifestation that I introduce, and theorize herein. As a means of grounding, this seemingly idiosyncratic sense of place, I then introduce a theory of place influenced by the work of geographer Doreen Massey, which sees place as process and unbounded, internally related, and more-than-human. I further develop the theory of place using philosopher Arne Naess’s gestalt ontology. I conclude by offering some observations regarding what difference place gestalts may make to methodology.

Gum-Tree-Man

Gum-tree-man is often smelt before he is seen, never heard. Smell is, I think, usually sensed bodily before it is isolated as a phenomenon within the nostrils. This is certainly the way with gum-tree-man. The sense of him surprises, before the physicality of him can. A sense, followed by a rapid intermingling—butt on mudstone, blunnie ¹ sole’s dusty depression, leaves windmilling. Smoke on the downward drift of breeze.

His presence is most strong on the track above the houses that line the topside of Magnolia Road. It is a place where risdonii frame the view. (The brittle dryness of these trees, their spontaneous crack and combustion, speaks little to the moist malleability of peppermint rendering “Risdon peppermint” an uncommon name for them.) Gutter to gutter, street and house combine, held between wandering branchlets of powdery blue-green and purple. At this spot the track heads into the drift of the breeze, and the smoke tails down within the flow of the air. Unseen yet sensed then smelt.

Coming upon the sense of gum-tree-man when heading up hill is a jolt upon an apparition. There appears some danger in making an approach, unseen from behind. Yet with both on the same path, one slow and one fast, approach holds constancy. He senses something, someone and he slows, waiting. He slows down, I speed up and we briefly meet and quickly part. My presence can be as much an uncertain and unfathomed apparition to him as his presence can be to me.

Though sometimes he is avoidable and avoided, at most times our passing carries within it rhythmic familiarity.

Walking down hill and him walking up, I am likely to come upon him unsensed—the breeze in his favor. He knows me before I know him and he is prepared. Head low, eyes downcast and stride even, focusing on his dust-stirring feet, or once, on a computer manual upside down. Within his absence of interest, his enclosure, he maintains his place, his space apart. Gum-tree-man does not feign his indifference; his eyes are not cast aside. There is intelligence well hidden that means no more, no less than an inability to die of a stress related disease.

In the first encounter he was unsensed, caught stretched beneath a humpy, ² fire lazing. Roughed up, a stringy, straggly-barked old gum. Skinny legs in baggy bruised pants and his bush-green jacket feathered at the cuffs. Old man’s beard ³ before the gray takes hold. Much of him slips me by; it is the bush-earth of him that holds me and contains me within this place. This is not the sum total of it though. Another encounter within the supermarket—him in black, blinging-belt-buckle and combed-out-hair and me in the fog at the end of a damaged year. That damage within here where smells are pushed in steady reliable streams, came undone. What holds me and contains me within this place is him.

Did the kangaroo hunters sense him? Did children follow him begging a smoke, snatching at his coat? Did adults tip him a nod or did their eyes slip toward something further afield? Or did he arrive later from someplace else where his roots were steeped in moisture. He’s had roots down somewhere, though the dry of here resists much penetration. In his rootlessness he travels elsewhere for the many things that he needs and for many things he doesn’t, and yet always he remains here. This rootlessness is not a freedom borne of flight and a trampoline-strung-somersault. He isn’t free, this gum-tree-man. Threads hang bare collecting in dust—merging and shifting, as things go. There is always something that’s caught up in it all. Sometimes roots, oftentimes something unsuspected—the drag of trouser leg in road-pooled rain, hair tangled in garden bush, urine leaking with a cough or a chuckle toward the sea. Never free, always bound. Stretched and sprung to rootlessness, yes. But always drifting shifting stirring up within some of all of it. Within all of some of it!

Elsewhere, elsewhere the possibilities explode.

