Ideas, quotes and anecdotes
According to Professor Andrew Taylor at Edith Cowan University, landscape is not “what is out there, unseen”. It is how we look at landscape that matters and the fact that I am looking at it from where I am because of who I am. As he remarks, a photograph of the landscape does exactly that. It clearly reflects my point of view, my interest in my surroundings and my association with place. Similarly, landscape can be likened to a blank canvas in which we are the artists who apply our artistic touches in a way that reflects our hopes, our desires, our fears and phobias. Everyone has a different way of looking at landscape which is influenced by their prior experiences and the accumulation of knowledge about who they are and how they see their own individual place in the world. As such the landscape takes on many hues – much depends upon our feelings, our position in time and our attitudes, experiences and memories.
In the Night by Elizabeth Jennings: the poet asks:
“How much am I then what I think, how much what I feel?
How much the eye that seems to keep stars straight?
Do I control what I can contemplate?
Or is it my vision that’s amenable?
I turn in my mind, my mind is a room whose wall
I can see the top of but never completely scale”.
“Every rock, every hill, every water, I know that place backwards and forwards, up and down, inside out. It’s my country and I got names for every place.” (Aboriginal artist, Queenie McKenzie at Black Fellas Creek, Old Texas, 1995)
“Just as there are many homes, there are many journeys home. Each one of us will have a different journey from anyone else. The journey home is mostly ongoing and in some ways never completed. It is a process of discovery and recovery”. (Bringing Them Home report.)
Malouf also notes: “but the landscape we most deeply belong to, that connects with our senses, that glows in our consciousness, will always be the one we are born into”.
See Malouf’s 1998 Boyer Lecture notes: a source of good quotes
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