PROJECTS

THE KITE4 PUBLICATION #1

 

ANanthology????

• Essays
• Documents
• Poetry
• Images ... videos
• DEEPhistories 
• CULTURALmapping ... WHATever??!!

SOMEthing I've prepare earlier

PONRABBEL PAPER: CATCHMENT 43: Troubling Waters

ABSTRACT

When we interrogate 'place' we tread on tender ground. “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” ― Joan Didion

It's touchy stuff 'place' and invokes all kinds of deep emotional responses to it. “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it." Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood.

Speaking of place, O'Connor said "where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got” ... and its true!

If you are a 'blow in' where you come from at best can only teach you about 'placedness' ... not yours but placedness alone ... and no matter how long it has been since you've arrived, contemplating 'hereness' and 'elsewhereness' locates you on the planet ... and here ... and it keeps on posing questions.

Here is an exploration of Launcestonian placedness with layered histories in mind.

Ray Norman February 2016

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CLICK HERE FOR TASMANIAN TIMELINE

As the ‘fresh’ collides with the ‘salt’ at the convergence of Northern Tasmania’s two Esk River systems and the Tamar Estuary much more than troublesome silt is deposited on the riverbed. 

All these waterways are named for others elsewhere. Yet this river junction is a feature in a unique and evolving cultural landscape that has a human history of 40,000 years plus. More to the point, it is very much its own place in the world with its own geography and histories.

Two centuries ago there was a cultural collision at this set of coordinates that is now Launceston that involved two different sets of cultural imperatives and two distinctly different knowledge systems – each of which shapes, and has shaped, place in different ways. 

Interestingly, the waters come together here at a point pragmatically and geographically described, and mapped, in 21st Century terms, as Catchment 43. Right here at this junction, the ‘spectre of the flood’ is possibly part of the explanation of place that is being navigated. Along with a hope of somehow accounting for the Launcestonian cultural landscape multidimensional mapping is an evolving process. 

As a consequence of postcolonial mapping, in the hope of better understandings of place, Tasmania’s ‘waterways and catchments’ have been ascribed numbers in an attempt to better understand geographies, bioregions, topographies, ecosystems, cultural landscapes and the phenomena these things involve and exist within. 

Current technologies enable us to look at multiple interfaced, interrelated and layered imaginings of place from never before anticipated vantage points. The amenities ascribed to places need to be mapped and asserted. Here, in Catchment 43, what is being identified is an ecologically and geographically defined network of phenomena – an ecosystem rather than a mathematically measured and mapped physical geographic feature.

The mapping here is ‘deep’ in so much as it is inclusive of all the phenomena that constitute ‘place’ – landforms, resources, populations, habitats, environments, cultural sensibilities, stories, etc. The mapping brings with it a kind of scientific compulsion to gather up multidimensional classes of information. It’s an open question as to whether that has yet been achieved.

Unsurprisingly ‘water’ is place defining and in multidimensional ways. Likewise, the various shifts in meaning relative to the changing understandings invested in a place’s amenity values, water sources come charged with cultural values and social obligations. Equally, in cultural landscapes, and in the cultural imperatives invested in them, water is a no small consideration.

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On The Tamar for instance, in an attempt to downplay cultural considerations, and to focus on more pragmatic issues with added ‘scientific’ accuracy, the ‘water catchment‘ has been given the number 43 – or more precisely the name, Catchment 43 … likewise 40 for the Macquarie system; 41 for the South Esk; and 42 for the North Esk. It’s a ‘place’ that finds its physicality in a ‘waterway’ as well as the adjoining land and placescaping located at the confluence of the Tamar and Tasmania’s two Esk Rivers.

Catchment 43 is a place that might be understood, even if somewhat differently, as ponrabbel if we invoke palawa-kani, Tasmanian Aboriginal language, and thus invoke palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal!) cultural imperatives. Here palawa understandings and palawa knowledge systems created a cultural landscape. ponrabbel is a palawa understanding and imagining of place and the place’s utility and amenity.

Putting colonial and palawa imperatives to one side for just a moment, the naming of a ‘place’ is unavoidably invested with layers of cultural narratives. Likewise the ascribing of numbers carries a narrative – it’s just another narrative. And, it’s so even if it’s ostensibly to play some role as a part of some ‘scientific cum ecological effort’ to better understand, disguise, soften, moderate perhaps, some exploitive purpose. Nonetheless here the ‘agenda’ comes with a level of universal transparency of a kind – and with a hypothesis of uncontestability. .......... Click here to read the entire paper