expectations or needs of the reader, embedded in metaphor, in a third reality or
elsewhere-place.
Tom Keneally said that in writing The Great Shame (1998), he became
convinced that ... place is ... a sense of the spirits of the landscape and that being
the most fundamental religion of humanity ... a sort of ... Animism, the idea that
landscape [ place] is occupied by God is almost, the most fundamental type of belief
since ... it is the easiest to believe in. Keneally also spoke of a recurrent theme in
his work the ... ultimatum of landscape, this utterness of landscape, the question of
God in landscape. These are interesting responses, relevant to the connection
between place and mythopoeic literary consciousness, because they introduce the
notion of interconnectedness, a pivotal concept espoused by quantum physics, a
notion that in one guise or another permeates this thesis.
The shaman-Rebbe described place as embedded in sacred time, which in
imaginal terms and also that of quantum physics is at once past, present and future,
and to exemplify this, quoted the American Rabbi Avrahma Joshua Heschel (1907-
1972) to suggest that the Sabbath was a place that ... was a palace in time.
Shaman Maureen in describing place personalised it in every instance and in
suggesting that her primary reality, her real home is an ... Other-place, also affirmed
the quantum potential in place.
(e) Reflections
The responses of Colleen McCullough initially concerned me but also
functioned to catalyse my thinking because she seemed to invalidate all of my
assumptions about the nature of mythopoeic writing, and yet, somehow confirm
them. I t was in this paradoxical situation that I found the answer, one that
permeates the whole thesis; the Gnostic potentiality of what at first appears to be
contrary to ultimately be transmuted or reconciled into the quintessence of its
opposite. Colleen McCullough is both an accredited scientist (neurophysiologist) and
a recognized writer of fiction, two seemingly divergent vocations, yet somehow in
her they are reconciled. The reconciliation comes from the realisation that the ‘out
there’ material, substantial or scientific, is not such until it is recorded ‘in here’, in a
sense, until it is imagined, that is, given a narrative of continuity. This was also
very much affirmed in the case of the shaman, Maureen, for whom an imagined
place, her spiral galaxy, Andemar, her primary reality, provides her with, as we saw