preliterate peoples sense their traditional lands not only in terms of sacred or
symbolic geography but at both the individual and collective levels as well, as
encompassing all possible expressions of the place-elsewhere-place continuum. For
example, in a work prepared by a group of Australian aboriginal elders, one
described how:
Aboriginal culture is spiritual. I am spiritual. I nside of me is sprit
and land, both given to me by the Creator Spirit. There is a piece
of land in me, and it keeps drawing me back like a magnet to the
land from which I came. Because the land, too, is spiritual. This
land owns me. The only piece of land I can claim a spiritual
connection with - a connection between me and the land - is the
piece of land under the tree where I was born, the place where
my mother buried my afterbirth and umbilical cord. The spiritual
link with that piece of land goes back to the ancestors in the
Dreaming. This is both a personal and a sacred connection -
between me and the land, me and my ancestors (Rainbow,
1997:12).
Here, place is experienced as the core of life and existence of both the
individual and collective, where the psyche synchronises with place to constellate a
powerful place-elsewhere-place archetype. Such an archetypal process is not
culturally specific, and its universal nature is implied in a statement made by the
author David Guterson, regarding the city of Seattle, where he was born in 1956:
I ’m haunted by Seattle. I ts streets are haunted by the feet of
another time I cannot readily explain. The city, for all its
understated beauty, is lost to me now, in most ways. Or perhaps
like many people, I confuse place and being. I cannot separate
myself from the city (Guterson, 1998:56).
James Cowan, through the words of Fra Mauro, describes how the process
manifests as an archetypal image:
... all we picture to ourselves or see with our eyes is inseparable
from ourselves. Such things do not exist except as an extension
of that inner world to which we give so little credence in the
conduct of our normal daily lives (Cowan, 1996:136).
I n another of his works dealing with the Dreaming of the Australian
Aborigines, Cowan describes the kurunba or life-essence, a metaphysical expression
denoting the presence of a cultural layer within the landform itself that has been
inspired by mythological contact with the Dreaming (Cowan, 1989:40), a notion that
again is best understood as a psychoid process where the psyche finds expression
and relationship in matter, manifesting as an archetype. This is very different to
place existing in the I maginal Realm.