A sense of place

A sense of place

October 15, 2005

Place is crucial to all Australians. It is fundamental to the human sense of self, sense of community, sense of mortality and sense of destiny, argues Hugh Mackay.

ONE OF the silliest ways of trying to put cultural distance between Aborigines and other Australians - particularly those of Anglo-Celtic stock living in the suburbs - is by attributing to indigenous people a mystical sense of place, a special relationship with the land that transcends anything we urban types could comprehend.

It's all rubbish, of course. Not the special relationship bit; that's true enough. What's rubbish is the idea that the sense of place is unique to indigenous people, or even that it's more special, more "spiritual" for them than for us.

Different cultures obviously have different ways of expressing their sense of place; we revere our "tribal grounds" in different ways.

But connection to place is vital to our sense of identity - both personal and communal.

In fact, I suspect that much of the uneasiness, anxiety and moral uncertainty of modern urban societies can be traced to our loss of a strong sense of continuous connection with places that help to define us. Cyberspace, it turns out, is no substitute for the real thing.

So where did we get this weird idea that a relationship to the land is important only in agrarian, nomadic or hunting cultures?

In Australia, the continuing debate about land rights has been part of the problem (and no, this is not a polemic against land rights; on the contrary).

We say "Mabo" and we think "land", and so we should. But many Australians say "indigenous" and think only of land, as if the sense of place is uniquely magical and central in Aboriginal culture.

Perhaps I need only mention the MCG, Flemington, the SCG, the WACA or the Gabba to make the rather obvious point that urban Australia has places of almost mystical significance - places that symbolise deeply embedded cultural values and mark the location of great struggles, great triumphs, great defeats and great outpourings of human emotion.

Sport may not be your thing, and you might think I'm belittling indigenous culture by daring to mention sporting venues in the same breath as Aboriginal sacred sites.

But you'd have to be either prejudiced or blind not to have noticed the profound, if not spiritual, significance of such places as settings for the acting out of ancient and primitive tribal rituals of the battle and the hunt.

If sport doesn't do it for you, think of Gallipoli, Changi or the Kokoda Trail. Think of the Australian War Memorial, or the smaller memorials - parks, plaques, obelisks and halls scattered across Australia, marking the spots where homage is regularly paid to those who made supreme sacrifices on our behalf. Those places matter, their location essential to their role.

Still unconvinced? Revisit your primary school playground, then, or a classroom you once sat in.

The powerful sense of that place - the look of it, the feel of it, the smell of it - will stir all kind of emotions in you, positive and negative, not accessible via mere memory.

Those emotions spring from deep wells of half-forgotten longing; reservoirs of an aching simplicity; the momentous nothingness of a child's life lived without any real sense of a past and not much connection with the idea of a future that once yawned in our faces, but has already swirled past us.

Go to the suburb where you grew up (it's probably not very far from where you live now, stamping grounds being what they are) and walk the footpaths, the shops where you strolled and loitered as a teenager; the park where you learned to kick a football, fly a kite or trained your dog to fetch; the backyard where you took your first catch or learned to skip, climb, hide or whistle. Not significant? Go and have a look.

The rush of recognition when we hear songs that supplied the soundtrack to our adolescence and early adulthood is an evocation of place as much as time, because the places matter.

You can see how much they matter when they're torn down or ripped apart. The cinema where you learned about good and evil writ large now a Persian rug shop, forever closing down.

And whatever happened to that corner? Why have they widened the road? Where is the ...

Where is the ... Hey! Where is the house I grew up in? Where is my neighbour's house? Shocking stuff, the removal or disruption of place.

The place where you worked at your first job. The quad at your university, the lawns where you lay in the sun, scarcely daring to believe she was feeling as you were feeling (and usually finding she wasn't). The harbour. The river. The lake. The holiday destination with its beaches, or its mountain tracks. The caravan park, year after year. Go back and feel it. Sense it. Tell me it doesn't mean anything.

It doesn't have to be a primitive, unspoiled place. It doesn't have to be grass and rocks and trees and streams. Ask the people who live in Carnegie if those places mean something more than just spaces to sleep and walk and eat in. They don't have to be charming, trendy, beautiful or even well defined.

"My street" is magic in every nuance, and sometimes the magic lingers: I have two streets like that - one in Sydney, one in Melbourne - where an occasional pilgrimage is both reassuring and gut-churning (that tree, that hedge, that fence, that veranda, those ghosts).

What about the cathedrals, churches, chapels, courts and concert halls - places that have enclosed and inspired some of our most numinous, uplifting, heartbreaking or clarifying moments?

Or the places where we stood and heard terrible news: we know where we were when we heard the news of Kennedy's assassination, or the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre because we were rooted to the spot.

And there are places we never want to go to again, because they contain demons or ghosts we know will catch us if we venture too close. I know of one man who will never, under any circumstances, visit his old school again; another who refuses even to drive down the street where he grew up in a desperately unhappy family.

Why would he: the place is the most powerful of all the symbols of his unhappiness.

Some places contain our personal secrets, but places also create and capture our sense of belonging to a community: indeed, it's arguable if we can hold on to a sense of community without anchoring it to places.

The places where we . . . where the family . . . where our neighbours . . . The places that stood for our emerging sense of ourselves as people who belong somewhere, and don't belong somewhere else.

The sense, as a child, of even the next street being alien, let alone the next suburb. The sense of a relative's house in a distant suburb being like an oasis of familiarity in a desert of strangeness. Tribal grounds? Stamping grounds? Of course; what else?

What's less mystical about any of that than the mystical status of place in indigenous culture? It is neither to detract from that culture, nor to honour it any less, to say that place is fundamental to the human sense of self, sense of community, sense of mortality and sense of destiny.

It's also fundamental to our sense of morality. Only when we feel connected to others do we seem willing to accept some responsibility for their wellbeing.

The real test of our moral sensitivity is not how nice we are to our friends and family members, but how we treat the people who share the places where we live and work, whether we happen to like them or not. (Funny how we so carefully choose the places where we'll live, but not the people we'll have as neighbours. Did you ever interview the people in the street before you bought a house? No; it was the place that spoke to you.)

Places shape us. Living in a mean little concrete box will take its toll on you, as surely as the design of Parliament House will shape the attitudes and behaviour of the politicians who work in it.

If you're interested in raising the moral tone of a community, look first to the creation of spaces where people can meet, walk, talk, play, eat, drink. (Is the regional shopping mall really the best we can do? Did any community ever find its soul in such a place?)

The places where we discover the magical sense of being connected to a neighbourhood - the pub, the park, the church, the schoolyard, the shops - lodge in our memory.

The "global village", by contrast, is just a hoax perpetrated by the high priests of the IT revolution. Villages, urban or otherwise, need real places to foster the incidental connections - the smiles, the nods - of village life. Falling in love on the net is usually a hoax, too: love needs a place to grow, just as herd animals need a place to graze together. One video screen is much the same as another (a bit like shopping centres and airports), whereas real places are unique. Cyberspace is a clever name, but we must resist the idea that it bears any relation to the other kind.

Our problem is not that we lack the yearning for a sense of place; that yearning is universal. Our problem, especially compared with Aborigines, is that we've often failed to acknowledge the deep need in ourselves.

Aborigines don't have a mortgage on the sense of place, but they could teach the rest of us a thing or two about how to nurture it.

Hugh Mackay is an author and social commentator.