Haunted Earth By Peter Read, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003, 272 pages, paperback, $39.95. Reviewed by Anne Elvey in the June 2005 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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The third in a series, which began with Returning to Nothing and was followed by Belonging, Peter Read's Haunted Earth is an attempt to explore, and in so doing take seriously, spiritual dimensions of Australians' relationships to place. While always linked for Read with the colonial displacement of many Indigenous Australians, the 'haunting' of Haunted Earth is not restricted to this. Ranging from the ghosts of Gore Hill cemetery on Sydney's north shore, to parents' memorials for their dead children, mutton birding families of Babel Island, the grain country of Young, New South Wales, the sinking of the Armidale during the second world war, and a ritual for leaving drought ravaged land, Read asks: in what ways do Australians--non-Indigenous as well as Indigenous--experience place as 'inspirited'?
At the outset Read ponders the deep suspicion many Australians have of the notion of 'inspiritment' and suggests that his own Anglican upbringing may have contributed to his inability to experience place as inhabited by more-than-human genii locii, spirits, or ghosts. Working on several levels, his book is first a personal journey, signified by Read's 'epigraphic' reflections on the title pages of the chapters which invite his reader to journey with him through one night and day in Gore Hill cemetery as he tries to be open to multiple 'hauntings'. As if he were marking liturgically in another place the monastic hours of prime, terce, vespers, and so on, Read takes us through the Australian hours of midnight, dark, piccaninny daylight, dawn ... until he concludes towards midnight. In the process, Gore Hill opens out over the hours into different times and places, so that the cemetery becomes the haunted earth of the many Indigenous countries that constitute Australia.
As a counterpoint to non-Indigenous stories of place, Read situates at 'Dawn' a narrative of Ricky and Anita Maynard's continuing links with their ancestral country on Babel Island. Despite the ambiguity Ricky describes concerning living away from country, it is difficult to escape (nor would Read entirely want to) an idealisation of Aboriginal relationship to place. 'Dawn' concludes:Six generations deep, two hundred relatives wide, a hundred sites of memory and association. That's the first time in this book that we have encountered such a rich and commingled complexity of land simultaneously worked and inspirited, and people so united in place and descent. I doubt that we'll find it again before midnight. (p 91) At 'Dusk' we visit Claire Milner on her farm near Braidwood, where she narrates an encounter with the spirits of the traditional Aboriginal custodians of country and her sense of the 'ghosts' of many nineteenth century European inhabitants of the place. For Claire these 'extraordinary' visions and the shared attachment to, and responsibility for, country they connote for her are part of a wider narrative of 'everyday' relationship to place. Her integration of the spiritual into the everyday, prompts Read to reflect on the dichotomy he has constructed 'between the supernatural or unexplainable and other forms of deep belonging'. (p 207)
Secondly, the book is an exercise in oral history, narrating Australians' relationships to place with particular emphasis on remembrance of the dead. The story of the sinking of the Armidale and the memories of its survivors told at 'Mid-Afternoon' is particularly poignant and stands as an important piece of Australian oral history in its own right.
At a third level, Read returns to questions about ways cultural understandings born of relationships to other lands can shape relationships to place in Australia. Chinese Malaysians in Perth, Kee Wei Eng, Pansy Warner and their families, reconstruct rituals for death and birth from fragments of remembered ancestral knowledge formed in another place; a bishop performs a cleansing for a Church that has been desecrated near Canberra; priest Colleen O'Reilly creates a ritual for a family finally leaving their drought-ravaged property after four generations. Underlying these searches for proper rituals is a sense of not quite knowing what to do in this place.
In the rhythms of monastic life at New Norcia at 'Late Afternoon' Read seeks ways 'an assertion of enduring inspirited place' might emerge from ritual engagement in place. (p 176) Instead, he finds a mode of prayerful attentiveness, paralleling the sensitivity to place of Mark Elvin's haiku-style poetry. Read also presents other artists who express and sometimes mediate 'inspirited place'. We encounter Australian Vietnamese novelist, Hoa Pham's 'fox fairy', the resonances of sound sculptor Ros Bandt's wheat silos, composer Ross Edwards' Dawn Mantras heard above a vast expanse of desert and later his Star Chant connecting cosmic space with local place.
Finally, Haunted Earth raises questions for contemporary cultural and historical studies concerning the weight these disciplines give (or refuse to give) to the spiritual. Where do a Wiccan healer of native animals, a Feng Shui practitioner, a person who experiences a house as haunted, and an ex-serviceman who is 'haunted' by the ghost of a lost ship fit into our rational scholarly engagements? Further, within heritage agreements: 'How do we recognise publicly the value of an inspirited site?' (p 247)
But given the diversity of association with place represented in Haunted Earth, how can we speak meaningfully of place as 'inspirited'? If place is 'inspirited', moreover, is this a function of human dwelling in and attachment to place, of place itself, or both? The meandering style of Haunted Earth and the inconclusiveness of chapters, which favour evocation over analysis, signal the difficulty in addressing these questions. While Read presents no definitive answers, he offers views into multiple worlds through a refreshingly self-suspicious meditation on questions of spirit, in a place where many of us -- religious and secular -- are uneasy with a landscape that is often more than we imagine it to be. Citation - Anne Elvey. 'Review: Haunted Earth by Peter Read' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 06 September 2010].
Back Cover Blurb - This extraordinary book tackles head-on the existence and meaning of spirit forces in Australia. Haunted Earth asks a few key questions: Is Australia haunted? If so, where, and with what? Are there spiritual or otherwise 'special' places in Australia? Each chapter follows a round-the-clock journey, from midnight to midnight, charting the activities of Australians of many different experiences and cultures: there are Aboriginal spirits on Flinders Island at daybreak, the summoning of a Chinese ancestor spirit at noon in Perth, an exorcism in New South Wales in early afternoon.
Have You Also Read? Mixed Matches: Interracial Marriage in Australia
 June Duncan Owen, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002, 177 Pages, Paperback, $34.95Reviewed by Ann Howard in the April 2003 issue.The cover illustration of June Owen's book is of Barbara Hanrahan's Generations, 1991. It shows happy, unaware, smiling children being carried on symbolic journeys by adults with tears streaming from their eyes. The inside cover is a patchwork of everyday couples, sometimes with children, all smiling contentedly. Living in big cities all my life, used to a cosmopolitan social life, with Hungarian and Japanese daughters--in-law, it did not at first seem unusual to me that the couples were sometimes strikingly physically different. This simple fact has, however often been the cause of deep misery. What emerges from these hundred or so interviews with partners from inter racial ... read more.
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Issue 44
Popular Music: Practices, Formations and Change - Australian Perspectives
