‘The bush’, ‘the outback’, remote Australia: these terms are used to describe a particular Australian place-world that has specific and particular forms of human and non-human socio-material knowledges, performances and practices. This chapter is a deep mapping of the linguistic, poetic, artistic, pedagogic, filmic and geopolitical socio-material representations of this place-world. This deep mapping is an intensive exploration that critically engages with diverse materials – histories, ecologies, poetics, narratives, artefacts, memoirs and so on – and can be used to ‘amplify the voices of marginalised stakeholders, both socially and ecologically’ (Springett 2015: 624). Using new materialist thinking demonstrates the power of matter, both its absence and presence, in understanding how place is pivotal in pedagogies of national identity and nationhood discourses.

Place-world

Place-world is a particular place that has specific and particular forms of human and non-human socio-material knowledges, performances and practices. A place-world is the intra-action of culture and context; the space between the subject and object of place – more than a site for research or analysis – the meanings and the materiality of this placeworld are practised and performed. In other words, the way we experience place, our knowledge of place and how we learn to make place emerge from practices that have value and are valued, and forces produced by intra-acting socio-material networks.

Context can be understood in terms of physical location or positionality ‘in a particular time and at a particular place’ (Hones 2008: 319). When context is conceived as a physical location it is seen as a fixed setting that is composed of parts that can be broken down and analysed; Seddon (1993) calls this the ‘atomist’ paradigm. This understanding of context involves individual people, events, phenomena and factors being reduced to data about ‘local understandings’.

However, when context is understood to be relational and intraacting, it becomes a dynamic process where ‘the complexification or mediation or spacing of an event, is not in any sense a backdrop to situated human activity but rather is something active, differentially extensive’ (Thrift 1996: 3). This relational idea of context can then be understood as ‘local understandings’ that are ‘socially produced through relations of dependence and mutual implication, through relationships established socially and hierarchically between the near and the far, the local and the distant’ (Radway 1999: 15).