Knowing our place : decentring the metropole through place identity in the Lake Eyre Basin

Abstract

Grounded in the experience of working on a community based heritage survey with Antakerinja and Lower Southern Aranda men in the Lake Eyre Basin of South Australia, during the 1980s, some hidden dimensions of knowledge and education are explored through three different epistemes. A deeply personal investigation of what may be lost and recovered from what Connell (2007) has suggested is a “silence of the land” is undertaken. Land enclosure and power exercised quietly to abstract, colonize and concentrate resources is inseparable from northern theory. All humans have an ancestry in the savannah or open woodlands where human agency once maintained a place within ecosystems. Many have rural forbearers who experienced land enclosure in one form or another. Decentring fragments are used to construct a fabric from rural English working class ancestry, childhood learning and art education, three epistemes, and the connections the Men and their family histories. This decentring weakens Northern theories from the peripheries. The reader is invited to share the tensions, the loss and grief, deeper spiritual understandings, awakenings of Christian and ecological connection and consider the validity colonial scientism and urban curriculum from a Southern Theory perspective. Now that most humans are corralled in the conurbations of a global metropole, the reader may also wish to question the fallacies of civilization and whither a globalized urban world is heading.