Place Matters

Gum-tree-man began with a gentle nudge, oft repeated until he became a quiet and persistent tapping. Although I had been looking for a place within a place in my purchase of a house and garden, while I was craning forward to see what I could see, this place snuck up from behind in the form of this man. Hence, putting roots down within Risdon Vale was not so much an affirming, grounding and deepening of what I already expected and knew, but a slow awakening, a reawakening to something that seems to have been always there but had remained diminished, overlooked and compartmentalized. From behind me, Risdon Vale said “hello” and I’m still in the process of turning, of re-turning toward it. Has eye contact been made? Have we touched? Perhaps within a dreamscape, but not I think within the landscape of the low valley and intersecting creeks. Then again when I dream within the land, or land within a dream, some kind of tentative contact appears most certainly to have been made!

But how to comprehend gum-tree-man? As a description of a sense of place, gum-tree-man embodies many of the characteristics of place articulated by scholars such as geographer Doreen Massey. Massey (1997) observes that the mobility of contemporary life is experienced by some as producing insecurity and vulnerability, and that this has led to a highly problematic conceptualization of place; it has led to calls for a,

strong sense of place, of locality, [to] form one kind of refuge from the hubbub. So the search after the “real” meanings of places, the unearthing of heritages and so forth, is interpreted as being, in part, a response to desire for fixity and for security of identity in the middle of all the movement and change. (Massey, 1997, p. 319)

Massey (1997) argues that this creates an imagining of place that is necessarily reactionary: a bounded and static conceptualization which creates place-based identity that includes active exclusion and the rejection of difference. Certomà (2009) describes a similar imagining of place that is “static, bounded and definable, isomorphic with society and culture settled in, producing a sense of belongingness and authenticity” (p. 315). Along with Booth (2013a) and others, Certomà notes the implication of this version of place in the romanticized narrative of the modern fall from grace that is evident, for some, in the loss of place-based identity, place authenticity and the production of no-places—inauthentic places that engender no sense of place.

Massey (1997, 2006) argues, however, that a focus or preoccupation with place is not in and of itself reactionary, and argues that it is only particular types of place imagining that foster this kind of conceptualization and subsequent problematic politics. Instead, Massey (1997) describes place as the shifting manifestation of internal relations; as process. She configures place as unbounded—stretching out along relational pathways within a globalizing world; as not having a unique identity, but “full of internal differences” (Massey, 1993, p. 67); yet retaining a uniqueness, a specificity that results, at least in part, from the differential nature of relationships. Massey (1997) describes what ensues as a “global sense of the local, a global sense of place” (p. 323).

In contemplating the role of Skiddaw, a mountain in the north of the English Lake District in the “event” that is the town of Keswick, Massey (2005) describes what she terms the elusiveness of place.

This is the event of place . . . in the simple sense of the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of process rather than a thing . . . it is a uniqueness, and a locus of the generation of new trajectories and new configurations. (p. 141)

The uniqueness of each place represents a “throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawing on a history and a geography of thens and theres); and a negotiation which must take place within and between both human and nonhuman” (Massey, 2005, p. 140). As such, places

necessitate invention . . . They implicate us, perforce, in the lives of human others, and in our relations with nonhumans they ask how we shall respond to our temporary meeting up with these particular rocks and stones and trees. (Massey, 2005, p. 141)

She argues that place is both the here and the now so that “it won’t be the same ‘here’ when it is no longer now” (Massey, 2005, p. 139).

Linking Massey’s ideas with emergent thought on relational materiality, Chiara Certomà (2009) describes place in terms of heterogeneity, porosity and nonexclusivism. She writes,

Even in the global world local places are spaces of daily life, power generations, novelty emergence and tradition contestation; it is necessary to reassert place, or, better, an anti-essentialistic notion of places . . . Non-exclusivist places are dynamic, fuzzy, and extroverted. Their porous boundaries explain strange presences, embarrassing links, inexplicable similarities in living organisms and cultures: the intense presence of Australian trees in Cyprus, a Muslim community in Chiapas, Chinese musical elements in Giacomo Puccini’s work. (p. 330)

Hence, place authenticity is reconfigured as a complex, dynamic, and ongoing negotiation of things, beings and events; the co-constituting force of the temporary meeting up of cultures, history, geology, technology, information, animals, plants and so on (Certomà, 2009). Place-based identities are thus understood as plural, hybrid, and reproducing.

