Dimensions
140 x 209 x 19mm
Walking is something we rarely think of beyond being a simple form of exercise, a ready means of travel and a chance to clear the head. But walking defines us as human, and is the oldest means by which we come to know the world around us. Walking may be considered a deeply cultural act, even political; importantly it has long been a pathway to writing about places, including the place where you live, your home.
Writing Home explores the literary representation of Australian places by those who have walked them. In particular it examines how Aboriginal and settler narratives of walking have shaped portrayals of Australia’s Red Centre and consequently ideas of nation and Australian belonging.
The Red Centre has long been characterised as a ‘frontier’, the supposed divide between black and white, ancient and modern. But persistently representing it as a troubled frontier is preventing Australians and others from re imagining this internationally significant region as home. Writing Home argues that frontier no longer adequately describes Central Australia, and the Aboriginal songlines long trivialised by settler Australians’ use of the pejorative Walkabouts are potentially an important contributor to Australian discourses of hybridity, settler belonging and home.
Drawing on anthropology, cultural theory, journalism, politics and philosophy, the work traces perceptions of Australian place and space through six recounted walking journeys of the Red Centre. The result is something of a biography of the songlines, and a journalism and literary criticism of their cultural and political fracture under European settlement.
