How is your sense of self shaped by the place you live?

The geology, the topography, the climate, the weather, the land, the bush. Do you tread sandy granite under foot, crunch on shards of slate and shale or squelch through clammy clay. Do you dwell by a babbling brook in a green gully, or high up in the rolling hills, perched precariously on a rocky ridge, exposed to the elements.

The town of Castlemaine, our social hub, was plonked in an odd place for a country town. As the colony spread out from the point of  embarkation, burgeoning like a well fed cancer, the sheep led the way. When they happened upon a grassy river flat, there they stayed, the shepherds followed suit. But this particular town was built on gold. It began  with a violent and ferocious attack on the land and every living thing upon it. Devastation on a monumental scale!

Yet ironically enough, those gold bearing hills have been saved from the rapacious pastoralists for the exclusive enjoyment of the rapacious miners, if ever they choose to take up treasure hunting once again. Until that day is upon us, the bush remains abandoned to benign neglect, to lick its wounds and focus on the perennial struggle for survival. After the environmental holocaust: the hills stripped of top soil, the creeks clogged with silt and gorse and willow trees, peace reigned. The bush survived, more or less in tact, even flourished here and there, from time to time. But it showed the scars of its violent past. Trees twisted and stunted, the ground all lumpy and full of holes. The blackfullas call it upside down country, the shale and rocks that were underneath are now sitting on top, so the plants must find a home in the cracks and crevices, extracting meager sustenance from pockets of poor soil, a hard life indeed! But they say suffering is good fro the soul, or something like that. (do plants have souls?)

Personally, I feel quite at home in middle of this scruffy scrub, this higgledy-piggledy, hodge-podge, disfigured, disjointed disarray. Boulders sitting around like they fell from the sky, slag heaps grown over with weeds, tall trees growing out of deep holes or sticking out the sides of mini hills of tailings at odd angles. A landscape full of character and meaning.

 

Tobias Richardson

 

Dave Waters  

 

Jan Palethorpe

 

Forest Keegal 

 

Ken Killeen

 

Virginia Harkin 

 

Ben Laycock

 

  Eloise Mitchell

 

           Eliza Gilchrist         

       Di Thomson    

 Lucy Foster

 Zoe Amor