In this chapter I am sharing the specific experiences-research-learnings, an assemblage if you will, of the entangled empirical and practice research of the socially, embodied and material ways of knowing and learning a specific place-world, the Australian bush. This chapter is an intra-action of the participants’ and my own, as artist researcher teacher, placemaking practices, the intra-actions of experiential and embodied practices and outcomes. The aim of this research was to explore and examine specific embodied socio-material ways of knowing place and learn how place is made.

The making of this chapter has been very difficult because I needed to share the colour, texture, sounds, tastes, feelings and so on all of the stuff of placemaking, within the limitations of text. Consequently, I have attempted to layer and weave; entangling the participants and my own ways of knowing, making and learning. My intention is to share our placemaking practices and make something that is rich, complex, layered, intra-woven and three-dimensional. I hope that this may evoke a sense of place (albeit one that may be unfamiliar) rather than, as Feld and Basso assert, ‘trying to describe a sense of place, or somehow attempting to characterize it’ (1996: 90) that may involve Othering. In this chapter I have included images with the text, at the times at which my own learning intra-acts, becomes entangled with the children’sparticipants. This usually occurs when we are journeying together or in interviews; however, where the images are separated from the text, it signifies a journeying (both mine and the participants), a continuing progressive sequence where one image is entangled and leads to the next, to be read/viewed collectively, where the spaces between matter.

The beginnings of this research came in the guise of an apparently very simple question: ‘So, where are you from?’ This seems easy enough to answer, but this question that many ask, usually as small talk when you first meet someone, is difficult for me to answer, as I have lived in and consider myself to be from many different places. So for me, the answer is that all the many places I have lived are where I am from.