Relph (2011) argues that ‘the deepest sense of place seems to be associated with being at home, being somewhere you know and are known by others, where you are familiar with the landscape and daily routines and feel responsible for how well your place works[1].’ I cannot claim to be responsible for how this place works but I can argue that at least some of what has been done by me in my life (perhaps a familiarity with this place’s rhythms engineers how it works for me) has been protest at the stripping away of nature from treasured places like this one. Such de-naturing, I’d argue, is T. S. Eliot’s ‘shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion…'(The Hollow Men, 1925). This place and the ways in which I sense it may be very different from how the Girramay, Bandjin and Warrgamaygan peoples knew it — their perspectives are outside the purview of my allotted span — but what I do love about my relationship and interaction with it is that they have a true form, shade and colour, force. This place asks of me to construct meaningful gestures.
If my primary (ostensible) reason has been to fish [this place], then my sense of this place, both real and imagined, reminds me that place, natured place, is far more than this one activity. Fishing it has never fully been my rationale for being there. I feel at home, and, if it were my one last port of call, it would be like going home. I have told people I would like to be buried beneath some tree on its banks, high enough up so that I cannot be washed away in some middling flood but close enough to hear it run, even in dry winters — if such a thing were possible. I am sad that it isn’t but…
Here I am not disordered with nature’s deficit.
[1] A Pragmatic Sense of Place
Inkstained fingers 