The Land
Authors: Bywaters Malcom , Wilson Shaun 
Published: October 2024

One of the most important issues that surround human inhabitancy is our relationship and experience with land. No matter the territory, climate, or locality where lands prevail, our agency and very survival is dependent on the liveability of our own inhabitancy. Land therefore is a haven by which we dwell, move through, and exist to forge our experiences through geography. More so, though, land is an essence of how we communicate, feel, identify, and move through locality. If place describes the way we emotionally connect to our localities, then land itself become a necessary connection within the topographies we reside and explore.
In Australia, for example, recent debates about Country have embodied these sentiments where we look to Indigenous ways of reflecting this inhabitancy that lend themselves more to the spiritual and the philosophical to describe profound relationships with land. If Indigenous knowledge systems of being within the land are anything to go by, a returning mindset asks "if instead of thinking of being 'land owners' we think, instead, of the land owning us" (Moore 11). Yet our artificial claims about land drift into entitlement and capitalist frameworks that disembody lands in such a way as to sever our connections with and from nature. Land outside of Indigenous knowledge, then, is governed by ownership. We purchase land, we create boundaries between lands, and we commodify and intervene with landforms none the more destructively than in the ecological devastation of the climate crisis.
Our very existence within and outside of these frameworks tells us that the places we inhabit and move through share a relationship inextricably tied to enhance or misuse, to destroy or rebuild, to develop or exploit, and to poison or regenerate. Irrespective of these traits, our sense within land defines our very existence as a species, determines our safety, and guides our connections between natural and developed localities. Land is, in any sense, a necessity for maintaining the living and preserving our relationships in and outside of place.
In this issue of M/C Journal, several articles have explored a range of perspectives about land from the Indigenous to the historical, the reinterpreted and the rural, and from the virtual to the physical. They reflect a counterpoint where at no other time in human history land has been so important to us, poised as environmental disaster impacts on all facets of our day-to-day lives. Authors have explored personal reflections that shape their own sense of place, from landforms to landscapes, place names to sanctuaries, and through representations of land in moving image and contemporary art.
Ümit Kennedy and colleagues' feature article brings the climate crisis to the discussion by examining how location determines its effects and impacts on young people. The article observes 49 participants situated in three areas of New South Wales, Australia, centred on Western Sydney, the Northern Rivers, and the Upper Hunter. The exploration reveals sentiments on the widely different effects of how young people are affected by climate change both in terms of their immediate environment and the anxiety they perceive about it. The findings discovered a range of disparities amongst economic and social groups based on where participants lived. Kennedy and colleagues reveal how different localities across the land impact on young people’s perception of climate crisis.
Claire Brennan examines the digital mapping of place names in journals from European voyages in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In asking how landforms influence mapping, Brennan reveals conversations about how the names of places can change over time. Can this affect our understanding of land by the knowledge of names, just as much as landforms can be modified or disappear altogether? The instability of place names can impact on the defining of localities, yet digital mapping technologies are enhancing comprehension of these early voyages to understand those who once inhabited marked places between oceans.
Alessandro D’Aloia looks to distinctions between virtual lands and real landforms in the work of John Power’s generative screenwork and Ben Koder’s Looking Glass quilts. In critiquing Jeff Malpas’s perspective on space as fundamental to geography, the article emphasises the pervasiveness of relational views, which leads to a discussion of the visualisation of the concept of space as place in media research. D’Aloia arrives at a conversation about land where the spaces we travel through in our perception of land further lead the reader to critique large language models and artificial general intelligence interwoven in the contextual relationships they have with space.
Eden Bywater and Bronwyn Fredericks explore how the development of land on Country has impacted the agency of Australian First Nations peoples. Despite the colonialisation of stolen Indigenous land, connections between First Nations peoples and the land remain a site of resistance. Irrespective of urban development, farming, and legal frameworks, the article discusses Indigenous resistance to development amongst the ongoing destruction of land and species. We witness that localities both sacred and significant have been removed for the sake of housing estates and industrial complexes. The article asks, how does a resistance to these developments lead to a greater awareness of the importance of Country?
Madelena Mañetto Quick, Catherine Caudwell, and Dylan Horrocks discuss how farm and sanctuary memoirs convey stories of land through what the authors claim are more-than-human narratives. The article explores a new interpretive framework to analyse characters, settings, relationships, and values in memoirs. It distinguishes, then, the differences between ‘land’ and ‘landscape’ to emphasise the significance of place. Nested in discussion is an analysis of ten farm memoirs revealing land/scape as a resource and eight sanctuary memoirs depicting them as idyllic settings. Their conclusion recognises land/scape as a type of protagonist emphasising environmental degradation and reframing our discussions about care.
Iain Bruce examines land in the world-building of filmmaker and writer Alex Garland, applied across film and television. With a focus on his screenplays Sunshine (2007) and Annihilation (2018), Garland’s writing posits a relationship between an audience and screen connecting land to storytelling. In as much as these worlds are designed by narrative, they bring land to the forefront of the storytelling process. They connect characters and audience together through the presence of land embodied in the process of world-building. Bruce indicates the effectiveness of Garland’s creations by looking back into aspects of characters, dialogue, and action. Land for Garland then becomes a central part of the storytelling process, as evident in how Bruce unpacks these relationships from screenplay to screen.
Sue Beyer looks to the mapping of autofiction in imaginary lands, using hallucinatory machine learning platforms. Metamodern thought informs Beyer’s work in asking how the conceptuality of land, which the author describes as an ‘in between’ and ‘a no man's land’, is posited on either side of a progressing AI technology and socio-culture. These types of fantasy lands are discussed in context to a metamodern structure of feeling defined as the theoretical mechanics of autofiction. The article asks how AI hallucination integrates with metamodernism by using land as a concept that is defined through data mapping. Yet the hallucinatory aspects of AI in this regard are also compared to psychogeography created by the interpretative visualisation of data, which Beyer considers a fantasy land.
Malcom Bywaters visits land through contemporary painting practice in his own journey as a cancer carer. He prompts us to think about the embodiment of landscape and how this in turn can allegorically become a mechanism to reflect personal journeys of trauma and resilience. Land for Bywaters reflects the representation of natural vistas concurrent to his subjective view that coexists within his paintings. Like the hallmarks of landscape painting traditions across Australian art, Bywaters embeds story into landforms indicative of subjective retrospection. Land as a concept in these paintings crosses over to the cancer carer’s plight, interlinked by experience ‘mapped’ back into landscape. Land, then, is revealed in painting to be a place of co-inhabitancy shared between the emotive and the experience of the carer.
As each article addresses its own perspective about land, this diverse collection of works highlights the importance of our relationships with the places we inhabit. They reveal aspects about land that intersect within our daily lives, brought into conversations affecting our identity, histories, and responsibilities. Whether this be the physical lands we move across or the virtual lands we create, landforms are integral to how humans dwell, gain shelter, and integrate across societies and communities. Yet this is only the starting point of many other conversations about land that are, it seems, infinite in how diverse our own relationship with land can be. This issue presents a diverse collection of articles in a long history of discussion about land. We thank all participants and reviewers for their contributions and look forward to the ongoing scholarship which land invites us to share and create.
References
Moore, Rhonda J., ed. Climate Change and Mental Health Equity. Switzerland: Springer, 2024.