While Massey’s concept of “throwntogetherness” may run a risk of emphasizing the more random, haphazard, and high-speed intersections and interactions, as Certomà (2009) points out, some things, beings, and happenings are more likely to intersect and interact than others. Co-constitution is not random, is not thrown together in a chaotic kind of way, but entails some form of patterning. Some things, beings, and happenings meet up with more regularity than others and some meeting ups carry more force or agency than others (Booth, 2013b; Booth & Williams, 2014). There are interdependent pathways, forever on the move and always open for disruption, yet continuing to demonstrate a fluid stability.

Place can be conceptualized as internally related—constituted through the relations that it holds, and that holds it, within world; as more-than-human—constituted through both human and nonhuman collaboration and corroboration; as process—constituted by relations that are never static as they ebb and flow in situationally unique ways; and as unbounded—constituted by relations that are implicated within, and have implications for broader, wider, or deeper web works (through both time and space; Booth, 2010). Moreover, and perhaps most significantly, place can be described as impressive—that due to this fluid interdependence place makes an impression or stands out as a powerful constituting element (or intersection of elements) in relation to all things, beings, and happenings. In short, place matters.

Thus, in research, there is an imperative for investigating and writing place and places in ways that contextualize and supplant the “categorisation, taxonomic intent or technical management of the external world” (Certomà, 2009, p. 330). There is a need to take into methodological account something beyond place construed as a backdrop for human interactions and something other than a basis for claims of some kind of exclusionist authenticity. Place also needs to be understood as something other than an inanimate materiality upon which people project their desires, emotions, imaginings, and constructions, as something more than that obscured by the machinations of the human mind.

Place Gestalt

Gum-tree-man can be read through the lens of Massey’s “global sense of the local, a global sense of place,” constituted within a suite of dynamic, unbounded more-than-human relations that arise through the intersection and interaction of things, beings, and happenings. For example, he is constituted through encounters in the bush (he was unsensed, caught stretched beneath a humpy) and in the supermarket (in black, blinging-belt-buckle and combed-out-hair). He is acknowledged as constituted through both time and space (Did the kangaroo hunters sense him? . . . Or did he arrive later form someplace else where his roots were steeped in moisture), and as unbounded and in process (In his rootlessness he travels elsewhere for many things he needs and for many things he doesn’t).

In such a reading, the global is constructed through specific local intersections and interactions:

the global thus does not stand above the local, but are a particular set of network ties, with the result that there is no “one” global, but an infinite multiplicity of global relationships, all constituted in various forms through particular local configurations. (Savage, Bagnall, & Longhurst, 2005, p. 6)

Place may be unbounded but it is also something within which we are caught up in (He isn’t free, this gum-tree-man . . . There is always something that’s caught up in it all). Place is always and already, embodying a sense of inevitability that just won’t go away (an inability to die of a stress related disease). As an unbounded more-than-human phenomenon, place is not a fixed thing that determines or centers upon the autonomous human self (Within his absence of interest, his enclosure, he maintains his place, his space apart). As such, the future is open and not predetermined or predetermining (Elsewhere, elsewhere the possibilities explode).

Yet, within gum-tree-man there is a host of intangible localized configurations that are not obviously accounted for in the work of Massey and others. There is sensory engagement within the more-than-human (A sense, followed by a rapid intermingling—butt on mudstone, blunnie sole’s dusty depression, leaves windmilling) and there are emotions (My presence can be as much an uncertain and unfathomed apparition to him as his presence can be to me).

Arne Naess’s gestalt ontology provides an account of place and self within place that includes consideration of emotional and sensory engagements, albeit tentatively and with Naess’s characteristic lack of precision (Booth, 2013b; Diehm, 2003; Rothenberg, 1993). David Rothenberg (2000) provides an interesting interpretation of Naess’s gestalt ontology using a comparison with phenomenology to argue that the notion of “concrete contents” implicit within Naess’s work is on the way to the expression of things “through their relation with each other” (p. 152)—on the way to poetry. Like phenomenology, gestalt ontology rejects the dualistic split between that which is deemed objective and that which is deemed subjective. In both phenomenology and gestalt ontology, spontaneous experience is prioritized as a means of perceiving and valuing other qualities in the world. However, unlike phenomenology, gestalt ontology not only brings to the fore these other qualities as meaningful and real from the experience of the human subject (Rothenberg, 2000, p. 154), it also identifies these qualities—these “contents”—as real or “concrete” in the experience of the world its self. In other words, what is experienced not only shapes the experiencer’s life in meaningful ways and as such is recognized as being of value. What is experienced are real qualities—are concrete contents—that exist not simply within the perception of the experiencer but within the world itself.

