CATCHMENT 43: Troubling Waters

Abstract: When we interrogate 'place' we tread on tender ground. “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” ― Joan Didion It's touchy stuff 'place' and invokes all kinds of deep emotional responses to it. “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it." Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood. Speaking of place, O'Connor said "where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got” ... and its true! If you are a 'blow in' where you come from at best can only teach you about 'placedness' ... not yours but placedness alone ... and no matter how long it has been since you've arrived, contemplating 'hereness' and 'elsewhereness' locates you on the planet ... and here ... and it keeps on posing questions. ... Ray Norman 2016

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As the ‘fresh’ collides with the ‘salt’ at the convergence of Northern Tasmania’s two Esk River systems and the Tamar Estuary much more than troublesome silt is deposited on the riverbed. 

All these waterways are named for others elsewhere. Yet this river junction is a feature in a unique and evolving cultural landscape that has a human history of 40,000 years plus. More to the point, it is very much its own place in the world with its own geography and histories.

Two centuries ago there was a cultural collision at this set of coordinates that is now Launceston that involved two different sets of cultural imperatives and two distinctly different knowledge systems – each of which shapes, and has shaped, place in different ways. 

Interestingly, the waters come together here at a point pragmatically and geographically described, and mapped, in 21st Century terms, as Catchment 43. Right here at this junction, the ‘spectre of the flood’ is possibly part of the explanation of place that is being navigated. Along with a hope of somehow accounting for the Launcestonian cultural landscape multidimensional mapping is an evolving process. 

As a consequence of postcolonial mapping, in the hope of better understandings of place, Tasmania’s ‘waterways and catchments’ have been ascribed numbers in an attempt to better understand geographies, bioregions, topographies, ecosystems, cultural landscapes and the phenomena these things involve and exist within. ... CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE ESSAY