'Most Australians live on the narrow coastal strip that fringes our island continent. For Aboriginal people a place comes into being each time it is sung, and it is through this process that places are learned about and cared for. These songs can be for all of us, in the places where Aboriginal stories are rapidly overwritten with grids of roads and towns.
Together Perkins and Somerville explore one coastal group's experience in maintaining the stories and songs of their country: Perkins' Gumbaynggirr homeland in mid-north coast New South Wales. These stories and songs are unique in their particularities, yet universal in their sense of knowledge, understanding and openness to sharing.
By taking up the metaphor of singing to capture a quality of voice, Perkins and Somerville show us how to share the land and its stories throughout Australia.' (From the publisher's website.)
'In this essay, I consider the poetics of the weather and studies in creativity, as a site to develop emplaced relations for a multi-species sense of place and research methods for place-based inquiry. I take up the theme of this TEXT Special Issue, ‘Writing creates ecology: Ecology creates writing’ as a conversation seeking generative responses to current dilemmas in terms of both ecology and higher learning. The context of the broader conversation sustains a personal inquiry that is quite specific and particular. The relationship I have to the work and that, to which it speaks, is intimate and lived. The themes woven into the piece are in tension with an individual and collective responsibility to respond to the more-than-human world in ecological crisis. The work is in progress, speculative and open-ended; I embody the work not merely as another project but as seeking a manner of life to live. The focus of these concerns can be summarised as revolving around varied forms of attention, modes of inquiry and modes of address. The material is accumulative and accretive, predicated upon the continuity of self-directed field and archival work, undertaken in the form of experimental philosophy, creative writing and living.The manner of writing is multimodal, non-linear, fractal, writing ecology as the resonance of a place from which the ecology emerges in the writing, reliant upon a recursive and synergistic recollection of fragments, shards, uneven and jagged pieces to formulate a whole. The ecological imagination at work morphs into a substantive form of creativity, as an everyday practice making sense and making art, as ecology and as cultural memory.' (Author's abstract)
'In this essay, I consider the poetics of the weather and studies in creativity, as a site to develop emplaced relations for a multi-species sense of place and research methods for place-based inquiry. I take up the theme of this TEXT Special Issue, ‘Writing creates ecology: Ecology creates writing’ as a conversation seeking generative responses to current dilemmas in terms of both ecology and higher learning. The context of the broader conversation sustains a personal inquiry that is quite specific and particular. The relationship I have to the work and that, to which it speaks, is intimate and lived. The themes woven into the piece are in tension with an individual and collective responsibility to respond to the more-than-human world in ecological crisis. The work is in progress, speculative and open-ended; I embody the work not merely as another project but as seeking a manner of life to live. The focus of these concerns can be summarised as revolving around varied forms of attention, modes of inquiry and modes of address. The material is accumulative and accretive, predicated upon the continuity of self-directed field and archival work, undertaken in the form of experimental philosophy, creative writing and living.The manner of writing is multimodal, non-linear, fractal, writing ecology as the resonance of a place from which the ecology emerges in the writing, reliant upon a recursive and synergistic recollection of fragments, shards, uneven and jagged pieces to formulate a whole. The ecological imagination at work morphs into a substantive form of creativity, as an everyday practice making sense and making art, as ecology and as cultural memory.' (Author's abstract)