For Rothenberg (2000), traditional phenomenology maintains the human subject as the center of experiencing, whereas gestalt ontology includes nonhuman entities within the realm of subjective experience. Nonhuman entities experience and act in the world, as humans do, and hence can offer corroboration to the meaningfulness of such experiences. The inclusiveness of this approach construes the human subject is just one among many others that make the world meaningfully real—value is not ascribed through human experience alone. While the necessity in phenomenology of remaining focused on the human subject has been challenged (Booth, 2010), Naess (2005) states,

Gestalt thinking combined with nominalism results in saying that the subject/object dualism is simply a projection of subjective states of consciousness on the outside world. But the joyfulness, liveliness, threatening size, dejectedness, gravity, or solemnity of a tree are properties of a tree on par with tallness, weight, and chemical structure. More precisely: the properties refer to situations or states of the world (Nature) which have gestalt character. The chemical or physical tree is an abstraction referring to elements, subordinate gestalts of the total gestalt. (p. 121)

Thus, it is an understanding of internal relations that distinguishes gestalt ontology from phenomenology. Within phenomenology, while the world and things may be experienced as internally related—as all relations being internal to their bearers, in the sense that they are essential to them and the bearers would not be what they are without them—internal relations is not an idea inherent within phenomenology. Gestalt ontology on the other hand is premised on an understanding of internal relations; it brings the relational quality or contents of things (of world) to the fore. This is perhaps best illustrated through an example.

Naess tells of an encounter with birch trees in which he experienced these trees as full of emotions—as smiling and weeping (Booth, 2011; Rothenberg, 1993). He refutes suggestions that this encounter is adequately explained as a mental projection from his mind onto the trees. He argues, instead that this emotionality is an inherent part of these trees; that these emotions exist out there in the world prior to his perception of them. In understanding the trees as internally related feelings that arise when one encounters them are conceived as part of the concrete contents of the world. The trees smiling and weeping are real qualities of the world as much as they are real experiential qualities of Naess himself (Booth, 2013a).

While language may be a hindrance in comprehending such ideas, there are expressions within English that do reflect such an understanding. We speak of “having a restless night,” where restlessness is recognized not only within ourselves but also within the night. The relationship between self and night is imbued with restlessness, and as both self and night are only themselves through the relations that bind them within the world, restlessness is understood as inherent within each and not merely a projection of the human mind upon the night. As such, it makes as much sense to speak of the night as restless, as it does to speak of oneself as restless. “Restlessness” is a concrete content—a very real quality—of self, night and world. In describing things in this way, we are acknowledging that these qualities lie within the things themselves and are not mere projections, and that as such these qualities are real qualities.

By bringing the relationships to the fore, gestalt ontology offers to us a world comprised of a matrix (or patterning) of relational parts. In such a world, the whole is of course greater than the sum of the parts, and in addition, and using an example of a melody, the more

characteristic feature is the influence of the whole upon each part. Whatever the part of the melody that is heard, the particular character of the whole influences the experience of the part. A “part” of a gestalt is more than a part. That is, if we listen to a part of an unknown melody the experience is different from listening to that part when the melody is known. (Naess, 2005, p. 119)

“The experience of the part somehow contains an experience of the whole” (Naess, 2005, p. 119). Each part is a gestalt that encompasses the whole yet is more than the “mere” whole, and each whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. Instead of “parts” and “wholes,” the linguistical separation of which is incompatible with the relational character of the world (particularly as “part” tends to prioritize spatiality over other qualities), Naess chooses the word “gestalt.” Gestalt describes the relations between and yet also the things themselves as the relations between are understood to be part of the things themselves as internally related.

