We hear the sounds of waves crashing on a beach, cicadas creaking and the whistle of birds. The sounds of Nature. On a backdrop the image of a nude by lngres fades. In the darkness the sounds of Nature are interrupted by the noise of machinery and then the audience is blinded by brilliant light. This is the opening sequence of The Geography of Haunted Places and with it director Nigel Kellaway has produced a metaphor of the West's colonisation of Australia by re-enacting the Western belief that the Australian land had remained dormant until its discovery by White Man.
Miss Discovery, our guide, lifts the veils which had hidden a koala, a quoll, a wallaby and a red kangaroo. She mimics the mythological imagery of explorer's journals (like those of Sturt and Mitchell), as she plays the part of Nature giving up "her gifts" to (White) Man. That which was once unknown, is now revealed. The visual articulation of metaphor and myth is potent in this performance and its themes reflect the theories of writers like Ross Gibson (1986, 1992) and Richard White (1981).
Gibson writes in his essay "Geography and Gender" (1992) of the pseudo-sexual relationship between the explorer and the land.[1] This, Gibson explains, is a kind of Oedipal relationship in which the explorer longs to be reunited with Mother Nature. The principle presumption of this theory is that the land is a woman.
In The Geography of Haunted Places we hear the story of Australia's colonization from the inside out, it is neither man nor the Empire telling this story, but woman and the Australian land. We are haunted by the spectre of a history