In 1998 Margaret Worth was invited by a small group of Pitjantjatjara women to visit the Tjilbruke Gateway installation at Warriparinga on the banks of the Sturt River in Adelaide. Months later Worth visited the women to talk about making a place like the Tjilbruke Gateway. This article looks at Worth's role in helping to develop a built site which would signify as much as its natural environment did. In the process she learnt what was important to know about the land and developed her own understanding of place.
The importance of place depends on what it means to us, what we make of it and our understanding of how it shapes us. In 2001 in the Australian film industry there was an avalanche of films, both documentaries and features, addressing issues surrounding place in the context of the relationship between black and white Australians. Six features which Hann values for their portrayal of this relationship are One Night the Moon, Rabbit Proof Fence, The Tracker, Beneath Clouds, Kabbarli-A Film About Daisy Bates and Australian Rules.
Two hours drive from Perth is the small regional town of Kellerberrin. With a population of nine hundred people and appearing just like many other municipalities in the region, the incongruity of this town lies in the presence of the grandly named International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA), a gallery and residency centre for international contemporary artists. IASKA was established in 1998, developing from a collaboration between two wheatbelt farmers, Tony York and Donna Dransfield, and two art professionals from Perth, artist Rodney Glick and Marco Marcon. The intention behind this double displacement is to offer both artist and communities a kind of shock treatment that will force them out of their respective comfort zones and encourage the development of new ways of approaching both art practice and notions of local identity. Visiting artists have included Salvatore Falci and Cathy Barber.
When Arthur Boyd gifted his large Bundanon property to the nation in 1993, he imagined the creation of a place that would become a living arts centre where artists of all persuasions would come to find refreshment and renewed inspiration in the landscape. The Bundanon Artists Centre is housed in former farm buildings and has hosted writers, visual artists, musicians, choreographers and film-makers. Among the most celebrated are J.M. Coetzee, South African novelist, Peter Mumme, environmental composer and Dorothy Porter, Australian poet. Kronenberg also discusses the work of artist John R. Walker who was invited to participate as a senior-artist-in-residence in 2000.
According to Chapman, the contemporary understanding of a globalised world is the result of the understanding that we all share a finite physical realm: this planet. The world is no longer understood purely in terms of geographic boundaries, but cultural ones. This article looks at some of the utopian values imparted upon some of the major cities in the western world and discusses concepts of globalism and localism as they contribute to a new perception of the world around us.
The Flinders Ranges in South Australia where Malcolm McKinnon lives is a place of diminishing population, sparse landscapes and resilient social memory. It's a place that reveals itself only over time, as the stories, names and explanations for particular places and people become gradually apparent. It's a place where most of the people of the land carry memories and maps of special places around in their heads. McKinnon's aim in writing this article is to use these places and the claims attached to them by many non-indigenous people to show that they are just as legitimate as those of indigenous people.
The body of work shown as The Living Room (RMIT Gallery 2001) continues Bette Misfud's studies of the emotive and emblematic power of landscape imagery. The Living Room represents, in part, the cultural segregation and physical isolation Misfud experiences in rural life as a second-generation migrant. The land is continually transformed by the marking and scarring of our habitation. Thus both land and identity are in a continual state of flux.