Excluding Spaces: The Figure in the Australian Aboriginal Landscape

Critical Analysis

In this text, the author explores the relationship between space, time, and boundaries. She uses the aboriginal’s relationships with land, taboos, and ownership to indicate that a traditional view of land as fixed and delineated is incorrect.

The idea of places and power intersects with the idea of space, time, and action in unique ways. This is exemplified by the Australian Aboriginal understanding of spatial form, one where presence is defined in many ways beyond the body and fixed landscapes of earth. Some have legal rights to be in a space at a certain time, while others don’t (“no room”); these spaces change; the time of access changes; the rights are based on who else is or is not there; and the rights are tied to actual places and to sacred and taboo places. This means that “the existence of topographical boundaries demarcating owned places is highly problematic.”

An aspect of this can be thought of as a problem of location—specifically locatedness of a mobile actor—because ownership “comes with” the individual. The individual has a “spatial field” that emanates from the center of the actor, and is something that “constantly goes with us.” When individuals encounter owned spaces, perhaps because they have intersected spatial fields, they detour, based on vision and hearing as a measure for distance. This “projects a signifier of limitation upon the land or place by forming transient but repeatable boundaries out of the moving body.”

Spaces also act as boundaries. The topography extends from a center, and has a similarly negotiated edge, but with key distinguishable elements within it indicating ancestors and their narratives. The spheres of these fields indicate power and influence in forms of gradient, diminishing at the edges. Ancestors travelled, and left behind elements (“forms”) which then become intertwined with these space-based boundaries.

There is a notion of “being still there,” related to ancestral delineation and to human traveling action or inaction, and this notion has legal authority; it is different than the idea of “went right through.”

As individuals travel, singing and voice indicates aspects of boundary definition: it is “part of his sensual reach—an extending movement of his spatiocorporeal field that impacts directly on the fields of others.” This is the act of delineating space, and land becomes fixed only in relationship to that delineation process.

A “Law” truck carries key individuals to ritual performance, and can be thought of as “Law-on-wheels,” as it indicates rules as it travels, still with a center that gradients outwards (both ahead and back). It defines inclusion and exclusion, with a “power ambience” extending beyond the route it takes or the endpoint of its conclusion, and it forces that ambience on other people as it intersects with their own spheres.

Aboriginal “excluded spaces,” then, cannot be definitively claimed as bounded by physical pieces of land or buildings.

The author compares, briefly, the aboriginal space to another space: Central Park, in New York. She argues that the scenes constructed in the park were “formulated in terms of the mobile spatiosensual field of actors.” The architects embedded their spatiosensual fields into the landscape, projecting themselves into the experience of viewing and the view itself. This was the creation of “transposable qualities” that shifted between the surfaces that were designed, and the actors.

The author concludes by stating the problems with current views of space, boundaries, and time. Space is not static and boundaries are not fixed. Assigning cultural meaning to a space ignores that nature of spatial fields that move and intersect. It removes the person from the description of the space, but the person (along with the ancestor) continually defines the space. To make sense of this, we need a “paradigm that works against abstracting the problem of space from that of the body and action, and against the oppositional separation of space and time.”

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Provides an entirely different way (theory) of thinking about space that relates to the negotiated nature of power and ownership (and trust) in a close creative area, like a design studio (particularly relevant: the idea of a sphere around, given the visual nature of the “mess” of making things)