people and shapes their lives and emotions as if it had begotten them and then
insinuates itself upon the reader. Similarly, cohort reader 3 attributed an inbuilt
memory to place so that one can feel its history beneath your feet and become
aware of place and share its history. Thomas Keneally seems to identify the
energy of place most potently as the spirits in a landscape and personifies the
Australian continent as loutish towards the European sensibilities. Colleen
McCullough reveals Norfolk I sland as being subject to, as she said in her response
to the questionnaire, “ ... time warps, field effects and all kinds of scientific
phenomena that we don’t understand”.
(c) Place as Sacred or Numinous Geography
Some locations are perceived by local or indigenous inhabitants as existing
within a sacred dimension; places such as Stonehenge and also those where cave
art abounds such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altimira. I n Australia and elsewhere
around the world, certain rocks outcrops, trees, and caves are sometimes perceived
as mythic and totemic places in a conceptualised sacred topography, criss-crossed
by invisible dreaming tracks or songlines. Some scholars may, as we have seen,
attribute these tracks to electromagnetic factors or ley-lines. However, I rather
observe a metaphysical process in operation, somewhat analogous to the Roman
Catholic mass, in that these places constitute a literal act of transubstantiation.
Some anthropologists refer to such sacred geographical places as cognised
landscape. (Devereux, 2000:29). The perception of such places is constituted by
psychological and physiological factors acting on an individual in their perception of
place. There can be a symbiotic relationship in which geographical and geomorphic
features affect the individual, where elements such as temperature, altitude and
terrain interact with the psyche to activate a profound, almost numinous perception
of place. I n Mysteries of the Dreaming, James Cowan suggests:
... that the Aborigines have made the face of the earth their
Bhagavad-Gita, their Torah, their Bible or Koran. I ndeed the
Dreaming is the Aboriginal Ark of the Covenant which they have
been carrying about the Australian continent since the beginning
of time (Cowan, 1989:2).