Naess describes the world as made up of a matrix of subordinate and superordinate gestalts:

It is . . . better to talk about subordinate and superordinate gestalts, when the structural unit of the first is part of the structural unit of the second. The movements of [Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony] as gestalts are subordinate under the gestalt of the whole. But as spontaneous experience of reality this gestalt is again subordinate under more comprehensive ones, like the experience of a concrete occasion of listening or performing as a member of the orchestra. (Naess, 1989, p. 136)

This is why, when a mobile phone rings during the Second Movement, it is not possible to unrelate this aspect (or intrusion) upon the subordinate gestalt of this movement from the superordinate gestalt of the whole Symphony. The phone’s ring becomes an aspect of both the part and the whole, even though the actual occurrence can be isolated in time to the Second Movement and within space on the music sheet. As stated previously, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and each part is more than the whole.

In terms of place, gestalt ontology elevates the notion of sense of place—the intersubjective experience of place—from the realm of subjectivity, through the realm of phenomenological meaningfulness, landing it firmly within the realm of reality. As a concrete content, a sense of a place is as real to the place as it is to the experiencer: “Feelings for water as well as the rootedness of sense of place are contents of reality, because they are there in the sea we swim in or in the place with which we identify” (Rothenberg, 2000, p. 153). Gestalt ontology deepens our resonance with meanings discerned within place through a reawakening to lived experience by recognizing place, our sense of place, as real. As such, our understanding of place and of ourselves within place is both enriched and empowered. We are offered a means of escaping the confines of how reality is expressed, and we can move toward more imaginative explorations of place.

Gum-tree-man is a concrete manifestation of the relationship between myself and Risdon Vale and as such lies as a reality both within myself and within Risdon Vale. It is a superordinate gestalt but is in no sense the superordinate gestalt of my relationship with this suburb. The relational nature of place gestalts denies any possibility of there being definitive closure to the sensing of a place (Booth, 2011). Place and relations with place remain forever shifting and open. Gum-tree-man remains part of the dynamic matrix of the whole.

While the phenomenon, that is, this gum-tree-man gestalt has been evoked by actual encounters with a strolling, smoking man within the fringes of the suburb, it must be emphasized that it is not within this man as a physical entity that the concreteness of this reality arises. I know next to nothing of the man himself, and it is not about him as a discrete human, male being that I write. As Rothenberg (2000) suggests, concrete contents are “better evoked than explained” (p. 166), and this self-as-related-to-place gestalt—for one reason or another—has received evocation from a tall, bearded wandering man. For Naess, his place gestalt takes its name from the geographic place Tvergastein, and its impetus centers on the cottage there (Naess, 2008).

To use the term man within the naming of a gestalt may be foolish. It could be construed as an anthropomorphization of place or sense of place—ascribing to place the features of the human individual. In addition, it could be perceived as an epiphenomenological description, where what is being described is not the experience itself—not the world as it presents itself to me or me as I present myself to world—but a kind of metaphor for what I already know projected upon a place. In both instances, the limitations of such a description in relation to place abound. Anthropomorphism often goes hand in hand with anthropocentrism, in which human features are perceived as the only defining and meaningful axis for contemplation. By identifying the humanness within something, such as a place, what remains central and primary is that which is recognizable as human. The place itself is indistinct and irrelevant unless there are features within it of human quality. Epiphenomenological descriptions, while not inherently invalid are nonetheless steeped in unquestioned presuppositions. In particular, it denies the more-than-human agency at work (and play) within place and places, relying instead upon an understanding of place experiencing as humanly derived projection and metaphor.

By understanding gum-tree-man as a place gestalt the concern of anthropomorphism and the limitations of an epiphenomenological description are alleviated. In gestalt ontology, the humanness within the place is acknowledged but can never be the whole story, as place and place gestalts are a manifestation of a myriad of relations that extend way beyond the human to include the nonhuman. Place is more-than-human in its constitution and all aspects, both human and nonhuman, construct the realities of the place. There is no mere human-projected metaphor, just another part within the patterning of the whole.

