into the world” (Malouf, 1985:9-10). That ‘second birth’ into the world is the birth
of the knowing-conscious psyche as it insinuates itself into place.
(g) Place as Symbol.
I n literature we find many examples where place acts as a symbol. I n
Melville’s Moby Dick the sea is symbolic of the mythic night sea journey or, more
precisely a descent into the underworld. I n a similar way Malouf’s barren land in An
I maginary Life symbolises Ovid’s state of mind, and the forest in Keneally’s Gossip
from the Forest symbolises the gossip or unordered content of the forest of the
unconscious. I find also that Colleen McCullough often conjures-up the symbol of
Edenic milieus to define places in her corpus. Generally place as symbol requires,
perhaps needs or impels, the individual to engage with place at a deeply soulful
level: the wilderness may affect an individual to adopt a different persona or set of
values, a church or sacred place elicits feelings of the numinous, war or holocaust
memorials, symbolically invade ego-consciousness. Again, James Cowan helps us to
understand this process when he writes that the Australian Aborigines:
... found their land to be an ideal vessel for all the great
metaphors that helped to make sense of the world. I t was in
essence a far more resolved chrism of reality than any I might like
to burden it with in terms of its economic or social affiliations.
Aboriginal land, so to speak, is less a thing that one walks upon
and exploits, as it is a provisional sura that we ‘read’ whenever we
wish to experience wholeness (Cowan, 1989:10).
I n other instances place acts as a symbol of the tension that exists between
the persona we think of as embodying true identity and the deeper, truer persona
that place mirrors or forces to the surface of consciousness. William Shakespeare
understood this and throughout his corpus shows how individual personas are
changed and transmogrified using the symbolism engendered in place; Lear by the
stormy heath, MacBeth by his castle and Prospero by his island.
(h) Place as Archetypal I mage.
Every sensory aspect of particular places is ultimately experienced as an
aspect of the inner world as well. I n effect, place inhabits and possesses us as a
form of enchantment, particularly when it manifests as an archetype. I ndeed, most