On Prospecting and Place

Last fieldtrip I went bunburying. (I can’t believe I missed the opportunity to use that pun in my previous blog post; remedying that now.) This time, I’m going prospecting.

That’s right, I’m in Kalgoorlie-Boulder. Apparently, like Fremantle and Perth, these are two separate towns. Duly noted, but I'm going to continue to refer to them as one town.

Kalgoorlie-Boulder has a bit of a reputation for being rough, and before my trip I didn’t meet anyone who had anything good to say about the place. And look, I can definitely see why you wouldn’t want to go out by yourself at night or loiter on the wrong side of the tracks.

(As someone who has both high anxiety and a complete disregard for my own personal safety, I feel like a cat falling from a great height with buttered toast strapped to my back, suspended in indecision. (You know. Because cats always land feet first, and toast always lands buttered side down.) Should I avoid hanging my washing out after dark or should I sashay down the main drag in drag, WHO KNOWS.)

But what people don’t tell you is that the Goldfields are stunning.



I’m a sandgroper and I love the south-west coast and I want to always live by water but I love this country too, in a way that makes me glad my grandparents decided to move to Australia.

To be fair, Kalgoorlie-Boulder has had an unseasonably high rainfall this year. But still.

It's not just the natural beauty of the place. Kalgoorlie is home to the super pit, which is its own terrifying kind of beauty.

When I arrived on Saturday the first thing the friend I'm staying with did was give me the grand tour of the town, an orientation to the place, including some of its social and ecological history. You feel differently about a place when you know where you’re situated in it, both in space and time. Coincidentally I’m also reading Thomas Wilson’s new book ‘Stepping Off’, which is all about that intersection of history, culture, biodiversity, and land in South-West Australia; and it’s about how when you lose your land either through dispossession or through a collective urban amnesia, you get vertigo, a feeling of imbalance.

Actually this whole research project is turning into a big land/language exploration ("only whitefellas talk about language like it's not connected to anything else"), in ways that I can’t quite articulate yet; but I’m certain by the end of my PhD I’ll have a different or at least more nuanced awareness of who I am and my place in the world. In the meantime, I'm very much enjoying this small part of it.