There is also the complication of issues pertaining to gender. What does it mean, it could be asked, that this gestalt is presented as “man”? It is important to stress that Risdon Vale for me feels neither male nor masculine; in fact there are few places that evoke a sense of gender within me. However, if the person I encountered had been female, I doubt very much that she would have acted as an evocation for the relationship I hold with Risdon Vale. Encountering a female wandering the fringes in the manner of this man would be unusual and would not speak to me of Risdon Vale. There is nothing to me that is particularly unusual in Risdon Vale. Risdon Vale is unique in some ways, yet it is not unexpected. In my experience, neither is a lone male wandering the suburban fringe.

Gum-tree-man is my experience that lies between myself and Risdon Vale. He is composed within the intersections and interactions of myself, other people and a myriad of nonhuman entities including buildings, machines, trees and rock that arise within waking, and sleeping experience. As a more-than-human being, Gum-tree-man is not mine alone, as he is the happenings between self and place that dwell within both self and place. Gum-tree-man also exceeds both self and place because of the relational complexity that lies beyond both self and place, yet that both self and place inhabit. He slips in and out of dreamscapes, and he surfaces through bush and at the checkout because there is no boundary in between. He is alive with the possibilities beyond that which we already think we know.

Conclusion

Many of us have experiences that fall in some way within place phenomenologist Edward Relph’s categorization of insideness (Relph, 1976). We have specific places where we live or where we have lived, and within which meaning arises. Yet it is common for such meaning to be viewed not as a source of knowledge about people and place, but as something that covers over the world (Ingold, 2000). It is viewed not as something embodied within the world, but as a cultural construction layered upon the world. Hence, meaning and meaningfulness are discounted and stripped away in pursuit of that which, in theory, lies beneath. Any knowledge gleaned is reliant on the untelling of places and people, and places and their significances are reduced to quirky idiosyncrasies. This is, however, knowledge stripped bare of the terrain within which it was once embodied. It is knowledge adrift, only becoming real again once it takes root within the meaningfulness of place; once storied within the particularities of specific places.

As Ingold writes, stories, “far from putting meanings upon the landscape . . . allow listeners to place themselves in relation to specific features of the landscape, in such a way that their meanings may be revealed or disclosed. Stories help to open up the world, not to cloak it” (Ingold, 2000, p. 208). In the mobility of our times, stories regarding people and places have, on occasion, become a little strung out. The legacy of colonization means that many stories have undergone dramatic and often violent unsettlement. Within a rapidly globalizing and constantly changing world, many stories remain in dynamic flux. Catching sight of a story—of storied relationships with places—is an undertaking seldom attempted, a pastime that at least on the surface bears little relevance to the main game of policy and politics. Yet it is within the lived experience of the day-to-day that stories reveal the world within which we dwell and we can turn our attention toward storying the relationships we hold with places. Rather than these being dismissed as idiosyncratic meanderings, their grounding in the particularities of place and the day-to-day insists that the insights gained remain infused with life and meaning.

Yet, there is a significant point of caution to be addressed in representing places and sense of place is such ways. As Massey observes, place is often constructed as a refuge within the chaos and dynamism of a rapidly changing world, and the resultant politics can construe an authentic sense of place with a bounded and predetermined suite of rights and authority. Perhaps at its most extreme, this is illustrated by the reliance of the Nazis on a historic place, the woodlands of first century Germania inhabited by a mythologized tribe from which the Nazis claimed a purity of lineage and thus a predetermined supremacy (Schama, 1996).

To represent a place gestalt, such as gum-tree-man, as a concrete reality without acknowledging place as inherently porous, heterogeneous, and nonexclusive (Certomà, 2009), could perhaps see place gestalts understood or used in a similar way. Or at least, as producing place-based research that is inherently problematic with regard to representations of the nature of the relationship between specific people and specific places. To represent place as a thing separate from oneself is, potentially, opening the door for place or a place to assert some kind of a piori influence and determination over oneself and perhaps over others. Yet a place gestalt represents a familiarity with place that is in no way fixed and no way discrete. It is the ongoing negotiation and renegotiation of things, beings and happenings that informs dynamic and open place-based identities. It evokes place-based stories in which dreams, imaginings, and emotions intermingle and constitute reality, and within which the researcher, at least tentatively, finds her place.