Another section, ‘Armidale’, draws our attention to power relations within
the city. Again this does not seem to be only applicable to Armidale.
Example 12.4
Armidale
This is a dirty doubledealing knifeintheback town. This town is
costlycostly. The town cannot be trusted by us, alone or in groups.
It’s a whisperinthegrassinthesleeve wallshaveears town.What is now
happening in Armidale has happened, in the course of history, to all
thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation.
This is a town of pyrrhic victories, of the ends don’t justify the
means, of symbolic goals. This is a place where the wrong word to
the wrong person in the wrong place always produces a deviant
response.From Tourism (Cohen 1992, p. 5)Bernard Cohen’s Tourism , therefore, grapples with generic ideas about
place, rather than conveying a realistic and individuated impression of
particular locations.
For Exercise 2 create a text with an oblique relationship to place. To do
this you might like to write a text with place names as headings, like the
Cohen examples, in which the relationship between place and name is
oblique. What can you say about place in this way that would be more
difficult by more directly representational means?
MOVING CITIES
In poetry, in particular, location has tended to focus on the countryside: in
the nineteenth century this was invoked in a romantic pastoral. Many con-
temporary writers have transmuted writing about nature into writing
about the social and environmental problems of rural life from an ecolog-
ical perspective. Other writers have reacted against the pastoral tradition by
focusing on urban environments, and this has been very popular in post-
modern literature. In this next section we will focus on writing the city.
CITY SPLITS
One way to write the city is to focus on it as a site of contradiction and
difference (Exercise 3). The city is a public site of buildings, thoroughfares
and institutions. But it is also a private site where we conduct relationships
Mapping worlds, moving cities 259